Category Archives: inspiration

Advice Martha Stewart Gave Me On Living and Lemons

Posted by

10

Martha Stewart's Vodka-Thyme Lemonade

Martha Stewart’s Vodka-Thyme Lemonade

I have a confession to make. Years ago, I was semi-obsessed with Martha Stewart. “Semi” in that while I did drive past her Connecticut farmhouse, I didn’t peer through her windows with binoculars (forgot them at home) to see if her magazine living room was in fact her real living room. I did collect every paint chip from her interior paint line, I attempted (or planned to, or fantasized about) every craft project and Good Thing, and to this day I own many years’ worth of Martha Stewart Living magazines, mostly the mid 90’s through the early 2000s. I ate up her advice like whipping cream, the essential rickrack, frosting windows, cornhusk crafts, pressed seaweed, chintz, decoupage! Tomato aspic! Don’t know what half those things are? Just wait!

The one thing I rejected like curdled goat’s milk was a monthly feature called, Martha’s Calendar−her personal daily to-do list. It was mostly chores and house maintenance tasks that “she” planned to do and wanted to remind others about. Who needs Martha Stewart to nag them about doing drudgery? That’s what family is for.  Plus, her to-do list was a far cry from the rest of ours. Did she intend for this to be a peek into an elitist farmer-collector-decorator-entertainer lifestyle or was she trying to inspire? It ran for a short time. After all, who but Martha Stewart has winter and summer curtains to switch in and out?

I recently had the urge to pull out a vintage MSL, and fell upon Martha’s Calendar with the same fascinated voyeurism I had years ago. Here is a compilation of some of the best Calendar entries. I’ve provided a handy-dandy how-this-might-apply-to-your-life translation.

April 1, 2001 – Count canaries. This was a stumper. Martha owns canaries, but doesn’t know how many? That’s a lot of canaries. But why count them? The closest thing I have to birds is a roast chicken in the fridge and a down pillow for overnight guests. Tally: approximately 2.

April 2, 2001 – Wash and seal stone floors. Wow, this sounds awful. In lieu of stone floors, remove nail polish from white bathroom tile floor where daughter has dropped a shocking shade of fuchsia.

April 4, 2001 − Sow tomatoes in greenhouse. Plant herb seeds for a clay pot herb garden. If they don’t germinate, buy small herb plants from Home Depot. If they die, buy basil at the grocery store. If you’re too busy counting canaries, use the dried stuff.

April 5, 2001 − Begin transplanting seedlings; apply horticultural oil to fruit trees. Drive your seedlings to school. Moisturize their arms and legs before leaving house.

April 8 – Organize linen closets. Be happy you have clean linens and go make a terry cloth rug out of old towels!

March 4, 2002 − Finalize tax returns. Ah-ha! Just figured out why Martha’s Calendar was canceled.

April 10, 2001 − Open pools in Westport and East Hampton. Order a Slip ‘n Slide from Target.com. Have it shipped in time for Memorial Day.

April 1, 2001 − Take final test for pilot’s license. Hmm, another toughy. If you want to feel like you’re flying, go get some dental work done and ask for the laughing gas.

April 9, 2001 − Return from Japan. Order sushi for dinner and pick it up. Return from Japan(ese restaurant).  

December 13, 2002 – Wash all light bulbs. If you have the time, desire or inclination to wash your light bulbs, you have bigger problems than I can help you with.

January 22, 2003 – Rotate mattresses. You’ll need assistance for this, so be sure to ask your husband 3 days in advance, so when he says, “I’ll be right there,” it’ll be done exactly when you intended.

June 8, 2001 – Clean behind washer and dryer. Barring the possibility that you are a contortionist, weight-lifter, or wizard, let the dust bunnies be and go decoupage a side table!

August 19, 2001 – Go rowing. Here’s one you need not feel guilty about unless you have a canoe, some oars and a body of water handy. Hey, if water is handy, consider making pressed seaweed art instead!

April 17, 2000 – Clean chicken coop. …I guess you could clean out your refrigerator…another job I dread. My rule: never clean anything that’s bound to get dirty again. Waste of time. Instead, take all the cheese and veggies you have in there and cobble together a sumptuous quiche!

Apirl 2, 2002 – Climb Mount Kilimanjaro again. Again? That sounds pretty boring. Decorate a wall with a bunch of empty mismatched tag-sale frames. Nestle some smaller frames into larger ones for a fabulous effect! (You’ll need a step ladder to get some frames up high. Be careful, the air thins out up there!)

April 6, 2002 – Take down and wash storm windows. Come on, Martha−we know you’re not doing this! Skip the windows and make a gorgeous lampshade out of sheets of birch bark−beautiful when light shines through!

April 7, 2002 – Scrape and paint chicken coop enclosure. Enough with the chicken coop! Fix yourself a Vodka-Thyme Lemonade and be thankful it’s someone else’s urge to raise chickens.

November 13, 2002 – Wash cats and trim claws. Oh, a cat bath sounds fun and easy! Everyone knows cats love water! Remember, ”claw” is a noun and a verb. My advice: get used to the way the cat looks and smells. With the time you’ve saved, make a Grasshopper Pie−Martha’s recipe is to die for. And watch your family’s claws come out!

The Books You’re Fated to Read

Posted by

2

photo by Ipoh kia

photo by Ipoh kia

It is that very particular exhilarating feeling, when you find a book so scrumptious and exotic you open it with a whisper and close it with a sigh. You’ve found this book through no one’s urging or description or advertising. You wandered alone, woozy in towering aisles with books stacked up to another altitude, on a day when no one seems to have this same idea. All others are elsewhere and so it’s only the sound of your own quiet breathing and the buzz of the florescent lights that you hear. You are looking deliberately for something, a book of fiction about a man who is lonely in a house deserted, but you are half-hearted about this man and his house and this story. You’ve read it before. With a woman and a castle. And you’ve written it before that. So instead you turn and change direction. “I don’t know what I’m looking for,” you say to yourself and are left to ponder exactly what it is you mean.

When left uninspired, it is always wise to choose a classic. You crouch down in the Fs in a position only three-year-olds find comfortable; your knees crackle and you know this limb configuration will have a deadline. Without pause your fingers skip through the shelf, grazing each binding, searching for FI and then T. Your time is up; your knees tell you so. Your fingers must decide. They do and pull back the top of a book’s binding who’s dressed in black and white and in one fell swoop you clutch and stand. Fitch. No. Wrong book. Before slipping it back into place, without a conscious decision to do so, you turn the book over and read what’s been said about it.

“This is what you’re after when you’re browsing the shelves for something good to read.”

A silent gasp preempts your next breath. Your cheeks prickle with heat and you gulp the collected saliva before your eyes move cautiously to take in who and what is around you. How can this be? How did it know? You bring White Oleander home and feast on its beauty and barbed wire without manners or even a napkin to dot your lips. When you’re finished you imagine you have joined a secret book club of members who have also found this book this way. A book you never speak about to anyone, instead you keep its secrets and believe others will read it because it will be fated to them. Just as it was to you.

Where Creativity Comes From

Posted by

4

photo by pbkwee

I have some good news and some bad news. It’s about creativity. Well, mine anyway. After many years of alternately experiencing both droughts and monsoons of creative vision, I have miraculously discovered from where to harvest my most creative self. I liken it to mining for gold−since the result of every creative endeavor (on a good day) yields a precious, rare, wondrous thing of beauty and value.

Of course no two nuggets of gold are alike. If I’m really lucky, some are hefty chunks.  Others are tiny slivers, gossamers even, so slight that most people could not see their true value with the naked eye. Each one is multi-faceted, sharing characteristics that are, at times, even contradictory. Parts are smooth like glass, so that if you looked into it you’d see yourself−only better.  Some parts are scruffy and rugged with razor sharp points that could gouge your eyes out like the grin of a saber tooth tiger. The dirty crevices inevitably found in nuggets of gold always seem incongruous to their opulence. Crevices caked with dirty black deposits so dark, like the unknown of a cave. Let’s not forget the shimmery twinkly parts, gleaming with luster like a wink from a star. To me it makes no difference what form or size the nugget takes−they’re all solid gold.

Ok. Here’s the bad news. There’s only one way I can source these clusters of creativity. For me, the most successful excavation happens under one condition: when I’m in a horizontal position in a half-sleep. I’m not kidding. I discovered this years ago when I started writing my first novel. I’d sit for hours into the late night at my computer exhausted and weary, often with a steady stream of drool leaking from the corner of my mouth. I would try to push through the zombie state because these were the hours I needed to make writing progress−my young children were finally asleep. But I would be too spent to feign creativity or anything writerly, so off to sleep I’d go.

It was on those exceptional nights when I’d find the most wonderful sleeping position ever, the kind where all body parts are in the exact intoxicatingly perfect place. (Why can’t my body find that position every night?) It was on these rare nights, when I’d feel myself slipping off into a deep slumber, that someone from my novel, usually the protagonist, would urgently throw open the door to my semi-consciousness. My first thought was always, “What the heck are you doing here?” Then, “Where’ve you been for the last three hours? Now you got something to say?” I’d argue with the protagonist a bit, but it was clearly futile because I knew in my heart of hearts that a gold nugget had just been plopped on my pillow.

Well, years have passed and one would think I’d have a system for capturing these inopportune but welcomed visits of vision. Since they can take the form of great dialogue−so natural it feels like I’m eavesdropping, or a shocking plot twist or the greatest cliff-hanger chapter ending ever, I should at least have a pad and pencil on my nightstand. I don’t. Nor do I have a mini voice recorder. And since my memory sucks, and since my memory sucks, I can’t possibly depend on myself to remember any of it in the morning. Sometimes I create word associations to try to help me remember; they’ve had varied success. Other times, I’ve relied on the rhythm of sentences that I repeat over and over again in my sleepy state.  Oddly, I can remember the rhythm of a sentence in the morning and derive the words from there.

A mini recorder would be nice.

This pattern of getting gushes of creativity when lying down dozing off has become predictable lately. So much so, I can safely call it my technique. One in which I call upon now even in the middle of the day. If, say, after toiling at my computer for an hour or two, but I’ve yet to make any kind of inroads on the story I’m writing, I actually start to feel a little sleepy. I get up from my desk and lie down on the couch, snuggle up to my favorite pillow, and drift into a half-slumber. And voila! I strike gold.

I’m sure it sounds strange to some people−in fact it was strange to me in the beginning. But it makes sense in a world with so much buzz, distraction and sensory assault, that I would need quiet in order to think and create. Emails, facebook and twitter are an instantaneous click away from a Word document. I don’t look at creativity and inspiration in the same way anymore. Noise ignites inspiration, quiet ignites creativity. This brings to mind something I read in Anna Quindlen’s Newsweek piece, Doing Nothing is Something. “You can’t write poetry or compose music or become an actor without downtime, and plenty of it, a hiatus that passes for boredom but is really the quiet moving of the wheels inside that fuel creativity.”

My kids used to think it was crazy that I’d need to sleep to come up with my best writing ideas. They’re used to it now. In fact the other day my daughter and a friend were walking through our family room on the way to the kitchen. The friend saw me on the couch, curled up under a velvet blanket, and she whispered to my daughter and pointed at me. Through my semi-conscious state I heard my daughter say, “Oh, don’t mind her, she’s just writing.”