18 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in A Change of View Tags: beauty, Breathe, caption, daily pages, dark roast coffee, espresso, essence, Janine Donoho, meditation, spicy chai, spirit, whole body stretches
Dark roast and meditation on beauty
Spicy chai and another helping of inspiration
Espresso and whole body stretches
While breaking a sweat to keep the body strong
Ah-a-ah-men, ah-men, amen
06 Apr 2010 2 Comments
in A Change of View Tags: Anjali Banerjee, Border Patrol, Colorado Corrections, dance, drip systems, drought resistant, essence, George R. R. Martin, Girl's Night Out, Janine M. Donoho, mustangs, Nevada, persistence, Pussycat Girls, sangria, Susan Wiggs, tactile quilt poem, Tloud Temana, Tonasket Community Center
This blog might have dealt with persistence. Sigh. However, after an evening in Tonasket at the annual Community Center’s Girl’s Night Out, thank you Suzanne, this idea of story awoke me this morning. Maybe it was Lindy, a wonderful poet, who edged me in this direction with her stunningly tactile quilt of a poem. Perhaps it was the exuberant time spent with two student dancers or the carafe of sangria we shared afterward. Or it might have been the experience of dancing for the first time since shoulder surgery. Okay, dancing might not give you the complete picture, for my shoulder limited me somewhat. But this body knows how to isolate muscles and break a move in equal parts to Pussycat Girls’ Buttons or Elissa’s Tloud Temana.
A recent opportunity to meet-and-greet mustangs serving our local border patrol presented itself. Captured wild and gentled by Colorado Corrections inmates, these bold animals appear to be perfect for their endeavors. Who taught who more–horse or inmate–before being integrated into the fold of this rugged Border Patrol station poses an inspired question. Surefooted, brawny, intelligent, they’re still enough mustang to stand against grounded cougar or foul malefactor and even stomp a rattler mid-strike. In other words, they retain their horsey essence–their wild being. For that we can thank the humans who chose to shape rather than break. Both wrangler and riders recognized the importance of maintaining their mustang’s nature even as they partnered with them for the rugged terrain in which we live. This is not a trivial matter, since each depends upon the other for life.
As when confronted the extermination of wild mustangs during my child- and young adulthood in Nevada, when reading accounts of stories, both long and short, that have been through a purported gazillion editing cycles, a part of me recoils. Another part longs to read the story, which is often what happens. Here’s my take.
Then there are the keepers. My friend Susan Wiggs wrote one that brought out the clichéd response in me–I laughed, I cried, I rooted for the protagonist and threw virtual rotten tomatoes at the antagonist. This was her novel JUST BREATHE. I felt the same about George R. R. Martin’s first few novels of his SONG OF ICE AND FIRE series, which since has shifted from fantasy masterwork to perhaps simply lost and unfinished. Sigh. Another friend and writer Anjali Banerjee writes young adult novels with a beating heart–stories that deal with ISSUES, yet remain true to story. Her first was LOOKING FOR BAPU and her latest SEAGLASS SUMMER. She edits, bends, spindles and mutilates herself over the process, which as her friend I wish she’d simply trust, but ends with these beautiful stories with essence intact.
Perhaps. WILDFIRE and CALLING DOWN THE WIND, award-winners that they are, might have reached a wider audience, found more of those who love them, then been touted to their friends. I’ve done the same for stories I love. Yet here’s the problem. Four, possibly five of my novels loosely fit into either what’s called contemporary fantasy, magic realism, speculative fiction or urban fantasy, although really four of the five are actually rural or ex-urban fantasy. Large publishers refuse to fully embrace any of these categories. Just look at the well-established Alice Hoffman’s lovely novels, that bounce from literary to fantasy dependent on the bookstore or marketer. Of course, there is my homeless high fantasy trilogy that’s too big to take on with an ‘untried’ writer. Why can’t too big to fail work in this case? Sigh.
So why try to form story into cubes that fit the perfect square systems that our current publishing world clasps to their collective chest in a death grip, which indeed may turn out to be the death of them? I can count on one hand the books I’ve purchased as keepers in the last year. This from a voracious and careless reader.
Janine Donoho 