Jewels

I'm working on getting my Ebay jewelry store, Luna Sirena, together. I've got two sets of earrings made! I'm really excited about this, even though I'm trying to be realistic about all of this. I simply love beading and can't really keep everything I make, or else it would take over the house. I don't have anything posted for sale yet, but will in the next couple of days.

It's been a really difficult week of my realization that I am REALLY OUT OF SCHOOL. I need to get downstairs to The Office and try to work every day--I'm behind on some paperwork I need to get out, at least. The Italian-American Historical Association is seriously considering my proposal for its conference, which is good--it just involves reading from the book, as usual.

Still, I am glad to be out of school--I loved the good things, but have to remind myself that my MFA program wasn't the whole world, or even a part of it.

Tomatoes! Tomatoes! Tomatoes!

I have a very elaborate container garden on the back deck of our house. The reason it's a container garden is that it's a sort of compromise between me and Mr. Strega. Our home is in the woods, and, before I came here, Mr. Strega was devoted to getting the land back to a state of naturally occuring wildflowers and plants. It's been successful--and then I came into the picture and took over the back deck. Right now, we have, among other things, a lilac, a honeysuckle, a giant peach-colored rose (I think it's one of the Peace roses, but am not sure), two planters full of morning glories (with weird, twisted branches for them to climb on), and rows of annuals--nasturtiums, cosmos, catmint, sweet peas, poppies, sunflowers, columbine--it's a jungle out there.

This year, we've started on tomatoes--I have four container tomatoes, and today found REAL GREEN TOMATOES on one of the plants!
For weeks, the tomatoes have been putting out their starry yellow flowers, and there are masses of them (which means, of course, masses of tomatoes later on)--but the Italian tomato has not only flowers, but a lot of long plum tomatoes in their infancy. My friend Mary is planning a Tomato Fest this summer (she gave me two of these plants and has been handing tomato plants out to other friends and neighbors). It's nice to see that one can still plant something and it'll come up!

FLOW and Swing Dance

Lots of fun last night--I went swing dancing with Mr. Strega (we took ballroom dancing lessons about a year ago, until our instructor moved to Hawaii). We resolved to start dancing lessons again, because it was so much fun to get out there and USE what we had learned, including the Triple Thread and my favorite, the Sugar Push. The swing dance was great (Mr. Strega is a very athletic dancer, so we worked up a sweat), and, best of all, the dance benefited Felton Flow, a local grassroots organization (dedicated to getting local control over the water supply in Felton). Viva Santa Cruz!

I Love Dance

I just got back from my Saturday bellydance class with Heavy Hips. My body rewarded me for less sleep last night with not being able to dance as well today. Bellydance has given me an incredible awareness that I HAVE A BODY, that a part of me IS a body, and that my body isn't some mule that I get to either punish or take care of, at my whim--I COULD punish my body by not eating right, not sleeping my eight to nine hours, and never exercising, but I would feel terrible and I know it. Now that I have been bellydancing over a year, I am more in tune with my body's rhythms and how stress or upsetting things make me tense up--and my physical self really responds to care.
Because I have a chronic illness (now almost completely in remission, thank the Goddess), I have switched to almost all organic foods in my diet, and have gone off dairy products entirely (as the old PG&E commercial says, "I'm a little lactose intolerant." I have also heard that dairy products can affect arthritis, so I use Silk soymilk with omega-3s, and soy yogurt. Soy yogurts took a little while to get used to--instead of the nice, creamy, pretty colors of the dairy yogurts, the soys tend to be a bit on the grayish side and taste like, well,. soymilk. I'm used to it now, although soy cheese has a long way to go in terms of learning to like it. It mostly looks and tastes just a wee bit like rubber). Changing my diet has slowly helped--I wish I could be a vegetarian, but I was one once, and that is when I got lupus. My doctor at the time (who was also following a vegan diet) told me that some people really can't be vegetarians--I lost nearly twenty pounds (after having weighed about 125 pounds), became horrifically anemic, and my immune system then got screwed up and, after a long bout with the flu, I developed lupus. Now my body responds to a mostly vegetarian diet, but with some good, fresh fish or organic chicken for dinner. I rarely eat red meat (sometimes, though !)--and I don't deny myself the occasional black-bottom cupcake from Peets or a croissant from the local French bakery.

I love my Heavy Hips instructor, Palika, for her incredible wisdom, humor, and strength--and the women there are really nice. I don't have a lot of close women friends--I went though a lot of women-betrayals in childhood and in college, especially with one friend in particular (whom I know now to have been someone who was suffering terribly). In my MFA program, I began to make women friends, and then more friends in the dance community. Another thing about bellydance is that my wardrobe is changing--I gravitate now towards Indian shirts and skirts, and more color and prettiness in my clothes. Plus, my feelings about this 46-year-old, slightly overweight body have changed--I do want to lose more weight (I've lost just under 20 pounds now in this year of bellydance, but have hit a plateau), but I am trying to love myself where I am at right now. I feel strong and very well; so what if I am not as thin as I was when I was 25? I was in terrible shape then, bodily and spiritually--I am, in some ways, much "younger" now in body and in spirit. So those are my thought for the day.

Yoga

I took a "real" yoga class today and loved it. I'm doing this to try and release chronic neck and shoulder tension (ouch), and it helped.
My teacher has long, reddish-brown dreads and is a great instructor. I can't do certain positions without help (a blanket under my butt, for example)--but then, I also have a knee injury, by and large healed now, which still inhibits my flexiblity just a little. I've noticed in both dance and in yoga (I have been doing yoga at home for two years) that I am more flexible on my left side than my right.

Speaking of bellydance, I balanced a sword on my head for the first time! I have pretty good balancing skills, so the sword went on just fine--it's quite heavy and I think when I get one of my own, I will probably have to let it sit on my head for a few minutes every day.
This sure beats footnoting and MLA format!

ANYWAY--I had a nice morning with my youngest son (whose blog-nickname will be Riff, as he's a superb guitar player). Aside from the fact that he asked the merchants at both the bead store and the metaphysical bookstore if they carried "necklaces made of pure hemp, so he could spread the love around," we had a good afternoon. He's quite a comedian.

Not much else happening, except that my cell phone rang in the middle of yoga class. That was embarrassing. But the teacher was good about it.

Sent it

Well, my first agent query for The Strega's Story went out last night. I am actually glad I am doing this after I graduated from my MFA program--it was hard not to get caught up in the competitive aspects of that program, which has, in the natural course of things, changed a lot since I first began there. When I first started my MFA program, I was in the very first class (it's a relatively new program), and the energy in that program, among faculty and students, was amazing and really opened up my creativity in many ways. I think one of the reasons it changed so profoundly is that the handful of male faculty (not my fiction prof, nor my TA supervisor, by the way, but certainly others) are utterly sexist and the male members of the program got teaching priviledges no one else got, much more praise and encouragement, were awarded the majority of the academic prizes, and were referred to as the "leaders" of the MFA program. At one point, some of the women got together and tried to get the MFA committee to put more women writers on some of the required reading lists, and we were shot down. One woman all but dropped out because of repercussions and outright verbal confrontations with one particularly threatened faculty member. It made me frankly sick, and for awhile during this past difficult year , I thought about never crediting the college I went to (in litmag bios and so forth) as the place where I got my MFA.

But, as a very wise person once said, "Resentment is the poison I take, hoping it will kill you." I learned a lot there, really got help from a wonderful group of faculty (not the jerks), had a small teaching job, and got a couple of prizes myself. My thesis director is brilliant in every way and truly in my corner (she's fiery and very strong and reminds me that it's okay to stand up for myself and get angry). So what if my MFA program became a microcosm of the literary world, despite the hopes of the people who started it? I've been in that world for more than twenty years, and I do believe that world continues to favor a certain group of folks. Sorry, one hopes it will be more equitable, but I think it's taken a step backwards in the last ten years. I know who I am, and some part of me does understand that I can write as decently as anyone out there. That knowledge keeps me pushing forward. And I don't care if I come off as a rabid feminist from hell. They aren't probably going to hire me back there (they've been whining about the budget, even though one of the former TAs gets three to four classes to teach every semester--but he was one of the "leaders," don't you know), and they generally fail to listen to most of the students (or the faculty who have moved on to better places) about ways to improve the creative environment of the program. I do hope things will change--the students themselves were absolutely wonderful, and also the few faculty that really have an idea of how to foster creativity. I AM grateful for the MFA program in general and this degree--I just couldn't close my eyes to the problems and the fact that the administration there seemed to be afraid of taking necessary risks to try and keep the program from stagnating in its own juices.

Still, all ranting aside, I did drive out to the Felton post office last night with my agent query; I was proud of how professional the query seemed. I put flower stamps on the envelope and took a moment to reflect on the journey in my life so far to this place, and to silently thank all the wonderful teachers, friends, and family who have helped me to this place. Since I'm a groovy Santa Cruz mountain woman at heart, I do these things. In The Strega's Story, I describe a field outside my childhood home--we had a large property with at least an acre of land behind it, a field that looked huge to me, spotted with timothy grass and scattered with walnut trees, as it had previously been a walnut grove. In summer, the air filled with the sound of crickets--a sound both delicate and pervasive, like a sort of aural perfume. There's also a field by the Felton post office--like the field behind my childhood home, it's a transitory place, slated to become the site of the new Felton library eventually. But last night, I recognized the fragrance that all fields, left wild and to themselves, hold at a certain time of night--a sweet smell of dry grasses that have been slightly dampened by the night air--and the crickets were singing. There is a sense that whatever I lost--my grandmother and great-grandmother, access to my mother because of her destructive life--can still be found, that writing redeems these things and pulls them out of the well of memory. I do believe something will come of my book--I can't be doing this process of getting things to an agent and into the publishing arena and not believe that--and that, if I stay strong in just doing things one day at a time, the right path will open for me. But one of the best things for me is that I don't feel divorced from these memories now--I feel as if I possess the past again, and there is a sense of goodness and wholeness about that.

moon June spoon

I am sending out my agent query today, on the night of the full moon--like many writers, I have certain quirks and rituals (I handwrite my manuscripts, then type them up; I like to use Waterman fountain pens to handwrite, as these are easiest on my hands and the ink looks nice. Plus, I generally like to have coffee or tea by my side on the desk, and usually write to music, as The Office has no door on it, just an old tablecloth with an autumn-leaves pattern on it).

Still, my big-time sending out agent queries is something I've decided I'll do on a waxing-moon/full moon cycle. My book isn't titled The Strega's Story for nothing--and using help from "the other side" is not unknown to writers. Ted Hughes cast horoscopes to try and find the best times to send work out.

I realize this process may be really difficult, but I guess I am as ready as I will ever be. I need to get downstairs now, cross my fingers, and hope for the best.

beads and massage

No, this isn't a naughty post,despite the title. I worked until one a.m. last night on my agent letter and the stuff I'm going to send with it, and then remembered that I had to be up at eight-thirty for a jewelry-making class. I tossed and turned until three, then finally fell asleep and did manage to make it to class--of which my daughter and I were the only two members, other than the teacher and her two very active toddlers (apparently the babysitting arrangements fell through). It was a fun class, though, and I made a very pretty,delicate necklace, consisting of a silver chain with rose quartz leaves and peridot Swarovski crystals dangling from it, plus a matching pair of earrings. Emily made a very complicated wrapped-silver moonstone drop necklace. We decided we could do this kind of stuff for Ebay, at least. Then I went downtown and got a chair massage on my shoulders, neck, and spine from Reggie, one of the massage therapists at Community Bodyworks. I usually go to women massage therapists for the naked-back/legs/feet thing (very shy person), but the chair massage is done fully clothed and Reggie specializes in releasing the neck muscles. My neck and shoulders are chronically tense and sometimes my shoulder will go out,as it did last night (the reason I was tossing and turning). Reggie helped work the tension out--I have knots of incredible, painful tension all through my shoulders--and showed me an exercise I can do to help relieve stress in the shoulders (raising my arms and breathing slowly in, then out while lowering the arms). I've gotten pretty sick of treating my body like crap--let's just say I GOT sick by treating my body like crap--and I now get massage and acupuncture on a regular basis.

As for my book , I am sending out my first agent query tomorrow, on the full moon (howl). Blessings to all on this solstice evening.

Writing, Spare Time, and Sadness

Nothing on my writing to-do list got done today. That's life--I spent a nice afternoon with my younger kids, eating sandwiches at Zoccoli's, the local Italian deli, and signing my daughter up for summer school. Tomorrow my daug er and I are taking a basic beaded jewelry making class; I've opened up an Ebay store and hope to sell some things on it (yes, this is another thing I do--I do basic knitting and crochet--I picked those up due to a long bus commute to and from San Jose State--I can sew very basic clothing, and I make quilts, though I can't seem to get the organization together that I had in my twenties and thirties to do these things--perhaps because I discovered in my forties that my body needs nine hours of sleep a night to function properly. Plus, bellydance--The Big Hobby--does take up a lot of time. Plus, teenage kids who don't drive need to go places. Still, I have a beautiful quilt in the works, what I hope will be my marriage quilt one day). It is called a Jewel Box quilt, made of multicolored squares surrounding one large turquoise blue square in each block.

Onto another news item: I got a very concern-making email from a fellow MFA-er, that a professor of ours (who taught mythology and a fabulous course on William Blake) is very ill with heart trouble and in the hospital. I am so afraid he is going to not make it, even though he has had many of these scares before--he is so fragile-looking and feels like a sack of bones when I hug him (and I do hug him, and his beautiful wife). I am going to go try and see him in the hospital this week. He has the most brilliant mind of anyone I know and, when I got past the fear of his considerable intellect, I found the kindest heart in him. I have several elderly friends and I am terrified this summer of losing them--one woman is the closest I have ever come to having a functional mother and losing her will be like losing a parent.

So, I have made a decision to visit all my elders this summer and love and enjoy them. I know it sounds like Pollyanna, but there's something to be said for keeping the heart open and being willing to love, to be vulnerable even though these people may not be in my life very long. And I'll be old one day, too.

Well, on and on--I'm starting to see that this blog is fertile ground for ideas I can use later. After all, no word really goes to waste--they are all seeds, all potential.

The Week Ahead

Well, my bellydance performance went well yesterday (I was in a student recital for Santa Cruz Dancenter, at which I take lessons). I had a terrific time, and am glad there's a bit of recess now between performances (the next one is at a big hafla at the Pacific Cultural Center). However, my teacher for my folkloric bellydance class talked about how she's ordering swords (to balance on the head and dance around). Well, why not--as long as I don't do inadvertent surgery on myself.

I am now getting into serious agent-querying mode for The Strega's Story. There are some folks from my MFA program who have had terrible luck with agents--one person got an agent a couple of years ago, but I've heard nothing at all about whether his book is coming out, or anything like that. The very worst story I heard was when a Great Writer taught at San Jose State awhile back and promised a few people in class that he would recommend them to his agent (I wasn't one of those people, and was glad of it--I felt uncomfortable about it, even though Great Writer liked my work, to some degree). One student in particular was very excited about the agent contact--only to find later that Great Writer never followed through, never contacted his agent about these students who were sending their work along, ever, and the agent had not even heard from Great Writer himself in six months. My friend was so hurt when he told me this story--he said that he felt Great Writer screwed him over. I told him I believed in his work and that he really could find an agent and get his book published--and I hope he does.

Slothdom, and What Seems Lost Sometimes Isn't

Trying to banish slothdom by sending out my CV and so forth to UCSC. I'm applying for lecturer jobs--San Jose State's English department has sent me a letter which states that they might not be able to hire me back next year, at least not for Fall 2005. My former students are literally begging me to come back and teach 1B, but I am starting to see that it might not be in the cards. Sometimes the tiny devil sitting on my left shoulder (ok, I KNOW there isn't one; it's a metaphor) tells me to resent and be jealous of the other TAs who got hired back last Fall, a couple of whom got creative writing courses to teach. "Nobody wants you!" sez the Old Scratchling. But I brush the little devil aside--jealousy and resentment get boring after awhile (and slothdom doesn't? No, it's entirely more creative to find different ways to be lazy).

I don't know about UCSC's budget and hiring these days, so it looks like I might not be able to work at a formal teaching job for at least the Fall semester. My beloved, whom I'll call simply Mr. Strega, being the soul of optimism, has told me this state of unemployment is a silver lining, that I now have months to get the book out to agents, revise it, etc. Yet slothdom really is a problem with me, until I get downstairs and try to start writing. I do have a room of my own (known as The Office)--about the size of a large walk-in closet, with one high, small window and, my collection of masks on the wall (I really love masks--I have everything from porcelain masks to feathered masks, and a personal favorite that only cost me a dollar at Palace Arts' post-Halloween sale, a silver paper mask shaped like a crescent moon). At the moment, The Office is something like a shrine to my childhood--my mother, being ill in both mind and body, took up with a creepy drunk many years ago. Together, they drank and partied until her home was lost (this was one of those really neat ranch-style homes in the San Fernando Valley, on a street with old pepper trees and established gardens, a home she once told me she was happy to have bought so that all her children could come home to her--a sad wish, as the man she was with became very destructive--one of those charming folks who gets wasted and all fired up, and who routinely called at 3 a.m. vowing to come to one's home and do some damage--and sometimes he really did, to people down in Southern California).

Anyhow, when Mom lost her home, she put her possessions and everyone's childhood things in storage, didn't pay the storage bill, and everything was lost. I was so lost from myself for many years that I didn't much care whether I had anything from childhood or not, or thought I didn't. Yet, when I went to grad school and began The Strega's Story, I realized I needed to have things from the childhood about which I was writing--that some of these objects were not just a bottle of the perfume my grandmother, the Avon lady, bought me when I was six, or a book of cat stories my grandmother (henceforth known as Nonni) read to me, but were also talismans, things that could open up memories for me. I have had to work on this book using no pictures from my family of origin (except for my slightly famous grandfather, John Indrisano), but, through the miracle of eBay, I have managed to replace a few childhood things, including my grandmother's perfume, Avon's Hawaiian White Ginger.

I discovered that smell opened the floodgates of memory for me, so I have several bottles of perfume on my desk in The Office; I also have childhood books (I was a great reader of ghost stories, with a bit of a Gothic sensibility even then); I also have a couple of dolls, a Raggedy Ann and an Italian doll from Naples. I search every couple of days on eBay for a replacement of the Italian doll I had as a child, a woman with a basket on her head full of cloth tomatoes, with dark purple violets tucked in among them. No luck so far.
My siblings and I have talked about going to the storage space where my mother had stored things, to try and find out the names of people who might have gotten our things. I would give anything for one photograph of my grandmother, though if I try hard enough, I can conjure her face, her hands, the crooked index finger on her left hand from a broken bone which was not set properly. I think writing this book, more than anything, was a conjuring-trick to bring back the image of her face to me, so that it would never be lost.

Enough for the day--down to The Office to get some work done.

Coda: My computer (one of those triangular UFO Imacs, in translucent alien grey) is SO FREAKING DISORGANIZED! Mr. Strega is all left-brain, and puts numbers on the files instead of names in an effort to try and sort out the cyber-mess. He has tried--dear God, the poor man has tried--to help me become more organized. He did, after all, go to a certain school in Pasadena and writes, all day, pages of computer language which look like a cross between math class and Vulcanspeak to me. Yet even his efforts do not help--my computer disorganization is chronic and terminal, so I just picked through folder after folder, trying to find my resume and publication history so I can GET A GOSHDARNED JOB. Finally I made a folder on the desktop, with "Job Hunting" as the title, and put my resume and publication history inside it, after spending an hour looking for them. The heck with tiny, strangely coded numbers--there's a reason I was an English major, Mr. Strega! Still, I would never go back to being single. One of the first things I said to Mr. Strega, after our first romantic month, was "Thank you so much for saving me from dating." Amen.

Show Me The Money

I've lately been gearing up to try and find grants for travel to Boston, so I can do more research on the book. The National Italian-American foundation is one source I'm going to try, though they rejected me for a grad school scholarship a couple of years ago.
Another source is the Barbara Deming Foundation, though this foundation has no website and must be written to via snail mail. I'd really love to travel to Italy on the pretense of researching this book, but, to be honest, the book has many more scenes in Boston than Italy (there's about five pages that take place in Italy). Part of the book takes place in the San Fernando Valley and that is a lot easier to research--I'll probably be accompanying my partner down to Los Angeles this summer for various errands. The Valley has changed so much since I was a kid there--it used to be a wonderful place to grow up. The house I grew up in is still standing--hope to take some pictures of it, and of my Aunt Anna and Uncle Mike's house, too. In the meantime, I'll be working on getting funding to travel.
I'll get to Boston one way or another,even if it's by covered wagon! :)

I was recently reading Her Husband, by Diane Wood Middlebrook, which focuses on the marriage of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. At one point in their lives, when they bought their home, Court Green, they decided not to work in academia any longer and make their living as writers instead. I guess this was possible to do in the late '50s/early 60s. It was a fascinating, if tempestuous, marriage in which both writers managed to be productive, even with small children. I was a single mother for many years and I also found it highly admirable that Plath could continue to be productive even after she became responsible full-time for her young children--and remember that she was physically run-down and emotionally traumatized after her separation from Hughes. I've also been reading her journals and am fascinated by how devoted she was to sitting down and writing for a certain amount of time every day. At one point, she wrote "Oh, what a writer I shall flay myself into." Now, that's a bit extreme--I'm not into flaying myself, but I do need to push myself more.
If they gave Pulitzers for sloth, I would win.

Welcome!

I want to welcome you to The Strega's Story, which is a blog created to help me muddle through the process of finishing my book about my Italian-American family. A strega is loosely translated in Italian as a witch; my great-grandmother was a strega. She wasn't exactly a witch, however; she did know charms and spells, but was generally more like a curandera or folk healer. My book describes what it was like to have such a powerful woman in my life; it truly affected the way I saw the world and continues to influence my life to this day. A large portion of the book centers around the death of my grandfather, John Indrisano, who was a champion boxer and went on to become a stunt man, boxing choreographer for films, and small-role actor for three decades. He left my grandmother to pursue an eleven-year dalliance with Mae West, and eventually committed suicide by hanging in 1968, on my mother's birthday. His suicide devastated my family, particularly my mother. This section of the book was the most difficult to write and I am still taking it through revisions, trying to really touch the heart of that terrible event and how it affected my family.

I recently graduated from an MFA program and The Strega's Story was my MFA thesis. I am currently entering the process of getting the book to agents, a process of which I am actually quite terrified. I will be presenting portions of my book at academic conferences this coming year and I'll otherwise be hitting the pavement to get the book into the public eye. I will be presenting a portion of the book in late October 2005 at the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association's conference in Idaho, and hopefully at the Italian-American Historical Association's conference in November 2005 as well. In the meantime, I am working on getting portions of the book published, as several chapters have been worked into short pieces.