Fair thee well...

We enjoyed a great day yesterday, walking about the Hopkinton Fair Grounds -- my first trip to the New Hampshire State Fair. And a superb evening tonight having dinner with friends. Labor Day Weekend should happen more often. :)

Cheers!

Don't cry for me, overweight chicken...

I saw FOOD, INC. almost two weeks ago at Red River Theatres and I can't get the documentary out of my head. It's the first time I've felt like crying over a chicken.

Okay, well, not technically the first time. I think it was actually when we moved to a small, three-acre farm in Sharon Center, Ohio. When my mom placed our order for our new chicks, she and my father were delighted to learn that they would receive ONE FREE ROOSTER for every dozen chicks. ONE FREE ROOSTER? Wow. It was like they won the lottery or something. So a few months after the 72 hens and 6 roosters grew up, we learned first-hand why the company might ship us all these free roosters: they were fighting. And I'm not talking a little pecking here or there, but a blood sport. There's a reason cock fighting is illegal.

And so my father invited his old-country Italian parents out for the weekend. And as he and my grandmother slit the throats of four roosters, my mom, my brothers and I hid in the master bedroom and balled our eyes out.

Still, that didn't get me out of my chores of plucking feathers and gutting the meat.

A few days later, as we sat down to a home-made dinner of fried rooster with a family from Cleveland, my dad picked up a leg and asked aloud, "I wonder who this is?" (Naturally we had named EACH rooster.) That was it: while their family ate the "best fried chicken they'd ever tasted," my family and I ate greens and whatever other veges my mother had cooked up for us that evening.

Years later, I would learn to accept the "savage" side of farming. While it's easy to eat the picked and pulled veges from the garden, it's not always easy to chow down on the animals who so easily become part of your life when you take care of them daily.

Take our first two cows for example. The morning after receiving them on our next farm, a couple-hundred-old cool homestead on about ten acres located eight miles from our three-acre starter farm, my father left for work warning me not to name the cows. That night I told him the two heifers were "Clem" and "Tine." Get it? Dad didn't laugh. The next night he returned home from his day job as a manager in a steel plant and informed me that he'd sold three halves of the two cows. It took my eight-year-old mind a few minutes to grasp, but once I realized what that meant I left the dinner table and went to my room to cry myself to sleep.

Still, what we did on our farm--raising grass-fed beef and sheep, and horses (which we did NOT eat), and goats (there's nothing to eat on them, trust me), and pigs (more a pain in the arse then they're worth...which prompted my mom to finally donate them to Oklahoma State University's agricultural program when we moved to a 20-acre ranch out there)--anyway, raising these animals as we did with the personal touch, made me want to cry when I saw the fat chickens that could hardly walk in FOOD, INC.

And so tonight, as my husband and I talked about walking downtown to grab a bite to eat, I couldn't get FOOD, INC. out of my mind. By the time he jumped from the shower (after his 25-mile bike ride) I had broiled up some green tomatoes from our garden, cleaned fresh lettuce (also from our garden), microwaved some"fakin" (soy-made vegetarian bacon...while trying not to think too much about that evil empire known as Monsanto), and chilled some local micro-brewed beers. And thus we enjoyed a fresh dinner in our backyard garden.

Can I thank FOOD, INC. for tonight's repast? Maybe, but I'd like to thank my mom and dad instead: for showing me the charms and chores of growing up on a farm (and ranch) in the many middles of nowhere in America.

Bon appetite!

Pare it down...

Can you write a complete, complex and compelling story in 25 words or less? It's called Hint Fiction and the best will tentatively be published in an anthology by W.W. Norton in 2010. Submit your two best Hint Fiction pieces by August 31; anthology submission guidelines are listed HERE. Good luck!

(Above is a picture I took of my Mother's Day Pear Tree planted in one of our several new gardens we put in this year.)

Am headed to Red River Theatres tonight for the screening of the winners from the New Hampshire 48-Hour Film Festival. (Read the excellent pre-review here.) Hope to see you there!

Careful what you say around me...

...it may end up in one of my stories.

Recently a friend was lamenting his life's situation - a number of unfortunate circumstances brought on by the economic downturn. I, of course, suggested he write what he knows--after all, he's living a wealth of material right now. Instead he permitted me to use whatever I want from his life. And so I did. Today. In my newest ten-minute play for the stage. I've gotta say - I love it! It's a jolly fun-filled romp through an agonizingly painful reality. (I always fall in love with my words at first glance; we'll see what a few days cooling period does for me--and how I feel when I revise them at the end of the week.)

Yesterday after the excellent performances of several short plays and scenes from longer pieces at the New Hampshire Theatre Project, we authors joined the actors and directors on stage for a Q&A. Much of our discussion revolved around our characters and how we write them. Do we picture the stage as we write, one fellow writer in the audience wanted to know, or do we--as she's been doing lately--picture the characters in their real life circumstances and write with that in mind?

Each of us agreed that it's far better to picture our characters as real, multi-dimensional beings, tackling what life throws at them as best they can. And in the case of the ten-minute play, we may only glimpse their problem, but it's best to show us that turning point--or one of the main turning points in a character's life--that ten minute window into an "a-ha" moment for a character and how a character reacts when pressed into a corner.

By glimpsing that moment on stage, we create a life before and after the scene. Audiences can infer enough to build up what occurred before the curtain opened, and hopefully will care enough to ponder what comes next in our characters' lives.

While I don't always know if the audience is wondering over the future lives of my characters beyond the story's end, I often hear that my stories of family have touched someone and that they can relate because either they too have lived something similar, or they know someone who has.

What a gift to give a writer. That an audience member empathizes with any character you've created means you've shared yourself with others, and probably even created truly three-dimensional characters.

So watch what you say around me. It might end up as a piece of one of my characters' lives. Though if it touches and even inspires just one person in the audience, maybe that's good enough reason to share your stories with me after all....

(Pencil drawing above by Leo.)

Summer Reading, Happened so Slow...

Not that life's returned to normal, but I am today able to focus (finally) on some ordinary summer hobbies. Thought I'd share, as I finally submit my last book request form for this fall's semester of teaching at UNH.

I picked up the Stephen King "On Writing" again - and am requiring it for my Advanced Scriptwriting class and for the Media Writing class - but would also like to suggest anyone who likes to write read it over the summer. It's unlike any other book on craft you've ever read. I know a few others who have read it too and agree with that assessment (including my son).

The other book, which was required of my last Media Writing class and which is again required of my class this fall, is Mignon Fogarty's "Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing." It incorporates silly examples, but is by far the easiest to comprehend grammar manual available today. Read it and keep it. Refer to it as necessary. Again, this is a light read and though it seems incomprehensible to say: it would make a good beach read. Or at least a great, quick, grab-me book for that next time you find yourself in a long wait line.

What else is everyone reading this summer? (Please, do share!)

I have about three books going now including two Asperger handbooks and a short story compilation by NH Humorist Rebecca Rule; I'll be re-reading the two "textbooks" mentioned above and all the others required for my classes ("The New Rules of Marketing & PR" by David Meerman Scott, "Little Miss Sunshine: The Shooting Script" by Michael Arndt, & "The Shawshank Redemption: The Shooting Script" by Frank Darabont).

I will also be reading four others: a new biography by Concord Novelist Merle Drown, a first novel written by a Goddard MFA dorm mate of mine (Bev Hamel's "Bethania: The Village by the Black Walnut Bottom"), the unfilmed original screenplay adaptation of "A Raisin in the Sun" by Lorraine Hansberry (I LOVE her stage play by the same name; apparently the 1961 film may have been based on another adaptation), and the play "Death and the Maiden" by Ariel Dorfman (I'm producing a play adaptation of his this autumn and wanted to read more plays he's written).

Of course I also have a couple more plays to read by that incomparable Irish dark humorist Martin McDonagh (who wrote the screenplay to the awesome film IN BRUGES) and, as always, I have a huge stack of books I'll probably never get to read, but will daydream that I might.

Happy summer reading (and movie watching), everyone!

Am flying to Maryland today to finally interview a fascinating cartographer who worked on the DEW Line project up near the Arctic Circle in the 1950s.

I stumbled upon him, or rather his photographs, while researching my graduate thesis project, a spec script set in Nunavut, Canada—in and around Baffin Island. His daughter had posted her father’s photographs from his time there to her flickr account.

Our first correspondence was in February of 2008. And here it is June 2009 and I’m finally listening to the advice of William Zinsser and getting on that plane. “If a subject interests you,” he writes at the end of chapter 23 in his book On Writing Well, “go after it, even if it’s in the next county or the next state or the next country.

“Decide what you what to do. Then decide to do it. Then do it.”

I am so happy to have finally arrived at step three, even if I wonder if I might be subconsciously endorsing Nike.

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PHOTO CREDIT: Bill McTigue, as posted to flickr by his daughter Terry (link to entire set of photographs above).