Thursday, May 5, 2011

My Garden in the Paper & More Good Writerly News

Looks like I never linked over to a nice article written on my garden and another's (Sue) here in Lincoln. So, here's that link: Flowery Blogs.

Also, as long as I don't get bumped, I will have a small piece appearing in The Sun come August. The section is from my January-written mini memoir Sleep, Creep, Leap: The First Three Years of a Garden (click on the bio tab above to learn more about the manuscript). Big, wonderful, lovely, important magazine you should go check out.

So if anyone's keeping count and peeing themselves like me, that's a photo in Orion for July, and some nonfiction in The Sun for August. So--freaking--awesome.

Clearly, the heavens want me to go to Oklahoma soon, do some research, and get writing the next book over the summer. But even thinking about this project sends bombs bursting in my intestines (one reason the research is taking me years). I cannot fully convey how I feel about that state where I was born, and once I cross the border, something always overwhelms me: not dread, or fear, or depression, or darkness, per se, but their is a pervasive ghost or echo that I am physically aware of (and part of that echo is my childhood, now like some odd dream). Maybe I'm making it up, but I feel Custer slaughtering Black Kettle's village on the Washita, I hear the last bison being shot and its bones ground up for fertilizer, I smell the oil in the air falling like rain from Tulsa, I feel the entire anxious weight of a nation on overdrive, boomers on the Kansas border ready for the gun shot. And that red dirt. So foreign and distant, like Mars, an unbreathable atmosphere, thick and vacuous. Oklahoma is my home (egads!) and no one's home. It's where we are all from, and it's something we must face in a changing environment and economy or else we'll repeat the same mistakes again, but even worse. See?

8 comments:

Town Mouse said...

Very exciting! Congratulations and have a fun trip.

Donna said...

wonderful news to celebrate!!

Adrian Ayres Fisher said...

Congrats & what a rush.

Woody Guthrie. William Stafford.

greggo said...

Congrats, it must make you feel euphoric. Oklahomaaaaaaaa, where the wind comes sweepin down the plains! lol. I lived there 20 years, met may wife there and worked in the oil "patch" to get through college. It's a unique place for sure.

Benjamin Vogt said...

TM--Whenever I go on this trip, you'll know. TDM will become darker, more lyrical, more melancholic (if that's possible).
D--Buy me a drink, or even better, Godiva?
A--Stafford? OK?
G--Euphoric will be when one of my memoirs is taken. That is chocolate pudding bath night. TMI? OK is so complicated, it seems to me. Angie Debo said whoever can figure it out can figure out America. I'll try, but I'm coming at this from an outsider--I consider myself Minnesotan. Probably.

Susan in the Pink Hat said...

I get the same way reading transplanting instructions apparently. Go to the blog for the 411.

scottweberpdx said...

Congrats to both you and Sue...that was a nice little piece!

Indoor Fountains said...

Congratulations!!