Category Archives: Uncategorized

My Last Transition Metal for a While

Posted on July 7, 2013 | Leave a comment

The end of this month, I’ll turn 48. Inspired by Oliver Sacks, I looked up 48 on my Periodic Table of Elements place mat and found that Cadmium is element 48. It is a Transition Metal, the last I’ll experience for a while. Next up is Indium, which is grouped under “Other Metals,” (so no telling what that’ll be like), and then a couple of Nonmetals, and then, at age 54, a noble gas! Xenon. That’s something to look forward to.

More about Cadmium, from a lovely blog called GrrlScientist, which has an “element of the week” feature:

  • It’s highly toxic.
  • Used in nuclear reactors.

Cadmium also “adds fatigue resistance to many solders,” which I mis-read first as “adds fatigue resistance to many soldiers.” In any case, fatigue-resistance sounds lovely. Just what I need.

It can make strong batteries and then pollute the environment.

It makes pretty colors.

This post on cadmium yellow says that “Claude Monet (1840-1926) liked to use cadmium yellow for outdoor settings in paintings such as Autumn at Argenteuil, as he believed it would better guarantee the survival of his art. For this reason he abandoned chrome yellow pigments (with the exception of zinc chromate yellow) in the latter part of his career.”

Cadmium green, meanwhile, shows up online as all the shades of green I’ve been obsessed with lately. I may have to go to an art store soon just to get a tube of Winsor & Newton:

cadmiumgreen

So, other than being toxic and all, 48 should be an interesting year.

If you haven’t yet, you should read “The Joy of Old Age. (No Kidding.)” in which Oliver Sacks points out that his upcoming birthday, 80, is Mercury on the Periodic Table (I don’t know if he has the table on a place mat or not). It’s a lovely piece, with several notable moments. My favorite is this:

“At nearly 80, with a scattering of medical and surgical problems, none disabling, I feel glad to be alive — ‘I’m glad I’m not dead!’ sometimes bursts out of me when the weather is perfect. (This is in contrast to a story I heard from a friend who, walking with Samuel Beckett in Paris on a perfect spring morning, said to him, ‘Doesn’t a day like this make you glad to be alive?’ to which Beckett answered, ‘I wouldn’t go as far as that.’)”

I have elements of both those sentiments. Sometimes I do feel “every day is a gift,” but some days, I admit, the gift feels like a total white elephant.

Here’s hoping 48 is more Sacks than Beckett. In most ways.

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Posted in Searching, Sustainable Chaos, Uncategorized, You Really Oughta Read This

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The Thinger for the Clutter Contained

Posted on July 4, 2013 | Leave a comment

Having declared repeatedly in public that my home was “half a matchbook collection away from being an episode of Hoarders” (saying this I am exaggerating, but not by as much as I would prefer), I have been plunging this summer, over and over, into our accumulated everything.

This is not easy.

One becomes a pack rat through a combo pack of habits, issues, and inept strategies.

For me, nearly every bit of sorting, cleaning, pitching, packing, reorganizing, moving, shifting, recycling, re-gifting, tagging for yard sales, and donating involves a commensurate inner activity.

Ideally, the inner activity means reflecting on and evaluating all the habits and strategies mentioned previously, and also gently, gently nudging apart the layers of issues involved that led me to the place in the first place.

Sometimes the inner activity is limited to “Ack!” or “oh my god” or “sheesh.”

But I keep at it.

I can be very persistent.

Some of this is deeply satisfying, the emptying of a container of stuff I no longer want, thus making it available to contain other stuff I do want.

And fairly often when I say or even think the word “container,” I think of James Thurber, and “Here Lies Miss Groby” (the first paragraph of which is available even to non-subscribers of the New Yorker, which fortunately contains the quote I was remembering).

“He remembers staying awake nights saying over and over ‘The thinger for the thing contained’ or thinking of an example of the Thing Contained for the Container. If a woman were to grab a bottle of Grade A and say to her husband, ‘Get away from me, or I’ll hit you with the milk’, that would be a Thing Contained for the Container.”

This is a way of talking about metonymy. I wonder if the act of blogging about metonymy will help me remember its definition in contrast to synecdoche. Probably not. But I would like to stake a claim here: I began saying “Schenectady” in place of “synecdoche” years and years before Charlie Kaufman made a movie called Synecdoche, New York, which I still haven’t seen.

All this is a way of procrastinating, by the way.

One last bit of reverie, before I head once more unto the breach, my friends:

I called my blog “marniere” because I’m fascinated by sinkholes. Fascinated and horrified by the idea of a chasm opening up where there previously was none. A chasm with ample space.

If you pitched your clutter in a sinkhole, you wouldn’t be able to access any of it easily. But you would be able to pitch and keep pitching for the longest time.

(I need to write part 2 for this a reminiscence of my childhhood entitled, “The Ravine Where We Threw Trash.” But for now, it’s once more unto the breach I’ve made in the wall of accumulated everything.)

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Posted in Anxiety/Depression/Yuck, Procrastination, Sustainable Chaos, Uncategorized

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Much Ado (Very, Very Much)

Posted on June 29, 2013 | Leave a comment

My anxious thoughts do woo me like Don John,
with wild tales of catastrophe, with shame,
and I play stupid Claudio each and every time.
I fall for lies. I forget everything I’ve known.
Up next the betrayed Hero inside me dies.
Not really dead, but a bad-ass swoon, or worse–
the split-second wish that everything would end
if this building, choking, chewing panic can’t.
Only Beatrice says it can. I always lose
when I argue with myself. I am a mess.
Only Benedick, in pill form, thus,
can hush me, with his little medicated kiss.

_____
That Joss Whedon. I tell you what. I loved, loved, loved his Much Ado About Nothing.

Having been swamped a bit with anxiety lately, I’ve been thinking on it, and am concluding that anxiety is a big, fat liar. But sneaky, and seductive.

Today’s wisdom, thus: if the sneaky liar is as cute as Sean Maher playing Don John, no wonder I keep falling for it.

Sean Maher taken by Gage Skidmore

Sean Maher
taken by Gage Skidmore

And, fortunately, all’s well that ends well, right? (Because in this case, Beatrice is right–the panic never lasts. Also note: I’m so sorry to repeat the structure of Shakespeare here in my sonnet, giving Benedick the last word. I just tell myself he must be an awesome kisser in that last scene, if she stops talking entirely.)

But wouldn’t it be lovely, if my inner Claudio developed his shit-detector a wee bit more?

And if my inner Hero freaking stood up for herself instead of swooning?

Well. One does what one can to line one’s psychological ducks up*, and then one hopes the duck poop doesn’t give everyone swimmer’s itch.

_____

*including the appropriate and authorized use of anti-anxiety meds, thank you very much

(Image of Sean Maher available through Creative Commons license on Flickr.)

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Posted in Anxiety/Depression/Yuck, Bloem or Pog, Car Sonnets, Folks I Loves, Healthy Health, Joss Whedon, Poetry, Searching, Uncategorized

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I Do Stew.

Posted on June 15, 2013 | Leave a comment

I’m so grateful to have a column in the Voice of the River Valley.

1. Even though it has a website, it functions largely as a print publication. You can see it all over southwest Wisconsin, lovely cream pages in stacks here and there.
2. It’s free!
3. The cover has fantastic photography, sometimes from my favorite photographer (hint: he has the same last name as I do).
4. It’s an audience I wouldn’t ordinarily reach. People come up to me in Richland Center, in Spring Green–they don’t read my blog. They don’t have a Twitter feed. But they read the Voice of the River Valley.
5. Regular deadlines help me. Speaking of which, today’s the 15th, isn’t it. Hm.
6. Word count maximums challenge me. I can write a sonnet pretty easily, or I can go on and on in prose–1,000 words, 1,500…. But 500 is HARD.
7. The editor/publisher Sara and I worked pretty hard to figure out what the focus of my column should be & when we landed on writing about the world of teaching from my perspective–long-time professor at UW-Richland and recent volunteer at the River Valley Elementary Studio School, we both knew there was a rich vein of material to mine.
8. I continue to be pleased with the name we settled on for the column. I wanted something to go with “pedagogy” in a way that was provocative or at least startling, and “stew” ended up being the one we kept going back to. It fits, you know? Because I do stew.
9. And so does Sara. The publication already has a pretty big audience and circulation, but she’s interesting in pushing the boundaries and experimenting, and I applaud that, in principle and in actuality.

Back to work on my 7th “Pedagogy Stew” column! The June column is available online; I’ll post it here when the July issue comes out.

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Posted in Daring Greatly, Pedagogy Stew, Teaching, Uncategorized

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Creative People Say Yes (Sometimes)

Posted on June 12, 2013 | 4 comments

I once came upon my cousin Reid practicing different ways to say “no.” He was 3 or 4 at the time. “No, I couldn’t possibly,” he said. “Absolutely not.”

He was onto something, that little ‘un. At least in my family, saying no takes practice.

Saying no? I’m big on it. Sometimes I’m even good at it. I certainly like the IDEA of saying no.

I’ve written about a fair number of times:
“How do I do that? How do I become the sort of person who says no to things?”

Clitter-Clatter Clutter Time , which references two terrific posts by my favorite tattooed Lutheran blogger, Nadia Bolz Weber, “The Spiritual Practice of Saying No,” and its companion piece, “The Spiritual Practice of Saying Yes!”

The Sarcastic Lutheran says, “The people who are inclined to say yes to everything do all the work and then burn out and become resentful about the people who are inclined to say no to everything. It’s as though the world is divided into martyrs and slackers.”

I don’t make a very good martyr or slacker, either one, not for very long.

I worked enough 50+ hours this spring semester, I worry my slacker credentials are in danger of not being renewed.

Busy as I’ve been, I’m nowhere close to martyrdom. I have some regrets, but I don’t regret all of the times I said yes. (Or came up with something to do that no one even asked me to do.)

Recent things that added to my to do list that I am particularly happy to locate in the land of “yes!”:

  • In addition to volunteering in my son’s classroom at the River Valley Elementary Studio School a couple hours a week, presenting a lesson on storytelling, with a way of talking about narrative arc that was a big hit.
  • Leading the Westby Co-Op Credit Union Board of Directors and branch managers in creativity exercises.
  • Serving as a (paid) reader for writing sample/placement tests for incoming UW-R students, and as a local developmental writing coordinator (unpaid).

In general, I am unrealistic about how the number of things I try to get done will fit into the number of available hours, and I don’t necessarily do things in the right order (which sometimes does and sometimes does not qualify as procrastination).

Thus, some of my commitments (such as returning student work promptly) suffered this spring, and probably, saying “yes” to new stuff impacted the ongoing stuff.

In general, I need to parse, pare, and prune my To Do list.

So, in one way, I totally get Kevin Ashton’s “Creative People Say No.”

He is right that “We do not have enough time as it is. There are groceries to buy, gas tanks to fill, families to love and day jobs to do.”

And he is right that “Time is the raw material of creation.”

Time is a precious resource. It must be guarded. I get it.

But wow did that blog post bug me.

(more on page 2!)

Pages: 1 2

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Posted in Burnout, Creativity, Daring Greatly, Family, Procrastination, Sustainable Chaos, Teaching, Uncategorized, Work Life, Writing

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Marnie’s Idea Mill–churning out great ideas since…NOW.

Posted on June 3, 2013 | 2 comments

I am pleased, excited, terrified and astonished to be announcing the launch of Marnie’s Idea Mill, a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo.

I’m raising money to replace myself in the classroom, so that I will have time to design and implement workshops on creativity.

Thanks in advance for checking out the site and considering making a contribution!

You can help other ways–posting the link on your own Facebook page or blog, retweeting, or forwarding to people who might make a contribution will help, too.

I also welcome feedback on any and all parts of this project.

Also accepting good wishes and blessings!

Metaphor 1.1

Metaphor 1.1


_____
The perks I’m offering include a shout-out on this blog, a copy of Each Other’s Anodyne (a hand-sewn chapbook, a collection of my poems about teaching), feedback on your own creative writing, customized sonnets, and personalized creativity coaching sessions.

As of today, I’ve raised $10,000 in contributions and pledges toward the $24,000 total I need ($6,000 per course x four courses). My fundraising goal on Indiegogo is $4,000, and the deadline for the online campaign is June 17.

My ultimate deadline is July 1.

When I say I love impossible things, I am not kidding.

But I’m trusting Marnie’s Idea Mill can make some magic and attract some magic and make creativity workshops possible (which will then generate even more magic).
_____

Because I am married to a man who is 1/4 Finn, who has read the Kalevala multiple times and also cheers for Finnish drivers in World Rally racing, I know that the Sampo is a mill that generated an infinite supply of flour, salt, and gold.

It was made by Ilmarinen (using a forge, that, as my husband likes to point out, the Kalevala never mentions being destroyed–so maybe it’s still out there…) for the Mistress of the North, who turned out to be a nasty sort, and after a complicated series of events I couldn’t quite follow as my husband described it, the People of the South decided to steal the Sampo. The boat it was in sank, but pieces of the Sampo washed ashore and prosperity accompanied even those pieces.

There used to be a store in Madison called the Magic Mill, which I loved, but it closed. The Sampo, though–that’s a really potent metaphor.

The Sampo one of the images I had in mind when I decided to call my Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign “Marnie’s Idea Mill.”

Idea generation is a huge part of how we measure creativity, so I wanted a metaphor of something that generates. Mill seemed kindlier than factory somehow….

Plus, we have a wide assortment of Peugeot hand grinders (my husband is also 1/4 French).

Another old, old story I had in mind is from 1 Kings 17. In it, Elijah curses the land of Israel, “there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word.” The Lord sends him to a brook where ravens care for him, and then to a widow, who, when asked for a wee bit of bread by Elijah says, “As the Lord God liveth,” (which I think would now translate to “holy crap, man”). She says she barely has enough to keep herself and her son alive one more day. But Elijah blesses her barrel and says it will not be empty until God sends rain. (I always thought that should be until a few months after the rain showed up, but I’m sure it worked out fine.)

For me, this is a story about living from a place of “enough” rather than a place of “not enough.”

I am trusting there is enough good will and money in the world to help me meet my goal of designing workshops to help people become more creative–more people who can forge amazing mills, more prophets who can see plenty when the rest of us see scarcity….

More where there is currently less.
_____
(You can read more about my creativity research, my fundraising, and my ideas for workshops on various pages here on my blog.)

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Posted in Creativity, Creativity Workshops, Daring Greatly, God Stuff, Sustainable Chaos, Teaching, Uncategorized, Work Life

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If God’s going to all the trouble of sending a tornado after you….

Posted on May 30, 2013 | 4 comments

When I was little, I wasn’t scared of tornadoes.

My Dad always said, “If God’s going to go to all the trouble of sending a tornado after you…” and I actually don’t remember the exact words of what came after that, but the idea was, just give up. If God wants you to die in a tornado and you survive that tornado, he’ll send another tornado. Or a car wreck. Or a brown recluse spider.

I found that profoundly comforting when I was a child and beyond, but I’m sure my Dad’s calm helped, too. (Note to self: try not to freak out ENTIRELY as you’re fleeing your own home, your child in tow, to your parents’ basement across town. When I said, “Get in the car right now!” I’m pretty sure I had the same intonation & volume as “You can’t handle the truth!”)

Back in the 70s, there were watches and warnings pretty much all the time, it seemed, from March through September. We ignored watches entirely, and only grew concerned about warnings if the sky turned green.

Dad and I used to stand in our garage and watch sheets of rain come across the open field northeast of our house. He was probably smoking a pipe. I was probably petting Wooly and Daisy (the best dogs ever in the history of the world).

Regardless.

I now note several problems with Dad’s tornado wisdom.

1. Even if my belief in God had not changed, OH MY GOD. Really? I’m a good Baptist girl and God might just, out of pretty much fucking nowhere, send a tornado to kill me? And I can’t get away no matter what?

2. My belief in God has changed. I have a kind of wacked-out sort of X-Files Mulder/Scully hybrid of beliefs. As in:
a. I want to believe.
b. Maybe God could steer tornadoes in a pinch, but tends not to.

3. The basically impossibly huge question of how a loving God could allow horrible things to happen. (I’m not going to solve that here. Sorry if you’re disappointed.)

When I lived in the second of a series of three trailers I called home as a graduate student at Southern Illinois University, I began to have a recurring nightmare about tornadoes. In it, I would wake up in the middle of a horrible storm, feel the trailer begin to shake, watch the walls suck inward, watch the roof blow away, and then try to hold onto my bed to keep from getting sucked into the sky. Then I would wake up.

I suspect this had to do with being in miscellaneous precarious emotional situations in those years. And also living in a trailer. “God’s bowling alleys,” my brother always called trailer parks.

(So, o.k. What is it with men in my family and tornadoes?)

But during one actual tornado warning, I stayed in Trailer #1 and announced to God, “I’ll just die here with my cats, thank you.” Very green sky. Large branches flying by the window. Trailer rocking in real life, not the dream world. (Oh, that girl. I could just smack my 21-year-old self!)

I think, over the years, I’ve just grown less and less fatalistic. Certainly less suicidal! It is also possible my frontal lobe has developed some.

And then having a husband I love and I son I am OVER THE MOON ABOUT makes storms really stressful.

We’ve had a wacky weather week in Wisconsin. More storms coming.

Is it possible, in what I now called the land of “Zen Baptist” on my faith journey, to take wise precautions and yet be at peace about whatever comes?

Sure hope so.

Because what comforted me as a child, comforts me not at all right now.

_____
Here’s what fun about social media. Someone named Kevin posted this on Channel 3000’s Facebook page. The comments are hilarious. Including: “it’s sunny in beloit” and a whole thread of “don’t take pictures while you’re driving” and “it’s not a tornado.”

So. Probably not a tornado. (No one actually said it was.) And also not my picture. But gracious. I wouldn’t mind some boring weather.

Not a tornado.

Not a tornado.

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Posted in Family, God Stuff, On Wisconsin, Opdyke, Searching, Southern Illinois, Uncategorized

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Driving in a David Cates Novel

Posted on May 29, 2013 | 1 comment

“O beautiful, for spacious skies
But now those skies are threatening”
“The End of the Innocence”

Taking the secret detour, the one the natives use,
I fly down Highway T to Z,
past the Cates family farm but really,
it’s the dips and swales and curves
and hills and valleys and long slopes up
and ridge roads that feel impossibly high
for Wisconsin that let me know I’m in a zone
where fiction could happen and also perhaps
some magic but for me, partly panic–

I get agoraphobic on some of these rises
where all you can see past the crest
is the sky. It reminds me of Eastern Montana
a little (except for more trees on both sides),
where I once drove up a long brown hill for so long,
for an hour, forever, I stopped believing in Canada.
I couldn’t imagine anything north of where I was.
Nothing but a sheer drop-off to Hell, maybe,
over the top, nothingness, a crevasse, the crimp-
edge of the known world, no ditch, just–

The trip up, the torture, doesn’t last that long here.
Just when I’m wanting to pull over,
figure out how to turn around or back up,
which is impossible–the road’s too narrow,
the curve’s too sharp, the hill’s too steep–
well, there we are, around the bend
finally, a stretch of open road, another red barn.

Another falling-down house tucked in behind
a mess of blooming lilacs, under which,
if this really is a David Cates novel, someone’s having sex
RIGHT THIS MOMENT, and probably with someone they shouldn’t.

And later the woman, or maybe she’s a girl,
would take a dandelion and say “make a wish”
as she blew the white seeds everywhere at which point
the man, or maybe he’s still a boy,
would think “tampopo” but not say it, not wanting
the girl to feel bad for not knowing Japanese,
and he might also think, but not say,
some racy, clever thing using the word “blow.”
What he probably would say would be “Great.
Now there are more weeds everywhere,”
but then regret having said anything at all.

Because you have to remember, the moment you think
“Anything can happen,” that something bad could.

Just because it’s almost June and everything’s green,
every shade of green, just because the blue sky
is paint-chip sky-blue right overhead, even when
you’ve got Don Henley cranked on the radio,
you can glance in your rear view mirror and see
how the bright blue turns to pale blue and then haze
and then gray along the horizon.

You can see farms you can’t get to on Highway Z.
The people who live there are happy or sad.
But you’ll never get there. You’ll never know.

Coming home, you’ll stop at the T of Highway T and 23
and you’ll see Frank Lloyd Wright’s wind mill
and it won’t impress you this time. Not at all.
_____

I left Southern Illinois to go to graduate school in Missoula, Montana, and there met David Cates, who’d come from Spring Green, Wisconsin, where I live now.

Freaky.

His latest book is odd and beautiful and haunting and two trips to Dodgeville recently I really have felt as though I entered some sort of parallel universe. If you read the book now, there’s probably a silver station wagon taking a curve a little too fast. I’ll be waving.

The latest novel by David Cates (wonderful to read, odd to drive in)

The latest novel by David Cates (wonderful to read, odd to drive in)

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Posted in Bloem or Pog, Car Sonnets, On Wisconsin, Poetry, Spring Green, Uncategorized, Writing, You Really Oughta Read This

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Teacher Lady! a new magazine for lady teachers!

Posted on May 17, 2013 | 1 comment
I get my best ideas during finals week.

I get my best ideas during finals week.

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Posted in Teaching, Uncategorized, Work Life

Hamlet’s Back at Devil’s Lake

Posted on May 15, 2013 | 1 comment

The actor playing him this summer’s there,
I mean to say. He likes to memorize
while hiking, where the purple quartzite shines
and the T-Rex headed vultures soar.
The rock he’s on is so much older than
the play he’s in. They’re metamorphic mirrors–
hard things from Shakespeare and tectonic shifting–
still shiny, still showing us us after years
and years, hundreds, and millions, a billion years.
It is time and timelessness. And time is time,
not out of joint, not yet, still gracious here.

He is morphing, but the actor is still Matt,
and this Prince of Denmark loves his dog.

(If only poor Ophelia’d had a cat.)

_____
Oh! I can’t wait to see Hamlet this summer–great fun to be had and heartache to be felt and always, always interesting to see a new actor take on the old speeches and give them to us new.

Which reminds me–I need to get all my tickets figured out! To the box office with me, anon!

If you haven’t already made your own plans, you really oughta go to American Players Theatre.

_____

(Apologies for the sprung rhyme scheme above. Once I’d thought of “If only poor Ophelia’d had a cat,” I couldn’t let it go. Fortunately “cat” rhymes with “Matt.” But “dog” is just hanging out there, not rhyming with anything. Yet. I might revise. In any case, I know Matt will take care of his dog. And dogs mostly don’t care about rhymes. Thanks, Matt, for letting me share the pics–especially the puppy one. How could anyone look at that picture and not smile?)

____
462639_10151595624175155_1127254500_o

Matt Schwader, appearing this summer in Hamlet.

Matt Schwader, appearing this summer in Hamlet.

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Posted in American Players Theatre, Bloem or Pog, Car Sonnets, On Wisconsin, Poetry, Spring Green, Uncategorized

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