Mendocino Writers Blog

Bird Banding by Sharman Russell

For the past four years, I’ve helped bird-band in a national MAPS or Monitoring Avian Populations Survey. Below are some notes from my experience….

    For most of the morning, my job is to check the nets and untangle birds. Each net is strung between two poles, thirty-six feet long and nine feet tall, with the bottom of the net high enough so a bird won’t dangle and rest on the ground. Some nets are in shady underbrush, others in dappled light near the riverbank. The birds fly into the mesh, entangling their wings, head, and feet. They stay trapped until a net-runner comes to disentangle them and slip them in a cloth bag. If the bird has an obvious brood patch, the net-runner will put a red clothespin on the bag, indicating that this is a parent taking care of its young and should get priority over other birds. If there are more birds than bird-banders, the cloth bags are hung on a clothesline near the banding table where they wiggle and shake impatiently. Each bird in turn will be taken out of the bag in the “bander’s grip,” its back cupped in the palm of the hand and its head held firmly between second and third finger. Using something like pliers, the bander puts a band around the bird’s leg and notes its species, age, sex, weight, wing length, appearance of breeding patch or cloacae protuberance (where sperm is stored), molting pattern on the wings, and unusual details such as injury or disease. Two tail feathers are pulled out for an isotope study. Swabs are taken for an avian flu study. Ideally, this should all take less than fifty minutes from the time of entanglement to release, so as not to unduly stress the bird. Nets are checked every twenty minutes.

     For me, untangling a bird is not easy. It requires a mental effort somewhat like a dyslexic trying to read. There is a spatial understanding I am supposed to have—from which direction the warbler flew into the net, how it half-bounced out, how it thrashed and fought and turned itself around, which wing got caught, and which shoulder--and from this I am supposed to intuit whether to free the head first or the feet. There is a physical confidence I am supposed to have, pulling firmly at impossibly-thin legs and trusting they will not snap off, feeling the rapidly-beating heart and trusting it will not stop. As my fingers search for invisible strands of nylon tangled in tail feathers or balled around toes, my mind should know what will happen when I move these strands down or up. Meanwhile the bird has its own opinion. Maybe it is not as hard as quantum physics. But it requires a meshing of my mind and body, those two seemingly separate modes. It requires skills I rarely use and have not much cultivated. Untangling a bird from a net makes me feel anxious and triumphant and weirdly centered—as though the coordination of these two separate modes is really, after all, what I am supposed to be doing.
    I concentrate. I pull a few strands. And the Yellow Warbler is free, held firmly in my bander’s grip. Here in my hand, the color of this bird rings like a carillon. This color could power a nuclear reactor, containing all the energy we would ever need in the world.

    That Sunday morning, July 10, we hardly catch anything. A Yellow Warbler, a Lucy’s Warbler, two Red-winged Blackbirds, a Brown-crested Flycatcher, and two Brown-headed Cowbirds. We recapture a Lucy’s Warbler and Blue Grosbeak. We complain about the mosquitoes at Net Nine and count our bites. In birder-language, fondle list refers to those birds that someone has personally handled as a bander. We talk about our fondle list. We don’t have much else to do but talk, and then Sarah does an imitation. She hops and stops and hops and stops and we must guess. Finally, someone says robin. Next Carol does a credible wren. Peter follows with a pigeon. He has all the moves, the back-and-forth neck, the puffing breast. Carol counters with a towhee, jerky, robotic, a little scary. Most of us are laughing quite hard by now at the comedy of someone so large trying to act like 15 ounces. The human body just looks silly hunting for worms. 

On July 16, we have a little more luck, banding three Lesser Goldfinches, a Bewick’s Wren, two Bridled Titmouses, a Black-headed Grosbeak, two Hairy Woodpeckers, a Blue Grosbeak, two Ash-throated Flycatchers, a House Finch, and a Lazuli Bunting. We recapture a Blue Grosbeak.
My personal prize is the male Hairy Woodpecker, which I disentangle from Net Three while holding my breath and thinking good thoughts. Woodpeckers, of course, are always personable with their erect stance, thoughtful probing, and energetic tapping like a very good carpenter going about the business of fixing up your house—fixing up the world. Tap, tap, tap. The Hairy Woodpecker has a white breast, a masked face,  black and white patterned wings, and a red cap. The males incubate the eggs at night, the females in the day. My Hairy Woodpecker angles his head, tries to peck me, and looks annoyed at the interruption. He has work to do.

Monsoon Meditation by Sharman Russell--presenter at 2009 conference

May 26, 2009

It rained this Memorial Day weekend, three-quarters inch for a total of one and one half inches for the entire year. The spring here in the Gila Valley has been dry, dry, dry. Already we are talking about the monsoons, when they will come, and how much we long for them to come. This year, right in the very middle of monsoon season, I will be on the Mendocino Coast—and I am very much looking forward to that new place with its new weather.
For anyone interested in weather, the democracy of clouds, Quakerism, and the Transcendentalists—here is what I wrote concerning a monsoon season only a few years ago.
        *    *    *    *
Commonly, the thunderclouds build up in the afternoon, growing darker and heavier until they drop their burden like a woman throwing water from a saucepan, hard and focused on a few choice spots, with flashes of lightning to make the humans run to shut down their computers. We hope to have rain now in the Gila Valley every day for some sixty days. We hope for the majority of our annual, meager twelve inches of rain, and we are always anxious that we might get less, that the rains will not be good this year or may not come at all.

The skies are tremendous, the clouds huge and masted flat-bottomed ships. Fleet after fleet set out for conquest. Majesty embodied. This is true democracy, beauty for everyone. You don’t have to be rich or successful or good. You don’t have to live by the ocean or in the middle of wilderness. This is drop-dead gorgeous scenery, the ephemeral version of prime real estate. This could be your ticket to a mystical experience, and the show runs through the rest of summer, almost every day. This is a grandeur that most of us, most of the time, barely notice, looking up and then away, intent on some errand.

Cumulus clouds form when the sun heats the earth. Packets of warm air rise from the ground, cool, and condense. The cloud’s flat base is the level where condensation begins, as the rest of the air continues to rise into stacks of  puffy white balls. Fair-weather cumulus often line up in cloud streets, clouds on a string stretching hundreds of miles, clouds following each other like ducklings. They live for five, ten, thirty minutes. They are low, perhaps a mile high, and small, perhaps a city block.
In the monsoon season, however, in less stable conditions, these packets of warm air rise through rapidly dropping temperatures, and the cloud develops higher and more vertically, with peaks and towering cliff walls. Inside the cloud, there is further rising and falling, condensation, coalescence, until water droplets become heavy enough to fall. In cloud language, the word nimbus means rain, and a cumulus cloud has just become a cumulonimbus, perhaps seven miles in height and several miles wide. High-altitude winds shear its top, the anvil from which trails of ice crystals spin out in thin, fibrous wisps. A cowboy might call these cirrus clouds mare’s tails. Electrical energy builds up as water and ice particles are repeatedly split and separated. Suddenly there is a flash, brightness, cracks, and rumbles. The force of ten Hiroshima-sized bombs can be released in a single thunderstorm. The Greeks were not wrong to imagine gods.

I walk Sacaton Mesa surrounded by cloud streets, cloud turrets, a small cloud East Asian art museum, cloud doorways arched and dissolving. It is architecture on the move. A storm builds in the east. The cloud cliffs grow taller. The prow of a ship crashes into another. Already there is rain over the Mogollon Mountains, the line clear between where water is falling and where it is not. Already I should turn back and hurry home if I do not want to get soaking wet. 

I feel what the Transcendentalists might have called a correspondence. This beauty is not a doorway into something better. This beauty is my other half. This sky, this majesty, is my other self. I feel the yearning to reunite, join with the sky. In some way, we reflect each other. I am transparent, and the clouds pass through me. I have felt this before on Sacaton Mesa, and I am careful now not to get too excited or try and hold on to the moment with words. The Quaker tradition of silence works best. There is something under the words. There is something calm and whole under the words.

Notes on Self Publishing--by Terena Scott 2009 Confernce Presenter

If the Self-Published Author was a Musician, She’d be a Rock Star

                                           

By Terena Scott

Why is there so much stigma around self-published authors, and yet a self-recorded musician is praised as a creative entrepreneur? Any fledgling, unsigned musician with “Garageband” can make a demo and post it on MySpace. No one looks down on them for doing so; in fact, many great bands have started out underground, collecting a following before signing a record deal.

     It isn't just bands who are allowed to self-produce; writing and producing your own short film is considered cool. Self-publishing the novel you've given five years of your life to is considered pathetic.
     Why does writing have to be legitimized by a publisher while music and movies are allowed to be independent? Is writing so hallowed that it takes finding a golden ticket to be admitted into its league of glorious prose?

     What makes writing so special?

     I once thought that self-published work must be inferior, just as many people still believe; if the book was any good, it would be bought by a "real" publisher. Now that I am a “real” publisher, I’ve discovered that the reasons people self-publish are far more complicated than they couldn’t find a publisher. Many writers love the control self-publishing gives them. The author makes all of the decisions and keeps all the earnings. She decides how the book will look and how it will be marketed; for control nuts, it's the only way to go. Others might dream of being discovered by a big publishing company, but rather than sit around and wait for that day to come, they self-publish their book and start finding readers. Many self-published books are just too niche oriented or controversial for a publisher to be willing to take a risk on. And sometimes the book really is just plain awful, but the author believes in her book so much she is willing to stake her life savings on it. You have admire that kind of dedication.

     After publishing Laura Fogg’s book, Traveling Blind; Life Lessons from Unlikely Teachers, I decided to write a hand book for people interested in starting their own press. I self-published What You Need to Know to Be a Pro: The Start-Up Business Guide for Publishers, because it seemed ridiculous to ask someone else to publish it for me, like I was ashamed of the work my own press produced. But self-publishing my book groups me with self-published authors, which in the hierarchy of the book world, drops me to a lower status, regardless of the fact I am one of those “real” publishers. Does starting my own press and self-publishing my book make me a loser, or an entrepreneur?
     If I had started a band, I’d be a punk rock star.

Terena Scott is the owner/publisher of Medusa’s Muse Press, an indy press located in Ukiah, Calif, and is the author of What You Need to Know to Be a Pro: The Business Start-Up Guide for Publishers. She is a play write, essayist, and mom. Read her blog at www.medusasmuse.blogspot.com      

Gate 22--- Poem by Ellen Bass

Gate C22
 
At gate C22 in the

Portland

airport
a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed
a woman arriving from

Orange

County

.
They kissed and kissed and kissed. Long after
the other passengers clicked the handles of their carry-ons
and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking,
the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other
like he’d just staggered off the boat at Ellis Island,
like she’d been released at last from ICU, snapped
out of a coma, survived bone cancer, made it down
from Annapurna in only the clothes she was wearing.
 
Neither of them was young. His beard was gray.
She carried a few extra pounds you could imagine
her saying she had to lose. But they kissed lavish
kisses like the ocean in the early morning,
the way it gathers and swells, sucking
each rock under, swallowing it
again and again. We were all watching—
passengers waiting for the delayed flight
to San Jose, the stewardesses, the pilots,
the aproned woman icing Cinnabons, the man selling
sunglasses. We couldn’t look away. We could
taste the kisses crushed in our mouths.
 
But the best part was his face. When he drew back
and looked at her, his smile soft with wonder, almost
as though he were a mother still open from giving birth,
as your mother must have looked at you, no matter
what happened after—if she beat you or left you or
you’re lonely now—you once lay there, the vernix
not yet wiped off, and someone gazed at you
as if you were the first sunrise seen from the Earth.
The whole wing of the airport hushed,
all of us trying to slip into that woman’s middle-aged body,
her plaid Bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse, glasses,
little gold hoop earrings, tilting our heads up.

Notes/Poem by Robert McDowell presenter at 2009 conference

   Acrostic: A Path To Gratitude

 

 

 

Poetry as spiritual practice embodies gratitude and evokes it. Living at the fast pace that most of us do, it’s easy to forget the people, animals, places, occasions and things we’re grateful for. I sit down to recite my poems and prayers and meditate, but my mind is agitated. I got up fifteen minutes later than I usually do. My ten-year-old daughter woke up sluggish and mopes through her getting-ready-for-school routine while my fifteen-year-old son chomps at the bit to be going. At last I’m finished and we dash to the car. If my son doesn’t get to his school in six minutes he won’t have a lunch today. Without saying so, I already know that my daughter will be ten minutes late to her school—again, which will irritate Doreen in the front office and her teacher, Camille. Driving them to school takes me thirty minutes roundtrip. Along the way I worry about the price of gas and my blood pressure. I feel guilty that I may be letting my kids down.

Then, usually as I’m nearing my driveway, I catch myself. What else, I ask, can I beat myself up about this morning?

If you’ve experienced episodes just like that, isn’t it wonderful? Isn’t it just like waking up, really waking up? There’s the waking up I do when I open my eyes (my outer eyes) and swing my legs out of bed and stumble into the bathroom. And then there’s the inner eye-opening, waking up that comes when I stop myself and say, “Wait a minute! I ‘m here, right here, right now! What am I doing worrying and fretting and working myself into a lather over schedules, my hair, the way my clothes look (or the way my kids’ clothes and hair look). Does my anxiety change anything? Who benefits from it?

 

Not I, certainly! Not my kids or friends or co-workers. Everyone picks up on anxiety, on negative energy, and the self-preservation mechanism causes emotional retreat. People do this to protect themselves, to save themselves from being consumed by someone else’s bad experience. And shouldn’t they? Of course they should! Are they betraying someone, disrespecting relationships? Of course not! They’re doing what comes naturally, reacting against the smell of fear.

In my spiritual core, I know that fear has one goal—to retard my progress, even to destroy me. Through spiritual practice I’ve learned to respect my fear, to befriend it and sometimes turn it into something positive. When that happens I’m grateful. I’m thankful for the insight, for the softening, for the opening up to the moment I’m living, which is after all the only moment I can be sure of.

So, what is it that makes you grateful? How do you honor gratitude in your spiritual practice?

Writing an acrostic poem can be one way you do it. How? Think of the people you love, who love you. Pick one and write her name (or his name) down the left side of your paper. Each letter of your loved one’s name becomes the first letter of each line of your poem.  Here, for example, is an acrostic poem that I’ve just written:

 

Dawn is a pretty time to feel you near

After so many seductive phantoms

Nodded all night, saying come

Away with us, for-

Get your morning star and moon, your

Eden with its green, calm core.

Rant with us! Strap yourself to illusions! Be

Hysterical and poisonous, like us!  Then I see you

And just like that I stop,

Refocused in a clear place,

Delighting in your company.

That’s enough. It’s all I need or see.

 

First letters can inspire us. They can act like cheerleaders, icebreakers, road signs. Like any poem, we can work on an acrostic for a while, put it away, and come back to it when we feel like it. Because poems are part of us, they are always there to greet us. All we have to do is look.

Write acrostics whenever you feel like it, and sometimes when you feel stunted or blocked or emotionally dry, force yourself to write one. It’s a form of play, and it nourishes the soul. Include your favorite acrostic poems in your daily practice and observe how they deepen your experience of love and gratitude.

 

           

If You Knew--- Poem by Ellen Bass

If You Knew

 
What if you knew you'd be the last
to touch someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theater, tearing them,
giving back the ragged stubs,
you might take care to touch that palm,
brush your fingertips
along the life line's crease.
 
When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase
too slowly through the airport, when
the car in front of me doesn't signal,
when the clerk at the pharmacy
won't say Thank you, I don't remember
they're going to die.
 
A friend told me she'd been with her aunt.
They'd just had lunch and the waiter,
a young gay man with plum black eyes,
joked as he served the coffee, kissed
her aunt's powdered cheek when they left.
Then they walked half a block and her aunt
dropped dead on the sidewalk.
 
How close does the dragon's spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?

 

by Ellen Bass

Notes on Writing by Gennifer Choldenko, presenter at 2009 conference

I love to write. I love when the words flow from my fingertips. It thrills me when my characters begin to talk to me and I can’t type fast enough to get their dialogue down. I adore polishing each sentence until it has just the rhythm and cadence; the snap, crackle, pop I’m looking for. There’s an endorphin high that comes when a really good idea pops into my head. It’s easily as wonderful as German Chocolate Cake, a ride on an elephant or a trip to Paris.

Maybe because I came out of advertising writing, I don’t have a writing discipline problem. I got used to going to work every day and writing from nine to six so that routine seems normal to me. But it didn’t always. When I first started writing advertising it was really challenging to write all day. I remember confessing to a colleague about how slow and tortured the process was for me. And she said: “It will either get faster and easier or you’ll find something else to do.” Obviously she was right. Writing is like running or weight lifting. You have to develop the muscles for it. It took me a year of writing forty plus hours a week before I found my groove. And now I consider it a really crappy day if I haven’t tucked myself inside my protagonist for the better part of the day.

What’s been more difficult for me in the last few years is balancing marketing writing and the real thing. Marketing writing, as I define it, is speech writing, presentation prep, web site writing, blog writing, Q&A writing, newsletter writing, answering emails etc. I only get so much writing juice every day and I have to manage my time so that I don’t squander the mojo doing marketing writing. Not that marketing writing isn’t important — but I could easily – oh so easily – have no time for the juicy stuff. So what then is my routine like? Generally, I do my creative work first thing and then at the end of the day I answer emails and do marketing writing. But sometimes I’ll answer a few emails first thing to get myself warmed up and then get going on the books. Some weeks I get absolutely no business writing done at all and my email inbox gets clogged with red exclamation marks. Then, I’ll have to take the day off from my book and get caught up. But I try not to let that happen, because it makes my characters stamp their little feet and bang their little fists on the inside of my skull.

While I’m writing, I do have little rules around the internet. I’m allowed to check my email, but not return it unless it’s from my editor or agent and I’m not allowed to surf the net. I try to keep a list of things I need to research, and then at the end of the day I’ll go on line and find what I need. I’m not rigid about this discipline, but I find it to be a useful guide. I know a lot of authors do word or page counts. I’m a huge fan of the work of both Linda Sue Park and Katherine Paterson, so you can imagine my delight when I had dinner with Linda a year or so ago and she told me the writing routine she learned from Katherine Paterson. As Linda explained this to me, you start your writing day by revising yesterday’s pages and then generate two new pages. That’s it. I decided to give it a try. And as it turns out I write many more than two pages a day. In fact, I blew through that novel. Whoa. Fastest novel I’ve ever written. The only problem was . . . . the novel stunk. Yep. Big time bad. And not the kind of cruddy first draft bad that Annie Lamott talks about in her terrific book Bird by Bird either. Does this mean I’m going to dump this work? Nope. But because I went so far with it, before it was ready to be written, the revision process is going to be a lot more like starting over than it will be about building on what I have.

It turns out what works for me is time. I need to make certain I block out uninterrupted hours to write or research whatever novel I am currently working on. The key for me is to feel my way along – like I’ve been dropped in a strange building on an unknown street in a country I’ve never been before in the dead of night– and slowly I must feel my way building the world of my novel as I go. The problem with artificial page generation goals is they encourage me to solve plot and character problems quickly instead of well. What works for me is: trusting myself and my process. What works for me is making sure I keep the world and its demands at bay so that I have the space I need to write the best books I know how to write.

Gennifer Choldenko http://www.choldenko.com/ Gennifer Choldenko’s first novel, Notes from a Liar and Her Dog, was a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year and a California Book Award winner. Her second novel, Al Capone Does My Shirts, was a Newbery Honor Book and a School Library Journal, Kirkus, and Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year. Al Capone Does My Shirts was short-listed for the Carnegie in the United Kingdom and has been on the New York Times, Booksense, and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists. If a Tree Falls at Lunch Period, Gennifer’s third novel, was called: “one of the funniest (kids will) read this year” by the Washington Post. Her newest novel, Al Capone Shines My Shoes is due out from Dial in September and she is hard at work on what she thinks is the last Alcatraz novel. Gennifer’s novels and picture books have been translated into 11 languages.

May Mendocino Coast Writers Conference Newsletter

The May issue of the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference Newsletter, containing the latest news about the 2009 conference, is now on-line.

Go to the May 2009 newsletter now

California Writers Club on Mendocino Coast?

The California Writers Club is the nation's oldest professional club for writers, founded in 1909 by Jack London, the poet George Sterling and short story writer Herman Whitaker, among others. Today it’s a nonprofit education corporation with seventeen branches in California, that among other things, offers its 1100+ members a group policy for health insurance. Branches hold regular meetings with educational speakers and opportunities to network. Molly Dwyer is looking to start a branch of the California Writers Club on the Mendocino coast. This means getting a core group of at least eight writers together and meeting, taking minutes and setting up the club’s structure over a six-month period, and then applying to the central governing body for official branch status. Both published and non-published writers are welcome. If you’d like more information or are interested in getting involved, please contact molly at molly@mollydwyer.com.