Category: Literary Life

Student and Teacher

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It’s time to come clean. I haven’t been devoting enough time to an important piece of my life and identity. I haven’t been scheduling–and honoring–a critical creative need: uninterrupted time to write.

Like an untuned car with dirty spark plugs, this sputtering connection–between me and my creative self–has been misfiring for about a year.

Though I have produced creative things (like a few librettos for my chorus and a blogpost once each week), I haven’t been protecting my creative time. I haven’t been developing enough ideas that are purely mine.

It’s time to take action. To go back to school. To open the metaphorical hood of this mid-century car. To do something about it.

I know this is a challenge for all writers … and I’m luckier than most. I’m not juggling a full-time job at this stage of my life.

Still, external forces and demands often flood through the door–disrupting my good writing intentions. (Even as I began to write this, a sprinkler head outside our front door just went haywire. I texted one of our condo board members to tell him a fountain of water is spraying everywhere!)

I’m back to the keyboard of my writing universe. Beyond the whack-a-mole geysers that pop up in every life, it’s time I became more selective and vigilant with how I choose to spend my time.

It’s time for me to find a better balance again. To be more attentive to my own creative needs (like I did when I wrote and published four memoirs and one book of poetry from 2016 to 2023) … while still taking some time to help others.

Today I began by scheduling two hours–between 10 a.m. and noon–to write this blog post about the writing process.

Tomorrow, I have another two hours on my calendar. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday will be the same.

Perhaps it is fitting that I’m treating myself like a misaligned student, who needs guidance from the teacher in me. Because this fall I will be leading a three-part “Meaningful Memoirs Matter” writing workshop for up to eight students at the Scottsdale Public Library.

I’m excited about the opportunity to teach again. (In the early 2000s, I taught the fundamentals of public relations as an adjunct instructor for Roosevelt University in Chicago.)

I think this 2024 experience will be more fulfilling on a personal level than the communication courses I led more than twenty years ago.

I genuinely want to help aspiring writers in my community tell their own stories. I want to tell them they don’t have to be celebrities to do it.

Extraordinary things happen to all of us. Important stuff flies under the radar in our everyday lives.

Just as important, I want to share my passion for the memoir art form and set this small group of individuals on a path to discover and unearth their own voices.

Back to scheduling. One of the things I will tell my students is that writing is a discipline. It requires solitude, time, dedication, energy, and–of course–passion.

But if you start small and string enough hours, days, weeks, and months of devoted and affirming writing sessions together–with time–the misfiring or underutilized writing jalopy can become a well-oiled machine.

Simply writing this is helping me get my creative energy back.

It’s time for me to practice what I will preach. To nurture the most important pieces of who I am … the writer, the storyteller, the essayist, the poet, the creative protagonist.

Because I am happiest when I am producing something that is entirely mine. Something that speaks to our human condition. Something that celebrates our connections to animals and nature.

Something that amplifies the importance of raising your voice and sharing your truth … even if the rest of the world has blown a gasket.

Higher Ground

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In January 2014, the fog of grief occupied my brain and body. My mother had been gone one year, but I hadn’t yet found a constructive way to heal and process my grief.

Along the way, my husband Tom and therapist Valerie encouraged me to embark on a new path that would help me recapture my creative spirit.

I decided to leave my communication consulting career. Soon after, I began to write personal stories that mattered to me. Vivid recollections inspired and spawned by grief. Observations about love and loss in my family that helped me chart a new course and publish my first book, From Fertile Ground.

With time and reflection, I wrote four more books about the tender and whimsical ups and downs of childhood, the poignancy of leaving one home and surviving to find another, the adventures of creating a new life in the Arizona desert, and the poetry that has stirred inside me for thirty years and finally escaped to land on a page.

In small and large ways, my mother is in every one of those books and numerous essays. Yet she didn’t live long enough to read any of it, except one poem I gave her on Christmas Eve 2009.

I know now that writing about her in new and different ways has kept her wisdom and generosity alive and accessible for me.

July 26, 2024, would have been Helen F. Johnson’s 101st birthday. I knew I wanted to write about that, but until my fingers hit the keyboard, I wasn’t sure what I would say … because I thought I’d said it all before.

Maybe I haven’t.

How I loved and admired–and still remember–her tenacity. Her legacy of letters. Her devotion to family, friends, and the power of nature.

She would have loved the artistic life Tom and I have created in Arizona among the buttes and cacti. Writing stories, screening movies, singing songs, feeding stray cats.

Making new friends, while remembering old ones. Doing our best to guide and encourage my sons–her beloved grandsons–as they make their way toward the middle of their lives.

Cherishing each moment of our retirement years, without ever knowing where it will lead. Never wanting to know how or when it will end.

On July 26, 2012, we celebrated my mother’s eighty-ninth birthday together. It was her last.

Twelve years have passed. I’m much older, more appreciative and impatient. But also, wiser. Healthier. Gayer. Grayer. More contented with my own life and legacy. More worried about the world’s plight.

Grief is no longer my catalyst, my nemesis, my companion. Of course, I see it in the rearview mirror. But, with the passage of time, I discovered higher ground without the ghost of grief.

I no longer think of my mother every day. But when I do, I am grateful for the moments she and I shared–the gifts of memories and photographs I treasure–and the propensity to write about it.

All of this runs through our DNA.

My mother and me, celebrating her eighty-ninth birthday in Wheaton, Illinois, on July 26, 2012.

Inside the Oven

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June is the start of triple-digit season in the Sonoran Desert.

When it reaches 110 degrees–as it has for the past several days–it really feels like you’ve stepped inside an oven alongside that batch of chocolate chip cookies you crave. Or maybe, you imagine, there is a blaze approaching just over the next butte.

Tom and I escaped the oven for a few days to visit friends in the mile-high altitude and pines of Prescott, Arizona.

Watching the acrobatics and listening to the distinctive calls of a wide array of birds–bluebirds, woodpeckers, finches, tanagers, nuthatches, hummingbirds, etc.–while sipping morning coffee with John and Carolyn on their front patio, was as rejuvenating as a day at the spa.

Now we are back home. There is a quiet, reflective component tied to the intense Sonoran heat. Early swims. Late walks. More time to read. Fewer people to navigate.

We’ll be here seven years next month. In the heat and stillness of that realization, we’ve carved out a good, artistic, and whole life among Arizona friends, buttes, and dazzling sunsets.

It’s a warm (hot) life I never imagined at 30, 40 or 50 years old–but still a pleasant surprise beyond the constant push and responsibility of my Midwestern bread-winning years.

Before the Blossoms Fell

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What will happen, when our last

parade of Palo Verde petals

paint the blue sky yellow?

Beyond the frantic flight

of ever-fluttering pages,

who will pause to remember

what we did, what we saw,

what we knew, what we missed,

who we loved and carried forward,

who we–proud and bold–held,

before the blossoms fell?

Blogging … or Something

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I heard him tell the other one that this is his sixth anniversary of blogging … or something.

I don’t really know what “anniversary” or “blogging” means, but they seem nice enough.

I don’t really care about any of that, as long as they keep feeding me.

I heard him tell the other one–again–that he is going to blog … or something.

It must be important to him, even though he doesn’t know what to say.

Oh, well, I guess it’s time for me to leave now.

I don’t really know when I’ll be back, but I’ll be on my way.

Inhale the Magic

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9:10 a.m. yoga mantra:

“When in doubt,

exhale it out.”

Without our breath,

and our ability

to let go of the negativity

in the world,

we have nothing.

6:56 p.m. sunset capture:

“Inhale the magic,

exhale the tragic.”

Without our compass,

and our agility

to embrace the possibilities

on the horizon,

we have lost all hope.

To enjoy more of my poetry, buy A Path I Might Have Missed on Amazon.

Five Hundred

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Numbers–like true stories that capture a moment on a page–are meaningful.

They aren’t merely markers on the shore of life waiting to be washed away with the next high tide.

They measure our progress. They tell us how far we’ve gone; how much we’ve achieved; how many we’ve accumulated.

My dad loved numbers, especially twin digits. On his fifty-second birthday–December 4, 1965–he wrote a poem about their significance in his life as a twin.

I published Unity 66 and the Twin Digits in the context of my first book. It belongs there, embedded alongside and intertwined with the writings of my grandfather, mother, and me. In its purest form, From Fertile Ground is an immersion into our family’s writing DNA.

Despite Dad’s volatility, he could be an exuberant, charming man. He believed in celebrating life’s mundane and magnificent moments as they happened.

On the road of our family vacations in the late 1960s (from his position behind the wheel of our white, four-door, 1965 Chevy Biscayne sedan), he announced to my mother (in front) and my sister and I (in back) when the odometer of our car was about to reach a milestone.

“Hey kids … we’re about to reach 50,000 miles.”

That was our cue to sing with him like circus clowns dancing to a calliope from the backseat.

“Da da da da … da da da da … da da da, da da … da da … da da da!”

Earlier this week–on April 7, 2024, to be precise–I hit the five hundred books sold mark since February 2016 when I first became a published author.

(If you are one of those who have supported my creative writing pursuits, thank you! I’ll bet there are a five hundred more who’ve read my books free through libraries and Goodreads giveaways I’ve sponsored.)

How do I know? First, I keep track of all my book sales on a spreadsheet I update monthly. Second, my Amazon sales dashboard tells me that someone in the United States bought number 500, my book of poetry, that day.

Of course, these aren’t best-selling numbers. Not even close. I’d need to add a few more zeroes to play with the big leaguers. However, numbers–while important–aren’t necessarily equivalent to quality or creative impact. (If you’ve seen the movie American Fiction, you know what I mean.)

At any rate, for an independent writer operating with a paltry budget, my book sales numbers aren’t too shabby.

Somewhere, on the highway of life and in the universe of creative possibilities, I imagine my father smiling at me from the front seat through the rearview mirror with the wind buffeting his combed-back hair.

He’s gripping the wheel with his left hand, while waving an imaginary conductor’s wand with his right. He’s singing along with the crazy circus music from our 60s family vacations.

Like my husband Tom–last night sitting on the fold out couch in our cozy Arizona den–my father Walter–if he were still alive–would be telling me to keep writing about the things I enjoy.

Because writing, telling, and sharing serendipitous stories is what I was meant to do. No matter what the numbers say.

Libretto #3

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My friend Randy–baritone section leader for the Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus–surprised me at rehearsal on Tuesday night. He handed me this descriptive name plate, which–four years ago in the depths of Covid–felt unlikely and unreachable.

As background, this unforeseen opportunity in my writing journey emerged in 2022, when I wrote lyrics for a few original songs for the Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus (PHXGMC).

Shortly after, PHXGMC’s artistic director Marc asked if I would have an interest in crafting a libretto for Born to Be Brave, the June 2023 performance.

Quickly, that led to libretto #2–Thanks for the Memories: A Gay Christmas Carol–performed in December 2023. Remarkably, what began as a novelty developed into a creative trend.

Over the past few months, I’ve been “noodling” and “angsting” over libretto #3. Marc, Scott (our choreographer) and I met a few times this winter to select the music and brainstorm creative approaches for Encore, our June 22-23 concert at Tempe Center for the Arts.

Randy knows I’ve been working on this behind the scenes. But what he doesn’t know (until he reads this) is I finished drafting libretto #3 on the same day he smiled and handed me his gift.

A beautiful arrangement of A Million Dreams from The Greatest Showman will open the show. That’s ironic, because–in my wildest dreams–I never imagined seeing the word “librettist” attached to my identity.

Son, student, graduate, husband, father, writer, gay man, friend, consultant, author, tenor, teacher, mentor, citizen, democrat, neighbor, dreamer, idealist, survivor, poet … yes. But lyricist and librettist? No.

I think this is one of life’s lessons. That the person you ultimately become at 65 or beyond may not reveal itself at 20, 30, 40 or 50.

But if you hang around long enough, and allow yourself to explore outside your comfort zone, you might discover you are capable of creating something meaningful you never dreamed of.

Momentous Marches

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In late March of 2015, we visited the Painted Desert in northeast Arizona.

Tom and I weren’t yet full-time residents of the Grand Canyon State. We were Illinoisans, traveling on I-40, passing through the desolation and grandeur of the American southwest.

Fortunately, when we saw the sign for the Painted Desert, we had the gumption to exit the highway and soak up the scenery.

I don’t know what I was thinking at the moment Tom snapped this photo. But I imagine the experience of gazing out over the majestic landscape of this geological gem inspired me to keep writing, keep exploring.

I was nearing the midpoint of constructing my first book, From Fertile Ground, trying to maintain my creative momentum and find an ending to my grief-induced story of three writers talking to each other across the generations.

A September 2015 trip to North Carolina would provide the inspiration I needed to cross the finish line.

In 2016–on another momentous late March day–my book went live. I remember the giddy feeling of amazement … holding it in my hands when it arrived in our mail in Arizona.

Somehow, buried in the fog of my mother’s passing, I had unearthed my story, discovered an avenue for my artistic passions, and found my voice.

Since that time, the first half of each year–with March as the centerpiece–has become a catalyst for my creativity. I have published all five of my books (and launched my website) spread across the months of January through May.

This year, March has presented me with a new opportunity, a new wrinkle … and a new voice. Let me explain.

Up until recently, my books have been available in paperback and Kindle formats, but not as audiobooks.

A few friends and family members have encouraged me to pursue this additional option, but the cost and the time required to “give voice” to even one of my books felt prohibitive.

However, recently I learned of a viable option through Amazon, whereby I could select a computer-generated “virtual voice” to tell one of my stories.

I was skeptical at first. The concept felt mechanical and scary. How could a computer-generated voice capture the emotion, description, and intent of my words?

But after doing some research and listening to various options, I found a voice that resonated with me.

It captures the essence of An Unobstructed View, the personal (but strangely universal) story of Tom’s and my circuitous journey–physical and metaphorical–to carve out a new life in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona.

Thanks to computer technology, readers (or I shall I say listeners?) can now feel the sense of possibilities and uncertainties we experienced in 2017–remembering the seminal moments of our past Illinois life while forging ahead (on the other side of trauma) to create a home in Scottsdale.

I hope you’ll listen. Allow yourself to be transported through the theater of the mind. It’s a unique experience–possibly more powerful, like tuning in to someone else’s serendipitous story–to hear the words I composed spoken by a “virtual voice.”

https://www.amazon.com/Unobstructed-View-Personal-Journey-Illinois/dp/B0CY941CS5?ref_=ast_author_dp

At any rate, I know many people prefer to consume their books that way through their devices, through their ear buds, as they navigate the trail of life.

Now, one of mine is out there for you–and all the world–to hear.

Under Construction

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Writing can be gratifying, but it’s not easy. It requires introspection, imagination, and a healthy dose of discipline away from the demands of the day.

As I write this, my creative inspiration has been less certain and more diffused. Perhaps the construction cones, yellow tape, and jagged chunks of sod–prominent through the screen of our kitchen window after the replacement of a water main valve this week–are a fitting metaphor for the disruption I feel.

I’m living between and among several writing-related projects that deserve attention. The largest of these is a novel I’ve been mining … and drifting in and out of for the past eighteen months or so.

It’s a compelling (I think) fictionalized story of twin brothers navigating the pitfalls of their differences and a significant/sudden loss that muddies their family waters and transforms them.

I’ve written six or eight chapters, spent significant hours developing the back stories of both characters, and have a clear idea of the troubles they will face and how the story will end, but there is at least a year of research, writing and editing ahead. That feels daunting.

In the near term, I’m committed to blogging once a week and working with Marc, the artistic director of the Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus, on another libretto later this month. This one, called “Encore”, will appear on stage in late June.

I’m also refashioning a retrospective essay about a teen’s emerging gay identity. This is something I’ve submitted to a few literary magazines. So far, no takers. But I’m determined to find a home for it.

Meanwhile, I want to teach a memoir writing class. On Monday, I presented the Scottsdale Public Library with a concept for a workshop I have developed. They like the idea. There are details and timeframes to figure out, but I hope to lead the first session with a small group of attendees this fall.

Yes, there is a lot under construction inside my brain and around me as snowbirds tiptoe to and from the parking lot past the various plots of uneven ground the plumbing crew left in their wake.

At least I’m choosing creative projects that are important to me … doing my best to entice more folks to read my books, while maximizing the slippery slope of my sixties.

It all feels exhilarating and overwhelming.