Drunken Boat Memoir and Fringe Interview

For those of you who have missed my shameless self-promotion, here is the scoop (and if you have been subjected to it, then just see my posting, "Are you F#@king Kidding Me?" for the appropriate response):

I have a memoir piece in the May edition of Drunken Boat at:
http://www.drunkenboat.com/

Go to the non-fiction section.

And finally, to read my interview conducted by the wonderful poet/writer Rachel Dacus, go to:

http://www.fringemagazine.org/lit/features/barbara-ellen-sorensen-an-uncomfortable-closeness-to-god/

Letter of Happiness

In the midst of tragedy, there are sometimes happy moments. I mean that sometimes I feel very happy. I don't mean ecstatically happy, or happy in an epiphanic way. I just mean a sense of simple, calm happiness. Such is the feeling I got when I recently received a lovely letter from memoirist Suzanne Paola. Apparently, my memoir piece of 18 pages has been accepted for publication in the online journal, Drunken Boat. The theme was "The Body Silent." I have pasted in Paola's letter for your happy reading! She is the editor for that particular issue..

Dear Barbara Ellen--

It is my pleasure to write a personal note of acceptance for your essay, "Ghost Flower & Wind," for the Body Silent issue of Drunken Boat, which I am guest-editing. I admired so much about this marvelous lyric essay: your brave examination of the body, your beautiful imagistic navigation through so many terrains. It is terrific work. Thank you for sharing it with us.

I have attached a copy of your essay with some revision suggestions done through the "Comments" feature on your PDF. I have never used this method of sending comments before--they are attached as "sticky notes" and I hope you can see them! This is, be assured, not a provisional acceptance, but I would appreciate it if you would consider my comments in the spirit they're offered--your essay is gorgeous. I want readers to see it at its best. Most of these are small matters of syntax and so forth, but one larger issue for me as a reader is the enormous amount of investment in images of Spain and Spanish-related places throughout the first two-thirds of the essay, which then disappears. In an essay this lyric, that moves through associative, lyric leaps, images tend to be what draw us forward through the work, as the beautifully sustained images of sand and birds do throughout. I wanted there to be some echo, possibly just an imagistic echo, of those powerful threads you weave earlier in the essay: the contented, largely limbless woman, the Sabanita statue. Even the silent story of the petroglyphs seemed as if they could reverberate more strongly against that ironic, infuriating testing through story. I have indicated some moments in the essay where I thought echoes of these key images could recur somehow, but they are not meant to be at all proscriptive--merely moments where it occurred to me you could let the earlier images back in to resonate. It is, above all, your work, so just something to think about.

Thank you for sending such strong work, and I look forward to reading more of your work in the future-- Best, Suzanne Paola 

Forgiveness and Cookies

I must now admit that I have gained too much weight since this time last year. I can no longer say that it is because I am off those horrid meds that suppressed my appetite. I could say that I have been "stress-eating," which would, in fact, be monumentally true. Since the death of my son, I have also not felt like hiking, snowshoeing, or cross-country skiing as much. The sky seems a little less blue; the neighborhood seems strange. Remember that song by Jim Morrison: "People are strange when you're a stranger, when you're a stranger people seem strange?" This is how I feel everyday when I wake up.

But this over-eating thing has got to stop. When I researched grief and eating on the internet, I could not find much. There are all kinds of topics that focus on the emotions. And, according to most of the "do's-and-don'ts," I am doing everything right.

Here are some of the tips that I paraphrased:
Keep to your routine
Express yourself through art, music, writing
Forgive yourself
Allow time to work its magic
Talk every feeling through
Seek counseling
Rest, get a massage, take a vacation, even if it is a mini-vacation.

Etc., etc. You get the picture. Nothing, however, about food!

Here's the problem: I am craving nothing but sweets! Coffee cakes, pies, cookies, brownies! The worst thing is, we live about a mile from a damn cherry pie company! They have everything and more that has to do with cherries and chocolate. Great!

One year, when I went to Haiti, we had along a lovely woman who had just lost her husband. At the time, I was still a young mother. My children were still at Sacred Heart of Jesus Elementary School. I remember being a little impatient with the woman because she was so slow about everything and seemed to be in a state of perpetual astonishment. How cruel I was back then!

Forgive, forgive, forgive myself I must. And my New Year's resolutions will be many: walk more and eat less and be kind. My Bryon was a big guy and he loved to eat. He had to constantly watch his weight. But, unlike me, he had such a big heart, such a big and loving heart. Those of you lucky enough to have met him, will remember how affable he was, how forgiving he was of everyone. If I could just be even a little like that, maybe, I think, this overeating thing would quit. Maybe that is just wishful thinking. Maybe I am just rambling. In the meantime, I will try to walk with my dog everyday and do sit-ups every morning, until I am back to the fine shape I was in before this nightmare began. I'll have to be like Bryon and overlook the strangeness of life in a universe that has a mother lode of grief to go around for everyone. If I ate a million varieties of cookies, I would still never remove the sting of that truth.

Gregory Corso and an Observation from Miss Emily D.

Years ago, I had the opportunity to attend Naropa University's Jack Kerouac Conference. This was really back in the day. A girlfriend and I volunteered to be "hostesses" at a private party and we wore little black dresses and walked around the party with trays of fancy hors d' oeuvres. There were so many people there. I remember William Burroughs sitting like a statue in a corner surrounded by adoring boys from some Boulder band. I remember talking to Ken Kesey in the kitchen, and that he helped us roll up slices of prosciutto and spear them with toothpicks. I remember shaking hands with the political activist Abbie Hoffman. I remember floating by Timothy Leary (he was not dead!) and, of course, Allen Ginsberg was there, as well. It's weird to think that all of those people are dead now. I have one favorite memory that I will share. As my girlfriend and I rounded a corner, headed to the kitchen to fill our trays again, we were blocked by an older gentleman who had his arm around a very pretty, much younger woman. The man turned out to be the poet Gregory Corso. Not many people remember him, but he wrote some good poems, like "Marriage," and "Bomb."  He was quite drunk when we saw him and he stopped dead in his tracks, looked us up and down and blurted out, "Look at this.. Jesus...Sorry girls, I can't fuck you tonight. My wife is here." Then he, too, floated away. 

Though we laughed, I felt ridiculous at that moment. We were like groupies! I felt ashamed. So, to prove to everyone, but most of all to myself, that I was a serious student of poetry, I signed up for a lecture series that Corso was giving. What an amazing person Corso was! He talked at length about how Emily Dickinson was a poet we should study and pay attention to. He didn't call her "Emily Dickinson," either. He called her, "Miss Emily D." It was as if he knew her personally, and he had just been conversing with her in the next room. Perhaps he had. Anyway, after my son's recent death, I have been searching for poems, and writing poems, as a way to "normalize" again. I think I may be fooling myself. But I did find the lovely poem below, "After Great Pain." I like to think that Corso and my son are together somewhere running around with Miss Emily D. My son Bryon had a similar "slant" sense of humor; he would have gotten a kick out of Corso. He also, like Corso, could be extremely insightful and perceptive about people, and I have found many poems he wrote, as well as really nice guitar lyrics. But the poem below resonates with me. There is a formalness to death that is inexplicable and distant. One is left only with shadows and dreams. And a "stiff Heart."

After great pain, a formal feeling comes –

The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –

The stiff Heart questions ‘was   it He, that bore,’

And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?

The Feet, mechanical, go round –

A Wooden way

Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –

Regardless grown,

A Quartz contentment, like a stone –

This is the Hour of Lead –

Remembered, if outlived,

As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –

First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –

Littles: Come Back

I Dream My Son

I dream my son walks

with me to the edge

of a teal-colored alpine lake.

I dream it sparks blue embers

and reflects only that I may

have imagined my son's

entire existence. I dream my own face

transfigured in blue-veined

icicles melding into cobalt

wave after wave. I dream

the epiphany of frost

hushed across cottonwood branches,

and willow in early spring,

the very day my son was born.

I dream of bells, cornflowers,

and the effervescence

of bodies being born to dream.

I dream of undulations

and how the Maya blue

sky remembers

my son’s journey even when

I have forgotten. I dream

I am beside a tarn that holds

one boulder tumbled

down from fields of many.

I dream the act of its falling

has clarity, as if in falling

it creates a line, a scar as blue

as an iris that I might recognize.

I dream my son dances on some far land,

his young body moving

from space to space, valley to valley.

He is always beside midnight

blue lakes where he beckons, radiant.

Writing Gigs/Gorgeous Autumn

After a year off as senior editor of Winds of Change, I finally landed a dream gig. I am now the editor at Cultural Survival Quarterly. This is a wonderful gig! Not only do I get to edit articles that relate positive information about North American indigenous people, I now edit articles about the world's indigenous peoples! In fact, just the other day I was given a poignant story about the indigenous people who live in the Samburu East district of Kenya. The captions to the photos had to be cut down to a tight 150 words while still retaining the voice of the Samburu speaker. He was trying the best he could to explain how elephants were actually beneficial to the region. Poor guy, he has to tell people that information! Yes, yes! It is not an intuitive fact for block-headed people! It is also not an intuitive thing that indigenous people are often offended by Columbus Day. For that holiday, I had to ghost-write a response for my executive director. It was a pretty simple thing to write.

Shortly after I took the Cultural Survival gig (which is a contractual, part-time job), I was offered a "longish" editing job at Tribal College Journal. I already contribute to them regularly and they pay well, but this is for a particular project and the publisher contacted me directly. It starts sometime in November.

In the meantime, my position with Cultural Survival allowed me to finally quit that online academic writing service gig that I HATED! Plus, with my grad classes, it was so much easier without those deadlines hanging over my head. That gig was especially painful because I was writing college essays and research papers for lazy grad students who had the audacity to snap at me if something wasn't to their liking and the support service really, truly sucked.

Writing gigs are funny things. You are asked (at least I am) to give them a quote, of which I am never really quite sure. The question is really: how much are you worth? This, no one can answer but you. The other day I met with an Indian woman-friend (Yakama/Colville) for lunch to discuss a book we are working on together. Anyway, my co-collaborator is a Dartmouth undergrad/Harvard grad writer. How impressive is that? Yet, even she was curious about how much she could ask for in terms of a writing salary. She had been approached by a company who asked her how much she charged for her services. She, too, was actually hesitant to ask for what she is most definitely worth! We must get over this! We really are worth more than we believe.

In addition to all my writing projects, I have had the most wonderful fall! I have been hiking every weekend in RMNP or in the Indian Peaks area. What a gorgeous showing we had this year of aspen leaves and fireweed and cottonwood! And, the final weekend in October, I am flying to Socorro, New Mexico to watch the sandhill cranes and snow geese in their annual migratory flight. We are also going to White Sands, NM. Then, come November, I'm off to SF to visit my sister and friends.