Guess who's back!

So, last post was nearly two months ago. Yikes. I don't know what happened to April, but let's just say that May was a rather crazy month.

Somewhere I read that you shouldn't tell the Internet when you're going on vacation, because someone will break into your home, steal all of your possessions, then find you on vacation and murder you. That was my assumption anyway. So I didn't tell post it on my blog, instead just posting it on Facebook, Twitter, and the Diary section of the blog. Safety first.

Long story short, smack dab in the middle of May, I spent two glorious weeks in the United Kingdom. With a friend living in Scotland and another living in England, I knew this was my chance to hop across the pond and see the British world I've so obsessively taken in, thanks to BBCAmerica and PBS. So I did it - I flew into Edinburgh, found my way to St. Andrews, and visited Edinburgh, Stirling, Anstruther, and Glasgow, before taking a train down to Oxford and taking day trips to Bath and London. It was completely, truthfully an exquisite experience, one that was profoundly life-changing and just a heck of a lot of fun.

As I wrote to some friends, Scotland captured my heart, but England captured my soul. I took days off work, like a real adult person. I took planes and trains and buses and Underground trains by myself. I got scared and nearly cried. I was extraordinarily happy and nearly cried. I saw things much older than myself, and much newer too. I was momentarily speechless. And I had the most delicious fish and chips.

Did I mention David Tennant? Oh, I must have forgotten to mention that I MET HIM. ("Met" in the loosest sense of the word. Let's just say that it involved a Sicilian woman making strange noises in my ear during the entire encounter. I'll explain more later.)

I'll be blogging more about my adventure in the coming weeks. You know me, I need to write, I need to process. And I did write, every day. Some of that will become Diary entries, I think. Yikes, I have a month to catch up on for the Diary. But mostly I want to share my adventure with you. Not just what I saw, but what it meant to a woman from the States on her first Great (Britain) Adventure.

One thing's for certain: I've caught the travel bug. And the rest of my life will have an undercurrent of waiting until I set foot on that lovely island again.

With that, I return, with more delicious bites of my life to consume! I promise to be more consistent in the next few months. Tally ho, good blog readers! On we go!

What I'm Reading - Austen, Scotland, and Skid Row

Jeepers creepers, I am using my peepers to read lots and lots of words. Okay, that was terrible, but it's the best I can do. I'm running on little sleep since a few nights ago, Nicole and I tried to recapture the sleep-deprived insanity of our college days by taking in a late Matthew McConnaughey (spelled it right on the first try!) movie...on a Tuesday night, no less. Then Hannah and I had a sleepover last night that involved girl talk late into the night. It was necessary, but less fun when you have to get up at 6:30 to get to work. Needless to say, I don't remember being so grumpy after staying up late. I'm getting old.

Well, I must be antisocial these days, because I finished three books six days into April. They're all vastly different, which is a theme I'm realizing as I go through my four books a month. The lack of theme is a theme, I suppose. I've been reading history, science fiction, memoir/creative nonfiction, classic romance, philosophy, new fiction. It's really, really great. Times like these make me celebrate not being in school any longer. I can read what I like.

Here's what I've read recently:

Northanger Abbey - a lesser-known Jane Austen book. It's great, though - she definitely is a queen of satire. Austen holds the culture up to the light and both celebrates it and pokes fun at it. Her heroine is naive and innocent, a girl who believes the best of people who don't deserve it. Her hero is sarcastic and has major daddy issues. Austen's first chapter made me laugh out loud, and some of her character choices reflect Austen's own view of things. The romance itself wasn't very developed, but the satire on the Goethic novel is quite. Plus, a good portion of it is set in Bath, a place I will be visiting in about a month, so I was quite thrilled to imagine it at that time period.

A Traveller's History of Scotland - I read this in a matter of days, which I do not recommend. As I've written about a bit in my "Diary" page, I haven't had any European history, so the only things I knew about Great Britain was what I gleaned from Austen novels, the BBC, and any movie set in England. Reading through much abbreviated histories of Scotland and England, I'm fascinated, repulsed, and enamored by this storied past that is so much longer than America's recorded history. I'm a bit of an Anglophile anyway, but I saw the bruises on the past, the hatred and rebellions. It puts into perspective that which all rebelling countries are experiencing today. It's a beautiful past, but also a very painful one. Not quite as glowing as I remember from the BBC.

The Soloist - You know I love creative nonfiction/memoir. I also love movies. Ta-dah! This one has both. This book was made into an Oscar-award-winning movie a few years back, and the movie is fantastic. The book is good too. A columnist wrote it, and you can definitely tell he is accustomed to writing shorter, more journalist-y pieces. He puts a face on the homeless problems in L.A. and around the country. I've seen L.A.'s Skid Row firsthand, and it is a horrible place. The other thing I really appreciated about this book is the honesty of Lopez. He is very forthcoming with his own emotions, especially feeling trapped and wanted to escape this relationship that is costing him too much. I think we all fear that when approaching any sort of service that involves relationship, but we can see from this book that it's the hardest thing you'll ever have to do and ultimately one of the most rewarding.

That's a run-down. I'm currently reading a book titled Beyond the Bible, and I'm LOVING it. I'll let you know more about it in the future. I'm also starting another memoir titled FBI Girl. It's funny - for all of my life, I've been a one-book-at-a-time-er. And now I find myself reading two or three at a time. Breaks up the monotony.

What are you reading these days? Tell me you're reading something! Anything! If you need some ideas, check out my "What I'm Reading" page. I've listed all of the books I've read so far this year with a one-sentence review. Let me know what you think!

Tomorrow Song

Okay, it's been a while since I've posted any poetry, so I'm a bit rusty, but here's the story.

Sometime last night, one of my favorite artists, Jon Foreman, posted on Twitter that he wanted an idea for a song to write the next day (today). The idea became "tomorrow's song," and he challenged folks to write a song in 24 hours with that subject or phrase or whatnot in it. People responded all over the world, posting their lyrics and music on Twitter. Well, I don't write songs, but I try my hand at a bit of verse, and here's what I came up with.


Tomorrow’s Song

She roots down underneath the purple sheets,
covered in stars that beam bravely. Her eyes are already
filled with the twinkling of sleep, waiting to take her
to lands beyond for the night, but she rubs them away

with the back of her hand, nose scrunched in attempts
to hold the blissful surrender at bay. Oh, how we fight the gift
as children. Every night, she asks me, “Please,
will you sing me the tomorrow song?”

And so I do, with my untrained voice and blurred,
tired mind from cleaning up macaroni crafts and
making peanut butter sandwiches in the shape of stars.
I sing her the song of tomorrow,

of trips to the zoo to see the elephants, of chocolate
chip cookies eaten under blue blanket forts. I sing
to her of yellow tulips heralding spring, and I sing to her
of the raindrops that make the muddy puddles. I sing to her
of classrooms, and first kisses, and prom dates, and graduations.

Sometimes my voice trembles as I sing of swimming
lessons while my mind is underwater, quaking with a nation
swimming for survival. Or I sing of parades and think of
the ones halted by gunfire and cold eyes. Or I sing of picnic lunches
and see hollow cheekbones and distended bellies.

Her eyes are always closed and her mouth always open,
the sweet puffs of yesterday leaving her, before the second verse.
But I keep singing despite my slumbering audience
because it’s tradition and because she asks every night

and because someday she won’t, and too late
I will realize that I sing it for me more than her, that
I sing the tomorrow song to believe
it is true.

George Fox Journal article: Tom Davis

The George Fox Journal came out this last week, and I've gotten a lot of great feedback about my article on Tom Davis and Children's HopeChest. It was a fun interview - Davis is a great guy, super friendly and very passionate about serving the "least of these."

Peruse the rest of the Journal and see what my alma mater and its alums are doing in the world.

Read my article at http://www.georgefox.edu/journalonline/spring11/measure.html.

What I'm Reading: Louisa May Alcott

Apparently, Lauren looks a lot like me. Or so people say. As my little sister, she gets to hear that a lot, but since they moved to Canada, plenty of people say I look just like her. I was here first, I reply. They smile and move on, nothing else to say.

We love a lot of the same things - musicals, Community, Switchfoot podcasts, other pop culture-y type things - but we're vastly different in other ways. She's extreme, whereas I'm moderate. She loves the spotlight, I prefer the shadows. She belongs on the stage, and I'm just fine backstage or in the audience.

Lauren attends a performing arts high school, and this year, her senior year, she was cast as Meg in the musical production of Little Women. Since I was far away and unable to see her starring role, I rejoiced from afar by pumping her for details, re-reading the book, and overanalyzing the characters. As evidenced in this Facebook comment I left her:
here's what i think: you're a jo-ish grown-up amy, and i'm a meg-ish jo. or maybe i'm a jo-ish meg. but you're meg-ish too. maybe you're a meg-ish amy with some jo-like qualities. and i'm a meg-ly jo with scant traces of beth.

Profound. But fairly accurate.

Every little girl wants to be Jo. She holds Little Women together - adored by her family, owner of a wicked temper of which she repents, and strong enough to make her own decisions despite the outside world. Only two things in the world matter to her: her family and her writing. Marriage isn't part of the equation at all.

I, of course, wanted to be Jo, but realized early on that I lacked the strength of will - which my parents were grateful for, but got in spades with the birth of Lauren. But I wanted to write - I wanted to write and support my family. Maybe that's part of the reason I like memoir so much, tracing it back to Jo's own decision to write about her and her sisters. That's what made her truly successful: her own life story.

Looking back at it now, after years and years, it's a beautiful story, though overly sentimental for our cynical time period. At the time, though, to write about domesticity in a way that celebrates and elevates it, even while pressing young girls to think for themselves and do what they dream - this was novel. And the woman behind it was novel too.

Louisa May Alcott. I just finished a biography of her, and she certainly was an interesting woman. She was Jo, though a little rougher and edgier. In fiction, we smooth ourselves out, make ourselves more palatable...or more interesting. She wrote of her own family, but she smoothed them out too. The Marches were the family she wished she had. Her father became doting and wise, her mother sympathetic and strong, her sisters her favorite playmates and joyful friends. In the Alcott family, her father was overly idealistic to the point of fanatic, her mother swung between strength and utter depression, and her sisters had to work to keep their family fed - playtime wasn't often an option.

And yet she grew up in one of the most thriving intellectual communities America has ever known: 1840s Concord. Ralph Waldo Emerson brought the brightest of the day to surround him, giving them money (in the case of the Alcotts, often) and inviting them into his circle. Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Margaret Fuller were constantly around. Young Louisa fell in love with Emerson and Thoreau like only young girls can with charismatic older men who dote on them. To be surrounded with such brilliance! Ah, but she paid for it - according to this biographer - with the struggles of life.

Like Jo, she published fiery tales of love and lust for the money, but it wasn't the Civil War that she sold her first serious book - Hospital Sketches - about her experience as a nurse. The Civil War also broke her health.

She didn't want to write Little Women. She thought the subject dull. But she was anything but dull. She had a romance in Europe with a much younger man when she was in her 30s. She never married. She raised her niece after her sister's death. And her temper always gave her fits. She was human and delightfully so.

A question posed in the book concerned whether you'd rather have an easy life or immortality through your work. (Side note here: I couldn't stand how the book was written - poorly organized, frustrating paragraphs, and too many darn rhetorical questions) It was an interesting question, one that we don't get to answer. I think we'd all say immortality, but that means suffer in the here and now, and who really wants that? Louisa may have chosen an easy life, but her life made her work harder. And though Louisa died at age fifty-five, Jo lives forever. So Louisa does too. Could a writer ask for?

The King's Speech - The Story You Haven't Heard

About three weeks ago, The King's Speech won a few awards. Actually, it won a great many awards at the Oscars, to add to the pile of awards from the Golden Globes, the SAG Awards, and the BAFTAs. You already know how I feel about this amazing movie (I talk about it a little here), and I was pleased to see it do so well. Usually, the movies I like don't win anything because they're not edgy enough. Well, The King's Speech wasn't edgy at all, but it struck a chord with a lot of people. We're all afraid, and we all want to think we can be fixed. Well, fear can't be fixed, but it can be maintained if we have good friends who believe in us.

Anyway, the story itself is great. An amazing piece of history, so rich and ready for Hollywood. Why hadn't we heard it before? That in itself is a fascinating story.

The screenwriter, David Seidler, had a stutter. He listened to King George the VI on the radio as a very young boy, feeling a special kinship with him. Seidler grew out of his stutter, but around the time Seidler turned 40, he started researching Bertie and Lionel. He wanted to write about their relationship and eventually caught up with Lionel's son. Lionel's son said he'd talk to Seidler and show him some family heirlooms - including journals - if Seidler had the written permission of the Queen Mum, Bertie's widow.

The Queen Mum did write him, but she asked him to not do it within her lifetime. The 40-year-old memories were still much too painful for her. When subject of the Crown is asked to do something by the Queen, he does it. This was in 1982, when the Queen Mum was 82 years old. Well, Seidler though, I probably won't have to wait too long.

The Queen Mum lived to be 101.

So, he started writing in 2005, when he was 68 years old.

Amazing. The first great part of the story is obviously Seidler's persistence. He didn't let go of his idea, his dream, even though he needed to wait. Lots of things make us wait in life; the divine makes us pause by many different ways. The trick is to keep the faith, to trust yourself, and to hold fast to your passions. Waiting is a part of life. The persistent ones are the ones who get things done.

The other beautiful thing is the respect Seidler had for the wishes of his subjects. In this day and age, artistic endeavors reign supreme. The thought is to say what needs to be said and do what needs to be done, regardless of who gets knocked down on the way. Of course, there are instances when truth needs to be told, regardless of someone's feelings. But those instances are rare, though people often use that as their reasoning for their poison words. Many people are hurt needlessly by media everyday, careless words transmitted on the internet or through television screens. Those words can never be taken back.

So Seidler waited 20 years. 20 years because the Queen Mum asked him to. Of course, she was the queen. She may have had a little more pull because of this fact. But she was the subject, and he respected her. She didn't say no - she just said, please wait because this time in my life was difficult. We all have our own stories in our lives that others may need to hear, but we're just not ready to share them or relive the memories. We need people to wait for us.

My favorite part of this story is the payoff. Can you imagine what kind of movie 1982 would have produced? There would have been no Geoffrey Rush or Colin Firth or Helena Bonham Carter - they would have all been too young. There would have been no Tom Hooper, because his parents wouldn't have been invited to see a staged reading of it and then asked to give their director son a copy of the script...because he was 10. And maybe it would have won awards and gained acclaim, but who knows.

Seidler, at age 73, is now an Oscar winner. He said in his acceptance speech, "My father always told me I'd be a late bloomer." I bet he's glad he bloomed now.

Persistance. And respect. And then, rewards. That's the hidden story of The King's Speech.

(thanks to this article, written by Seidler, for the back story: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1339509/The-Kings-Speech-How-naughty-word-cured-King-George-VIs-stutter.html)

What I'm Reading: All Things Shining

Well, I read this book called All Things Shining. And I wrote a review about it. And it got posted on RelevantMagazine.com.

No big deal.

Except it's a pretty big deal. I love Relevant Magazine - I love the print copy, I love the web content, I love the podcast. I'm kind of a fangirl, minus any creepiness (I hope). My dream job is working for Relevant Media Group. Of course I'd have to move to Florida, which means I'd probably see my family about 10x more than I do now. "Christmas at Sara's!" But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

I'm proud to add this to my CV.

Commence giggling like a fangirl.

Check it out here ---> http://www.relevantmagazine.com/culture/books/reviews/25013-all-things-shining