Isabel Myra in all of her glory!!!!

nothing left to paint

I should be up and about but I’m not. I’m a ball in the bed with a laptop. Last night I dreamt I could time travel. I could enter the body of who I was in the past but I had all the knowledge of my self in the present. I told my father, the ice was thin around the corner, he needed to go slower or he would crash. I told Michelle Merrithew she was beautiful, if she let herself grow up she would always be beautiful. I had twenty seconds—somehow I knew this was all I had to make people understand me. Believe me.

I’m sure the dream had something to do with the major rejection I received yesterday, where the editor actually said, “it breaks our heart to reject writers like you.” Well, I hope it actually KILLED them. I like the plain, simple letter which says they don’t like me in ten words or less.

I am not proud. Nor will I pretend here that as writer you will mature into someone who doesn’t care about this shit---rejection. Maybe you will, I won’t. I curl up in a bawl and cry if I care about it. If I believed the submission was close to perfect. If I believed the work fit perfectly. Sometimes of course it makes sense, this rejection and I put the writing in a drawer---hopefully to be heard from again.

But some days the damn spinning wheel gets to me.

books, books and more books!!!!!

When I’m overwhelmed I buy books, if you were take a look at my library you would see that I am overwhelmed quite a bit and today was no exception. Here is what I bought:

1.Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing by Helene Cixous (Rebecca put this on her blog so it is her fault!
2. "A Natural History of the Senses "by Diane Ackerman…this is an amazing book, read it three times and I want a copy I can write in.
3. “Deep Play” by Ackerman
4. “Burning the Empty Nests” by Gregory Orr…love him
5. “101 Life Skills Games for Children: Learning, Growing, Getting Along”…this is for work, this way they pay for my shipping;)
6. "104 Activities That Build: Self-Esteem, Teamwork, Communication, Anger Management, Self-Discovery, Coping Skills" b/c my kids at work are OUT OF CONTROL!
7. "Mosquito: Poems (A Tin House New Voice)" by Alex Lemon; he is a friend and an amazing poet. I will post his reading next week.
8. "Other Fugitives and Other Strangers" by Rigoberto Gonzalez. I loved the cover.
9. "Original White Animals" by Tracy Philpot. She is also wonderful.
10. 12 Best Foods Cookbook: Over 200 Recipes Featuring The 12 Healthiest Foods" by Dana Jacobi….b/c I eat terribly and I don’t want to die.

Ballard truth: this is not my complete list but then you might think I am out of control, which of course I am.

Come one, come all

for anyone interested in a summer workshop here I promise you a wonderful martini and a fire in my backyard....

flowers on the table

I am starting to learn how to use my new camera. It took me an embarrassing amount of time to find the built in flash. It was really built in! Carolyn Forche’ is coming to Minneapolis for my birthday. Well, she is coming to teach this but I can say she is coming for me. I am in the class. The U is picking up the bill though I had to throw my teaching schedule to the wind. Now I am in a panic b/c she has already read my current manuscript of poems and maybe I should be working on another. Here is a goal, maybe I should just write ONE fricken, mothertucking poem. Or maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe I should stick with the flash.

Another thing I have applied for. I want to go to a ghost ranch in New Mexico and write. I want horses and dust and no way for my children to find me.

Vividly, I remember being 13 and knowing I was forgetting how to be a child. Lately I am feeling that way about poetry. I am forgetting…and maybe that is good. Maybe I will emerge something else I haven’t even considered and that would be okay. Wouldn’t it?

Why do I feel like I am trying to convince myself that growing old is pretty?

our snow day

my morning girl

Yes, they closed down the highway; yes there is more than three feet of snow on the ground; where to go in all this white--to the hills of course, the fast wonderful hills.

This morning while I was trying to dig out a small path to civilization, I looked up and right over my head was a hawk, she had a chickadee in her beak and she did not move. I did not move. Ever so slowly she began showering me with chickadee’s feathers and then we both did our jobs, I made my path and she devoured everything except the small beak which now rests by the climbing rose bush.

I sometimes wonder why we need to make things beautiful—because this wasn’t beautiful, yet I wanted to wake everyone up and make them see that she had chosen me somehow, she had chosen me this morning to see her and I wanted to choose them. But I didn’t. Okay, so I made the children look and Em but I didn’t wake the whole block which was my initial reaction. The hawk was there for three hours or more without flying away until I called my best friend and asked her if she thought it was a sign.

It was.

It is truly the size that matters

We are suppose to get 16 inches of snow today and I got to call my first “snow day” at work and all the children had to stay home, which made me feel a bit like a king you shall not venture out into the weather.

On my way to have breakfast with my love, I passed a house that had a ten foot snow sculpture penis in the front yard. I know it’s a frat house but I still wanted to pull over and sculpt a dog taking a leak on their snow balls... yet I had to get to breakfast. I have the talent but I just don’t have the time. I think THAT should be printed on a T-Shirt for me to wear everyday.

At breakfast the man behind me said, “My first wife was named Joy and when she left I didn’t have any” which almost threw me into a fit of giggles, causing me to blow french toast out my nose. True Ballard fact: I'm always listening to conversations around me and not to any I am actually HAVING which makes me a horrible love most of the time but I am trying to make up for it other ways.

Hey, maybe I’ll make a sculpture out on the front lawn!

O Happy Birthday You Beautiful Maine Girl

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain

Edna St. Vincent Millay 

 

“The truth in life lies in the impulsiveness of matter. The mind of man has been poisoned by concepts. Do not ask him to be content, ask him only to be calm, to believe he has found his place. But only the madman is truly calm.” – Antonin Artaud


Reasons I might be CrAzY……

I woke up this morning and it was twenty degrees below zero and I still went OUTDOORS.
I have not fixed the crack in my windshield.
I did not go to work.
I did not go to work and yet I answered the phone when my boss called and spent all morning discussing work.
I drank moon tea for health and one giant ass chocolate bar for breakfast.
I ONCE AGAIN prepared a packet for submitting and then missed the posting date.
I believe you are actually listening harder b/c I am using CAPITIALS!!!!
I invited 12 nine years old girls to sleep over next weekend for Bella's Birthday.
I let her pick an American Idol theme.
I ordered the playstation game.
I bought a disco ball.
I peed today on a toilet with no seat.
I replaced a hundred year old pull chain toilet (that I loved) with a brand new, fancy-ass (pun) with no seat.
I paid $680.00 for this.
I tried to hit a squrriel with a broom.
I think the toilet actually looks better in Sepia.

Before I love, I fear the dark
with its gradual strangeness, familiar burden.
How sly the light with her shadow.
How quick the eye to forget.

Yet in my own night I’m forgiven.
If I close my eyes, follow the map
on the underside of my lids, my body
will remember which way to walk.

Until a chair bites me in the hip. 

Robert Creamer 

I’m still ill. I work, I come home, I do laundry and I run the three flights of stairs but I still feel like crap.

When we were D.C. we went to this great exhibit where the artist, Robert Creamer had built a box with this huge flat bed scanner, he then hung flowers as if they were in space and created amazing images. He also collected petals for years, meticulously arranged them for months and then set them on fire for a single photograph.

He talked about how he adapted as an artist. How he changed because of the digital world, how his art became something totally different then what he believed it would be when he first started taking photos. He was not born in the digital age but it was what he was given.

So these are my questions for myself today and thus for you in some way:

How are you willing to adapt as an artist, how willing are you to let your art change from what you once believed it to be?

And what are going to set on fire?

t. ballard