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Posts Tagged ‘from the edge’

Autumnal Break

Posted in Culture, Seattle, tagged , , , , , on 07 Oct 2021| 1 Comment »

 

First, many thanks to those who showed interest in my new book, From the Edge (now available via Amazon). If you liked it, please  consider writing a review, as that helps drive its visibility.

Autumn figures strongly in From the Edge, as it is without doubt my favorite season (how’s that for a smooth segue?), so it should be no surprise that I’ve scheduled some time off for mid-October. We’re not going anywhere special—trips during the pandemic still carry too much anxiety—so we’re planning local activities and, as is our habit, we’re over-planning.

The kitchen white board now lists a few museums to visit and a couple of the bookstores we like to hit on stay-cations, but one category has grown out of all proportion to its fellows: Day Trips for Fall Color.

Seattle and the Puget Sound region are blessed in that we actually have four seasons. Much as we joke about us having only three—Summer (three weeks), Smoke (three weeks), and Rain (all the rest)—we really do have a distinct Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. And though we’re known as the Evergreen State, we have many areas of deciduous flora that make for stunning fall color vistas.

In combination, the region and the season have another advantage: variable elevation. Fall colors peak at different times at different elevations, so if (as has happened) our fall vacation arrives and the colors aren’t ready down hear near the Sound, we can drive up into the Cascades or the Olympics, where the colors get a two-week head start. Of course, if it is peak color time here at sea level, we have a great collection of parks and gardens from which to view them.

So, the Day Trips for Fall Color list on the white board includes the near (Kubota Garden, Washington Park Arboretum, Japanese Garden), the close and basically sea-level (the Mountain Loop Scenic Byway, the Whidbey Scenic Isle Way, the Chuckanut Drive Scenic Byway), and the not-so-close and higher elevation (Stevens Pass Greenway, Leavenworth, and if we’re feeling adventurous, the Chinook Pass). It’s an embarrassment of fall-color riches.

More than just driving around to view the colors, though, we like to stop and enter the autumnal world, for there are scents and sounds that only come at this time of year, in leafy places when the colors rage.

There’s the crispness, a bit of sass, that thrives in the morning and evening air. There’s the urgency of chipmunks, seeking oil-laden seeds on which to grow fat for the coming winter. Birds, their feathers adapted for camouflage amid deep summer shadows or against dark wintry limbs, dart about in deep contrast to the bright riot of translucent hues. And the scents! The smell of moisture has returned after summer’s sere mien has passed. The earth-wood aroma of fallen leaves and rising mushrooms are the umami of forest glades. Rivulets and streams chuckle, happy in rebirth, and all around are the tiny paper-rustles of birds searching beneath leaves, the pit-pat of squirrels covering their caches, and the tentative steps of blacktail deer mincing along narrow, leaf-strewn tracks.

Autumn, to me, is a reward. It’s a reward for surviving the busyness of spring and the chores of summer. It’s the year’s twilight before winter’s somnolence. Autumn is the cognac by the fire before I turn in for the day.

And I intend to enjoy it.

k

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Poems and Spreadsheets: From the Edge

Posted in Creativity, Writing, tagged , , , , on 30 Sep 2021| 7 Comments »

You knew this was coming (either that, or you haven’t been paying attention): From the Edge, a collection of poetry and vignettes, is now live on Amazon! W00t!

In putting this together, I encountered needs that never arose with my novels. Primary among them was the concept of a coherent theme, and right behind that, organization. These aspects were new to me, as with novels they’re just part of the package. Here, though, I was making a whole out of things that were never written as parts of a whole, so theme and organization suddenly took on new importance.

Sure, I could have just collected “poems I like” or “things I wrote in chronological order,” but I wanted the whole to have something to say, as a whole. This goal proved quite a challenge, though, since none of these pieces was written with the others in mind.

The first task, naturally, was to winnow the hundreds of pieces I’d written since the late ’90s into a manageable pile. Immediately I divided them into “Maybe” and “No” piles, a process I repeated, each time with a more exacting eye. Eventually, I had an “Almost Yes” pile of eighty or so pieces, all poetry and short poetic prose that would fit on one or two pages.

Next was to distill from these a theme. This was difficult, and literally kept me up at night. Eventually, though, it became clear that many dealt with a transition, and from that the concept of liminality became prominent. The title, I felt, should evoke that concept, and after trying out many of those, I settled on From the Edge, as in: from the edge of the century, the edge of the continent, the edge of patience, the edge of life, from the edge of a transition from one state to the next.

Then I needed to make a final cut and organize the pieces and here I fell back into true to geek-boy form. I put the pieces in a spreadsheet, analyzed their content, and determined a meaningful structure.

Yes, seriously.

It’s not as crazy as it sounds (or so I tell myself). Many of the pieces had a “seasonal” component, reflecting a certain time of year. Each one also carried an “emotional weight,” and I didn’t want the reader to be hit by (what I felt were) several hard-hitters in a row. Topic was a factor; just as I didn’t want three heavy poems in a row, neither did I want having three “nature” poems bunched together. Finally, the length had to be considered, both (again) to avoid clumps of longer works, but also (and more importantly) to ensure that the works requiring two pages could be read without breaking the flow by turning the page.

The result is a selection of nearly fifty pieces, from winter to winter, exploring the nature of transition and transformation.

Or, at least, that is the intent.

The last decision I made was to break with one of my guiding principles and only offer this in hardcopy. Presentation has a greater impact on poetry than on prose, and I spent many (many) iterations getting the font, format, and layout just right. If I were to adapt the book to a digital format, most of that would be lost, so, sorry-not-sorry, you won’t be able to read these in Arial or Times New Roman on your phone. Want to read them? You’ll have to go old-school.

So, From the Edge is alive and has been released into the wild. Go catch one (if you can)!

k

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