Praise Break

There are days when almost nothing on my to-do list seems to get done, and yet I look back and say "That was a rich learning day. Thank you, God."

Today has been one of those, and I am feeling tremendously grateful that sometimes, I have just enough wisdom to get out of my own way, scrap my agenda, and let the Lord do what he wants to do in me. 

This praise break brought to you by the heart of a humble, grateful woman.

The 24 Hour Retreat

So much richness in the retreat I went to Friday night and Saturday. It’s hard to believe that so much rich teaching could be packed into such a short time.

The shortness of the time – 24 hours – was the hardest part. I don’t think anyone slept very well on Friday night, as one often doesn’t for the first night in a strange place. But we didn’t get a second chance to sleep better. It seemed we got there and had to turn around and head home right away. I felt extra tired on Saturday, and the bleak grayness of the day (which was rainy/misty and only about 40 degrees) didn’t lend itself to providing much energy. And yet it was still completely worth it. I didn’t come home physically rested, but I didn’t expect to. I did come home spiritually enriched, and that was a blessing.

Dr. Kenneth Bailey is an amazing Bible teacher. I have had the privilege of listening to many good teachers of the Scriptures. There have been a few teachers in particular at whose feet I have felt especially privileged to sit, and I count Dr. Bailey among those. With his long years of experience in the Middle East, and his many years of prayerful listening and careful scholarship, he brings a faithful yet incredibly fresh perspective to the Biblical text. He opens up the Scriptures in ways that sometimes literally take my breath and bring tears to my eyes.

Many of the teachers I’ve had over the years, going back to the late 1980s at Eastern, have given me deeper insight into the place of women in the Scriptures and in the Kingdom. I have always been incredibly thankful for that. But it is not something I have spent a lot of time thinking about specifically in recent years, and I was amazed, as Dr. Bailey unfolded his teaching on women in the New Testament, to realize how much I have unconsciously absorbed that is not helpful – attitudes and assumptions about women’s roles, worth, and place that are culturally shaped but not gospel shaped. We get these tapes playing in our minds and hearts sometimes that are so quiet and unobtrusive they’re like muzak on elevators – but the messages can really hurt us. Then we “flee to the life of Jesus” (as Michael Card puts it) and we discover the truth that set us free.

It is always amazing to realize anew how radically freeing the gospel is, and to see again and again how deeply and tenderly Jesus cares for all of creation and every single person in it. As Dr. Bailey flew through passage after passage (amazing how much he got in during three sessions) the insights were flying around the room like a flock of birds, and every diverse note seemed to sing the same song. It takes *male and female* to be the image of God. And we are at our best and most gospel-shaped when we are not fighting, not trying to oppose each other, not trying to trump or one-up the other, not trying to jockey for positions of power over each other, not lording it over each other, but joining hands at the table to work together, love together, serve Jesus together, radically thankful for the grace that makes us all forgiven and free, radically assured that we are equally broken, equally saved by grace, equally called and gifted, equally needed to share his love in this messed up world. And that we manifest that love best together, because there are things unique in both women and men that reflect the character of God.

The other wonderful thing about those 24 hours was how lovely it was to connect with women: past and present. I had time in the Scriptures with women who have shaped our heritage of faith since the church’s beginning. I had leisurely time at three meals to get to know four ladies in my parish better. I was there because a woman friend from afar gave me the gift of the retreat. And in what felt like a total grace note, in our closing Eucharist, we “happened” to sing two songs which incredibly represent, for me, two very different spiritual seasons in my life shaped very strongly by two different women. I learned these songs while learning from those two women, Evelyn (in my childhood) and Lucille (in my 20s). Along with my mother, they have been some of the deepest influences ever in my spiritual life.

Imagine That! They're Asking You to Do Math!

Sometimes a conversation will occur during the course of a homeschool morning that just makes me laugh. If you could eavesdrop on some of the conversations at our house, I have a feeling you'd chuckle too, though some of these conversations are not the kind you'll find in magazine articles about the joy of teaching and learning.

Because let's face it -- real kids and real teachers sometimes get cranky. They get bored. They get frustrated. They miss the point. Real learning, and real teaching, is full of ups and downs and moments that look anything but graceful. And sometimes they're just downright funny.

Take today's math lesson. The sweet girl has been swimming in the land of fractions for a few weeks now. Although we've moved on to ratios, fractions still loom everywhere, and today the book had the audacity to present not one, not two, but three sections of dividing fractions.

Now...the sweet girl is good at dividing fractions. She totally gets the concept, and she does them well. But frankly, she's bored. Now sometimes when a student is bored, it's OK to say "go ahead, skip that, and go on to something else." But she's been struggling a good bit lately with keeping a good attitude and persevering on things she doesn't really feel like doing, and today I decided to die on that hill. So I told her she needed to soldier through.

"But I know how to do these," she said (okay, whined might be more accurate). "They're easy and I know how to do them and I don't want to do..." she paused and counted..."26 dividing fraction problems."

"Well," I encouraged, "break them up. Do one section and then go on to something else. Then come back and do another section."

Often this works. She's found it a helpful strategy in the past, to break up doing several sections in a row of the same thing. Today she sighed. "But the only other section left is the one on equations," she said in a aggrieved voice. "You know I don't enjoy equations. Especially when I have to check them. Checking them is such a pain because if I don't know for sure that it's right, then I actually have to go back over and do the math to figure out if they're correct."

I was in the kitchen cutting up veggies for the crockpot when she said this, and for some reason, it totally tickled my funny bone. Although I try hard not to give into sarcasm very often (knowing how much it bothers my daughter) a snarky little elf seemed to be giggling right next to me. Without thinking I said, "Imagine that! Having to do math in a math lesson! What could they have been thinking?" As the snarky elf continued to giggle madly, I added, "I mean, you might think they could have come up with something a little more creative! They could have asked you to do science...or yoga...or cooking. But no, they asked you to do math!"

Lest you think the snark elf masquerading as mom went too far, I am pleased to report that I suddenly heard snickering from the dining room. Once the giggles subsided, she did the rest of the math with nary a complaint. OK, maybe one or two small ones.

"The Bridge" (A Poem by Kaissar Afif)

The sweet girl and I have been journeying through Jordan on our geography Mondays. Today we were reading from The Space Between Our Footsteps, a collection of poems and paintings from the Middle East collected by Naomi Shihab Nye.

Some lovely poems in translation here, with some especially beautiful metaphors. I really liked this one:

The Bridge

Poetry is a river
And solitude a bridge.

Through writing
     We cross it,
Through reading

We return.

~Kaissar Afif (translated by Mansour Ajami) 

Sleeping Like Bears

My daughter and I have a running joke that her favorite stuffed bear, Trumpkin, hibernates during the winter. We have made up lots of little stories over the years about how he hibernates, and how he wakes up and comes alert again every year round about March.

So...the bear is waking up here, but the rest of us are sleeping a ton.

I don't know what our family caught this past week, but it's been a doozy. The sweet girl got it first, a little over a week ago, and she had a few rough days of fever, aches, sore throat, just plain exhaustion. She's still sleeping more than usual, though the rest of her symptoms have gone away.

I've had congestion, cough, fever, aches, and have been sleeping a bizarre number of hours each night for the past few nights. Fever is gone now, but the rest of it remains, and despite all the extra sleep, I am energy-less, just dragging through the days.

Today I noticed that my dear husband was dragging, just completely exhausted looking. He has dark circles under his eyes and was having a hard time staying awake at the dinner table. Granted, he's been working a lot lately, but this was not your normal tired looking. He admitted he was starting to feel "wheezy" and he went to bed as soon as we finished eating.

I have a feeling we might all feel better if we could find a cave somewhere and just hibernate for the next couple of weeks....

I keep telling myself that one day I will have energy again! 

"Instructions for Living a Life"

My heart is tired this week.

Tired, discouraged, and fighting what feels like this winter's seventeenth bout of illness, I turned to poetry. More specifically to Mary Oliver, who has been speaking to my heart a lot this year.

And I stumbled onto this stanza from her poem "Sometimes" in the collection titled "Red Birds":

"Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it."

It was one of those poetry moments where I found myself not knowing whether to laugh or cry, so I think I did a little of both. This is so where I am right now in this tired, busy season. It's like she took a peek at my life and wrote exactly what my heart has been learning and wanting to say.

I love it when a writer does that.

Watching the Boats (an original poem)

Monet's Les Barques

Where clouds end and boats begin

I cannot tell.

I only feel the gentle swaying swell

of the waves beneath my feet

and hear the billowed sails that snap

like sheets on a line. Are there eight?

Maybe nine? I start to count

but am lost in delight as the wind-capped waves

meet blue sky bright. Spume, clouds, sails –

soft as cotton or down, the sky in a bowl

and the world upside down and the wind

rushing free and the bend of dark trees and

the roofs of red tiles and the sense of good

miles still before me today.

I don’t know what to say.

~EMP, 2/25/13 

When Words Just "Click": Fun Today With Visual Latin

The sweet girl has been working through Lesson 17 of Visual Latin this week. In the reading/translation section of the lesson, she's up to the story of Noah and the ark. VL uses an adapted version of the Vulgate for these sections.

As part of the "immersion" approach, the Visual Latin teacher, Dwane Thomas, first reads the passage aloud while the student just listens. Then he reads it again, more slowly, pausing between sentences or phrases, while the student repeats it after him. (The words are written on the screen each time too.) Then the student works through the same passage to translate it, with any new vocabulary for the week listed at the end of the passage.

This means that by the time the student actually has the passage in front of them to translate, they've already heard all the words twice and said them once. Sometimes it's fun to see the brow wrinkling that can go on when the sweet girl is listening to a passage and a word she hasn't heard before pops up. I saw that today when the teacher read: "Signum est arcus. Nimbi sunt in caelo. Arcus quoquo in caelo est."

She knew the word "arca" from last week, and from earlier in today's passage. She knew it meant ark. But "arcus" -- close to arca, and yet so far -- was a brand new word. The brow definitely wrinkled when he read "Arcus quoque in caelo est," because if you translated "arcus" as "ark," it would read, "The ark is also in the sky."

Sure enough, when she got to that part of the passage, she wasn't quite sure what to do. I pointed out that "arcus" was a different word than "arca" and told her to go to her new vocabulary sheet. Light dawned as she realized that "arcus" can mean "bow, arch, or rainbow."

"Oh!" she said, "I get it! The RAINBOW is also in the sky. Not the ark. I was wondering. I was thinking maybe it was talking about when the ark landed on the mountain!"

We had a good laugh, and then a fun marvel over the closeness of the words. It had never fully dawned on either of us that the rainbow "arch" in the sky is really the inverted shape of the "ark" in the water.

Don't you love it when you learn new things about words, and when words just suddenly "click"?

More Than a Puritan Valentine: Remembering Anne Bradstreet

In honor of Valentine’s Day, a couple of friends posted a funny meme. It had to do with “Puritan Valentines” and showed a series of cards designed as though written by Puritans, things along the lines of “Roses are red, violets are blue, and both of those things are completely frivolous and useless.” (I’m paraphrasing, but you get the idea.)

I’m all for a little good-natured snark on Valentine’s Day – I had another friend post something about how strange it is we honor St. Valentine the martyr by buying chocolates – but giggling over Puritan Valentines, I suddenly remembered Anne Bradstreet’s touching love poem to her husband.

Why don’t we remember Anne Bradstreet more often?

Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672) was a Puritan and a poet. She was also a dedicated wife and mother to eight children.

Her’s was “an authentic Puritan voice” and she was also “the first notable poet in American literature” ~ to quote what I think of as the liner notes in my Norton American Literature anthology.

Stop and ponder the coolness of that for a moment. “The first notable poet in American literature” was not a wealthy, elite, highly educated man making his living as a writer of literature, but a relatively well-educated Puritan woman who got married at 16, shipped out to the Massachusetts Bay Colony at 18, and spent many years reading and writing in the crevices of a pioneering farm life while she raised eight children.

Stop also to consider that she was a pioneer 230 years before the Ingalls family headed west, and that she lamented “I am obnoxious to each carping tongue/Who says my hand a needle better fits” more than 150 years before Jane Austen had Captain Wentworth drop his pen in Persuasion, right before Anne Elliot declared that “…Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story…the pen has been in their hands…”

What I like about Bradstreet is that she built her poems out of the real pieces of her life. She writes about giving birth and about watching her children grow up and fly away from the nest. She writes about her love for her husband and how much she misses him when he has to travel. Yes, she writes love poems – less sentimental than Valentines, more true to the kinds of daily loving and living we all know. One of my favorite lines comes in the poem where she’s missing her husband while he’s away (he was a magistrate and often traveled on business) and misses him most poignantly when she looks around the house at her children and notices they are “true living pictures of their father’s face.” She concludes that poem simply but eloquently: “Flesh of thy flesh, bone of thy bone,/I here, thou there, yet both but one.”

She also writes movingly of sadness and hardship. The poems that mark hard events are especially touching. She often includes important dates in the title, so you feel as though you’re getting a peek into her diary. “In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet, Who Deceased August, 1665, Being a Year and a Half Old” is the title of one, and “Upon the Burning of Our House, July 10^th, 1666” is another. That was clearly a very hard year. In that last poem, she spends several stanzas lamenting the loss of their house, which lies in smoldering ruins she vividly recreates in words. The she turns her words to prayers and gratitude, remembering she has a more permanent home “on high erect/Framed by that mighty Architect…”  She then added this wonderfully real and homey detail to her theology: “It’s purchased and paid for too/By Him who hath enough to do.” 

Giving Up & Embracing: Lenten Spiritual Disciplines

I wrote this post on Sunday. Then I almost decided not to post it at all, partly because I felt a little shy about sharing something this honest about my shortcomings. It also may seem a little wacky. But then I thought, what better time of year than Lent to post something this wackily honest? So here it is...

***************

I had what I think is a God-given spiritual insight today. It sounds simple, but it’s something I think I need to grasp and hold onto tightly with both hands. It’s simply this: the enemy can’t defeat us on ground we haven’t ceded.

I was having a deep spiritual struggle this afternoon. I had been fighting a deep sense of failure for much of the afternoon – failure as a mom, a wife, a friend, a provider, a nurturer, a writer. You name it, if it was part of my vocation, I felt like I was totally failing in it. Mostly especially I was feeling, very deeply, failures in the first three categories – all the relational ones.

Then I had a fight with my ten year old about her messy room. I reacted impatiently and angrily to small things, mostly because I was letting everything she did and said play into that terrible pit of failure I was living out of. Of course she didn’t want to clean her room – not because she was a normal ten year old, but because I had failed as a parent to instill in her a sense of discipline. That’s the kind of beating I was letting myself take inwardly. (And while I’m not saying there’s not a lot of truth to the fact that I need to teach and model a whole better than I’m doing, I don’t think God wants me to feel browbeaten and defeated about the challenge.)

The hits just kept coming. My husband and daughter left to spend some time together, and I found myself cleaning the messy house and feeling ferociously a failure at every turn. Even housekeeping. Even this. Even that.

It was at my lowest ebb that I finally realized I was getting beat up. So I started to fight back. I don’t often shake my fist at the enemy the way Luther did, but today, I needed to. So I did. I started telling the enemy, in the name of Jesus, that he could take a hike. I told him that he could not tell me I wasn’t good enough, because I don’t need to be good enough, I only need to hold onto God’s grace and righteousness. I told him that he couldn’t slam me for the amount of spiritual growth there might or might not be in my daughter’s life, because I’m not ultimately responsible for that growth – I am a seed planter and waterer, and only God can make things grow. I told him he couldn’t slam me for not being beautiful, because God has made me beautiful. I told him he couldn’t get me to give into anxiety, because I was casting my cares on God. I told him he couldn’t trip me up by making me ungrateful about my life, because I was choosing to be grateful.

All that time, I was cleaning and organizing. We’ve had a broken dryer for a long time, but even before dealing with laundromats, we were dealing with a dryer that ran too hot, and it kept shrinking our sheets. We haven’t been able to afford really good sheets in a long time, and there’s something about not wanting to spend money on good ones that you know are going to shrink or scorch anyway. But having sheets that don’t fit well and slip off the mattress really bugs my husband. It bugs me too, but it’s a real nuisance for him. He finally gave in the other day and bought a new fitted sheet on sale. It’s not the best quality, but it’s a new sheet, and I was wrestling to put it on and realizing that we really need a new top sheet too. I ended up putting on a top sheet from a pile of sheets we got from my mother-in-law, only they’re not quite big enough.

All the time I’m dealing with making the bed, the enemy – that terrible sneak – starts pushing and prodding at me to get mad about the sheets. He’s trying to trip me up on something so small that I don’t even notice. I’m starting to grumble and growl about the sheets and how tired I am of having sheets that aren’t soft and don’t fit or sheets that have scorch marks. Seriously. Sheets. And then – are you ready for this? – he brings to mind some sheets I slept on a couple of years ago, when visiting my older sister. They were gorgeous sheets. Seriously. Soft and satiny and fresh smelling and just lovely in every way, and I remember slipping under them and feeling just amazed that sheets could ever feel that way. And the stupid enemy – you know what he’s doing? He’s trying to get me to fall into envy OVER SHEETS.

I know this is weird, but I’m explaining it in such detail because of what it led me to. As I’m falling under the onrushing bus of envy, it suddenly hits me – I DON’T HAVE TO. I took this ground back from the enemy a long time ago. When we made the decision to stay here, to embrace a life of ministry and mission and homeschooling, we embraced simplicity. That was the discipline of engagement. We also, at the same time, renounced certain material things and the dreams of other material things, like having a house. That’s the discipline of letting go. I told the enemy – you know what, you can’t get me here either. Because I let go of my need for nice sheets a long time ago. Because I can be grateful for the few nights I had sleeping with nice ones at my sister’s. Because there are people in this world who have no sheets, or blankets, or beds. Sorry, buster, but there’s no playing field here. You lose again.

And it’s true. Of course, the fact that he could still make headway shows that I’ve still got some sheet envy in me. (Go ahead. Laugh. It’s good for the soul.) But it also shows what a pathetic attack strategy he really has. And most of all, it showed me anew the importance of those disciplines of relinquishment and engagement. We may think those are small moves we make, the little things we willingly (or not so willingly) give up, but they matter. They matter to our soul’s health. And when we willingly put ourselves in the love of the Father, who truly knows our needs, and daily give up and daily embrace what he asks, he will use those little relinquishments and embraces to make us stronger and more stable when attacks – paltry or big – come, as they surely will. When we find ourselves in a place of anger or sadness or despair or self-pity, that’s when the enemy sometimes tries to trip us up on the small stuff, the old stuff. But you know what? He can’t if we won’t play.

The enemy cannot defeat us on ground we haven’t ceded.

And if we find ourselves ceding it again? In the name of Jesus, who hallowed that ground, we can step boldly forward and take it back.

 

Favorite Books of 2012: A Sweet Year

January rushed past me, murmuring "Excuse me, February coming through..."  Feeling winter dig its cold elbow into my ribs, it dawned on me that somehow I have not yet posted my list of favorite books from last year.

For the past few years, I've done a lengthy list with numerous categories. This year it's going to be shorter and sweeter. I changed my cataloging system part-way through the year, which made coming up with the list more challenging than usual. More than that, however, is the simple fact that last year had so many prolonged seasons of tiredness and stress that my reading was not as wide and deep as usual.

Yes, you heard it here. 2012 was the year of fluff reading. Not entirely, of course, and I'm not sure it was a bad thing -- but I mostly read to be refreshed and to have my heart lightened. I usually like to mix up my reading "pace," but last year I did almost no heavy lifting.

Still, I've got a number of books and authors I'd love to recommend, so sit back and enjoy this year's short, sweet, fluffy little edition.

If 2012 was especially marked by one writer for me, that writer was Deborah Crombie. I had never even heard of her until about a year ago when I came across a review of her latest mystery novel. The review was sparse, but there was enough in it to intrigue me, and I went hunting for the beginning of the series. Once I got acquainted with her detectives, Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James, I couldn't seem to stop. In fact, I read through the entire 14 books of her canon last year -- and am feeling so excited to know that #15 will be published this month. I've got it on hold already!

I especially love the heart and intelligence of Crombie's books. Her mystery plots are always layered and well carried out, but it's the depth of her characters, both main and secondary, that I find especially inviting. I've reviewed all 14 books; if you click here, it will take you to my review of the last novel, No Mark Upon Her, which includes active links to my reviews of all the earlier titles in the series.

Finding Crombie's work was a delight this year, but I also fell pretty hard for the mysteries of P.D. James, though in a different way. While I don't think you can call mystery reading heavy lifting, with James, it comes close. She writes in a very dense prose style and really makes you work for your fun. If some mysteries could be considered marshmallow fluff in the world of literary s'mores, P.D. James books are the rich, dark, quality chocolate. Her Dalgliesh books generally have a somewhat intense, somber tone, which often means I need time in between them (usually time to read more Crombie, who gives me a delicious graham cracker crunch). James did surprise me with a lighter sense of humor in An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. I'm only up to the Dalgliesh books published in the later 1970s now, so I've got a long way to go...and I think I will enjoy parceling them out slowly.

I enjoyed some biographies this year, but probably none more than the one I read in the final days of December, Leonard S. Marcus' new mosaic work on Madeleine L'Engle. Listening for Madeleine does what its subtitle promises and creates a portrait in "many voices."

My favorite history read this year was Pearl Harbor: FDR Leads the Nation Into War.

My favorite book on writing was Jane Yolen's Take Joy: A Writer's Guide to Loving the Craft.

One of the books that both intrigued me the most and made me laugh was Quinn Cummings' The Year of Learning Dangerously. I found this comical but informative memoir of a first year in homeschooling quite provocative.

In the literary memoir and travel category, another book that made me ponder as well as laugh was the delightful All Roads Lead to Austen by Amy Elizabeth Smith. Not at all what you'd expect -- it's a good book on Austen, but an even better book on cross-cultural learning.

The "new to me" mid-grade books I enjoyed the most this year? Melissa Wiley's The Prairie Thief and Hope Larson's graphic novel version of A Wrinkle in Time. I loved introducing the sweet girl to the original A Wrinkle in Time this year -- and I also loved reading Little Women to her for the first time.

Other books worth mentioning this year include Lauren Winner's spiritual memoir Still, and Gary D. Schmidt's mid-grade/YA fantasy What Came From the Stars. Oh, and I also really enjoyed Matt Phelan's Around the World, a mid-grade/YA graphic novel about three late 19th century journeys around the world.

The Third Annual Crocus Poem

For the past two years, I've marked my first sighting of crocuses with a tiny poem. Our afternoon walk yielded this year's first sighting of a clump of purple beauties. So here is this year's small poetic celebration!


The sun threw a party
for my winter-tired eyes.
Thirty-one crocuses popped
up and yelled "surprise!"

~EMP, 2/7/13

It's a Truth Universally Acknowledged...

that one should celebrate great books. A very happy 200th birthday to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, which was first published in London on 28 January, 1813.

I posted this as my Facebook status earlier today (or something very similar) but I had to share it here as well. I think this wonderful novel is still looking marvelous on its bicentennial!

Writing Exericise: Fun With First Lines

This week during our morning writing time, the sweet girl and I have been looking at first lines. She’s been fascinated to realize how many different ways there are for writers to begin stories, and how that first line shapes so much that comes after it. We’ve looked at a number of books she loves and talked about how the writer’s choice affects the story that comes after, and how it hooks us into wanting to read more. We’ve also talked about how the story would be shaped differently if a different first line had been written.

We explored several kinds of “first lines” today – traditional storytelling lines; short lines that tell us just enough to keep us going; setting lines that put us immediately in a definitely described place; voice lines that grab us, sometimes with an exclamation and sometimes with a question, but that definitely give us a real sense of a narrator or character’s voice (depending on whether or not the story is told in third or first person).

As an exercise in writing different kinds of first lines, we picked the story of Cinderella. Here are some we came up with – first lines that invite you into a retelling of Cinderella in all kinds of creative ways:

“Once upon a time, there was a girl named Cinderella.” (We agreed that this was about as traditional and simple as we could get.)

“Cinderella! Wash the dishes!” (The sweet girl loved coming up with this one. An exclamation that probably would come from stepmother or stepsisters.)

“A young girl slept with her head pillowed on the cold stones of a sooty hearth.” (A line that gives a definite sense of place, and that presents some important details that could come in useful quite soon.)

“Cinderella always had to work hard because her stepmother mistreated her.” (A line the sweet girl came up with, one that presents a lot of information packed in right upfront.)

“Oh, how tired I am of all these chores!” (Cinderella’s voice the first one we hear.)

“Why is it that my stepsisters get to lie in bed all morning, when I have to get up at the crack of dawn to work?” sighed Cinderella as she climbed wearily out of bed. (A question to get things rolling, and one that sets a contrast and drops us right into conflict. Cinderella’s voice, but also establishing third person perspective.)

“The old woman was annoyed with her lazy stepdaughter.” (Stepmother’s perspective, one that will be challenged by the reality that Cinderella is not lazy at all, but working as hard as she can for an unreasonable and overly demanding taskmaster.)

“There once was a prince who longed to find a princess to marry.” (What if we started the story not with Cinderella, but with the prince? A whole different way into the telling.)

Playing with first lines is a fun writing exercise, one that gets you thinking about the many creative ways that writers and readers can climb inside a story – whether a familiar one you’re retelling, or a new story. 

It may be easiest to give it a try with a familiar tale. Choose a fairy-tale, folk tale, Bible story, or story passed down in your family – something you know really well – and then see if you can come up with at least seven unique ways to begin it. Sometimes you might want to spring a surprise to keep your reader going. Sometimes you might want to try a quiet, traditional line that almost lulls the reader (and then you can grab them quickly with the second line). Think about how you want to establish a character, a voice, a setting. Think long and hard about who is telling the story. It might be a narrator or your  main character, but then again, maybe not.

Estes Tops Booklist

 My non-fiction work in progress deals with about ten American writers for children, most of whom were at work in the mid-20th century. As I continue to research into the lives and work of these writers, it's always wonderful to see them appear on current day booklists.

Today that happened with School Library Journal's post on the 25 best books for children's social and emotional learning. 

A lot of writers and books I admire here (and some I don't know) but I was very happy to see Eleanor Estes, one of the writers I am working with, topping the list with her lovely The Hundred Dresses. I love that the book has had such staying power. It is certainly a book that has stayed with me for most of my life.

Revising Poetry

I've been working on my advent poetry collection, pulling together twenty-one years of poems: collating, arranging, reflecting, revising.

A few thoughts on the art and effort of revising poetry came to me this morning. I thought I'd share.

1) Sometimes you have to remember a poem is your's. I've been working with a poem I wrote seventeen years ago and it took me a while to move back into ownership of it. At first, I felt so distant ("did I write that?") that it almost felt as though I was doing a writing exercise with someone else's poem. A few minutes in, and it finally dawned on me that it really was mine...mostly when I came across a line that really needed help. I made the quick incision with such confidence that I suddenly realized, yes, this is really my work, and nobody can make these kinds of decisive cuts but me.

2) Line breaks make or break a piece. I think I have always been far more at home writing prose than poetry, though I've always hoped at least some of my prose has lines that sing. So many of my early poems, especially of the non-rhyming variety, are really big chunks of prose that I attempted to line break into poetry, and it shows. Although I've gotten more seasoned with line-breaks, I still struggle with them -- especially knowing if I should utilize them more for the eye than the ear or vice versa (I think it depends on the poem). These days I am finding myself drawn to writing more spare poems, or ones that impose some of limitations in form. Working up against the limitations keeps me from the excesses I'm prone to fall into.

3) Adjectives aren't always necessary.  Many times when I stumble onto a line that needs work, I discover I have lost the mystery of the poem somewhere along the way by piling up adjectives. I think I tend to hide behind them when I'm not sure what I want to say. So I say it two or three ways, or I try to give too much away to the reader, piling those adjectives on.  Sometimes I end up leaving more of them in than I should. Again, I am feeling more drawn to precision these days, not that I'm always wise about how to get there.

4) The line that didn't work when you first wrote the poem probably still isn't going to work years later. I discovered this recently in a poem I originally wrote three or four years ago. There was a line that always bothered me -- its meter was off, and every time I read the poem again, no matter how many times I drafted it, I always stumbled when I got there. For some reason, despite that, I left the line in -- probably because at the time I couldn't see my way around it, or didn't want to cut whatever particular image I'd crammed into the small space. I think I figured that, over the years, the line would somehow wear its way into the poem and just magically work. But then I picked it up and read anew for the first time in ages, and guess what? I got to that line and tripped on it again (like Dick Van Dyke tripping on his ottoman). I've been reworking it to make it sing instead of squawk, and I'm discovering that a few years distance actually helps -- I am not so wedded to whatever it was I couldn't seem to bear to give up when I first wrote it.

Revising is a whole different art than original drafting, but there is something uniquely satisfying about it, especially when it gives you the opportunity to sharpen a poem's focus. I hope that's what I'm doing with some of these poems, especially the older ones.

Patchwork Post: Epiphany, Les Mis, Books & Writing Life

Epiphany began on Sunday, which means the Wise Men have settled in at the creche. The sweet girl takes them on a long trek around the living room, up and down various pieces of furniture, before they land at the stable. (Not historically accurate, no, but it's still a delight to have them there worshiping the newborn king along with the shepherds and townspeople and various animals who have been there for weeks.)

We still have our Christmas tree up. In recent years, we've begun leaving it up longer and longer -- now that we're not putting up a cut tree, that's possible -- mostly because we all agree we need the lights. January can be dark and cold, and a little extra light is just fine by me. This year I've been especially blessed by our glass angel topper. D and S decorated the tree while I was down with the flu, and they put her right on top of a green light (green is my favorite color) so she glows from within with a lovely green luminosity. We will likely do our "breakin' down Christmas" traditions this coming weekend, unless family pleas (it won't take much) press me to go even a week longer.

D. and I had a date night last Friday, the first in quite a while. We decided to go to a movie (it had been a very long time indeed since we'd done that!) and took in "Les Miserables." We love the musical, having seen it twice over the years, once in Philadelphia and once in Pittsburgh. We also had the London cast album for a while (though it was stolen from us several years ago...yes, I know, such irony...if the thief is ever dragged before me, I promise I will be forgiving). D. got me a lovely 3-disc version of the entire libretto for Christmas, which he found used. It highlights performers from stage versions all around the world. So I'd been humming for a couple of days before we made it to the theater, where I was blown away by the grace and beauty of the film. My review of it can be found at the link here. I think the most important conclusion I reached in the review was this:

What I think the filmmakers do best here, however, is not to make the film “bigger” than the stage version, but to make it “smaller.” Drawing on the strength of the story’s characters, the film provides us with up-close, intimate moments with them, closer than we’re able to get to them on stage. That makes some of the singing performances especially powerful and poignant.

And oh my....Hugh Jackman's performance is amazing. As is Anne Hathaway's. Lots of tears shed before I left the theater, and they were cathartic tears.

I'm re-reading Leonard Marcus' introduction in Listening for Madeleine and am drafting my review of the book, which left me feeling such a mixture of feelings I'm having a hard time putting my response into words. I suppose the best thing it did for me was to make me realize anew how important Madeleine's work has been in my life and how much I miss her.

I'm enjoying Prayers for the Writer, compiled by Gary D. Schmidt and Elizabeth Stickney. While looking for Schmidt books recently, I came across a used copy of a textbook on children's literature he co-authored a decade or so ago, and picked it up for almost nothing. (I subscribe to the school of thought that if Gary Schmidt has anything to do with a book, it will be good. Sort of the same school of thought that says if Alan Rickman read the phone book, I'd sit there and listen.) Though I'm not usually a fan of text books, this is one is lively and about a topic near and dear to my heart, and each chapter (on different genres in children's lit) also includes reflections and exercises for those teaching and writing literature for children. It's helping me think through some things for my non-fiction WIP, which at the moment feels more front-burnerish than my fiction, though that's definitely still simmering too.

Jumping Back Into Story: Beginning With the End

On this third day of the new year, I’ve been cleaning, organizing, lesson planning, enjoying time with the sweet girl, and generally trying to get well (still congested, still coughing). Now that end of term grading is done, I’m also trying to get back into the writing groove, but it’s taking a little longer than I anticipated.

What is it that makes jumping back into something creative so hard sometimes? Writing is the thing I love to do beyond all else, and yet when it’s been a while since I’ve regularly written – especially fiction – I can find all manner of things to put off the jump.

I used to think it was because my writing muscles weren’t well exercised. That may still be true, but it’s less true than it used to be since I do other kinds of writing regularly even when I’m not actively writing stories. Still, there is a different part of the brain (and hands) involved in writing non-fiction and even poems, so lack of regular exercise may still be part of it.

For me, I think it’s more often the realization that my jump can never be as deep as I’d like it to be. Although I’ve gotten better at writing in small spurts, out of necessity, I still write stories best when I can dive and dive deep for long, long stretches of time. That time is scarce at best and non-existent at worst some days. Knowing that I can’t give the time or attention needed makes me feel like I'm always “holding back” when I start. When you know there is a good chance you will be interrupted seven minutes in (and twelve, and sixteen, and nineteen) it’s just harder to leap with abandon.

Some of my hesitation may also come from the simple fact that I cannot shut a door. My writing space is in a corner of our living room. Even late at night, often my best writing time, when everyone else is in bed, there is still something that feels not private enough about the space. Add in that my crowded desk is cluttered with books and papers connected to all the different hats I wear in family and ministry, and it sometimes just doesn’t feel like the writerly space I need.

But enough whining. I am here to say, on the third day of the new year, that I need to dive back into story soon. And today I found a fascinating blog that provided me with some creative ideas to jumpstart my WIP. One of the most audacious ideas I found there was the suggestion that I write my story's final chapter now. Yes, now, when I am nowhere near writing the actual end, and when I don't know everything I need to know yet. The mere idea of doing this scares me in a delightful way.  I think I must feel a little bit like my ten year old did when she recently managed a 25 foot rock climb in a gym. When she landed on her feet at the bottom again, she clutched at her heart and announced "That was terrifying...AND awesome!" I suspect writing my last chapter now would feel just like that.

But the idea is resonating with me. Perhaps because a couple of weeks ago, my husband and I sat down and worked on plot points for my WIP -- moving from the end to the beginning. So I already feel as though I've been building from that perspective in my mind.

Snowdays: Links We Love

This morning the sweet girl and I decided to snip some snowflakes, and I went looking online for some easy patterns to follow. I've never been a very confident snowflake cutter, but I had a feeling today would be a good day to experiment.

The sweet girl has been on a very long paper creating kick. Well, she's always loved crafting with paper, but this particular folding kick started months ago when she made her first paper airplane. Numerous books from the library and packs of paper later, and she's become a pretty adept folder, so I had a feeling learning a snowflake fold would be easy and fun. It turns out it was. I found a pattern for a six point flake, she gave me some good tips, and away we went.

We found two great sites I'd like to pass on. You'll find them at the links. There's Snow Crystals, which has some great science as well as other fun activities, and Snowdays, a super creative site where you can virtually cut snowflakes of all sorts. You add your name and location, they assign your snowflake a number (so you can search for and find it again) and then it gets added to the constantly falling snow on their homepage. You can email flakes to friends, print pictures of the flakes you create, and more. So much fun!

Responding to God in the New Year

I pray that anyone reading this is having a blessed new year's day, a refreshing time to look back with gratitude on the past year (even if it was a difficult one) and to reflect on hopes and goals for the new year. Here we are at 2013!

 When I began this blog in 2006, almost exactly seven years ago, I had no idea that I would still be posting my thoughts here this far down the road. Although I do not always post as often as I used to, it's still a place where I enjoy coming to share creativity, struggles, prayers, inspiration, and of course lots and lots of good book recommendations.

One thing I hope to do this year is both a writing/creativity goal and a spiritual one (so often those two come bundled together). I have been thinking about the many things that often "come my way" in the course of each day, be it a lovely photograph on Facebook, something I've read online, in a book, or in the Scriptures, or just the ordinary thoughtful moments of family life and friendship. I'm hoping to maintain the discipline of writing something small each day, usually a poem or prayer, in response to whatever God opens my eyes to that particular day...whatever it may be. I hope to share bits of that "day book" here in the coming year.

I also plan to compile my list of favorite books from 2012 sometime this month, once I get past the sinus infection I'm recovering from -- and get back into some semblance of school and work routine following the holidays.

Whatever your goals and hopes are for the coming year, I pray that your eyes will be opened more and more to the riches of God's grace, goodness and mercy. The year is still like a day of new fallen snow...hardly any tracks yet, and so many beautiful miles to go.