Sand is a Verb

A week ago today Caleb and I became homeowners! Since then, every spare second of our time has been spent working to get the house move-in ready. The last owners were unfortunately not very up on maintaining things, and they owned three cats. (We’ve probably vacuumed up about eight.)

The first thing we did was rip out the carpets so our vacuum would survive to live a good long life. Underneath are original hardwood floors that I am in love with – it’s been too long since I walked on wood every day! After this the weekend was spent tearing up tack strips, ripping out nails and staples from the floor, and taking every screw, anchor, nail, staple, and piece of scotch tape off the walls. The fun part came Tuesday when I spent twelve hours sanding every surface in the house – except the floors. Walls, baseboards, quarter-round, doors, trim, and window sills are now all covered with a fine dust that means after a little vacuuming they will be prepped to paint!

So here’s some photos of the worst it gets, folks. From here on out, our busy hours will be spent filling, priming, painting, and improving!

 

The one surface we haven’t sanded yet – the floors – will be waiting for us and a rented drum sander this weekend. That’s right, we’re refinishing all of these floors. And the end results will be be-a-u-tiful.

P.S. – Since this post was written, we’ve done a lot more sanding (this post title is so true) that got us some floors that are even prettier than we hoped!

To Try… Or

All of the sudden, when you’re not looking, life decides to bombard you with everything your back was turned on.

Last I checked, July was just beginning. It was summer(ish) here in Michigan, and I had just finished my first packet for my MFA.

Now, August is upon us. (You may think not, but it has turned up on the date stamp we put on books checked out at the library, so you’re wrong.) My second packet is due, and a million things need to happen before the next one gets turned in. My family is coming to visit from Maryland, we’ll be closing on our house – which involves painting, tearing out carpet, and moving – and I’ve got to read and evaluate submissions for the Louisville Review. I also recently remembered that the deadline for that evaluation is also the deadline for my writing sample if I want to explore another area of writing next semester.

I considered blowing this off and just continuing in the study of creative nonfiction. I really love this genre, and I’m learning so much about it. But this is my opportunity to get some feedback on an area of writing that I have never had a professional opinion on, and that is a chance I don’t want to pass up.

So here’s to the next few weeks. Let them be crazy.

 

When Writers Gather

My first MFA Residency experience has been one of absolute joy and a profound sense of belonging which I don’t know that I’ve experienced more than a few times in my life. I am living and working and eating among 125+ others who are seeking the same thing I seek. Doing the same thing I do. Striving for the same thing for which I strive. Whatever the genre, the age, education, number of publications, we are all artists, working to improve, to perhaps some day perfect, our art.

Although it is only halfway through, I can already say with certainty that this has been the most rewarding experience of my creative life. Workshop every day. Lectures on craft and on elements of writing that inspire me to go out and live the way a writer should! Readings by faculty members who are brilliant. Purchasing faculty books and not knowing which one to read first. If a heaven for writers exists, this week must a peek around the corner, a tiny window, a door knocker.

Needless to say, the creativity is so pervasive one can feel it in the air, a physical energy, a presence that follows down sidewalks, into buildings, up stairs. If writers could feel this energy all the time, surly they would get a lot more work done. There is a love here, for words and for what we can convey and create and imagine while using them. There is a camaraderie and a respect in everyone for everyone else, everyone knowing that we have come here, together, from the corners of a vast country to seek out and strive for the very same things.

I walk a few blocks in the morning, two fiction writers behind me discussing the difficulty they have presenting round antagonists, the opposite of their beloved protagonist heroes.

I pass a group lunching beneath an umbrellaed cafe table, one reading poetry aloud to the other, who listens with interest and respect.

I seek a place to sit, be still, and ponder.

I feel incredibly blessed to be here, and relish that while much has happened, much is still to come.

A taste, for you, of what has transpired here, is this Sonata No.3, “Moon,” composed by Jeremy Beck – an excerpt of which I saw performed live on Sunday. Enjoy! And may you be inspired.

Thinking Back

Working in a library surrounded by page after page of information, one begins to wonder about things. The kids that come into the library regularly are always the same kids, and even in just the short amount of time that I’ve been around, I’ve gotten to know their faces. i know which kids are good, strong readers, and which ones make a beeline for the graphic novels. (Nothing wrong with that!) I know what each person likes to check out before they place their items on the counter.

As a kid, I was an avid library user, and I took full advantage of my library’s services. I placed holds and found them later on the shelf with my name and the date I needed to pick them up by. (E. Hemphill, 10/23.) I saw the library as my place, and I knew the librarians – which ones I liked and which ones were grouchy. It never occurred to me, however, that those librarians might know who I was, too.

Now I think back and wonder, did they know me like I know the kids who come into my library? Did they notice what I checked out and what I put on hold? Did they know when they rang up my books what my name was and what I liked to read? My childhood library was much bigger than the library where I work, but each time I place a paper around a book and write someone’s name on it for pick up from the holds shelf, I wonder.

I wonder, too, if of all the books that we process and place on the new shelf, one of them might someday have my name on the cover. We see a lot of books come through. Many of them are wonderful, but as many or more I could never bear to read. The thought all aspiring authors have flashes through my mind regularly –

If these people can get published, certainly so can I.

If it were only so simple!

Here’s to libraries, to child readers, and to the ones who grow up to supply the libraries with new books for new readers.

Pensworth 2014

Some of you might be familiar with the annual publication put out by the University of the Cumberlands’ English Department – Pensworth, a journal of student art and writing. Although I did not have the privilege of acting as a student editor this year, I think the journal looks lovely! April is a fitting month for the journal’s publication, for me, because even though I haven’t celebrated Poetry Month this April the fruits of last year’s inspiration made it into the journal. My creative nonfiction piece which won the 2013 Creative Writing Award also appears among the work of many other talented writers! Please enjoy!

You can read last year’s issue here, or visit my post from last April.

P.S. Happy Earth Day! Go plant something!

Country Manor Adventures

Last week Caleb and I had the fun task of house sitting for some friends of ours while they were away on a medical mission trip. Their house is lovely, and living above ground again made it even sadder that spring was not yet here. Each day we looked out of as many windows as we could ever hope to have at a (usually sunny!) garden and fields to go walking in – but the temperature was still nippy enough to keep me mostly inside.

We did venture out one day and head up to the town of Niles, MI. (We went to see Noah, but you can ask Caleb about that one.) There’s a little secondhand and antique bookshop in the downtown area that I love, called A. Casperson Books. It’s one of the few really magical bookshops left to be found anymore, and we make a point of stopping in whenever we’re in Niles for a movie or anything. Books line the shelves, walls, floors – every nook and cranny – so there is always something exciting to find.

Not everyone knows that for several years now I have been collecting the old Nancy Drew books. They have blue board covers with orange titles and silhouettes of one of my favorite childhood companions printed on the front cover. I have several of them now, but they can be pretty hard to find (in the antique/rare book world, they are considered “scarce.”) A. Casperson’s is special because the first time I went the owner had two of these books with intact dust jackets on display – it is immensely harder to find these books with dust jackets than without. I’ve found more, at least of the orange titles, reliably on every visit to the shop.

Last week, however, I was blown away by how many of these books were on a shelf behind the checkout desk. There were more than a dozen without dust jackets, and three with them – many more than I’ve ever before seen in one place. The other difficult thing with these old books is that there are so many different editions, some with only minor changes, that it can be really difficult to tell whether or not a book is a first edition (the very scarce). On this trip, however, I finally found my first first edition – and it is a copy of the first book in the series, too! Now if only it had a dust jacket… 🙂 I left a happy camper.

We had a great week in the house of many windows, and because were dog-sitting, too, I got some quality canine snuggles in. The availability of natural light from windows that provide great views of the countryside was a great aid for me with the writing I needed to do (that and the awesome-if-nerdy event of finding my first first edition). My first residency for the MFA program I’m in is at the end of May, and this week was the deadline for turning in our first writing sample to be discussed in workshop at the residency. I sent mine of today – not without a bit of fear and trembling.

In the meantime, the temperatures are rising! Soon I’ll be suggesting you go enjoy a good book – first edition or not – out of doors.

Not Yet Spring at Spring Institute

April has begun, and though the average temperature is still in the 40’s, we’ve at least chased away most of the snow. Even so, when I had the pleasure last week of attending the Michigan Library Association’s Spring Institute – a conference for youth and children’s librarians and library staff – the view from my 15th floor window showed a few too many specks of white falling past.

Since I am so new to library work, last week was both especially fun and increasingly tough. We started the week off by closing the library to train the staff for the catalog migration that was implemented on Wednesday. Then, soon after the migration we discovered that well over 1,000 patron records had been compromised during the switch and went about fixing them. While everyone else continued working on that for the rest of the week, I got to travel up to Battle Creek, MI for Spring Institute, where six talks per day informed me of the latest innovations in the younger generations’ library services. Talk about a lot of learning!

SI was incredibly fun, and I got to meet fun authors like Susin Nielsen and Jim Benton. Nielsen’s book The Reluctant Journal of Henry K. Larsen won the MLA Thumbs Up Award this year. (I’ve since read it, and it’s quite good!) I also met many other fun people who work in libraries all over the state of Michigan – including one library that services an entire county, including a real-life ONE ROOM SCHOOLHOUSE that has 30 students K-8th grade! Who knew places like that still existed?

After a full week of workplace learning, I almost feel like I need to learn it all again. So much was crammed into my head in so short a time that it’s hard to tell if anything stuck! But one thing I know for sure that I learned, and won’t be soon forgetting, is that I love that I’ve been given the opportunity to work among such an awesome group of people. Library people are awesome! They are people who love to knit and craft and do cool science-y stuff with kids. They love the work they do and love going to conferences to chat with others who do the same kind of stuff. But they’re also the kind of people who can write the entirety of The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock from memory during a one hour session that doesn’t interest them. Prufrock!

In short I can safely say that for the first time ever I’m glad I work where I do, with the kind of people who really like working there, too. Yay libraries!

Even the Winter

My whole life, I’ve always felt that the four seasons I was lucky enough to experience in Maryland had a big impact on who I am. Whether it was summer or winter has a big impact on my attitude, my personality, and even to some degree who I am as a person. Some people, I know, are unaffected by lack of sunlight and don’t mind the winter at all. But I’ve always been quick to notice it’s absence, and quick to welcome the cool rain of early March that means spring is following close behind. Summer is usually a time of working for me, but also a time of traveling, exploring, and having fun enjoying the familiar. It is a chance to recharge and recuperate and prepare to go inside for the winter again. It is the season during which life is actually lived; the winter is a hibernation period of waiting for life to return.

Last summer, everything above was present – work, play, travel, exploration, and fun. It was an unusual experience for me, however, because instead of spending the summer in Maryland, for the first time I was away for the entire summer working on an internship in southwest Michigan. Despite Caleb’s assurances that Michigan summers actually were very warm, the temperature was rarely above 73 degrees – spring weather to me. It was the coldest summer in a long time, everyone said, but to me it was a spring without a summer. When I got back to school in Kentucky in August, the weather was the warmest I had experienced since the summer before. Of course, it was only a little more than a month before fall came, and then winter, and then in January a move to Michigan in the middle of what would become the coldest, snowiest winter in a long time (people say).

It’s March 25th today, and there is still snow on the ground that has been there longer than I have been in MI. I still wear my winter coat everywhere I go. I still don’t know what to expect when I go out to my car to go to work – a dusting of snow, perhaps? a thick frost that is worse because it’s harder to clear off of the windows, maybe? Seats in the car so cold that I don’t want to sit down and an engine so cold that in 10+ minutes the heater barely comes on?

I’m not sure how much this winter has truly affected my personhood, but I have to wonder. Like the trees who have no leaves, the flowers that are absent of buds, and the birds who regret their return and rarely sing, why would I open up, fly, or sing at signs of spring in the earth or those around me if tomorrow the frost might bite again, and the cold might shut me in?

I’m ready for a really good spring that has a nice, blistery summer behind it. I’m ready to live a little more. And thanks to this young lady, I think I might finally be ready to hope for the sunshine I want to badly.

Book Review: A Stillness of Chimes

Meg Moseley’s newest novel, A Stillness of Chimes, is a southern story in every sense – with all of the heartache and hidden secrets that implies. Rather than providing readers with a simple romance between a freckled, barefoot tomboy and a farm boy with a southern drawl, Moseley’s characters face real issues and emotional struggles that ring true with readers no matter where they are from.

Born and raised in north Georgia, Laura Gantt has run away from the conflict between her parents that possibly led to her father’s disappearance and from her childhood friend and high school sweetheart Sean Halloran by going off to college in Denver Colorado. Years later, Laura returns to her hometown in order to settle the affairs of her late mother, but she ends up finding more questions than answers, and Sean is there at every turn to keep her safe and help put the pieces of the puzzle together. A Stillness of Chimes deals with all kinds of problems that many readers today might face, including child abuse, alcoholism, adultery, and PTSD.

I thought Moseley’s writing flowed naturally and had an easy to read quality that made the story move quickly. The story itself was intriguing at the very least – the mysteries are introduced early on, but Moseley does a great job of leaving nuggets here and there to keep the reader turning pages to find out more. Character development, on the other hand, is not Moseley’s strongest point. Laura and Sean are constantly at odds with each other, but as their relationship progresses it seems to come out of no where and there is little evidence given to support Laura’s feelings or explain her behavior.

For a quick read, this book was entertaining and pleasant, with a satisfying ending. The setting seemed real, too, but maybe that’s just me wishing I could trade this never-ending Michigan winter for some pleasant flowers and a Georgia breeze!

To find out more about Meg Moseley and her books, visit her website.

When You Need the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything, Ask a Librarian

A few months ago when I was out shopping, I picked up a LEGO mini-figure for Caleb as a surprise. If you don’t know how mini-figures work, they are purchased unassembled in unmarked little packages (made of foil, so you can’t see through), and you never know which little guy you will end up with until you get home (or past the checkout counter) and open the package. I felt around through every package, hoping to pick out a really cool one that Caleb would love (this series included a Roman soldier, Medusa, and a paintball player). When Caleb opened the package at home, however, inside was the mini-figure pictured above.

Hermione? I thought. Wish I’d gotten her for myself!

But Caleb said, “It’s a librarian. I think she looks like you.” And he put her together and stood her up on his desk.

This was a while ago, before we graduated college, got married, and moved out into the scary world on our own. A week ago we were still both jobless, as we’d been in the area only a week and half. What reminded me of this little LEGO librarian, however, was that I was hired to do the first and only job I applied for during that week and am now a Youth Services Librarian!

Sometimes (often), life is a lot more exciting and a lot less scary than grownups say it is.

P. S. – The LEGO Movie was “awesome”! I love 1980-Something Space Guy more than anything! It’s true.  I’m so glad he got to build his SPACESHIP!