Is This Where We Are?

Posted on by alisonmcghee

little-luke-and-devUntil about half an hour ago I would have responded, had you asked me if I kept a journal, “No. I don’t keep a journal.”

Because I don’t.

If you had persisted, and asked me, “Did you ever keep a journal?” I would have said, “Yeah, when I was in fifth grade. It was one of those tiny little diaries that you lock with a tiny little key, and every entry was about a) the boy I had a crush on from kindergarten through senior year, or b) my tiny little baby brother, just born that year, whom I adored.”

I might then have followed it up by saying,  “But as an adult? No. I never kept a journal” –

forgetting entirely about the years when, in fact, I did keep a journal. They were what I think of as the years of blurred-ness, back in the nineties mostly, when I had the three tiny little kids and I was trying to do a million different things at once. Which I still am, but in a slightly less blurred fashion. Or so I hope.

Anyway, back to the subject. Which was what? Oh yes, something to do with keeping a journal. I was looking through old files, of which there are perhaps thirty trillion or so on my computer, and which I figuratively drag from one computer to another computer as soon as the old one breaks down, which, if you’re me, is a maximum of every two years because I am to computers what some people are to watches. They stop working in my presence, possibly because they know I need them so damn much.

Back to the subject again, which is the fact that I do have journal entries, quite a few, dating back many years, journal entries that I had completely forgotten about. And I’m here to tell you that it can be simultaneously horrifying and comforting to see how much you haven’t changed, deep down, lo these many years.

Have my children changed? I’m talking about inside, way down deep, from the beings they used to be, housed in those tiny little bodies that now are bigger than mine.

I’m guessing not. I remember being tiny, and wondering about the same things that I wonder about now, a lifetime later. These are the wonderings of my son, then age six.

“Mom, somewhere in the world, right now, a ship is sinking, a house is on fire, and a person is being robbed.”

“What if there was no time?  What if there was no past and no future?”

“I feel short.  I feel very, very short.”

“What kinds of things haven’t been invented yet?”

“I feel nothing.  I feel as if I weigh nothing, as if I feel nothing, as if I can think of nothing.  Nothing.”

“Mom, what if we’re all, all of us, just characters in a book, and someone is writing us right now?”

“Where do spirits live?”

“How high is heaven?  Does it come before outer space?  Is it lower than the clouds?”

I wonder how I answered him, back then. Did I answer at all?

Or did I just listen and then, late at night or at dawn the next morning, write it all down.

Let Us Begin with Coffee

Posted on by alisonmcghee

mexican-mug-with-coffee-filter Do you like coffee? Excellent. We have French Roast available for your drinking pleasure.

Should you prefer add-ons, we have heavy cream, half ‘n half, and 2% milk in the refrigerator to your left. Sugar can be found in the baking supplies cupboard directly above the counter where I am carefully pouring boiling water through the small camping coffee filter positioned above your mug.

Notice that I am giving you the very first cup. This is hard for me, because I myself prefer the very first cup –after all, I drink but half of one small cup of coffee per day— and yet I am magnanimous and am giving it to you. That is because you are my guest.

And how happy I am to have you here with me, in this quiet kitchen at dawn. Because it’s November, the sun has yet to come up. This is a situation which is only going to get worse until we reach the end of December, at which point the days will — thank God— start to get longer again, but we shall not think about that now.

Cream?

Half ‘n half?

2% milk?

Sugar? Or perhaps some blue agave nectar?

None, you say? None at all? Interesting. Would you characterize yourself as ascetic, that is to say, a disciplined, semi-monastic type of person?

Come, sit with me here at the kitchen table, which was purchased at a garage sale some years back, along with four matching chairs, three of which have subsequently broken. Perhaps they were not intended for the large heft of the modern American, or perhaps they were cheaply made out of inferior wood and glue.

At any rate, nought but one remains, and there it is, right there next to the stairs, serving as a way station for items which need to be brought up to the second floor of the house. You may sit instead in one of these four wicker chairs originally intended for outdoor use, but which to my mind work perfectly well as indoor kitchen table chairs. Not to mention that all four were purchased at a season-end clearance sale, always a plus.

Let us first give thanks.

Thank you for this day. Thank you for this life. Thank you for my family, and my friends, and my students, and thank you also for the animals.

You can fill in your own thanks above. I will not write down what you say, as we here at the garage sale kitchen table believe that some things are best kept private.

Notice that we do not speak of regret, here at the kitchen table at dawn. There is plenty of room for regret in a day, not to mention a life, and yet just for this day we will keep regret at bay, the reason being that if later, later in this very day which has barely begun, an airplane or other large, airborne mass such as a giant mutant raptor with enormous talons suddenly swept down out of the sky and obliterated you from existence, would you want your last feeling to have been one of regret?

No, me neither.  Enjoy your coffee.

Why I Started Writing for Children (instead of just grownups)

Posted on by alisonmcghee

pinky-on-scooterWhen I first moved to Minneapolis, I took a job teaching Chinese at a big public city school. I was new to teaching, and teaching–especially grades K-12– is wonderful but exhausting. I would power-teach three to four days a week and then ease into the weekend by reading aloud to my students for the last half hour of every class on Friday. I rationalized this activity by choosing only books–novels, memoirs, collections of stories and essays–that had something to do with China.

I had made a bunch of giant pillows out of corduroy and foam, and every Friday these big old teenagers–the hockey players, football players, cheerleaders, loud kids, shy kids, street kids, rich kids, kids who barely spoke English–would arrange themselves on the floor, and I would begin to read. There was never a sound in the room, but all eyes were on me and everyone was listening.

Those were peaceful, happy Fridays. I sat on my desk swinging my legs and reading. There were no windows in the room, and I had brought in lots of lamps so as to avoid the overhead fluorescence, and the lamplight pooled on my students’ faces, which in that light and that time were beautiful, every one of them. . .

(The above is part of a guest blog I wrote for Pippin Properties. For the full blog, please click here.)

A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a tiny mechanical horse

Posted on by alisonmcghee

little-creatures-on-the-buffetWe have called you here today, Alison, for a reason.

And what might that reason be?

Don’t get that look on your face. This is for your own good.

Nothing that begins with “this is for your own good” is ever any good. Also, there are so many of you and only one of me.

But we are tiny mechanical creatures and you are 5’10”.

5’10.25″, thanks. And could you tell me if the comma should actually go inside the quotation mark there? It just looks so wrong when I do it that way.

No, we cannot tell you, as we are tiny mechanical ungrammatical creatures skilled only in leaping, flipping, scuttling rapidly, dancing in a robot-like manner and spinning about in circles while lying on our backs.

So can I go now?

No. We’ve asked you here today to explain yourself in the matter of the pound cake you served at a gathering in this very room approximately one month ago.

What about it?

So you remember the gathering?

Yep.

Do you remember bringing the pound cake to the dining room when it was time for dessert?

Yep.

Do you recall telling your brother, who is, we believe, 6’6.5″ tall, in response to his delighted exclamation of “Wow! That looks just like our mother’s pound cake!” the following: “It is our mother’s pound cake! I followed her recipe exactly!”

Yep.

And do you feel that was a truthful statement?

Yep.

(TINY BLUE MECHANICAL ROBOT ABRUPTLY BEGINS A ROBOTIC DANCE. TINY MECHANICAL MONKEY ABRUPTLY BEGINS LEAPING BACKWARD WHILE STILL CLUTCHING BANANA.  BOTH ARE QUICKLY SILENCED BY THE TINY MECHANICAL BUMBLEBEE.)

We ask you now to take a look at the pound cake recipe, carefully written out on a recipe card in your mother’s distinctive backward-slanting lefty’s handwriting and stored in the small wooden recipe box next to the Jim Beam in the cupboard above your stove. Is this the recipe that you followed “exactly”?

Yep.

So you changed nothing about the recipe, then?

Nope.

(SILENCE, FOLLOWED BY AN ABRUPT CONCATENATION OF ALL TINY MECHANICAL CREATURES, WHIRRING, HISSING, LEAPING, FLIPPING AND SPINNING.)

Okay! Geeze! Maybe I changed it a tiny bit.

Yet you still feel justified in referring to it as your mother’s exact pound cake recipe?

Yep. It’s called “tweaking.” Ever heard of it?

(SILENCE.)

You guys are too uptight.

(SILENCE.)

Are you actually accusing me of lying to my own brother?

(SILENCE.)

You know what I don’t like? I don’t like your beady little eyes all staring at me.

(SILENCE.)

You know what else? I’m going to leave the room now. That’s because I can. Unlike you, who are not people with legs but who are, instead, tiny mechanical creatures perched precariously on a window shelf where an errant cat could knock you to smithereens with a single swipe of the paw.

(VAGUE WHIRRINGS AND CLICKS OF DISPLEASURE, MIXED WITH AN UNDENIABLE HINT OF FEAR.)

Hey, I know – maybe I’ll go make a pound cake.

"The Bluebird Carries the Sky on His Back"

Posted on by alisonmcghee

min-watertowerSomeone told her once that everyone corresponds to an element, and that all you have to do is ask yourself the simple question, “Which element am I?” and the answer will come to you.

She loves simplicity – “simplicity is complexity resolved” after all – so she asked herself the question. Even though she didn’t need to. She already knew she was air.

Air.

Closely followed by water.  Air with a rising water moon, or however the astrology people would term it.

She might like to be fire, because she thinks it’s beautiful, and she’s always cold, and she might like to be earth, because then she would be solidly held to this planet, but the elements are not to be argued with, so she doesn’t bother regretting that she is neither fire nor earth.

Air.

She has a friend who at times believes himself to be in danger of floating off the planet. Yet when she asks the question “What element is he?” the answer is immediate: fire.

She has another friend whose laugh she loves, the kind of friend she wishes lived on her block. It seems as if this friend should be air, like her, but ask the question and the answer that comes back is water.

Her son? Air. Double air. Triple air with an extra scoop of air.

Her older daughter? Water with a rising air moon.

Her younger daughter? Earth.

Her mother? Water.

Her father? Earth.

And on and on it goes, some more intensely so than others.

If you’re air, you have to work to stay on the ground. Breathe in and push that breath out down through your feet. Imagine your feet growing roots down through the earth. Imagine that every breath you take, every step you take, stitches you to the earth so that you can’t just float away, the way you dream of doing.

Literally dream, at night. Her dreams are filled with air. She drives a car around and around and around a road of hairpin curves that leads up and up and up a mountain until suddenly the car, with her one hand on the wheel, is airborne. She’s floating above, looking down.

Air people need to eat a lot so that their bodies don’t turn themselves back into air.

When air people think hard they can feel themselves evaporating. This is why she shovels spoonfuls of peanut butter into herself on a daily basis. Things like sweet potatoes are important for air people to eat.

ADD and ADHD are most prevalent in air people. (She just made that last one up.) (She’s kind of making all these up, but they all feel right.)

It is hard for air people to focus on one thing for a period of time. Activities such as knitting, quilting, washing dishes by hand, folding laundry and vacuuming slowly all help to keep an air person from floating away.

Long-distance walking, running, hiking: these are good activities for air people. Rhythmic motion that helps keep their thoughts from spiraling up and away.

Heavy blankets and quilts are important, especially in winter.

Whiskey is better for air people than wine.

She’s rocking on the porch swing as she writes this. Her dog, who is a fire creature if ever there was one, is perched at the door, crying for the neighbor boy. The neighbor boy is earth, as is his father.  His mother is water with an earth moon rising.

Her cat, who is an air creature, just leaped from the open window to the ground below, there to prowl about before skittering up the steps and yowling to be let back in.

It does not surprise her that in all the accounts of near-death experiences she knows of, the near-death people rise above their bodies and survey the scene below. It does not surprise her that long ago, at the moment her grandmother Reine died, her mother sensed her flying above and away, calling her name in a young and happy voice.

When she was little, maybe five, the sky outside her house up there in the foothills filled with a wild wind. She ran outside with an umbrella and stood on the top of the small hill that she’d learned to ride a bike down. She opened the umbrella and held it above her head and the wild wind lifted her off the ground an inch or two and she dropped the umbrella immediately.

She has wondered ever since if it might actually have carried her off.

Eagles and hawks can carry off small animals, and back then she was a smallish animal. So it seems entirely possible that she might have been carried away that day, up into the dark and wild sky.

Here on her porch swing, in freakishly warm weather for October, she’s wearing a t-shirt. She can see the bones of her rib cage, expanding and contracting. The air smells like leaves and grass and dust and heat. She is in her element.

Les yeux sont le miroir de l'ame

Posted on by alisonmcghee

min-first-day-homeHer photographer friend Dani loves faces best. Eyes particularly. Dani laughs and shakes her head, surprised that after a decade of taking photos she is still and always drawn to eyes.

What can I say? They’re the window to the soul.

Her youngest child notices hands, the size of someone’s palm, the length of their fingers, the presence or not of rings, what those rings are made of.

Hands are expressive. Her mother’s hands, for example, are almost a part of her voice, the way they move when she talks, describing shapes in the air.

But the older she gets, the more she herself is drawn to eyes. Or maybe she always was, but she was more distracted before, by everything that surrounds eyes, all the other possibilities of the body.

Now, though, the eyes have it.

She thinks of an old man and woman she used to know, in the town where she grew up. Every Sunday she would talk to them at coffee hour after church. Early on she was taller than both of them. They were small and finely made, kind and talkative, dressed for church, and she loved them both.

The old man’s eyes were blue and kind, and he gripped her hand when he spoke. The old woman’s eyes were bright blue, clear and sharp, and she smiled when she looked up. They are gone now – where are they? – but she thinks of them often, and when she does, it is their eyes that she sees, looking up at her, seeing her.

Back then, she used to be surprised at the brightness of their eyes. They’re so old, was her teenager sense of them, but their eyes are so alive.

Now she thinks, They weren’t old.

She thinks, No one is ever old.

What is happening, now, is that she is starting to see people as separate from their bodies. Good looks, grace, strength and muscles and power, the way a person moves in the body he’s been given, all of that she still loves, and notices, and appreciates.

But the body no longer truly corresponds to the person it houses, in this new phase of life. Bodies are disappearing. Bodies are dissolving. When she looks at people now, what she sees is their eyes.

A big fat list of upcoming readings and workshops

Posted on by alisonmcghee

krazy-mouse-20101Perhaps you are wondering, as am I, what a photo of three people on the Crazy Mouse has to do with this post. Please let me know if you come up with anything.

I’m going to be here and there in the next couple of months, giving talks and workshops and signing books and, in between, bumbling about the streets looking for the best diner in town, one with a Formica counter and twirly red Naugahyde seats. Insider tips always welcome.

If you happen to live near any of the below places, I’d love to meet you.

September 24-25 I’ll be at the South Dakota Festival of the Book. I’m giving a workshop on Friday afternoon and a talk on Saturday morning. (Best diner in town, anyone?)

On October 2 I’ll be signing copies of my new book Bink and Gollie, co-written with Kate DiCamillo and illustrated by Tony Fucile, at the Midwest Booksellers Association Trade Show.

I’ll be doing a reading and giving a talk in east St. Paul, in the Dayton’s Bluff community, on Tuesday, October 5, at 6:30. The event will be held at the Twin Cities Academy.

On Saturday, October 9, I’ll be reading from the aforementioned Bink and Gollie at 1 p.m. at the wondrous Wild Rumpus bookstore in the Linden Hills neighborhood of Minneapolis.

On Saturday, October 16, I’ll be giving a talk and reading at 1:00 p.m. at the Ortonville Public Library in Ortonville, MN.

Tuesday, October 19 I’ll be giving a reading and talk at 7 p.m. at the Prior Lake Public Library in Prior Lake, Minnesota.

On Saturday, November 6 from 3:30-4:30 I do believe I’ll be talking about writing novels  at the Loft in downtown Minneapolis. The Loft is located in one of my favorite buildings of all time, Open Book, and if you haven’t been there it’s worth it just to walk in and up the winding staircase.

Wednesday, November 17, at 7 p.m., I’ll be giving a reading and talk at the Dakota County public library in Apple Valley, Minnesota.

Any interest in writing picture books? You can sign up for my workshop, “The Puzzle of Picture Books,” to be held at the aforementioned Loft on Saturday, November 20, 12:30-4:30.

Whew. That’s a lot of event-type-stuff for someone who doesn’t do much of it. Are you sick of me yet? I can’t blame you. Maybe it’s time for a ride on the Crazy Mouse.

Some places I like to visit

Posted on by alisonmcghee

still-lifeThe web is large and intricate, and completely beyond my comprehension – how do these words get to you, anyway, you whomever you are and wherever you may be? – but most things are beyond my comprehension, and I do them anyway.

Take driving, for example. I have no idea how my car works. Here’s what I can do: put in gas, check the oil and add more if necessary, check the tires and add more air if necessary, wash it, vacuum it, and speak to it encouragingly. Yet I zip around in it as if I were fully in control.

Which I’m not. Of much of anything.

But back to the web. Like most of you, I have my favorite sites bookmarked. Here are a few that I particularly like. I offer them to you in case you might like them too – and if you have one to suggest, please send it my way.

Here is a tiny story, the sweetest story I’ve read in many a day (and by sweet I mean tender and lovely, as opposed to saccharine). Enjoy, and if you like, sign up to follow the blog itself, as it’s quite a wondrous, ever-changing creation.

This is an entrancing site, well worth the few seconds it takes to download Google Chrome so that you can use it. Type in a childhood address, sit back, and wait. Indescribably moving.

I tend to follow the same orbit in my circlings of the web, and sometimes I want to be surprised, taken out of myself and faced with something new. If you are like me in this way, click here and go where it takes you.

Do you love poetry? Then you are a person after my own heart. There are many sites devoted exclusively to poetry, and I follow a bunch of them, but this one combines personal narrative with poems chosen by the writer, most of which I already know and love. Enjoy.

And finally – for today, that is, because I’m just setting down a few of my favorites – this site belongs to one of my favorite authors. Funny and sharp and cool, with an enviable design.

Have fun.

For most this amazing day

Posted on by alisonmcghee

granny-and-grampa-on-the-farmAs she left the church of the non-churchy a few weeks ago, she was a little late in joining the line of people filing out, because she had to gather up the strands of wool and knitting needles and stuff them into the bag containing the Scarf of Endlessness, so named because she does not know how to cast off, meaning that she will be knitting it for the rest of her life.

The scarf could also be called the Scarf of Continuing Mistakes, given that she cannot remember how many rows she’s knit and how many she’s purled, nor how to tell the difference between the two, and also she keeps dropping and adding stitches at random, but that’s a topic for another day.

Anyway, because of the scarf mess, she could not follow her usual routine, which is to leap up and exit the church of the non-churchy rapidly, before, God forbid, she might have to talk to anyone.

She loves this church because it is so beautiful, in its word and song and sermon – yes, even the sermons, even, especially, the sermons, which she still finds kind of shocking – and most of all because of its acceptance, even of people like her, who sit in the pew knitting away on a mistake-ridden scarf and then leap to their feet and exit rapidly without partaking of the social hour.

As she stood in the line of people filing out of the church, holding her program in one hand, ready to deposit it into the reuse-it-for-the-next-service basket, she noticed the necklace the young woman in front of her was wearing. Or rather, she noticed the chain of the necklace, since all she could see was the back of the woman’s neck.

She stood behind the necklace-wearing woman, clutching her program in one hand, mess of a scarf in the other, anxious to be out in the sun, idly observing the fragile gold links of the necklace and the way they curved around their wearer’s slender curved neck.

Then time did one of its  weird, loopy, out-of-time pauses, and everything slowed down.

The church, with its enormously high ceilings, hushed. The murmurs of the congregants hushed too. The dust motes in the air hung suspended in the golden light of the windows. The woman in front of her took one step forward, and she did too, still looking at the necklace.

But now everything was different. She saw the necklace, and the wisps of light brown hair escaping from the clips that held it to the back of the woman’s head. She saw the earrings the woman was wearing, dangling stones on hoops, and the pattern of her sundress.

She looked at the man in front of the woman, and the mother to the left holding the child’s hand.

Someone loves them, she thought. Or she didn’t think it, but that was the feeling that came flooding through her. Each one of these people is loved. Cherished.

But it wasn’t entirely that, even. What was it? She stood there, feeling as if she might cry. This feeling was too huge. She couldn’t hold it inside herself. Everything surrounding her, and every aspect of the people in that room with her, was beautiful. The old man, the young woman, the child, all of them filing out through the double doors.

She could love all of them. She already did, on some level that was far below the surface of her life. That was it. Not that she did love all of them, consciously – she didn’t know them – but that didn’t matter, because this was a feeling that was beyond her. She didn’t matter in this equation.

The beauty of the sensation – that all around her was such tenderness – was unbearable. She was too small and human to hold it beyond that one moment.

Time started up again. The woman with the necklace reached the recyle basket and dropped her program into it, and she followed suit. Out the doors, down the marble steps, and outside.

Now, weeks later, she closes her eyes and tries to remember the sensation, conjure it again. The church, the dust motes dancing, the sudden hush and pause, the certainty of love and its possibilities.