My Bold Writing Retreat!

I really enjoy reading about author Tayari Jone's adventures at writing retreats, but I often become envious knowing I don't have the time or leisure to go off to some fancy, schmancy mountaintop writer's colony to schmooze with those lucky enough to secure a spot at some prestigious hideaway for creative minds. Soooo, the first weekend in August, when my beloved is away for his niece's wedding, in the scenic suburbs of Jonesboro, Georgia, I am holding the first ever, (spoken slowly, with a deep voice, and an echo) Bold,Powerful, Magical Summer Weekend Writing Retreat! Ahem...here at my house...for uh...well, ME! Since I can't go to the mountain, I'm bringing the mountain to me. My retreat will include late night writing workshops (with Coltrane playing softly in the background) working on my own stuff...no class assignments, no papers on Lady Mary Wroth, just my stuff. And as an added bonus to stimulate my creative juices, I am including a walk at the Chattahoochee National Park, a pedicure, and an outing to Doc Chey's Noodle House in Emory Village...

Live From London

Wow, what a great way to end the semester. I paid three pounds to use a computer in my hotel for an hour, so I suppose I should make it quick. So far, London has been pretty cool, I must say. I've been here for four days now, and I've visited the British Museum, Windsor Castle, the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, I saw the Lion King at the Lyceum Theatre (which is a blog all by itself)and the highlight...I spent yesterday in Paris where I saw the Eiffel Tour, the Arc de Triumph and the Louve....Thoughts...maybe it's me, but here in London, I'm not conscious of my blackness. I'm not sure how to explain that, and it's not that I've read to much James Baldwin or Richard Wright or Nina Simone. You may know that London is an international city, so there's nothing special about being white, or black or whatever. I don't feel as though people look at me and wonder, "what's that black women doing here in our neighborhood?" or "I'm gonna watch that black woman in my store, because you know they steal." Maybe it's still too soon to tell, but if I get noticed, it's because of my accent...especially in France.

First Life Overloaded? Try a Second!

Well, now that I've safely made it through the first half of an Early British summer with a midterm 'A', I can tell you about my latest partial obsession. I think it's even better than Spider Solitare as a being totally time consuming and an excellent object for procrastinating when I should be studying: it's Second Life! It's an online, three-D world where you create a personality, live, work and play....like in real life...but, it's sort of a cartoon...with some very real like avatars...or, people....anyway, it's a lot of fun.

For my second life, I've chosen to be a man...a black man. (Hey, why not?) And, I'm trying to see just how much second life money I can make on a free account. Second life money is called Linden dollars, after the company in San Francisco that developed it called Linden Research Lab, Inc. With Linden dollars you can buy and sell anything from yourself...yeah...to an island.

Not are there companies that are experimenting with Second Life to do virtual job interviews, but apparently some people are even finding religion in their second life.

For me, it's just a fun way to relax exercise my computer skills.

Shooting Hooky and Aspirations of Becoming A Writer

The three moments I remember as being a realization that I was on to something with this writing thing were the time I overheard my mother on the telephone bragging to one of her friends that I’d written a ‘book’. I was in the eight grade at the time, and she found out about it because I’d gotten into trouble for working on my ‘book’ (a story about a fashion designer named Casey Wycliff) during class time. And, in my junior year in high school, I entered a national scholastic writing competition and won fourth place for a one-act play about a teen-aged boy molested by his mother. I also got a fifteen dollar check from NBC for my efforts. Then there was the time my sophomore English teacher asked me to write an essay at the beginning of class. By the end of class I’d finished it, and unbeknownst to me, he entered it in a district wide composition competition, and I won third place. My essay was about what I did when I occasionally played hooky from school. Now, call me what you will (nerd, geek), but when I played hooky I’d go to Forest Park in St. Louis with the guy I called my boyfriend and…no, not climb in the backseat of a car. We’d go to the Municipal Opera (MUNY) during the off season, sneak in under a padlocked fence and see how it felt to be on the stage of an amphitheater. I’d fantasize about receiving a fifteen minute standing ovation for the opening and closing of my award winning play. But, there was another favorite hooky spot that I relished even more. Don’t laugh. It was the St. Louis Public Library.

Ah yes, I have fond memories of walking up the grand marble staircase from Olive Street which was used in the past as a reviewing area for parades passing through downtown. And, of scaling the Maine granite and marble panels with relief carvings of early printers' marks, decorative medallions, notable authors and inspirational inscriptions as I approached its doors. Traipsing its marbled floors modeled on the floor of the Pantheon in Rome; inhaling the aroma of the aged oak tables, marble, dust and old books is a scent that is eternal, and I will always treasure it. I recently learned that in 1901, philanthropist Andrew Carnegie offered the city $1 million for construction of this central library. And, that architect Cass Gilbert, who was the architect for the Saint Louis Art Museum, the U. S. Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C. and the Woolworth Building in New York City, was selected to design the building. It opened in 1912.
Perhaps it is that geek in me that compelled me, while on a mini-vacation over Labor Day to visit my peeps, to drag my beloved to the place where I fell in love with books. He sat so patiently in the car while I got out, much to the intrigue of the downtown vagrants, and photographed this building that all of these years later still enthrall me.

Looking 4 Literature On Vacation

On a recent impromptu holiday, I wondered how I could turn this quickie, two-day vacation to Savannah, Georgia into something literary; you know, for the blog. I mostly wanted to take photographs of cemeteries, majestic colonial mansions and moss-covered trees, but surely there was something that I could relate to literature and writing during my stay, save for the renovated riverfront, its cobblestones, and the city market on the banks of the river where at one time, more than just vegetables were sold.

I’ve seen quaint little bed and breakfasts on travel shows and have always imagined that it would be a dreamlike experience. I chose Savannah’s Bed and Breakfast Inn, a colonial townhouse, which is located at the northern edge of the historic downtown district. It is surrounded by the otherworldly landscape that only a swamp could produce. A few blocks in every direction reveal yet another neighborhood square: Lafayette, Chatham, Monterrey, Pulaski, Oglethorpe, and so on. There was no elevator, so we climbed a narrow, wooden staircase to our third floor room. Walls lined with Victorian portraiture and clipper ships felt authentic, and me and my beloved tried to guess what they would be worth on the Antique Road Show. Our four-poster bed needed a ladder, and we were high enough from the street that we heard relatively little noise.

Staying in a bed and breakfast is an intimate and unruffled encounter. It feels like you’re staying with relatives minus, well, relatives. Breakfast is served in a dinning room that feels like your grandmother’s dinning room, and there was a veranda with a sleepy, tiger-striped cat, whose name I neglected to inquire about. There is a pleasant absence of the concrete, geometric uniformity of a hotel chain. No unruly children wandering, unattended through the corridors. Oh, and in case you forgot you were in Georgia, everyday at four p.m., glasses of iced, sweet tea was served with lemon poppy seed pound cake, or zucchini bread, or sugar cookies.

There is a saying, or a bible verse, or maybe my Aunt Fannie said it once. It is something like, ‘that which you seek is causing you to seek’. Well, being the only tenants with dreadlocks, I decided to break the awkward, racial ice and ask where our other guests were from. There were two, stylish gentlemen from France, although they didn’t say what part. A couple who had been there a week and were about to leave were from Italy. There was an older couple, from Buford, Georgia, who didn’t engage us until after we’d run into them twice at African-American historical tours. And, then a young, Australian lady, who was traveling alone, came to the table. She was an English teacher of high school students in London. Her worn copy of Teaching Stone to Talk by Annie Dillard was a give away. We briefly discussed our English studies lineage, talked about what we were reading, and exchanged book lists. I gave her The Known World, Bellocq’s Ophelia, The Farming of Bones, and The Bondwoman’s Narrative. She gave me The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kinston, a poet named Ruby Ginibi, My Place by Sally Morgan, and the plays of Thomson Highway. In a place I chose randomly I met a fellow traveler who shared a love of reading and discussing literature. Well, now I felt like I belonged. Later, we toured the Ralph Mark Gilbert Civil Rights Museum. Gilbert served as pastor of the historic First African Baptist Church of Savannah, reorganized the Savannah Branch of the NAACP in 1942, and served as its president for eight years. He was a nationally known orator and playwright, producing passion plays throughout the country.

Having had my literary itch scratched, we retired to another vacation favorite: the beach.