October 24, 2013 — The cook toasted a purple chicken atop the flagpole until it became crinkled like the brown cellophane you crushed in your hand yesterday.
I am preparing a recipe for my Blue Deer Writers Workshops I intend offering in my home after the first of the year. Writing gets easier and improves when you don’t try to control it. Hell, you can even write upside down, Stephen King said. You can’t hold all the reins. If you do, you become so busy trying to control your team of words the reins entangle and you get writer’s block. So many potential writers tell me they want to write but they just can’t seem to get the story out. Everyone has a story to tell. My answer is, just write: write anything; just put the words on paper; write for 10 minutes without stopping; go back and edit and rearrange the words and phrases afterwards. If you don’t know what to say, begin with “I don’t know what to say,” and write that over and over if you must. Or talk about purple chickens. Combine seemingly unrelated words and see how they taste together. You may be pleasantly surprised. Unless you’re in a dark closet, be aware of your surroundings. Is your neighbor really cooking dog or does it just smell like that? Outside my window the vermillion dogwood leaves burnished by golden October sun, against a slate-gray wind cloud backdrop, quiver in the breeze surfeiting a corner of my mind with abundant beauty as I type filling the white page with black words in Times typeface.
Take a walk. Leave your cell phone home. With your face aglow in the light of the smart phone in which you’ve buried your nose, you miss your natural surroundings – the golds and reds and browns of the fallen maple leaves and the dry, smoky aroma rising from them as you shuffle through them; the venerable bald cypress incensing your hair and ears and shoulders with exotic fragrance as you walk in the cathedral of its graceful arms and hear the chittering and chirping of the many, busy little lives sheltered deep within.
In the Eastern High Sierra Nevada Mountains of California, the dry air smells of pinesap and granite dust. Hiking up the mountainside, at 9, 000 feet altitude and higher, I round a bend, unexpectedly to come upon a waterfall. I stand in awe, mesmerized, watching it shift and lift and change, sonorous, a white lacey veil played by the fingers of the wind. I move on, tripping the light fantastic along the banks of a glacier lake, taking care not to stumble over the plumbing, the pipes running from that lake down to the next and the next, ultimately to supply water for the town of Mammoth Lakes and other California places. The long arm of mankind reaches into the backcountry.
Sometimes I hiked with companions; sometimes I hiked alone. Always I listened, felt, watched, sensed, sniffed the air. High above, the sun glinted off an airplane, a silver sliver aloft in the blue, the singular sound of its jet engines in the high dry atmosphere, a sound that carries me back to the Sierra on the rare occasions the humidity is low here on the East Coast and I hear that sound again. Hiking in the Sierra, I didn’t take a cell phone, though always a camera, a bottle of water and a snack. The wildlife was different there from at home in Southern California; there were blue stellar jays, marmots and mule deer. The marmots resemble miniature bears; I steered clear of real bears, which at close encounter appear way bigger than portrayed in photographs.
Today a friend in the Seattle area mentioned buying delicious vegetable lasagna at Trader Joe’s. In Southern California I shopped regularly at Trader Joe’s. I bemoan the absence of Trader Joe’s in our local area. The nearest one is an hour away, and here in Delaware the law prohibits selling wine in a grocery store; TJ’s sells excellent wines at excellent prices. I really miss that store; and Whole Paycheck (oops, Whole Foods), too. A writer friend called it Whole Paycheck on her blog (http://lameadventures.com). I find the term accurate. Our family-owned Willey Farms, though, just up the road, is a combination of the two, everything locally grown or in winter trucked from their Florida farms, connected to the farm stand where I used to work. I smile when I walk in the door — it smells so good, of the season — in summer like melons and beans and tomatoes; in fall like squashes and cauliflower and broccoli; in winter, citrus; and onions in spring; a feast for the eyes in red, yellow, green, orange and purple. Of course, there are the homemade soups and the mac & cheese seemingly made from the recipe Thomas Jefferson brought back from Paris. Then there’s the candle department, perpetually illuminating my temptations.
This is my favorite time of the year. It is also the time of the year my sinuses get stuffed up and I develop a sinus infection. This has happened to me every fall, from October, before Halloween, through Christmas since I was a kid (on the East Coast, though not in Southern California). As a kid I suffered from terrible sinus pain and infections, having to be in bed and take this horrible green liquid medicine. I would have a mild fever and hallucinate. Big cinderblocks closed in on me in my bed as I dozed. Mother fed me orange Jell-O which I didn’t like, but found interesting to poke with my fingers and play in. Now every time I see that particular color green, I can taste that medicine and feel that sickening sinus pain. Every year Mother and I rode the trolley out towards West Chester, Pa., to the office of Dr. Tunnell, who washed out my ear. Interesting name for an ear, nose and throat specialist. The accent is on the second syllable.
I had a set of wooden design blocks that amused me while I was bed bound. Each side of the block had a different geometric design – adjoining triangles in complementary colors – or was a solid color, in red, blue, yellow or white. I could make several different designs with those blocks. I liked the red/blue combination because they are the colors of the University of Pennsylvania. The design examples were pictured on the inside of the lid. I wonder what happened to those blocks. I often wish I still had them. I read a lot, too – Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verse, classic short stories and novels – The Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew – and biographies.
Last year my left ear was closed for a month. This year when I felt it coming on, I began taking colloidal silver. That normally stops the infection in its tracks and clears it up in three days. Colloidal silver kills the bacteria. It’s a liquid I administer by dropper — mouth, nose, ear.
I intend to begin the new year with a series I call “The Scheherazade Chronicles Afternoons of Authors Tea Readings.” I want to do these Sunday afternoons monthly until summer, in my home, each month featuring a different revered author, at $15 per person per session, beginning with a Jane Austen Tea Reading. At that time I will, of course, promote my books, Begins the Night Music, To What Green Altar, and hopefully by then I will have published my new one, The Phantom of My Blog. Moriarty’s been nudging me on that one.
I will also launch my writers workshops then. I’m planning to offer these workshops as 10 weeks of weekly hour and a half sessions for $300. If you are interested you can make a reservation via email at samanthamozart@gmail.com; and you can pay through PayPal at the “Donate” button here on my site. I will keep writers groups small, no more than nine, and I want to invite local authors to come read their work and discuss writing. The only tools you will need for the writers workshops are a couple of good, easy writing pens and a spiral bound notebook. We will handwrite our work, we will take short walks, listen to music and otherwise immerse ourselves in sensory stimulation. We will read our work aloud.
My Blue Deer Writers Workshops: The blue deer rends the cloth of the common brown herd.
—Samantha Mozart
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