First Newspaper Column is Out!

Headshot for The Greenville News
by Paula Player Photography

Hi, all!

I'm thrilled to announce that my new parenting/outdoor/general life column is now up and running in The Greenville News! Makes me very happy to have a byline in my hometown newspaper again.

To check it out, go here.

And be prepared to read about Shakespeare and refrigerator magnets.

Searching for Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman. My hero (ine).

I have been not-so-secretly obsessed with Wonder Woman since I was four years old, when I got to be her for Halloween. It remains my favorite of many wildly creative Halloween costumes (man, my Mom could sew), and included red rainboots, stars-and-stripes Underoos, and aluminum foil magic bracelets. I felt powerful. At four years old. I never wanted to take it off.

It didn't matter that I was a tiny towhead better suited for a Heidi costume: Wonder Woman was my girl. I loved her.

Wonder Woman has followed me throughout my life, and once lived on a huge poster on the screened-in porch of a cabin in the North Carolina mountains that I shared with six other 20s-ish women. We were outdoor educators (basically a fancy way of saying camp counselors and trip leaders), most just out of college, working through the Fall and early Winter on group programs for middle and high schoolers--in hiking, biking, team-building, paddling, climbing, you name it. The cabin wasn't insulated (in fact, the windows were covered with screens, which is interesting in October in the mountains), and we slept in our sleeping bags in a row of bunkbeds, tobaggons on our (sometimes wet) heads and double layers of socks on our feet. On the other side of the cabin lived the male counselors, and though they were a bit smellier than we were (only a bit), we were a big, happy family, silly and raucous and entirely invested in working with kids and teenagers and living an outdoor life.

I have to pause a moment. Man, I loved that life.

Okay. So, Wonder Woman. One of my buddies in the cabin stuck the poster up on our screened porch, so we could see it every time we left and entered the cabin. Wonder Woman began to feel like a welcoming committee, after sometimes days of being out with 6th or 7th graders, or high schoolers, trekking through the Appalachian backcountry. I started imaginging that she smiled at me, that she'd give me imaginary high-fives when I'd return sweaty and dirty and happily exhausted.

Today, as a 30s-ish woman, I've got Wonder Woman magnets on my fridge, and a ridiculously cool Wonder Woman mug (I'm actually drinking out of it as I write this). It says, in bold, slanting black letters, that "This Amazon Princess Will Not Bow to Any Man!" Awesome.

I'm even teaching my two year-old daughter to say "WONder WOman!" with the same inflection as the '70s TV show theme song. And if you ask her who her favorite superhero is, she'll tell you, just like that.

I am so proud.

But lately, I find myself reaching for my Wonder Woman mug far more often (I used to just drink from her on Friday mornings, when I was feeling especially sassy). I need her magic bracelets, her gold headband, and certainly her invisible plane, now more than ever.

Every modern woman, I think, attempts to be Wonder Woman. Most of us have jobs, families, avocations, homes, and some of us have kids. Though the balancing act of being a modern woman has become a sort of cliche, especially in modern media, we're juggling all these aspects of our lives like a Ringling Brothers' clown riding a unicycle center stage and tossing up tomatoes. The spotlights are blaring and hot, and beyond the ring of light the bleachers are filled with the faces of our family members and friends. We don't want to drop anything.

I don't have a solution for this. If I did I'd sell it on t-shirts. At the moment I'm caught up in my own wonderful but bone-tiring roles of writer, teacher, mother, wife, student--and I don't feel that I'm doing anything well.

And so, for the thousandth time in my life--including senior year of college, when in order to graduate, I desperately needed to pass a math test that looked like hieroglyphics; or, for that matter, when I was in labor with my daughter for 20 hours--I am calling on Wonder Woman. I need her back in my life, go-go boots, booty shorts, bustier and all.

Because she's my favorite superhero. Because she deflects bullets with her wrists. Because, I think, she gets me.

Favorites List: Things I Love About Life-Long Friends

This afternoon my daughter and I are headed to Charlotte, N.C. to visit two of my oldest and dearest friends. One of these women I have known since birth, and another since I was in kindergarten. Years ago our parents forged a bond of friendship (involving quite a lot of adult beverages, Motown, and beach/lake time) for which I am forever grateful.

I'd include photos here, of our parents and us, but that could be trouble. Instead, I'll share one of our favorite places:

The Lawdy Mercy, Garden City Beach, S.C.

All friendships are blessings--some of the greatest in this life. Whether old or new, friends bring color and relief and magic to our everyday spinning through space. But for today, here's to life-long friendships, and life-long friends!

10 Things I Love About Life-Long Friends:

1. They don't let you lie to them.

When you've been friends so long that you learned to potty-train together, you forfeit all subterfuge.

2. They really, truly think you're beautiful--and say so.

This one's important: No matter how fat or thin you grow, no matter how your belly and boobs change after childbirth, or how many wrinkles form at the corners of your eyes, these friends see you as you were 20 years ago, and as you are now. And they love you for it all.

This is especially important in the case of my particular friends, because I suffered the zit and braces-filled adolescent years with them. Years when my mouth and my nose were too big for my face. Years when I had bouffant bangs. The year of the perm.

3. They know how to mix your drink.

Heck, they know what you like to drink, how you like to drink it, when you like to drink it, and when you need a drink.

4. They share with you.

Their clothes, their shoes, their children, their vacation houses, their favorite new music, their secrets, their recipes. Life-long friends love you like family, and when they find or have something or someone else that they love, they want you to be part of it.

5. They're there for you, good times and bad.

This is a biggie. When you are, and have been, friends for life, you endure it all together: weddings, funerals, births, cancer, moves, job losses and gains, hearts merged and broken. Whether you're in the room or over the phone, or a thousand miles away from each other, you are there. And there's nothing more important than this.

6. They make you do things you don't want to do--but they do them with you.

Even if one of these (many) things involves a lot of wine, a sunset over the marsh, a band, a microphone, and maracas.

7. They put sunscreen on you.

This cannot be overstated. Lathering someone up with sunscreen is tedious, annoying and messy. You have to really love another person to commit to making sure they're not going to get fried in hot pink patches. I've estimated that these friends and I have been putting sunscreen on each other for about 20 years.

8. Their hearts break and swell with yours.

When you hurt or get hurt, life-long friends feel it too. This is different than being there in spirit or being there physically when something happens in your life.

The simple fact is, when you've been friends this long, you're part of each other's DNA. You feel for each other like family... really, in many ways, like something more than family, because you've chosen each other. And it doesn't matter if you don't talk on the phone every week, or if there are years when you see each other only once or twice. When they hurt, you hurt. And you're on your knees, in the dark, begging for their relief. When they rejoice, you rejoice. And you send your love out into the stratosphere like shouting into an emotional bull horn.

9. It doesn't matter how far apart you live, or how long it's been since you've last been together. When you get together, it's as if time has stood still, and you pick up right where you left off.

We have lived as close as half a mile and as far as 700+ miles apart. We've gone months and even years since being together. It just doesn't matter: our connection is rooted in the blood.

10. You are forever friends.

Really.

Book Heroin & Writer Lust

I've got a book problem.

I've always had it, but lately it's gotten worse. I am drowning in books.

Over the years--as recently as the Fall--I have made attempts to seek a cure. I've culled my books, my haphazard library. I've donated books to friends, to the county library, to women's and childrens' groups. I became a volunteer for Operation Paperback, and each month I send countless paperbacks overseas to soldiers who desperately need a good story.

None of this has helped my disease. Let me offer proof.

Exhibit A, one of the four bookshelves in my livingroom/kitchen:



This bookshelf just squeaked, "Save me!"

Do not believe my husband when he tells you that I haven't given away enough books. I have. But this is as far as I can go. I won't show you the other seven bookshelves in my house. They're not fit for company.

Some girls dream of shopping sprees at Sephora and Manolo Blahniks. I dream of built-in bookshelves.

Now that I've begun my MFA in Writing, my book problem has gotten worse. Short story collections and essay collections--slim volumes, true--have been added to the stacks. Aimee Bender, Katherine Mansfield, and Jim Harrison have now joined the ranks of William Shakespeare, Diana Gabaldon, Lauren Groff and William Bartram. The books on my shelves speak Cherokee, Gullah, Cockney English, Gaelic and vampire. Yet they get along. I think.

Yesterday, I continued work on a new novel, which opens up a realm of possibilities for research. Okay, fine. A new reason to feed my book problem. Still, the sky has brightened and the seas have parted on a whole new world of topics like the Antebellum women's movement, the cotton industry, and pirates. Ooh, and also horse racing and 19th century politics and riding boots.

I might as well just go ahead and open a vein.

As a result of my book problem, I recently purchased one of the most enjoyable novels I've read in years: A Discovery of Witches, by Deborah Harkness. This book, which I gobbled down in about two days last weekend, satisfied all my cravings. It's centered around a
young American historian in Oxford (a hereditary witch determined to ignore her witchy DNA); a gorgeous, bookish vampire-scientist, and an ancient text. This is no teenager's vampire story: The pace of the novel is lightening-fast, the settings gorgeous, the mystery fun, and since Harkness herself is a PhD in history and a research hound, it totally satisfies the egghead in me. I can't wait for the sequel.

Since I read it, I've been suffering from writer lust. Another of my unfortunate "problems." I'm not necessarily jealous of Harkness's success (okay, maybe a smidge). What I lust after is her skill, her power to meld intellect with imagination. This is the sort of story I always long to tell: one that fuses history and research and books and adventure, and, when necessary (and some could argue this is always necessary), love.

And on top of all that, to create a story readers enjoy--full-throttle enjoy, like I did. On a beach, at the lake, on their couches, on a plane. Heads bent over gripped pages or Ipads or Kindles, completely immersed. Reading into the wee hours, though they have jobs and kids and life to take care of the next day.

It also doesn't hurt that as a full-time professor and author, Harkness is engaged in almost exactly the dual career I've been working toward since I was 24. And she's only in her mid-40s.

Did I mention that A Discovery of Witches is her fiction debut? Debut. First novel. And already a bestseller.

Okay, maybe more than a smidge jealous. But it's good-natured jealousy, non-threatening writer lust. Because for all her success and writerly genius, I get to read what she writes. And that's a gift.

So now it's back to my own projects and the story I'm currently trying to tell. In two minutes, it'll be time to wake my daughter, whom I've already let chatter and sing in her crib for far too long. Then my day really begins.

It's a wild, complicated, frustrating, wonderful, exhausting, exhilirating life, choosing to be a writer. I wouldn't trade it for anything.

I also wouldn't trade this for anything:

My daughter, 2 1/2, head in her own book.



Happy Thursday, all!

Steady as She Goes

It is well with me only when I have a chisel in my hand.

~ Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, 1474-1564

Sitting at this desk in a brown-tiled room, a fire blazing on a chilly—but not yet cold—November morning, it becomes apparent to me that I am a Spurter. One-who-spurts. Better yet, I should say: One-Who-Does-Things-in-Spurts. I’m certain that this comes as no surprise to anyone who knows me; so indeed, it’s not really a surprise even to me. Recognition, however, comes a little slow for my mercurial and somewhat exhausted brain.

But it’s true: almost anything I’ve ever done—and done well—has been in a great spurt of inspiration or information or necessity: writing a college essay (night before, cram cram), reading a book (all in one sitting, no matter the tomb), writing a novel (I’m a sixteen-plus pages at a time sort of writer), cleaning the house (flurry of activity, Windex, Lysol, vacuum, oh my!), hiking a trail (turn around now, are you kidding?!), catching up with friends (all of them, all in one day), and even deciding to have a baby (okay, maybe I won’t go there.) “Slow and steady wins the race” has never been my adage of choice, and perhaps it should be. Perhaps those plodders, the successful, steady-as-she-goes types, are onto something. Maybe there’s a potion.

It can’t be easy to live with, this spurting tendency of mine. Since we dated for three years before becoming engaged, I think my husband may have had some sort of idea what he was getting into. But then, we’d never lived together before, so the day to day reality of this odd aspect of my nature may still be an annoyance… even after six years of marriage. Yeesh. As we’ve grown together, we try to plan, to budget, to make lists. These are all practical antidotes for the spurting. They help at times; at others they’re just stop-gap. My fifteen month-old daughter doesn’t seem to mind the spurting, though she may be too young at this point to recognize that Mama is a little nuts. Or maybe, heaven forbid, she’s a spurter, too. Maybe there’s a potion.

The dog is definitely a spurter: this I knew the day I brought her home from the breeder and she went skidding full-tilt around the hardwood floors of the beachhouse I was renting at the time; or, when she bounded—at all of six weeks old and about the size of a loaf of bread—into the rough Atlantic, only to be pummeled by a monster wave. She’s still that way, gazelling up steep trails in her late-middle-age, high on joy, then crashing on our couch for hours after. The lulls between spurts, for both of us—my dog and me—are getting longer. This does not bode well for future productivity.

At times I long to be one of the plodders, those whose houses stay clean for months on end, the ones who train for marathons a year away, whose lives are clear and unworried and neat, those steady, accomplished people. Michelangelo was steady. It took him four years each, give or take, to both sculpt the David and paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling. During each of those times he was also commissioned for, and completed, other works—including architectural projects and paintings. Inspired? Surely. But also determined, prepared, steady. Most would say that Michelangelo was a master, a true genius. He felt differently: “If you knew how much work went into it,” he would say, “you would not call it genius.”

So there’s the goal: to marry the inspired, the passion, with the steady, the deliberate. In the meantime, I bow to you, Plodders. Keepers-of-the-schedules. Master Buonarroti, always. My elderly, across the street neighbor, who raises her American flag every morning at 7:35 a.m. You are the producers. That I may, one day, be one.