ghost sherds

WEEKLY WRITER'S PATH #40

I woke up on Christmas eve morning to find the bowl of the bird bath had cracked and fallen to the ground. I then discovered the story I’d won a prize for was not being published in the newspaper that day as I had been told previously. The day ended with the discovery that my Neverwinter Nights disk was cracked.

Light bulbs are popping and going out all over the house this week: the front door in the Santa Fe sconce, the back door that keeps the mice away, my desk light, the one over the stove; every time I find a new darkness, I laugh.

Then James Brown passed away, and President Ford, and in-between, the ex of our ex-governor planned her Christmas, brought all her gifts and trimmings into her Aspen home, went to bed and didn’t wake up.

The veil is thin these days between the living and the dead—or the almost forgotten.
As the week continued I ran into or reconnected with all kinds of people I hadn’t been in contact with for years.

First, I watched an old Christopher Reeve’s movie, “Somewhere In Time” about a playwright who hypnotizes himself back in time to meet an actress he has become obsessed with. I became obsessed myself this summer with Reeve’s entire life, his fall and his self-recreation, fighting for nine years to grant rights to quadriplegics. Read: universal kryptonite.

In a scene less than a minute long, a face from my past appeared, a face I loved almost as much as my father’s: my first acting coach in Chicago, Ted Liss. The summer I was 19, I found his acting class in the most roach infested, stinking hole in Chicago on Wells street, across from the now infamous Second City. We worked on scenes in pairs and presented them every week, often breaking up at two or three in the morning. The night he graduated me, I played the teacher in “And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little.” The next week I left for New Mexico.

I grabbed the VHS box with the movie cover in it and pulled it out of the plastic to read the date: 1980. That was the year I began with Liss. Most likely, the movie had been filmed the year before. I stared at the frozen frame on the TV: Liss and Reeve, both dead men now, both shared the same air I shared. Two degrees of separation.

Then an old printing friend found me on email, last time we spoke was three years ago. Old family friends contacted with us from Tennessee, last saw them at our Vista del Sur house. Could it have been ten years ago? I saw Carole and her mom at the bank—five years ago seems to be the last time we saw each other. That night I ran into Murrae, who worked with Carole and me. He said my name while I picked out ground beef at Trader Joe’s. He’d just cut his hair to donate it to cancer kids for a wig. I laughed to think of a kid with a long grey ponytail. I haven’t run into Murrae in at least six years.

My best friend in high school, Jimmy Granger, used to call these sightings “ghosts”; visions of the past in the present.

The week was summed up when my sister sent a disc with the photos she had taken from her Thanksgiving visit. On one she had printed “GHOST”. It was evening and we were walking up Canyon Road. I sat on a giant ant sculpture and she took the picture. In it you can see my gloved hand emerging from a bolt of yellow gold.

I didn't tell her, but I had twice that week prior to their visit stayed up late working into the wee hours of the morning and felt a very physical presence at my right elbow, like someone had walked up silently behind me and looked over my shoulder.

~mel

contest winner

Dear Weekly Writer’s Path readers,
I am happy to let you know that my short story, “Night of Shiva” has won 3rd place, nonfiction in the Santa Fe New Mexican’s Holiday Writing Contest, 2006. The story will be published in the Sunday, December 24th edition. For those out-of-state, I will send you an e-link. This announcement also coincides with the launch of my new website: www.melissajwhite.com

in the groove

WEEKLY WRITER'S PATH #38

What does this moment feel like? It’s 1pm on a very sunny December day. I am sitting in a café called Java Joe’s in Santa Fe. Outside the plate glass windows, sheets of snow continue to occupy space in the northern shade of four ponderosa pines on a busy traffic corner. Inside the café the air is too warm. I scribble into a wire-bound notebook. On my table: a blue plate, spinach feta quiche crumbs, a crumpled white paper napkin.

This day is like any other day. The sound of dishes sinking down into deep water, refrigerator doors closing, the hiss of a cappuccino machine’s steam spigot, the soft tinkling of roasted coffee beans being poured from one container to another like a seashell waterfall. These sounds aren’t more distinct, more important than yesterday. But this day is unlike any other. This day I spoke the words, “my book agent.”

I just dropped off my manuscript copies of DIZZY SUSHI at the doorstep of a literary agent I met Friday. We shook hands. She emailed me a list of six editors at publishing houses. I looked over an agency contract for the first time. Tomorrow, DIZZY will be in the mail and in 6-8 weeks the first news will arrive. Acceptance? Rewrites? Rejections? An offer?

We don’t know if DIZZY will sell, (another new word in this context, “we”), but the idea is to get my name in front of editors so if DIZZY doesn’t win them over, we have at least started a dialogue when the next project comes to them.

I have said these words before—agent, editors, publishing houses—but now they stick. They’re real, actualized. Now there is a connection between them and me.

Remember records? LPs? A needle with a diamond tip carefully placed on the outer circumference of a rotating disc. It catches the first thread and a song begins. Before today the motion was there, the needle tip sharp, but the two weren’t meeting. Today, the outer edge of the publishing world and my creative intention have met and the beginning notes of music reverberate. A fitting end to a year-long blog about getting published, no?

My first post in January invited you to walk with me on this path and I am happy we have gotten here together. Your encouragement, interest, notes, and support have been an important piece of the whole. In you I have created an audience. I think of you when I write. And that has been one of the most important things I have discovered this year.

Are you ready for chapter two? We have climbed to the top of the canyon and stand on its lip looking out in all directions. Can you see the shape the river has cut into the rock? How it flows away to the south? I don’t know the path from here, but now we have a guide. Be assured: this is just the first step in possibly an even longer process. I, for one, am happy to have the company.

Yesterday as I began checking the pages of my ms, my hands had forgotten how to do it. It was almost 12 months ago that I last made so many copies of DIZZY. 332 pages were stacked in front of me, I had a rubber tip on the middle finger of my right hand and my left hand settled on top of the stack and I forgot the motions.

Then, as I leaned into the paper, my left hand curled over the top edges and caught them as they flipped by while I confirmed no page was missing. Like being handed a newborn baby, your arms remember the pose.