Nova Walsh

The Yard Water Level is at 127%

October 19, 2018 By admin 2 Comments

It’s been raining a lot in Austin lately. Days and days of it after a summer of serious drought. I like the rain, and it’s a welcome change. But the dog…

The dog is terrified of the rain. A couple of days into the onslaught I start really worrying about her. I watch her as she sits in the sink shivering, wondering what I should do. I think it’s been maybe 24 hours since she’s gone out to pee and the only way I finally entice her out of the house is to let her out the front door to chase the deer that run amok in the neighborhood.

I wait until there’s a break in the rain. It’s cold and wet but nothing murderous is attacking her from above. There aren’t any deer out this evening but thankfully Pepper follows me out anyway. She’s nervous though. She keeps eyeing me like, you better not leave me out here to die, bitch!

Does she pee? No, she does not.

She’s taking her sweet time as it starts to drizzle again, suddenly unafraid and intensely curious about what the squirrels have been up to in her absence. Until now I’ve been encouraging. “Go potty, Pepper. Come on, go potty, please!”

But it’s cold and I’m getting wet and I really just want to get back inside to see what the boy is up to. He’s been quiet too long.

And this is when I realize my preschooler has followed us out into the yard. He doesn’t seem to mind the cold drizzle. He’s watching me yell at the dog with what can only be described as glee.

“Pee, Pepper! Go potty you stupid animal! Pee, damn you!” I’m really getting into it now. I’ve had enough and I’m cold. She’s still sniffing pecan carcasses like they hold the secrets of the universe.

Something catches my eye. Until now I haven’t realized that while I’ve been yelling at the dog to pee my son has whipped it out and is whizzing with wild abandon in the front yard in the rain, a look of sheer joy on his face.

I really wonder sometimes what our neighbors think about us. But that is another post for another day…

My instant reaction is to yell, but after a minute of fuming I start to laugh.

Probably the wrong reaction because now he’s laughing too and I can see how his little mind is working… peeing in the yard makes Mama laugh. I should pee in the yard every day!

I look over and Pepper is going now, too. At least the yard got plenty of water this week.

Shotgun Shells, Oh Hell!

February 5, 2016 By admin 4 Comments

I guess I could make a long meaningless excuse for why I haven’t blogged in six months. But I don’t want to, and I don’t think you want me to either. Instead, I’m just going to say that shit got real for a while, and I’m presently working my way out of an extended period of sloth-like mediocrity and toward something new, as evidenced by such things as the complete redesign of this blog and the (hopefully) different slant my writing takes henceforth.

So why not get right to it? I’m going to do a series of posts about our recent experience with corporate housing. Forgive me if you’ve already heard these stories. I’ll shamelessly complain about The Apartment to anyone who will listen.

This week, we’ll begin with my personal favorite of all time, wherein I am nearly shot…

A bit of a preface first – When we lived in Austin, we lived way way south, on the edge of the city limits. Just about every afternoon a neighbor shot guns, probably practicing for the glorious day when Texas would finally cede from the nation. Or perhaps honing skills for the fast approaching zombie apocalypse, who knows? Whatever the reason, the great echoing booms scared the shit out of our dogs. It got so bad, they wouldn’t even go outside in the afternoon, gunshots or no. So when we moved to Portland, one of the things I promised them was that there wouldn’t be anymore gunshots. Ha. Ha.

Our Oregon apartment was a tiny cookie cutter sort of thing where you could hear everything from all the apartments around you. We were blessed to be on the second floor where we got to hear the blaring t.v. and late night parties of the downstairs neighbors and the stampeding children running in circles from the neighbors above. Lucky us.

It’s eight thirty on a Sunday night sometime in November. The baby’s in bed, Dan is watching t.v. and I’m in the kitchen doing the dishes in my nightgown. Pepper Potts is right beside me. She has a habit of finding a “safe spot” everywhere we live, where she can go in times of trouble – and for some reason she’s chosen the tiny kitchen, between the fridge and the dishwasher, in this place.

So we’re in the kitchen together, me loading the dishwasher, her looking at me with mild disdain. And all of a sudden there’s a huge thud and the floor kind of vibrates. It’s almost as if the disposal has fallen out of the sink or something. Dan hears it too and comes over to inspect.

Pepper, of course, hightails it out of the kitchen in search of a better safe spot and we try to figure out what’s happened with no luck. I let it go because everything seems fine and I’ve got dishes to do.

A few minutes later…

I’m in the bedroom and hear a knock on the door. Dan answers and then comes in with a frown on his face.

“Do you want me to tell you what that noise was? Because I’m not sure you want to know.”

Hmm. Of course I had to know. Of course I did.

“It was the downstairs neighbor. I guess he was cleaning his shotgun and it accidentally went off.”

Blank stare. It might take me a few minutes to process this information in its entirety.

“He claimed it was an ‘unintentional discharge event’.”

Still processing…

“We should probably keep an eye on the pipes and the dishwasher, make sure there aren’t any leaks or anything.”

I think even now, four months later, I’m still processing the fact that our neighbor “unintentionally discharged” a gun into our floor right where I was standing.

Dan helpfully pointed out that we were lucky he hadn’t been cleaning a rifle.

And poor Pepper Potts. She went from being traumatized by the sounds of our neighbors’ guns, to almost being shot by a neighbor’s gun. I way oversold Portland to her, and she still hasn’t forgiven me.

A Becoming

August 1, 2015 By admin 1 Comment

woman is not a completed reality, but rather a becoming, and it is in her becoming that … her possibilities should be defined”

– Simone de Beauvoir

About a year ago I found out I was pregnant. It wasn’t exactly planned, but it wasn’t a total surprise either. My husband and I had talked about having kids many times in our fifteen years together, but with our nomadic ways and our epic self-absorption, we found it hard to take the plunge. At the beginning of 2014 we sort of (probably drunkenly) agreed we would roll the dice and not try to prevent it anymore. We continued our lifestyle, ignoring the possibility that I might eventually become pregnant, totally unaware of the turn our lives were about to take.

That positive pregnancy test was a shock to my system. Suddenly I felt totally unprepared for what I had just gotten myself into. The fear and weight of the responsibility settled immediately over me, took over my entire being. At the time I had no real idea of how vulnerable and constantly concerned I would feel once my son came into the world, but I knew it was going to be tremendous and that it would change me, and the fear of that change was palpable.

On top of constantly worrying that I was doing something that would harm my baby (the amount of googling that took place in those pregnancy months was impressive) and being concerned that all fun and adventure were gone from my life forever, I was also worried what becoming a mother would do to my creativity and my ability to write. In her book, Black Milk: On the Conflicting Demands of Writing, Creativity, and Motherhood, author Elif Shafak wrote about her own struggle between being a writer and being a mother.

My vocation as a novelist thrives upon solitude. In almost all areas of art one has to work with other people during the creative process… But not fiction writers. For weeks, months and sometimes years on end, we retreat into the novels we write; we stay inside that imaginary cocoon surrounded by imaginary characters, writing destinies, thinking we are God… Self-absorption and an inflated ego are the two most harmful side effects of our profession.”

Would I still be able to write, to create, once I became a mother? Or would I have to let go of that self-absorption and inflated ego so necessary to this work in the process of becoming a mother?

This pull between the needs of creativity and the demands of parenthood has long been a popular topic with writers. Recently, Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings highlighted a book dedicated to the subject. Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids by Meghan Daum gets to the heart of what many writers feel about the decision to have kids or not.

No young woman aspiring to a literary career could ignore the fact that the women writers of highest achievement, women like Jane Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, did not have children… Doris Lessing declared herself “not the best person” to raise the two young children she left behind when she moved from southern Africa to London to pursue her career. Why? “There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.”

– Sigrid Nunez

As evidenced by my total lack of posting or social media interaction over the last year, pregnancy obviously did have a profound effect on my writing. I found it difficult to know what to say. Suddenly I was thinking in terms of being a mother rather than simply being myself. What would my child think of what I was writing? How would my decision to publish one thing over another effect him or her in the future? Once my son was born, it became a problem of finding the time as much as anything else, and of not feeling guilty for spending that time with a pen instead of him. It was overwhelming to the point that I quit writing all together. But the urge never left me. In fact, having my son made me want to write even more, to capture all the new thoughts and emotions that have flooded into my life.

Now, with a beautiful seven week old boy sleeping peacefully beside me, I have finally found my voice again. But I find it has changed. I’m no longer the person I was before, but I’m okay with that.

Is being both mother and writer going to be a challenge? Of course. But now that I’m here, now that I can call myself both mother and writer, I wouldn’t have it any other way. This baby has given me new eyes with which to see the world and I’m happy for the change. I’m looking forward to exploring both my inner and outer worlds from this new vantage point.

I’m looking forward to a continued becoming.

The Book World is Your Oyster

April 11, 2014 By admin 1 Comment

I think most readers (and writers) fall into one of two camps. They are either plot people or character people. Plot people like things in a book to carry on the way they are supposed to. They know the steps of the Hero’s Journey by heart, even if they’ve never heard of it. Endings are very important to plot people – if the ending is not a satisfying one, the plot-oriented reader will not be satisfied. Character people want to empathize with the people of the book. They want the character to become as real to them as their best friends. It doesn’t matter so much to character people if the book has a satisfying ending. They are much more interested in how the character grows and changes throughout the book.

There’s a third category, of course, the people who read mostly for the setting. They don’t get mentioned often in writing books and the like. But they are out there. When these people open a book they want to imagine themselves walking dark alleys, watching spaceships fly above their heads, or getting sand stuck between their toes on a sandy beach.

I love realistic and captivating characters. And I love a good plot that pulls me along so fast I don’t want to put the book down. But what I really read for is to get lost in a world that is not my own. I’m definitely a setting person. I want to walk the dunes of Arrakis, drink the potion Alice picks up, sit around the campfire with McCrae and Call. I want to see the gray caps of Ambergris scurrying down the street.

There is nothing quite like the pleasure of entering into a new world I’ve never before experienced. The thrill of finding new places to visit will have me hunting down books for the rest of my life.

I guess my point is this – the next time you’re enjoying a lightning-fast plot or delving deep into a character’s psyche, take a mental step back and let yourself appreciate that unique world the author has created for you. Because really, it’s a world that only exists in your own mind, at the time that you are reading. That particular world, the words the author has chosen to present a picture and the way your individual brain interprets that picture, is something special, something that exists nowhere else.

Do you have a favorite book world? What made it so special to you? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below!

Picasso and Mastery

March 17, 2014 By admin 3 Comments

In 2012 my husband and I visited Spain and spent a few days in Barcelona. The buzz of old-world art was intoxicating – being surrounded by the surreal architecture of Gaudi, the art of Miro and Goya and Picasso – I came away inspired to create. The most memorable part of the trip for me was our visit to the Picasso Museum, an entire building devoted to one of my favorite artists. I learned recently that Picasso completed over 135,000 works in his lifetime, an absolutely outrageous number to contemplate. But having walked through the museum, seen all of the sketches and practice pieces he did before creating any one of his masterpieces, I can believe it.

Gaudi - Barcelona — A Gaudi Rooftop – Barcelona

The biggest takeaway for me was just how much Picasso practiced before he even began working on a piece and how that practice was key in his absolute mastery – not only of painting but of sculpture, book illustration, and set and costume design. Without dozens or even hundreds of sketches Les Demoiselles d’Avignon or The Old Guitarist wouldn’t exist (you can see some of the sketches he did here. ) Sketches helped him figure out placing, subject, line. I loved seeing all the iterations, all the subtle changes that went into the sketches that preceded the completed piece, how Picasso worked out each and every detail.

Portrait of Picasso, Juan Gris — Portrait of Picasso – Juan Gris

It’s hard to contemplate the equivalent of this sort of practice in writing. One doesn’t normally think of a writer as a sketch-artist, creating a piece over and over again, subtly changing characters, dialog, setting before starting the actual drafting. Most people have a concept of a writer as a person who sits at a keyboard or with a pen and paper and just starts drafting. I’ve had a hard time myself trying to figure out how to apply the lessons I learned from all of Picasso’s experiments.

But even as I’m writing this I’m beginning to see that all the prework I do as a writer – the character sketches, the babbling to myself about what-ifs, the half-formed dialog and scenes, the arrangement and re-arrangement of the pieces of a work – those are like Picasso’s sketches. You sketch as much to practice as to figure out what does and doesn’t work, to find the right combinations that lead to the masterpiece. Without that practice, there can be no mastery.

Editing, then, is a sort of equivalent of the artist adjusting as he is creating the actual piece. Scraping paint off that doesn’t belong, adding shading or changing colors mid-work, eventually leading up to the finished product, much as a writer changes words, scenes, scrapes out the pieces that aren’t working, and tightens the prose. All leading the writer to her own finished product, the final manuscript.

It’s tempting to look at all this struggle, the hours that feel like little is happening, the notes that never make it into a book, the characters lovingly created and then abandoned by the side of the page as waste. I’m extremely guilty of this – if I’m not drafting I feel like I’m wasting my time. But when you look at it compared to what Picasso did, it becomes clear that all this struggle is the thing. It is the lead up to the masterpiece, the work that has to go into mastery.