THIS IS A PLACEHOLDER. I post it in the hope that it will turn up on searches for “Sewanee Writers’ Conference” acceptance/rejection/ notification. The news is in.

I have been waitlisted for the 2012 Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Further notification will come by May 25.

This is about what I expected, except for the short time to a further decision.

Keep on keepin’ on.

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The sisters [Sylvia and Bobbie] walked to Fulton Street, urging along the children, who stamped on piles of brown sycamore leaves. Climbing the stairs to the elevated train, Bobbie was already tired…. They had to change trains, and as the second one approached, Sylvia said, “Does Bradley know what to do in case we’re separated?”

“Why should we get separated?” said Bobbie.

“It can always happen,” Sylvia said.

— Alice Mattison, b. 1930s, American fiction writer
“In Case We’re Separated,” in In Case We’re Separated: Connected Stories

It’s National Short Story Month again. This is my second year of awareness and participation. According to Dan Wickett of the Emerging Writers Network, who appears to have originated it, this is the sixth year for it.

I was an enthusiastic participant last year. I read a short story every day, posted a quotation from it (most days) on my Facebook and Twitter streams, and wrote eight pieces for this space about the works or the authors I encountered. I am committing to the process again — 31 stories, 31 authors, 6 of the selections (about 20%) stories I have read before.

I think of myself as a novelist, more suited to the long form than the short. But it is in short fiction that I hone my craft. The conferences and other opportunities I apply to usually allow no more than 6000 words for a work sample. I have found that novel excerpts, especially if they are not the opening 20 pages or so, do not do well in workshop. So every year I work up another piece of short fiction, often using the characters who populate the novel I have been writing since 2002. The result is that I appear to be on my way to that recently popular hybrid genre, the collection of linked stories.

The story I read today, “In Case We’re Separated,” comes from such a collection. In “A Note to the Reader,” which comes after the last of the thirteen stories, Mattison explains

The book’s thirteen stories imitate in prose the thirteen stanza of a double sestina, using repreated topics or tropes  . . . .Inthe changing order prescribed by the sestina pattern, each story includes a glass of water, a sharp point, a cord, a mouth, an exchange, and a map that may be wrong.

That description sparked my interest, and I acquired the book when I was at the Vermont Studio Center in November of 2010. I’ve moved it from pile to pile since then, always drawn to the cover illustration, two pre-teen girls who have a 1950s look. They are wearing double breasted dress coats over cotton dresses, and are admiring their low-heeled patent leather Mary Janes worn with white anklets. They remind me of me and my sister.

And the passage that contains the title phrase reminds me of Lynn. When she was very little, I taught her that if we got separated in a store or in a crowd, she should go to a police officer (someone in a uniform with a badge on his hat) or a cashier (Lynn called them “payer girls”) or a woman with children and say that she was lost. When she was 14, I took her and her friend Kim to New York City for a week. They didn’t have their own phones yet. I made sure they knew the name of the hotel where we were staying, and I gave them the advice that Bobbie and Sylvia give their children for what to do if they get separated on the subway: “If you’re on the train, get off at the next stop and wait. If you’re on the platform, just wait where you are and we’ll come back for you.”

I did not repeat those instructions when she was 23 and we went to New York City together again, in November of 2008. And that is the one time we got separated. She got off the train, but a woman with a bulky stroller was in front of me, and the doors closed nearly on her as she exited, leaving me on the train. watching Lynn’s worried face recede as it pulled out. She had her phone with her, but I was carrying her wallet, and I was not at all sure she knew the name of the hotel where we were staying. She forgot her training, went up to the surface, and called home. “I lost Mommy,” she told her father.

I actually read two stories today. “In Case We’re Separated” is short, so I read the next one, “Not Yet, Not Yet,” as well. It was fun to look for the elements — the glass of water, the sharp point, the cord, the mouth, the exchange, and the map that may be wrong — and to see how they are rearranged. This, too, is about two sisters, grand-neices of Sylvia fom the first story. Of these characters, one has brought her baby to visit her sister, the one “with all her troubles.” Like the girls on the cover, I see my sister in the new mother and myself in the other, at least the way we were for a while.

(Logo for National Short Story Month 2012 is by Stephen Seighman.)

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Two weeks ago, when a friend twittered in all caps, WHAT DO YOU MEAN NO AWARD?, I was pretty sure I knew what she was talking about. I knew that the Pulitzer Prizes for 2012 were being announced that day, and I figured she was expressing something about the award in Fiction, since she is a fiction writer. But I googled to verify the information, and discovered that, indeed, No Award was made in fiction this year. But I also discovered something else, Pulitzer news that made me so happy you’d think I’d won something myself.

Sara Ganim, of the Harrisburg Patriot-News, has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting, for her work on The Events in State College, Pennsylvania, involving Jerry Sandusky and allegations of his sexual abuse of boys, both during and after his tenure as an assistant football coach at The Pennsylvania State University. (For convenience, these matters are referred to as the “Sandusky Investigation.”)

Ms. Ganim, at 24, is the second youngest person ever to be awarded a Pulitzer. She broke the Sandusky story only a few months after she started working at the Harrisburg newspaper. A native of Florida, she graduated from Penn State in 2008 and went to work at the Centre Daily Times, the local paper that serves the community the comprises the university and the town of State College, Pa. She is a crime reporter, not a sportswriter, and in covering this story she had to develop leads and rely on contacts in a milieu that sought to protect beloved figures, primarily the legendary Penn State football coach, Joe Paterno, who died a few months after the story gained national attention and became known as “the Penn State sex abuse scandal,” even though it involved no players.

Jerry Sandusky is accused of crimes against children that many people find unspeakable. In December I wrote about how so often we don’t even use the “ferocious words” that actually name the acts. I wrote a story in which a neighborhood has to come to grips with the fact that a popular family is being torn apart by the discovery that the father has been abusing his daughters. It was the manuscript I sent as my application piece to Bread Loaf in 2009, and I have for these three years harbored a suspicion that it was the subject matter that put a first reader off and led to my intial rejection. I have returned to that manuscript in recent weeks, to discover that even I don’t use any ferocious words. I defend my word choices by noting that all of the references to the acts are in dialogue, and I am being faithful to the way people talk.

Sara Ganim’s work in reporting this story has been tough, relentless, fierce. She was determined to keep the focus on the [alleged] victims, the brave young men who came forward with their stories of how they had been befriended and then betrayed by someone whom they trusted. Her motto for this work has been “Move it Forward,” ask questions and cover aspects of the story that the national media would be unlikely to address, even after the story captured the attention of readers, child-protection activists, and sports fans far from central Pennsylvania.

Sara Ganim continues to work this story. The trial is set for June, and there are few days that go by without some piece that notes efforts by the defense to enforce burdensome subpoenas that probe the personal lives of the accusers in areas that would seem to have little to do with the cases, or ask for more and more indulgences from the court so that the accused can enjoy a more or less “normal” life. It is a measure of her commitment to this story that her blog hasn’t been updated since September and her website doesn’t mention that she has won a Pulitzer. A Pulitzer, for cryin’ out loud!

Sara Ganim serves as an inspiration to me. This is the last day of April. I’ve moved out of my usual winter blahs, complicated this year by a stubborn virus that would not quit me. I’ve picked up some projects that I let languish. This is Bite Your Nails and Wait for the News season. I’ve applied to both the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Bread Loaf. What to do until my Gallivants are set? This afternoon I devised Plan A, in which I get accepted by both conferences, Plan B, in which Sewanee takes a pass but Bread Loaf welcomes me back, and Plan C, in which both conferences say no but I go to Vermont anyway (I already have a deposit on an off-campus house) and look at the leaves and the light.

I’ll be working, working, on the troubled neighborhood story, reading several collections of linked stories, studying form, practicing craft, moving it forward.

Thank you for reading, so much, so often.

(To see Sara Ganim’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work, go to the Jerry Sandusky Invesitgation pages at the Harrisburg Patriot-News.)

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WHAT DO YOU MEAN NO AWARD FOR FICTION?

The question was Tweeted by a fiction writer of my acquaintance. I saw it after being offline for several hours while I addressed the task of revision on a particular manuscript.

“Somebody has some splainin to do!” I tweeted back. ”What does it mean that I intuited what this was about without having heard or read the news today, oh boy?” Congratulating myself on squeezing in two pop culture references (Ricky Ricardo and the Beatles) into a single 140-character message, I Googled for the story.

I knew that the Pulitzer Prizes were being announced today, so that gave me a clue about what had driven my friend to an all-caps exclamation that was less a question than an indication of shock unto outrage. She wasn’t expressing disappointment for herself — her first book came out in 2009 and won a number of prizes, although not the Pulitzer — but a bafflement that spread across my Twitter and Facebook news feeds (many of my friends are fiction writers). The Pulitzer Prize Board determined that all three finalists, Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, Swamplandia! by Karen Russell, and The Pale King, by the late David Foster Wallace, fell “below the standard of excellence fixed by the Pulitzer Prize Board.”

Train Dreams, one outraged commenter said, is a novella, at 128 pages. That commenter went on to characterize Swamplandia! as a gussied-up coming-of-age story with a tricksy title, and The Pale King as an effort by “the greatest novelist in the past thirty years” that should have won by default.

I can’t say anything about those assessments, because I have read only Train Dreams. The Russell title did kind of put me off, and undertaking David Foster Wallace frightens me, so vaunted is his reputation.

Winning a Pulitzer is a goal I announced when I was sixteen, in a letter to MacKinlay Kantor, who had won it for Andersonville in 1956. Mr. Kantor wrote back to me, encouraging me. I still have his letter.

The news about the Pulitzers broke on a day when I had actually followed Ron Carlson’s advice to “stay in the chair” and not be always visiting your friends Mr. Coffee and Mr. Refrigerator and Mr. Email. I took a deep breath and began the messy and often confusing work of revision on a story that, my notes remind me, began with a remark by a colleague about this time in 1992. In twenty years the idea had gone from a page or so of musing in my journal to an anecdote and then increasingly longer narratives until it became the piece I sent to Bread Loaf in 2009. And we know what happened in 2009. (If you are not a longtime reader of this space, you should also read the followup.) I did a half-hearted revision of it in 2010, before I spent the month at the Vermont Studio Center really learning revision.

The subject matter of this story still interests me, so I spent today with several copies of it spread about, colored highlighters to mark it, strategies for changing the voice, the time frame, the point of view, the outcome even. I barely raised my head for three hours. For someone who still hasn’t forgotten the rhythm of the school day, where life happens in forty-two minute segments, that’s some serious focus.

When I finally did visit my friend Mr. Facebook, only minutes after my friend’s initial all-caps outburst, my news feed and my Twitter feed were full of comments and questions about the No Award in Fiction brouhaha. I keep the device I surf the ‘net on when I am at my studio at a standup table in the corner of the room, where the wireless signal is best. I read for a while, and then, well, then, I decided to get back in the chair.

The Pulitzer for No Award in Fiction in 2012 has outraged a lot of people, as if they themselves had been snubbed. It’s seen as a comment on the quality of contemporary fiction, a slap in the face to the authors and the books that did become finalists, a denigration of all of us who scribble scribble in the hope of recognition. But for reasons I can’t explain, I went back to work, my resolve to keep on keepin’ on strengthened rather than diminished.

There I was, surrounded by the detritus of more than twenty years of telling people I am a fiction writer, the folders of drafts, the notes from workshops, the posters and talismans I keep around for encouragement (“That thing you’re writing is awesome!”). I took an inventory of every single thing I have at some stage of development, and I made my own poster.

The photo is a little fuzzy, but what it shows is this: on the left, Post-it flags with the title of every piece of short fiction that I have in some advanced stage of development, six stories altogether. In the middle, my longer fiction, including the historical novel that got me into this life to begin with but that has been stalled for nearly ten years — five ideas. On the right, three pieces of narrative nonfiction.

And at the bottom? A flag with the title of the brief memoir that won me public recognition and publication last fall.

Time to start moving those other flags down!

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It’s one of those random memories that sticks in my mind despite its mundane nature. It’s 1973 or 1974.  I can’t be more specific because I know that it occurred during My Great Depression, that 30 month period between the fall of 1972 and the spring of 1975 when I lived through what I can now recognize as a period of clinical depression. I wasn’t keeping a journal then, and the months run together, differentiated only by knowing that it was around Christmas when one thing with one person happened, summer in Vermont when something else with someone else took place. This memory comes from around this time, the turning of winter into spring.

In the memory I am sitting on the left side of the auditorium of the school where I taught, about two-thirds of the way down. I am sitting with my homeroom students at an assembly. The house is dark, and the stage illuminates a singer/songwriter/poet, a man with a guitar who sits on a stool to perform. I can see him so clearly that I know he looks like actor Donal Logue. He’s reciting a poem, the theme or title of which is “Opening My Christmas Cards in a Phone Booth in July.” As I recall the narrative, the Christmas cards were addressed to him jointly with his wife, who had left him not long before the holiday greetings started to arrive. Most would have come from people, most significantly other couples, who would not know of the change in circumstances. He has been unable to muster the emotional energy to open them and read them for seven months, but he’s done it now and he is calling the absent wife to tell her some of the news about friends that she perhaps will want to know. Or maybe he’s calling the senders, to thank them for remembering him. That part of the memory is fuzzy.

I bring up this memory now because downstairs, in my kitchen, is a stack of unopened birthday cards. On my hard drive here in my study, in my email reader, are several unopened items that I know from the subject lines are birthday greetings, most of them from people on a discussion list that I no longer read or contribute to, but to which I still belong, so that my birthday gets noted by the list administrator. And there are more than 100 unacknowledged (except in a general way) birthday greetings from Facebook friends that rolled in last week, most of them on Friday, March 9, my actual birthday.

I can’t say precisely why I haven’t opened the cards. One of them is from an old friend, someone I’ve known for fifty years, whose birthday in January I did not exactly ignore, but nevertheless did not acknowledge until one month later. (And I take some pride in saying that it was with an actual handwritten note and not a cheesy “Sorry I missed your birthday” commercial excuse card.) Another is from a woman whose frail health has kept her from attending our Thursday morning women’s spiritual study group for more than a year. She was on my list of people to write to during the Month of Letters project that I undertook in February, but her slot was after the date, February 8, I think, beyond which the illness unto despair that I was mired in caused me to drop my efforts in that.

I have made reference in recent posts (the not-very-many recent posts here for 2012) to this “siege,” to “the blahs beginning to lift.” That was hopeful, wishful thinking. The Monster Mutating Virus that took hold just before the new year brought with it bacterial infections and the compromises in mood and cognitive function that the medications intended to treat symptoms bring on. Ten days before I was to leave for AWP 2012 in Chicago, I didn’t think I could do it. By February 29, though, I did do it, spent a stimulating but intellectually exhausting four days going to readings and panels, and arrived home not reinfected (there were 10,000 people there, and many of my friends now report that they are sick), but ready to reboot 2012.

The weather has changed, the light has changed. I have lesson plans set for myself for the coming week, including playing with that remembered narrative, reimagining it with a character who, like me, hasn’t opened her birthday cards yet. And I promise to do that before July.

Thank you for reading, so much, so often.

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The . . . usual functions of [a journal are] to chart a life, to pique a memory, to confirm inner life and perhaps to dispel the doubt that one exists at all.
— Frances McCullough, b. 1939
American editor
from the Introduction to The Journals of Sylvia Plath

Today is the thirteenth anniversary the earliest incarnation of what would become Markings — Days of Her Life. I was prompt to that party, in the first wave of “escribitionists” who did not think to call themselves “bloggers.” In fact, The Silken Tent went live four months before the mailing list discussion that suggested the term as an alternative to “journaller.” Some in that first wave are still online, some have found other avenues of expression. The discussion lists survives, although many of the original voices have fallen silent. I have formed genuine friendships with a number of people I met through the OLJ community. I’ve even met some of them “in real life,” as they say, and spent extended time with them.

I was in my first year out of the classroom, my first year out of the career that had identified me for almost thirty years, that week in February of 1999 when I was wandering the World Wide Web in search of something to do with my creative energy, and the isolation I was beginning to feel. Establishing myself as a “blogger,” a term I at first resisted but now embrace, was the best thing I ever did for my writing.

In these thirteen years I have amassed around 700 essays. That works out to about one a week. There have been periods when I’ve posted something every day, and periods when I have gone weeks without something new. I’m in something of a fallow period now, at least online, as I deal with the winter blahs, a Monster Mutating Virus that took hold in mid-January and let go only today, and the preparation of my annual application to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

In my first post thirteen years ago I quoted a very young Sylvia Plath on her reasons for keeping a diary. She said she wanted to “keep and hold the rapture” of being seventeen. In recent weeks I have walked the landscapes that I inhabited when I was seventeen, trying to access the energy that I felt then. I have nothing written from those days, although the walks do pique my memories, and when I get home I write them down.

This is coincidentally the 101st anniversary of my mother’s birth. As I wrote in the eulogy I gave for her in 1993, “Rose Dwyer was born on February 13, 1911. It was a Monday, and every post office in America was closed that day because a mail carrier’s daughter had been born (so her father told her), and only incidentally because Lincoln’s Birthday, a federal holiday, had fallen the day before. She died November 11, 1993, Veterans’ Day. Once again, every post office in America was closed.” And here we are, Lincoln’s Birthday a Sunday again, but the post offices were not closed today, because Presidents’ Day has subsumed it. At least they still observe her death date.

The blahs are beginning to lift. I’ve kept up with reading a poem a day, a writing a letter, too, although there is a slight backlog on mailing. This evening I noticed that it was still almost light at 6:00. I may not be a genius of a writer, as Sylvia Plath saw herself, but I have in me the capacity to keep on keepin’ on. I am doing the best work of my life, the work that will make my name.

Thank you for reading, so much, so often.

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Never think, because you cannot easily write a letter, that it is better not to write at all. The most awkward note that can be imagined is better than none.
— Emily Price Post, 1872-1960
American author and arbiter of etiquette

Fresh from my success in reading and posting a line or two from a new poem every day, I take up another challenge: A Month of Letters.

This is not my idea, although I had one like it. In 1999, six months into this online presence, and while I was still trying to shape my post-classroom life, I announced my Hundred Letters project. I was going to write a hundred letters over the course of a year, two per week. They would be “surprise” letters, letters that the recipient had no reason to expect. It was an extension of a project I had once done with eleventh graders, assigning them the task of writing ten letters of positive focus to people who had taught them a skill or given them some good advice, people whom they found inspiring, a former teacher who had meant something to them. The letters didn’t have to be sent, just written, and if they were intensely personal, the contents did not have to be divulged. It was an easy grade, and proved popular.

I did write some letters, both when I wrote along with my students and when I reframed the project as a year-long effort. But certainly never a hundred. I do write a lot of letters, although most of them are by email. I used to write a holiday letter, but for reasons that I can’t quite pinpoint, I haven’t done it since 2006. I keep lists of people I’d like to write to, people I don’t communicate with regularly. I often recopy the list without actually writing the letters.

Mary Robinette Kowal’s challenge to write a paper letter and send it through the mail on every postal day in February has come to my attention at the best possible time. I’m in a period of some emotional turmoil, feeling isolated and out of touch with people I truly care about.  So I’ve drawn up a list, announced my participation on Facebook (inviting postal addresses from online friends who might want a letter), and made some guidelines for myself, such as a decision to use materials — stationery or pretty art cards — that I already have in sbundant supply.

And I am off to a good start. At left is a book that I got at Bread Loaf last August, Beautiful Unbroken, by Mary Jane Nealon. It is a memoir of her career as a nurse, and it won the Bakeless Prize for nonfiction. When I heard her read, I immediately thought of Kim, one of my daughter’s closest friends. Like Nealon, Kim carries the death of a beloved sibling into her life and her work. And she works in pediatric oncology, an area of practice that can be especially draining of one’s emotions and challenging of one’s skills. The letter says those things, but also mentions something that Kim did last week, mentioned on her Facebook stream, that I found especially tender.

It is my custom with a gift book to sign inside at a passage that I think captures the essence of the recipient, or reflects the reason I chose this book for them. Near the end of the book, Nealon mentions the death of her father and likens her grief to a loaf of bread. That is also an experience Kim already has borne though she is only 26. The best part? I signed it “Marm,” the name Lynn calls me, the name some of her friends use as well. Writing the letter reminded me of the level of intimacy, the feeliong of family, that I have had with so many of the beautiful young people I have come to know because of Lynn.

I’ve already gotten a great deal of reward from this project, and the first letter hasn’t even been delivered yet. I can’t wait to see what comes next.

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I see myself in the mornings that stretch ahead into this new year, coming down the steps, walking into the kitchen, fixing my coffee and then, while my first cup brews, walking into the library, running my hands along the spines [of my poetry volumes], and choosing one book to open at random. Judging from the size of my collection, I will be able to do this every day for many years to come without reading the same poem twice.
— Margaret DeAngelis, b. 1947
American writer
from “A Poem a Day,” blog post dated January 11, 2012

I started 2012 as I do every year, on the Feast of Stephen, December 26, the “week between” Christmas Day and the official start of the new calendar year. I woke that morning from a dream in which I am with two young friends, the three of us wandering in a museum. We get separated, I become anxious, I try to call the young man, 3+Send, and when the call goes to voicemail, it is a stranger’s voice I hear. I look at the phone and understand that it is not mine. I have called someone else’s 3+Send. “Change. It’s about change,” I write in my journal.

I wrote for three pages that morning, a good start on the 2.73 pages I should write every day to achieve 1000 pages in a year. Measurable goals like that are attractive to me. I was going to write “important,” but “attractive” is a better word, because although I set the goals and make a plan to achieve them, I fall short of so many of them. During this January I have achieved maybe 50% of what I planned, in terms of reading, writing, and redding out my Amazing Clutter. Other goals had to be abandoned or heavily modified.

I really can’t blame my scatteredness entirely. For two solid weeks now I have been hosting a Monster Cold, a mutating syndrome that has left me tired, depressed, anxious, and angry. I tried very hard to control the anger, because the last time I felt this bad, some time in the early 90s, I got so frustrated I kicked a kitchen cabinet and broke a toe.

Things are looking up a bit. I went out today, only the third day in this siege that I have left the house. My gallivanting was mostly to escape the noise of rotted deck demolition and roofing repair being done on the house next door (fortunately on a very small area of roof). I went to a library I haven’t used in a long time, got two books for some light research on the day-to-day life of a Catholic priest (for a short story I am writing), breathed some fresh air, and started to feel a little like myself again.

So I didn’t get that story to a complete first draft as planned, didn’t lose 10 pounds, didn’t make my kitchen look like the one in The Good Wife (there is nothing on that polished granite, NOTHING!) But I did succeed at something: I read 31 poems, one a day. I also Tweeted and Facebooked my selection. And I kept a list on this site. (See Today’s Poem — January 2012)

I was going to make comments on some of the individual poems, the insights I’ve gained about myself and my own writing, the memories I accessed when handling a volume acquired at a reading in, say, 1994, and not looked at again until now. I’ve made some modifications to my protocol with a decision to read 366 different poets as well as 366 different poems, a decision that will have me reading four “extra” poems to make up for using two poets more than once early on. But that’s going to have to wait. For now, I say to my wonderful readers, hello again. It’s good to be back.

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It began on the Feast of Stephen, December 26. In a four-minute audio essay on NPR entitled “A Poem a Day: Portable, Peaceful and Perfect,” fiction writer Alan Heathcock recalled a time of some personal turmoil when, after a resetless night, he plucked a volume of poetry off a shelf, and opened it at random. It happened to be a book by Mary Oliver, and the poem he read was “Egrets.” The experience bolstered him against the difficult day ahead, he said. Since then, he has endeavored to read a poem a day. Because he picks the poems at random, there have been mornings when he laughed, when he walked around all day with a playful image, and others that were more reflective, evocative of loss and pain rather than the beauties of nature.

I met Alan Heathcock last summer at Bread Loaf. He was a fellow, a writer with at least one book published who serves as something of an assistant in a workshop. I had never heard of him. That’s typical of my experience with the fellows. They are new to me unless they’ve been a contributor before, or someone I know who knows the fellow promotes his work.

He was teaching a craft class that I signed up for. I cannot honestly remember what the subject was that drew me without getting out my notebook. As I recall, it had something to do with point of view and scene, and involved a photograph of a lynching. But I can say with certainty that Alan Heathcock’s energy and generosity as a teacher just lifted me, bolstered me for the year of work ahead. Craft classes at Bread Loaf can be hit or miss. This was definitely a hit.

The first book I read when I got back from Bread Loaf was his story collection, Volt. One reviewer called it “blistering . . . stark realism leavened by a lyric energy.” And that it certainly was. I copied out a number of intriguing lines, used one of them as the epigraph for my Festivus complaint.

I read Alan’s NPR essay and thought it compelling. Other people did too, and the link made the rounds of our Facebook updates and Twitter streams and blogs. Within a few days there was a hashtag on Twitter: #todayspoem, and I found myself checking what others were reading, often being drawn in by the briefest of excerpts. (The hashtag consumes 10 of the 140 Twitter characters. That leaves little left for title, author, and excerpt.)

I go through periods where I actually do read a poem every day. Why not be more intentional about it, the way I was about short stories last May? And keep a list.

I began with a book that was in the “currently reading” stack near my kitchen table, where I start each day. It happened to be Satan Says, by Sharon Olds, one of ten volumes of her work that I own. I had begun reading her fairly intentionally in November, searching for artistic expressions of certain difficult subjects such as family violence, sexual assault, and other kinds of abuse. Her work is difficult, and not likely to leave the reader feeling peaceful. The poems I read across the first four days of January were ones I’ve marked with Post-It flags, the ones I return to again and again.

On the fifth day, I opened Nicky Beer’s The Diminishing House. I have to admit, this was unintentional. I’d bought it at Bread Loaf last August, after hearing her read. It was in the bag of books I’d carried from the car to my study, where it had rested, unopened, all these months. And the only reason I opened it on January 5 was to get a book intended as a gift for a friend I would be seeing a few days later. I read from Nicky Beer that day and the next, remembering why I had been drawn to her in the first place.

The next day I picked up a volume of the New England Review, the literary magazine published by Middlebury College, that I had also brought back from Bread Loaf. I read “Macbeth,” a poem by Rachel Hadas, whose work I find compelling, and “Prelude,” by Shane Omar, a poet I had never heard of.

That’s when I made the decision to be more random in my choices. At left you see the poetry shelves in my house, as they looked in 2007, on a day when, seeking to avoid a writing task which was giving me anxiety, I decided to organize all the poetry books I had. Yesterday I pulled out the work of R. S. Thomas, a book I’d bought for a seminar a few years ago and not looked at since. This morning it happened to be Tangled Vines, an anthology of poems about the relationships between mothers and daughters.

I see myself in the mornings that stretch ahead into this new year, coming down the steps, walking into the kitchen, fixing my coffee and then, while my first cup brews, walking into the library, running my hands along the spines, and choosing one book to open at random. Judging from the size of my collection, I will be able to do this every day for many years to come without reading the same poem twice.

I tweet my daily selection, marked #todayspoem. I go by “silkentent” on Twitter, should you want to follow me there. I also post to my Facebook news feed, even though I recently read that the posting of poetry is one of the top annoying things people do there. And I’ve started keeping a list here, under “Always Books in Your Room, Margaret.” That line is from a poem by Irish poet Pat Boran, in a volume that is likely near the right of the top shelf. Chances are I’ll be looking at that one soon, if only to be able to quote a line with my name in it.

And, once again, thank you for reading, so much, so often.

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For the fifth year in a row, my essay about the True Meaning of Christmas as revealed in the 1953 Christmas Eve episode of Dragnet. No more need be said.

Dragnet was a favorite in our house when I was growing up. When the narrator announced solemnly that “names have been changed to protect the innocent” I wondered why the innocent needed protection. And I recall that the sweaty hand that pounded “Mark VII” into the stone was a signal that bedtime had arrived. I was six years old in December of 1953, and I can’t say that I saw this episode of Dragnet the first time it was shown. It became a perennial favorite of the show’s viewers and of Jack Webb himself, so it’s likely I saw it more than once in the years that followed.

I also can’t say when I became emotionally and sentimentally attached to “The Big Little Jesus,” the episode’s official title. But when I started putting my childhood Christmas back together when Lynn was a baby, seeing this show was something that I longed for. Our public television station presented it once, and I taped it. A few years later I found a source for a commercially-recorded copy, and bought that. Since the early 90s, watching this 25-minute lesson in the True Meaning of Christmas on the night we decorate our tree has become a staple of our Christmas preparation.

Several years ago when I was doing a monthly column about faith in literature for my church newsletter I wrote about this program for the December issue. When my pastor read it he called me and reminded me that the newsletter goes to hundreds of people beyond our congregation. “Do you realize how many pastors are going to cut this out and preach it verbatim?” he asked me.

I don’t know the answer to that. I do know that every time I see the episode (indeed, every time I have to think about it long enough to write a piece like this), I get teary by the end. I offer you, then, a short meditation on the True Meaning of Christmas.

Look on any newstand beginning as early as Halloween and you’ll see them — glossy magazine covers offering 657 ideas for a Merry Christmas, timetables for producing an efficient holiday dinner, advertisements for all manner of things sure to please everyone on your list, and articles detailing how to care for poinsettias, have the most dazzling tree, cope with holiday stress, and, oh yes, how not to forget The True Meaning of Christmas, whatever that might be.

Most of us are children of the television age, and we’ve grown up with media images of Christmas. In addition to specials such as Charlie Brown’s Christmas and the original animated story of the Grinch, every popular television series has its Christmas episode. Most of them can be characterized as either overly sentimental, disappointingly secular, or grotesquely slapstick. There are some, however, that strike just the right chord, and they endure. My personal favorite is an episode of Dragnet, first shown in 1953.

The story opens with the familiar figures of Sgt. Joe Friday and his partner Frank Smith who are working burglary the afternoon of Christmas Eve. During a discussion of how to choose gifts for women, they receive a call from a local priest. The statue of the Child Jesus has disappeared from the parish Nativity scene. The priest assumes it’s been stolen. His parishioners are simple people, most of them Spanish-speaking immigrants, and this is the only Baby Jesus they know. He wonders if the police can do anything to help recover the statue.

The detectives visit the church and determine that the statue is of no real monetary value. They seem annoyed that the priest cannot pinpoint the time the statue disappeared, as the church is never locked.
“You leave the church open so that any thief might come in?” asks Friday.

“Particularly thieves, Sergeant,” answers Father Rojas.

Friday tells him he is doubtful that they will be able to do anything, but they’ll try. There follows then the typical Dragnet search for “just the facts.”

Friday and Smith interview the altar boys who served Mass that morning and the owner of a religious articles store who is indignant at the suggestion that he would buy for resale any used statue, particularly one that might be stolen. “People don’t have religious articles so they can sell them. They have ‘em so they can have ‘em,” he tells the officers. Finally, they take in for questioning a sad, down-and-out man who was seen leaving Mass with a package. They grill him about his whereabouts, his past, his intentions. It turns out that the package contained the man’s extra pants, which he was taking to a tailor to be repaired in preparation for the Christmas program at the seedy boarding house where he lives.

The officers return to the church and tell Father Rojas that they have been unable to recover the statue and that Christmas services will have to begin without it.

A noise is heard at the back of the church, and the men watch as a small boy pulling a wagon makes his way down the center aisle. When he gets to the front, they see that the wagon contains the statue of the Child Jesus.

“It’s Paco Mendoza, a boy from the parish,” Father Rojas tells the detectives. In Spanish, the priest asks the boy where he found the statue. He replies that he didn’t find it, he took it. For years he prayed for a wagon, and this year he promised that if he got a wagon, he would give Jesus the first ride. He has fulfilled his mission, and is now returning the statue. The priest tells the officers that Paco has asked if the devil will come and take him to hell because he took the statue.

“That’s your department, Father,” answers Friday.

Father Rojas drops down beside the boy. “No el Diablo. Jesús ama Paco mucho.” He helps Paco replace the statue, and the men watch as the little boy goes away up the aisle, pulling his wagon.

Officer Smith asks the priest how the child obtained his wagon so early in the day. Don’t the children wait for Santa Claus?

The priest explains that the wagon is not from Santa Claus. The firefighters at the neighborhood station collect old toys, fix them up, and give them to new children. “Paco’s family . . . they’re poor.”

“Are they, Father?” asks the hard boiled, cynical Friday.

If the True Meaning of Christmas can be found anywhere in commercial presentations, it can be found here. In this short play we see ordinary people who challenge us to examine the ways in which we respond to others: police officers whose job, even on Christmas Eve, is to look for the worst in us; a priest whose job it is to welcome sinners and help them find peace; simple people whose piety is symbolized by a statue; a man who has lost much in this life but who finds joy and acceptance among other lonely people; and a little boy whose faith leads him to wait in patience, and to give thanks in the only way he can when his prayers are answered.

At this season of hope and renewal, may we see with fresh eyes the old stories, the stock characters, the expected endings. And may we come, like Sergeant Friday and Paco, to know what it is to be truly blessed.

Love it? Hate it? Just want to say hi?
margaretdeangelis [at] gmail [dot] com (replace the bracketed parts with @ and a period) OR
Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/silkentent

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