The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": Kreativ Blogger Award

Thursday, January 29, 2009

Kreativ Blogger Award

Thanks so much to Marcia Hoehne for nominating me as a kreativ blogger -- I am to name seven things I love, then pass it on to seven people. I think I will have to search for seven folks to pass it on to, (I checked a few blogs, and most of the blogs I read already have been nominatated), so I may do that little by little. Here are seven things I love:

1. If you talk to me for more than fifteen seconds, what I love more than anything in the world are my kids. I was the one who said I was going back to work after the baby was born, checked daycare centers, and put in for just a six week leave from my teaching job. My first born in now working on getting his driving permit, and I am still home every day when he comes home from school. I can't imagine ever being without them for more than a few hours.

2. I think secondly, I would have to say I love writing. Because as much as I love my kids and my husband, when they drive me nuts, and they do (my boys decided last night that studying for midterms was a huge waste of their free time) I escape everything by writing. I almost go into a trance when I write, crazy as that might sound, but everything else in life drops away when I am working on a scene in a story. It's almost like a drug for me.

3. Of course, with writing goes books. I am happiest at the library or in a bookstore. I don't get that same sense of being in another place when I read as often as I do when I write, but it's similar. I have so many boxes of books in my basement I wonder if it's normal. Then that passes, and I order more books...

4. I really like to cook. I like the whole aspect of it: shopping for the ingredients, preparing it, serving it. I especially like to cook and feed my kids. I even like growing the food in the summer.

5. Speaking of cooking, I have to say the all time most perfect food on the earth is chocolate. I sometimes teach and tutor Spanish, and I have to thank those Aztecs for coming up with the refinement of the cocoa bean. There is chocolate stashed all over my house, and my daughter said to her brother the other day when he discovered a Cadbury bar, "Don't eat that; it's Mom's stress chocolate."

6. I really like having friends. Right now, it's so hard for me to maintain friendships. I work four days a week, and my husband works on weekends so unless folks want three kids (and by kids, I mean one flexible child and two frequently surly teenagers) tagging along to social events, it's difficult for me to do anything socially.
For some weird reason, the majority of my friends are childless so it's not like they want to go to a water park or do anything that would encompass kids. So I really value the little time I get to spend with friends.

7. I would have to say music here -- I don't watch too many movies and I can't stand tv, but I do have music all over the house. And I have to mention animals -- I can't imagine a house without music, books, animals and kids (or mess, laundry, and dishes either), so I am going to cheat a little bit here and include music and animals in the same number because I have to mention them both. I don't think there are actual rules to these things, and so far I haven't met any blog police, so I think it's okay to do a combo for my last pick.

Now the trick is to find seven folks who haven't been tagged -- (and why do I keep thinking of dwarves?)

5 comments:

Katie Anderson said...: congrats! And we are kindred souls. Especially the writing trance, the chocolate (I went to Oaxaca with a chocolate chef one time to study cooking moles etc..) speaking spanish and the ever present music in my house :-); Thursday, 29 January, 2009
Mary Witzl said...: Kids, reading and writing are my top three too, and chocolate and music are definitely in the running.

Our first born has yet to get her driving permit, but she swears this will happen this summer. How do you cope?; Friday, 30 January, 2009
Anne Spollen said...: The writing trance thing is weird -- I think that's why I wrote just poems when the kids were little - I really space out.

I would love to go to Mexico, but my husband is convinced we will all come down with a bacterial infection they won't be able to name in the U.S.

Oh, and Mary I'm thinking of becoming a lush to cope. If I didn't throw up every time I drank, it might work. He goes BOWLING on the weekend and they are driven by one of the parents, and I'm looking out the window from 9 pm on until he comes home. I can't imagine how this will play out.; Sunday, 01 February, 2009
Nora MacFarlane said...: "I can't imagine a house without music, books, animals and kids (or mess, laundry, and dishes either)"

I completely understand! I'm not much of a TV watcher either, and I'm married to a musician. Never a dull moment. Thanks for visiting my blog!; Sunday, 01 February, 2009
Carrie Harris said...: How nice it is to find a kindred soul. (Or two... I'll have to visit Katie's blog too.)

I adore my kids, but sometimes I think that if I didn't have writing, I would go insane.; Monday, 02 February, 2009

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Books

Light Beneath Ferns

"I have this strange sense that my silence is preparing me for something I can't name . ."

Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants is for them to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jawbone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

Only by forgetting everything she knows can Elizah understand the truth about Nathaniel—and discover an unimaginable secret.

Teen made trailer for Light Beneath Ferns.

Order Light Beneath Ferns here.

Foreword Magazine's Review of Light Beneath Ferns

Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

***