I’m happy to say both Heidi and I are fully vaccinated (Moderna for us), as are both my parents and my in-laws. Hopefully the kids will be allowed to get vaccinated in the near future, though my daughter turns 18 in about five weeks (yikes, how did that happen?), so she’ll be eligible soon enough. If you have an opportunity to get vaccinated, I’d encourage you to do so. While dangers still lurk (people letting their guard down too early, new COVID-19 variants on the loose), I’m feeling a metaphorical shot in the arm of optimism for the world at large. It might also be the weather, since I’m typing this on a warm spring day, with my wife’s tulips beginning to bloom out front, and our long wet winter has resulted in everything being lush and green.
I’m halfway through a new Karen Pantelli book and feeling good about it. The last book, the big one that I had to put aside for a while, still gnaws at me, and I’m sure I’ll be returning to it soon enough, but I still need just a bit more distance from it. It’s not like anything else I’ve written. Writing that book had me thinking more about my writing process as a whole, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, even if it’s never fun, and even a bit depressing, to work so long on something and feel (even temporarily) that it might have been wasted work. If you want to keep getting better as an artist, there’s a real danger in getting too comfortable with your methods, and if you’re not failing regularly then you’re probably not growing. Writers who get too dogmatic about a particular way of doing things run the risk of calcifying their creative abilities, I think. Heck, this is true about just about anything really. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve started questioning myself anytime I’ve started sounding a bit too rigid in my thinking.
My productivity has been pretty decent lately, though a year and a half into my stint as a full time writer I’m still experimenting with methods. Jerry Oltion, a great writer who was a regular at an amazing, and quite frankly, life-altering writer’s workshop I had the good fortune to attend for a few years when I was barely out of high school, and was therefore barely ready for some of the lessons it had to impart to me, once told me that the definition of a professional writer was a writer who never thought he or she was writing enough. I try to keep that in mind when I’m beating myself up too much.
A Bit of Whimsy: Red Barn on a Lush Green Hill
Heidi took this one from the road. With my daughter testing for her brown belt in Kempo at a location halfway to our destination (she passed!), and spectators not allowed in because, you know, pandemic, the rest of us took a sunny afternoon hike at McDowell Creek Falls, near Lebanon, Oregon. The hike, while a bit mucky in places, was great, but I enjoyed the rural drive through the foothills of the Cascade Mountains almost as much.
Scott Recommends
Just a brief aside on why I have no books to recommend this month: I did read a few, but I generally subscribe to the belief that if you don’t have anything good to say about a book, then it’s usually best to say nothing. It’s just my opinion, after all, taste being a subjective thing, and besides that I don’t think there’s much point in giving attention, which is the currency of the realm in the modern digital world, to something unless you really want someone to read it.
Brené Brown: The power of vulnerability. As usual, I’m late to the party on this one, but somehow I missed Brown’s amazing TED talk on the power of vulnerability when it was released back in 2010. Only twenty minutes in length, and interwoven with her personal story of how her academic research into shame, courage, and empathy changed her own life, it became one of the most popular TED talks of all time. Well worth a few minutes of your time:
Nomadland. Speaking of being vulnerable, I can’t help but think of Frances McDormand, one of the best actresses working today, in this quiet but powerful film. If the best kind of entertainment often defies easy categorization and critique, then this movie, which netted McDormand a best actress nomination for her portrayal of Fern, a widow who sets off on a road trip in a ramshackle van after the collapse of a company mining town in Nevada, certainly fits the bill. It had the feel of a documentary (perhaps partly because a few of the supporting characters weren’t characters at all, but actual nomads), and does not offer any easy answers about modern America, and yet, it’s all the more powerful because of its unconventional nature.
Normal People. If my recommendations this month seem to be fitting a theme of vulnerability, it wasn’t by design, but I have to say that the exquisite love story about Marianne Sheridan and Connel Waldron, two Irish students whose complicated romantic relationship begins in secondary school on Ireland’s Atlantic coast and continues later as undergraduates at Trinity College in Dublin, wouldn’t have been nearly as compelling without the risks the two leads took to deliver such outstanding performances. My description above doesn’t do it justice. Watch the first episode (they’re all available on Hulu) and see if you can stop yourself from watching the second. I couldn’t.