Courage to create

Don't let the idea of creating scare you

First of the season

This is not the most compelling photo, but a week ago it was the first tree I noticed starting to switch to fall color. Now trees are starting to turn everywhere.

Fran Gardner photo

Seasons

September, the season turns west.
North is the domain of winter.
Two other fall into place:
Spring in the east, summer south.

Each time, a turn in the weather.
Winds change, the temperature moves.
Each time, surprised by the movement,
I retreat and resist—for a while.

Finally, I come into knowing,
Dancing the rhythm of time.
Fall’s with us now, moving westward.
Changing the season in me.

About Becoming

When I first started writing this thing—Substack, blog, newsletter, I still don’t know what to call it—some of my readers puzzled over the title, Becoming. Where did that come from, what did it mean? 

“Becoming” came to me like every other idea, via inspiration. It was a way of sharing ideas and insights that I had been noodling on for years.

Mostly, they are  about learning how to be, how to create in this world. I am really imperfect at being, and at learning to be.

Now that I am more than two years into writing every week, I sense some movement. That is, I’ve grown. I think my writing has always been sure-footed, but I am getting even more comfortable with it. I know will always come up with something to write about. And this is something.

In Ruth Reichl’s The Paris Novel, she says this about a character, Chef Django:

Utterly unafraid of failure, he was willing to try anything. It was the source of his creativity. He was a confident person who pleased himself; if it didn’t work out, he simply moved on.

That’s how I want to create! Not fearing failure—not even thinking such a thing is possible. 

Are ideas alive?

In her fascinating book Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, Elizabeth Gilbert posits that ideas are alive. They visit you and fill your imagination. You work with them, fine. But if you lay them aside, let them languish, they move on to someone else who can give them more attention.

I have a long list of half-written ideas in a file called WAM (write about me). Many of them were great ideas, once. But I can’t always revive them. I let them sit too long.

Gilbert provides a jaw-dropping anecdote to illustrate how an idea died for her.

The telling anecdote

Gilbert once garnered an advance from her publisher to work on a novel about an unmarried middle-aged woman from Minnesota who has an unrequited crush on her boss. The boss sends her to South America to check on some missing construction equipment. There’s a love plot.

While Gilbert was working on that book, she had to set it aside to iron out some personal issues. A year or more later, when she returned to it, she just couldn’t revive the idea.

Meanwhile, she had become friends with another writer, Ann Patchett. She and Patchett were on a panel discussing libraries, after which Gilbert, entranced by Patchett’s presentation, rushed up to her, gushing “. . . you’re extraordinary and I love you!”

After a moment, the other woman, who, as the uninhibited Gilbert says, “actually does have boundaries,” replied, “And I love you, Liz Gilbert.” And with that she kissed her. They were instant friends.

A few years later, they got together once again for an event in Portland. Patchett asked about Gilbert’s aborted idea, and she described the book about the woman from Minnesota.

Patchett paused for a profane rendition of “you’ve got to be kidding me!” before outlining her own project: A middle-aged spinster from Minnesota has been secretly in love with her boss for years. The boss sends her to South America to untangle a situation. There’s a love plot. 

Patchett’s book is State of Wonder. When she thought back to when she first got the idea for it, it was about the time she kissed Gilbert. And that was about the time, Gilbert writes, that she lost her own hold on that idea.

Gilbert goes on to explain that situations like this are why we sometimes feel like someone stole our idea. She’s had dozens of people complain that Eat, Pray, Love was their idea. 

Well, maybe the idea visited once upon a time, but it didn’t find enough nourishment and moved on.

In the end

I want me, I want all of us, to be creative. To create more and more. I believe that is why we are here. To fulfill ourselves, to share our essence. To become.

So, when I write “Becoming,” I mean moving into your creative self, shrugging on the cloak of creating, picking up the scepter of ability and buckling on the sword of desire and completion.

Move forth into the world. Nurture the ideas that come to you. For they will come. And you, fearless, will work with them.

Noticing

Images for me to photograph, like ideas, appear seemingly out of nowhere. The green of the wall, the shadow of the tree, the antenna at the top, the grating near the bottom, the energy of the oblique lines—all combine to make this photo memorable. It helped that the light was just right, too.

Fran Gardner photo

Paris in books

I quoted above from The Paris Novel  by Ruth Reichl. I have been a huge fan of her writing since she was The New York Times’s food critic back in the ’90s. I had never encountered anyone who could describe taste the way she did (try writing about how something tastes: it’s nearly impossible). I even wrote her a note, in those pre-email days, telling her how much I loved her writing. And she wrote back, thanking me for the compliment!

I followed her career as she became editor of Gourmet, my favorite magazine of all time. I was crushed when, 10 years later (in 2009), Condé Nast bean counters decided the magazine had to go. They tried to replace my subscription with Bon Appétit, which is like trying to replace Architectural Digest with Southern Living. No thanks, I said, and I meant it.

The novel

I enjoyed Reichl’s memoirs, including Tender at the Bone and Garlic and Sapphires, but I hadn’t read her fiction till I picked The Paris Novel off the library’s Lucky Day shelf.

This book is a true page-turner. Sometimes it takes me weeks of dipping in and out to finish a book, but this one was the work of a day. 

The prose is breezy and propellant, the plot delicious, and the food—oh, mamma! Like this example: To eat a little bird, a bunting or ortolan, you have to put a napkin over your head so other diners aren’t disgusted as you put the whole bird in your mouth and munch your way through from claws to brain. 

As always, Reichl’s way of describing taste is transporting. And in fiction, what wish fulfillment! Her main character learns to cook by feel, naturally. She learns to trust an old man who eventually becomes her mentor. One of the things he shows her is a cathedral that, like Stonehenge, is a giant sundial when the summer solstice sunlight strikes a window—only the guidebooks don’t mention it.

So the romance involving the estranged son of the harmless old man was a little lame. That wasn’t the point anyway.

An explosion of Paris

All of a sudden, Paris is in books all around me.

My church choir is working on an anthem by the mid-20th century composer Ned Rorem. I had not heard of this songwriter until last year, when I came across a copy of The Paris Diary of Ned Rorem, in a gorgeous edition by George Braziller. 

Rorem was immersed in the culture of that city in the early and mid-1950s. He met famous people: Man Rey, Jean Cocteau, Darius Milhaud, Zsa Zsa Gabor. Virgil Thomson was his mentor. He encountered Picasso at a movie theater: “Those jet bullet eyes both burned into my brain and absorbed me into his forever. I was so carbonized. . .”

Present Paris

I am still dipping in and out of Paris in the Present Tense, by Mark Helprin. I am a great fan of Helprin’s dense prose, with its lengthy sentences and odd positioning of disparate images. But I am torn by other forces—writing and quilting, riding the bus, cooking dinner and just staring into space. Time to read is at a premium. I need to apply myself to read this book, and I’m not sure I can do it.

I’m having the same dipping issues with Le Divorce, by Diane Johnson. It doesn’t have Paris in the title, but the Eiffel Tower is on the cover, and it’s set in Paris. 

I picked it up because on some Substack (I’ve forgotten which one) readers were listing the books they had read multiple times, and this was one woman’s choice. I’m still trying to figure out why. It could have to do with the romance of Paris. And that would be a nonstarter for me, because I don’t think present-day Paris is romantic.

Paris and London

I may be the only woman on earth who is not charmed by Paris. I feel the same way about that city as I do about London. Both are replete with grimy white limestone buildings. The people are not unfriendly, just unapproachable. And my disability got in the way of enjoying either city.

I’ve been to each city just the once. London was in 2000, when my daughter Lyza was in a graduate program at the University of Birmingham and I met her in London. 

I had found a hotel on the then-nascent Internet, and I misunderstood where it was. It was definitely not central, and Lyza and I, in our few days in the city, didn’t have a lot of money for cab fare.

I was only about five years into my diagnosis, but I was already walking with a cane, and not rapidly. I remember walking endlessly on uninteresting streets. The only place I remember clearly is Camden Market, then, as now, a hub for hipsters. The Camden scene is also a feature in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, which is the one book I reread every few years. I don’t know why.

Paris visit

Robert and I visited France in 2007. We loved Provence, where we had a car, but Paris was difficult to navigate. I remember, again, walking and walking—I used a walker by then—to various restaurants. The Louvre was closed for some reason. Notre Dame seemed unapproachable. We took the funicular to visit Sacré-Coeur, but we couldn’t tour the Champs-Élysées by bus because it was Sunday and the buses didn’t run.

We did see some famous sights in Paris, like this lion in the Jardin des Tuileries. Fran Gardner photo

We stayed near the Rue de Rosiers in the Marais, the old Jewish section of Paris. On one occasion, when Robert was elsewhere and I was walking in that street by myself, a Frenchwoman approached me and tried to give me a euro. She was quite flustered to find the sorry, stooped figure she was taking pity on was just an American tourist.

I took a lot of shots of doors in Paris with my tiny 3 MB Fujifilm FinePix. Of course it didn’t include location information, and I didn’t take notes. Fran Gardner photo

Not everything in Paris was grimy limestone. Fran Gardner photo

Check out

Changes and additions

When writing about the Sterling Room for Writers at the Multnomah County Library’s Central branch, I noted that it was funded by Donald Sterling, Jr., in honor of his parents, Adelaide and Donald. I neglected to mention that his sister, Harriet Hayes, known by all as “Sis,” also contributed.

Wrong maple?

A tree I identified in a photo in my article about Maples on September 7 as a Japanese maple may instead have been a Chinese maple. The two trees have similar foliage, but the Chinese maple’s is redder.

I’m indebted to a hairdresser named Ray, whom I found staining the front steps of his home on Southeast Belmont, for pointing this out. Thanks, Ray.

Stray ghosts

I wrote in “Ghost Streets” about street names that disappeared when Portland revamped its street address system in the early 1930s. North-south streets became numbered avenues in every sector except North.

Nelson Street

This street name is at 92nd Avenue and Woodstock Boulevard in Southeast. Nelson must have been renamed 92nd Avenue.

Portland Boulevard

Portland Boulevard lost its name much more recently. It became Rosa Parks Way by vote of the Portland City Council in 2006.

Poem

I’m always trying to settle on a morning routine. It eludes me because there are simply more things to do than I can do. So I do some of them when I can. 

Morning routine

After I exercise
Water the plants
Think about more coffee
Settle down
Get ready to write
Shake out the wrists
Keyboard in lap. . .
Open wide, now
The words tumble out

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