The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": Breathless and A New Interview

Friday, May 14, 2010

Breathless and A New Interview

I have been swamped these last two weeks or so, more swamped than I ever want to be again.

Ever.

We had some family illness, a good friend in a car accident, the end of the college semester with term papers and final exams, college entrance forms, prom preparations and a few other incredibly time-consuming situations that all added up to some of these behaviors:

1. Buying underwear at WalMart on my way home from the college so I could put off laundry one more day to grade papers.

2. Not one, not two, but three family sized packages of Lean Pockets and two giant bags of pre made salad as dinner two nights in a row.

3. I can now name all the items on the McDonald's value menu.

4. Ditto Walmart and sock buying.

5. Only using the computer to post grades and/or correspond with students.

I've been remiss in keeping a blog and in visiting other ones, but I'm back now, and hopefully with the end of the college semester, I will be stalking all my favorite blogs again.

Foreword magazine, which did a really nice review of Light Beneath Ferns, just posted this interview.

I've subscribed to them, and not just because they wrote a nice review of my book; they do a great job of reviewing a lot of independently published books.

I'll be back sooner than last time. Hope you enjoy the interview!

9 comments:

Jemi Fraser said...: Yikes! You're a busy lady! My week has been nutty as well - and the next 2 are going to be crazy. *sigh*

Hope the weekend brings you some relaxation! Enjoy :); Friday, 14 May, 2010
Glynis Peters said...: Welcome back. Life can be so overwhelming. My emotions are on a roller coaster at the moment. 3 extremely sick friends under 55yrs old. A sick father in the UK.
I get up every day and thank the stars I am healthy.

I love the buying of new underwear to put off the laundry. :)
So glad you got Flux back out of the drawer and found a publisher for it. It just proves that determination and confidence in our work, might pay off eventually.

Take care and remember to breath!; Saturday, 15 May, 2010
Anne Spollen said...: I don't want to be this busy again, Jemi. I really did feel like I couldn't breathe, and everywhere I looked, things were piling up. It's much better now, with grades going in on Monday and a long break at the college. Now I just have my other job and Christopher's graduation, prom, and leaving for a summer program at his college -- that all seems so tame now.

Sorry about your friend, Glynis, and your dad. You are lucky you are healthy - I need to think like that more -
Well, I think we all needed new underthings anyway...
And you do have to be determined. I'm not really confident; I'm always surprised when someone says they like what I've written. But I guess going back to revise work is a kind of confidence in your ability to make it all work.

Yes, breathing now, thanks!; Saturday, 15 May, 2010
Marcia said...: Welcome back, Anne. Don't you HATE times like that? It's crazy when everything happens at once. Hope your friend is okay and your family is well again. When my kids were young, I actually read this parenting tip: Own as many pairs of underwear and socks as you can afford and store for each family member so you don't have to do laundry so often. See, you were just following that. :); Saturday, 15 May, 2010
Christy Raedeke said...: What an amazing interview. I love the idea of a young mother hanging out in the graveyard to keep her kids safe!; Saturday, 15 May, 2010
Anne Spollen said...: That's right, Marcia -- a tried and true parenting tip. They seem to be the first to run out -- and pretty essential. And yes, when everything happens at once, the stress levels redline. It's all over now, though, at least for now.

Thanks, Christy! To think I never met any other young mothers there in the cemetery -those nuts were in the playgrounds.; Tuesday, 18 May, 2010
Anonymous said...: That sounds too busy. I hate going through times like this. All I want to do is catch up on sleep, and real food.; Tuesday, 18 May, 2010
Mary Witzl said...: Here's to easy food and brand new underwear! (You know all about turning it inside-out, right?)

One week here, we had kebabs three days in a row. Not the worst way in the world to save time!; Wednesday, 19 May, 2010
Anne Spollen said...: Yup, Medeia - food preceded with the "Mc" suffix gets really old really fast. And microwave pocket food is pretty terrible as well. Things are so much better now.

In college, at an orientation, my roommate for the weekend told me she regularly "inverted and powdered" her underwear to cut down on wash. I was horror-stricken and avoided her for the rest of the orientation. Oh, how we change, Mary, how we change...; Thursday, 20 May, 2010

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.

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