Since the Santa Ana essay was published in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a collection of her essays, I looked for that book in the library. The catalog indicated the book would be on the shelf. Exciting! I was thrilled to get the book on the first try.

Of course, the book was nowhere to be found. –sad– Then, I found that Slouching Towards Bethlehem was collected in a larger book of her essays, and the library really did have that. — happy again! –

The book waits for me on my bedside table. The book is coated with a layer of white dust. The white dust came from the ceiling. We patched the ceiling. We sanded the ceiling. We used an electric sander with a strong motor. The strong motor strongly pushed and blew white dust all over the house — even to the second floor.

Do you understand what that means?

To reach the second floor, the white ceiling spackle dust had to float down, float across the room, turn the corner and then make its way up the stairs and towards the second-floor ceiling before it could fall gently to the floor and handrail. How? How did it do that?

Today is a day for nurturing, inventing, creating and eating well.

Be well everyone. I’ll be back tomorrow with more.

Her essay mentions that she did not get a MFA. Instead, she took a series of odd jobs on ranches and in restaurants and kept writing and showing her writing to people. That reminded me of the debate that seems never to die: “Should You Get the MFA or Not”? That debate is also known as: “Is the MFA Worth It?”

Here is what she has to say about writing… She writes about how hard we are on ourselves with our writing. I had to laugh at her comment about the one hour per day. How many times have I said I’d write one hour per day. It took me a long time to realize I do better with concentrated bursts and then periods of rest.

“The more important virtue for a writer, I believe, is self-forgiveness. Because your writing will always disappoint you. Your laziness will always disappoint you. You will make vows: “I’m going to write for an hour every day,” and then you won’t do it. You will think: “I suck, I’m such a failure. I’m washed-up.” Continuing to write after that heartache of disappointment doesn’t take only discipline, but also self-forgiveness (which comes from a place of kind and encouraging and motherly love). The other thing to realize is that all writers think they suck. When I was writing “Eat, Pray, Love”, I had just as a strong a mantra of THIS SUCKS ringing through my head as anyone does when they write anything. But I had a clarion moment of truth during the process of that book. One day, when I was agonizing over how utterly bad my writing felt, I realized: “That’s actually not my problem.” The point I realized was this – I never promised the universe that I would write brilliantly; I only promised the universe that I would write. So I put my head down and sweated through it, as per my vows.”

I read it because I have a husband and a daughter.

Grief.

I finished the book quickly. Reading it was painful. I wanted it to be over. The writing was beautiful, and I still wanted it to be over.

She used short sentences. These short sentences of hers were more painful than longer ones.

You could tell she led the life of a highly educated woman — trips to Honolulu, New York, LA and so on — on a regular basis. Homes in Brentwood, Malibu and the UWS or UES. She attended Berkeley. Her husband attended Princeton. Money rarely seemed to be an issue. When it was, they flew to Honolulu or Paris anyway.

While I read the book, I could not help but think of her life and how easy it would seem in comparison to people with less.

However, she is telling her own story and not someone else’s. She went to those places and had that life.

This is the second book I’ve read in the past year that honors the dead spouse of the writer. When I wrote “honors,” I wanted to use a word that meant something about memory. I did not want to use the word “discusses” and the right word seemed important. The book honors the person and shares the experience of grief.

If I tell my friends about this great book, many will shy away from the grief and sadness.

One of my friends read it and wondered why she did that to herself when her own mother is dying.

Didion’s grief and experience of grief and mourning shows up in every word as she recounts medical files, shares bits of computer documents, and includes passages from medical texts.

Like many writers — are you like this? — she researches endlessly to find out more. Was he dead when he collapsed at the table? Could she have stopped it? She notes that the high achievers in her life, including herself, think they can conquer the uncontrollable with the right phone call or pulling of strings.

She wonders when her husband actually died.

After looking up “lividity” in a medical textbook, she calculates her husband died immediately.

From wikipedia, lividity is:

a settling of the blood in the lower (dependent) portion of the body, causing a purplish red discoloration of the skin: when the heart is no longer agitating the blood, heavy red blood cells sink through the serum by action of gravity. This discoloration does not occur in the areas of the body that are in contact with the ground or another object, as the capillaries are compressed.

Coroners can use the presence or absence of livor mortis as a means of determining an approximate time of death.

By the time her husband was brought the hospital, lividity indicated he’d been dead about one hour.

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Could this book have been written years ago?

On a poet mother listserv, it was discussed that women did not write of children, birthing times, and “women” events before the confessionalists. Only in more recent memory have women written of these events.

I will now mix up poetry and prose.

We have Alice by Calvin Trillin and The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. Would these books have existed before 1945? Would they have been allowed to exist? Would anyone — man or woman — be “allowed” to discuss the intimacies of grief and mourning before the world was prepared for it by the likes of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and many others.

If you know of prose examples from before 1945, please share them with me in the comments below.

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I’ve been going over what books to take with me to LA. We’ll take a guide of some kind, of course. Today, I was in the mood to read books about reading or writing, so I picked up Francine Prose’s book on reading like a writer, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit by Jeannette Winterson, Translating LA by Peter Theroux, and The Writing Life and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard.

I’m astonished that Tinker Creek won a Pulitzer. It does not seem like the kind of book that would win, because it’s heavy on heavy details. One page was spent on an insect that poisons a frog, turns the frog’s insides into a liquid and then sucks the liquid out for dinner.

So, which to take? I think Tinker Creek is out right now, because the details (while fascinating) are putting me to sleep — at least when I read in the sunshine at the pool.

I’ll probably pick Oranges by Winterson and the Translating LA. I thought it’d be a good idea to read about LA from a resident’s perspective. For years, I never wanted to visit LA. The town and its people sounded petty and fake. However, now a wedding draws me there, and I find I’m excited to visit. The art collections! The gardens! I already feel like Pasadena is home. I know the roads and the places I want to visit. We’re staying at a homey place (where Einstein lived for a spell!) on the CalTech campus.

I thought about how poets might benefit from such a book. Kennedy talks about turning off the phone, running errands and commuting to work at off-peak times, limiting email, and limiting meetings. He writes that you lose 5 minutes here and 10 minutes there and pretty soon you are talking hours. How true.

Recently, I read of a well-known author who said that email was his big procrastination tool. (I have to admit email is one of the time suckers in my life.) I’m sure we’ve all heard at least one writer (or one hundred) say that their whole house must be cleaned before they can write or that the house is never cleaner than when they want to write.

Today, I listened to a educational CD in my car. That filled my 20-minute commute perfectly. I work from home a few days a week, which saves me several hours (and gas). I plan out what I am going to do with my time, so I don’t meander like I can sometimes do. I plan meals ahead a lot of the time and use a slow cooker so food is ready when we get home. I keep lists. If I have a list, I am MUCH more motivated to complete what I need to do. I keep easy-to-lose items like keys in the proper place so I know where to find them (instead of wasting 5-20 minutes searching like I did before). Everyone finds their own way of making more time; I learned to say ‘no’ to a lot.

One suggestion in the book is to link all of your tasks to your overall life goals. Then, you can ask yourself if you are making the best use of your time in this moment. Sure, we’ll goof off and play video games, chit chat with people, and drink lemonade on the porch. However, we also want to make time for what is really important to us and to what we want to accomplish. It’s a good book if you want to check it out.