The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": End of Prom Season

Monday, June 14, 2010

New Seasons

The second prom is now over and done with and Christopher and I discovered a new species here in South Jersey. It's possible that this species inhabits more high schools, but since his first prom was just attended by us saying goodbye, it was a relatively calm process. No new species.

The second prom introduced us to the group goodbye, and the new species of person: a prom mom. The first picture here is not actually one of those moms, and yes, it's exaggerated, but the overall look, the general impression of that overly accessorized personality is pretty much representative of the prom mom. Maybe shows like Jerseylicious and The Jersey Shore have made this species more normalized so they came out, especially at an occasion like the group goodbye at the senior prom. Since this was not his high school, I didn't know anyone, but after a few minutes, I realized that I had seen them briefly on those idle, rich housewife shows.

They loved the limo: it was one of those superstretch ones that could house a small village. When it drove up and swallowed the kids, it seemed really apropos. I waved to Christopher. He was sitting there in tux number two with his eyes very, very wide. Of course, it could have been optical distress from the glare of the many sequins and sparkles on the dresses which looked something like this:

Tiaras are really, really big in these parts. So are gloves and boas. Wow.

Anyway, once the proms are over and I'm on line buying graduation decorations, it can mean only one thing: summer is nearly here! And that means plans. Tomorrow is my last day of work for six weeks. Now, a friend of mine pointed out that taking care of a house, keeping track of and feeding three kids and half a dozen animals and finishing two novels is not exactly "off" - but in my world, no lesson plans and no students is off. I usually ask my students to have three writing goals a semester, so here are my three summer goals:

1. to finish YA book and MG book (in other words, butt in chair time)

2. to have a yard people can walk through without checking themselves for ticks

3. it's possible that, after nearly four years of living here, I actually might buy curtains. Well, I HAVE bought curtains, ones that looked like they would fit. You really do have to measure first. So it's possible that we will have more than KMart blinds on our windows.

You can bet those prom moms had some pretty amazing curtains.

So what are your goals for the summer?

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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