7 Words Meme
Jun. 12th, 2012 10:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjThe meme goes like this: Comment to this post and I will pick seven things I would like you to talk about. They might make sense or be totally random. Then (if you choose) post that list, with your commentary, to your journal. Other people can get lists from you, and the meme merrily perpetuates itself.
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vittoriosa gave me: garden, novelist, kalamazoo, inspiration, music, picnic, welsh.
Garden
I do not have a green thumb. My default gardening style is what I call "unintentional xericulture", i.e., "see what's still growing after you forget to water for most of the summer". But I love to plant and grow things, and back when I spent a few years living in an apartment I discovered that I'm unhappy if I don't have at least a bit of dirt to play with. I love to plan gardens, almost more than I like planting them. I tend to create scale-gridded yard maps so I can design multiple ideas and then keep track of what's planted where. For me, gardens should be both beautiful and useful. I don't have much use for pure "landscaping". But "useful" includes cut flowers. I have a few totem plants that I've accumulated through the years. Roses, of course, for my middle name. (I'm less enamored of trying to grow heather.) Plum trees. When I was a kid, we each had a fruit tree that was "ours" and mine was the plum tree. I fell in love with my current house before discovering that it had three (3) plum trees on the property. Bay laurel -- I wish I'd been successful in rooting a cutting from the laurel tree I had in Oakland. I grew it from a gallon pot to a tree that had to be pruned ruthlessly to keep it from being two stories tall. Back almost 20 years ago when I moved into the back unit in the Oakland house I started tackling the wilderness that was the back yard. Then my life shifted and I decided to go for a PhD and did some hard thinking about how much work I wanted to put into that yard given that I might end up going for a teaching career and moving somewhere else. I came around to a philosophy that you have to plant your garden wherever and whenever you are. Gardens can't wait. You may be planting it for someone else to enjoy ... and someone else may be planting one for you. But you can't hold back and wait for "some day". Plant your garden as if you're going to live there forever, but don't let the roots bind you if the time comes to leave. My property here in Concord has a quarter acre of land and I have lots of plans for the garden.
Novelist
Interesting that it's specifically "novelist" and not "writer" or "author" because each would mean different things to me. I am a writer in much the same way that I am a human being, or I am an American or I am an omnivore. It may be part essence, part chance, and part choice, but it's an intrinsic part of everything I am and do. But I aspire to become a novelist. Being a novelist is something I would do rather than be.
I've always been a story maker. Not necessarily a story teller -- many of them were for me alone. When I first started writing novel-like objects, around about high school, I would have told you that I had to put them on paper to get them out of my head, because the stories were making my head too crowded. At the time, I wasn't actually very crazy about having other people read my stories. I wasn't so much self-conscious as overly sensitive to self-censoring or self-editing to avoid drawing attention to myself. The year after I graduated high school, when I had an empty year (because we were living in Germany that year and I'd graduated early to avoid having to finish after a gap), I really started writing in volume. I also acquired my first serious reader, my youngest brother (who, to some extent, was simply famished for English-language reading material). We had a deal: once a week I'd hand over everything I'd written that week (because otherwise he had a tendency to hang over me waiting for the next page), he'd read it, and he wouldn't provide any feedback except to keep demanding the next installment. That was all the weight of critique I could handle at the time, the knowledge that a reader enjoyed it enough to keep reading. (The other part of the deal was that I'd dedicate my first book to him, which is why he got the dedication for Baby Names for Dummies. I never promised it would be a novel!)
Eventually my ambition shifted from simply getting the stories out of my head to writing the stories I really wish I'd had available to read for all those years. And that, my friends, is why my novel projects all tend to be fantasy/historical lesbian romances. I don't care about writing the Great American Novel; I don't necessarily care about writing a best-seller (although I wouldn't complain). But I'd like for a younger me out there to be able to walk into a bookstore and buy my stories and think, "Wow -- I can have adventures and a happy ending!" I'm old fashioned enough to want hard-copy publication by a serious publishing house. I may, in the end, settle for something short of that in order to match my novels to the audience they're meant for. But I'm confident that some day I will become a novelist, because I'm a damned good writer and I have some fun stories to tell.
Kalamazoo
What can I say? Kalamazoo is my Pennsic. Kalamazoo is my "next year in Jerusalem". Kalamazoo is one of my annual family reunions. Kalamazoo restoreth my soul. For those who live under a rock, Kalamazoo is the International Congress of Medieval Studies, held annually (on my birthday!) in Kalamazoo, Michigan. If my memory is accurate, I first attended in 2001, a couple years before I finished my dissertation. By that time I knew I wasn't headed for an academic career. (I just couldn't see putting in the years of short-term contracts hoping for a tenure track eventually, given the age I was starting at.) And while the Congress is very definitely an academic conference, it has pockets of specialties that are very welcoming to "independent scholars". I not only recognized it as a niche where I could continue doing academic work as part of a community, but I enjoyed one of my rare successful entries into a new social circle among the textile & clothing geeks there. I think the only year I've missed since I started going was last year when I was (literally) in the middle of closing the sale of the Oakland house at the time.
Inspiration
Gee, this one is actually a toughie. I'm not sure I stop to think much about inspiration. If we're talking about external inspiration (in the "X inspires me to do Y" sense) it isn't really a driving force in my life. Mind you, there are a number of people I find enormously inspiring! (I'm looking at you,vittoriosa and you, thread_walker among others. And my mother was the most inspiring person I ever knew.) But even when I'd like to have that inspiration push me to create something in their honor, I'm not so good about following through. Honestly, most of my creativity is extremely selfish in its seeds, although often generous in its by-products.
If we're talking in more abstract terms about "what sorts of topics inspire me to do/make things" I'd have to say that it's all about cataloging, organizing, and analyzing data. When you look at most of my creative projects, it boils down to: I want to identify all the data that exists about Topic X, sort it out, slice and dice it, tag it, color code it, sort it some more, throw it at some graphs and spreadsheets, and then stand there muttering, "Whoa man, look at all the colors!" That's what the Welsh names project is all about. That's actually what the Surviving Garments project is about (although making costumes is nice too). Heck, it's what my dissertation was all about. And, fortunately for me, it's something that I often end up doing in my day job, where they pay me nicely to do it.
A lot of my project-inspiration is fairly random. Any number of projects have started from a random observation that made me go "Huh!" Next thing I knew I was knee deep in art clips and spreadsheets.
Music
I grew up in a musical family. My mother was an instrumental music teacher in the city schools and we were pretty much expected to pick up an instrument in the same way we were expected to read books. But it was a bit more pervasive than that. My parents would invite friends over for chamber music parties. A few doors down the street, my friend Nancy's dad was the head of the school district music program and was prone to doing things like putting together a neighborhood children's orchestra during the summer (just for fun). All those things your parents say to get you to practice regularly? "Some day you'll be glad you put in an hour every day because you'll be good enough to have fun with music for the rest of your life"? I hate to say it, but they're right. I've never had any interest in being a professional musician, but I'm glad that I had a good enough grounding to be able to enjoy being a musical dilettante without a lot of extra work. I was part of a folk/filk band for a few years. We even recorded an album. I started writing songs (that I was willing to perform in public) in college and had some small success in the filking world before moving on to other interests. I keep thinking I should get back to doing more music (and not just playing with a pick-up SCA dance band a couple times a year) but it's not in the current priority rotation.
My motto concerning music: Music is far too important to be left to professionals. I think society is much richer for having a strong amateur musical culture, and even if I'd rather it involve more analog instruments (rather than digital) I'm glad to see the pendulum swinging back in that direction.
Picnic
I'm assuming this word is in reference to my Historic Picnic Project. This is a perfect example of accidental inspiration. A chain of accidental inspiration, actually. Back in '81 when I happened to be in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, I was sketching various interesting objects and images and one of them was a "pastoral" tapestry, which I noted primarily for some interesting costume features. But many years later when I was answering a random question about people wearing tools and objects hung from belts, I recalled this image because the shepherds, in fact, were wearing an assortment of odd objects tied to a distinctive type of pouch ... or belt ... or something between the two. That led to a long cataloging-analyzing-synthesizing project on a distinctive style of pouch/belt associated with shepherds in certain genres of medieval art. I'm getting to the picnic angle. Really. As I was collecting images of "shepherds" in art, another repeating motif became apparent, which was a group of what appeared to be well-born people playing at dressing up like shepherds and having a picnic lunch out in the countryside. This set of images then popped to mind when I was brainstorming seed-topics for an experimental "collaborative art" project to see if I could capture some of the creative dynamics that had developed during the Perfectly Period Feast project. And ... well, the rest of the idea is expanded on at the Picnic Project website.
The Picnic Project was hampered by two things: its launch coincided with the beginnings of my decision to move from Oakland to Concord, so during the period when I thought I'd be guiding it along, I was distracted and worn down by a lot of other things. Also, rather predictably, I was fine on the initial idea part, but not so good on the follow-through. (Never, never appoint me in charge of something that needs long-term planning and follow-through.) But the Picnic Project was officially a success in that it inspired other people to look into examples of historic picnic-like events, and became part of the inspiration for the Gaston Phoebus hunt-picnic (which, alas, I didn't attend as I had a wedding to go to instead). Since the Picnic Project was designed to be free-form and more of a "process" than a specific end-point, there's no reason I can't pick it up and run it a bit further at some point.
Welsh
I have always had a bit of a knee-jerk avoidance of "running with the crowd". Tell me something's popular and I'll be disposed to dislike it. Show me something everyone is doing and I'll find it boring. So when I started exploring my family tree and discovered that among all my generic northwestern Europe ancestors, the Jones line originated in Wales, my thought was, "That's cool -- now there's a family ancestry that isn't done to death in the US." Yeah, pretty shallow, I suppose. But see my above comments on the random nature of my inspiration. And then in '76 (that same year that we spent in Germany) we bent our touristing through Wales to see if we could turn up any of the sites mentioned in our meagre records of Frances Jones and family. While there, I picked up a little booklet of phrases in Welsh with a bit of description of the language. It caught my interest partly because of that whole "not done to death" thing and partly because it was different enough from the various other languages I'd been exposed to that I wanted to know more. So the next year (when I started college) I picked up a "teach yourself Welsh" book and a dictionary and started exploring the history and language of Wales in the U.C. Davis library. That was also 'round about when I connected with the SCA, so when it came to choosing a culture to base my persona in, I had a natural choice.
Everything else more or less grew out of that. I fell in with the College of Heralds and found that there was a great dearth of available information on historic Welsh naming practices in the SCA and decided to single-handedly remedy that. (Don't laugh too loudly.) Striving for the goal of learning everything there was to be known about medieval Welsh onomastics, I decided I wanted a more formal academic grounding for what I was doing, which was a large part of my decision to go to graduate school, even though my dissertation ended up being on a purely linguistic topic.
And that finishes the seven words.
vittoriosa gave me: garden, novelist, kalamazoo, inspiration, music, picnic, welsh. Garden
I do not have a green thumb. My default gardening style is what I call "unintentional xericulture", i.e., "see what's still growing after you forget to water for most of the summer". But I love to plant and grow things, and back when I spent a few years living in an apartment I discovered that I'm unhappy if I don't have at least a bit of dirt to play with. I love to plan gardens, almost more than I like planting them. I tend to create scale-gridded yard maps so I can design multiple ideas and then keep track of what's planted where. For me, gardens should be both beautiful and useful. I don't have much use for pure "landscaping". But "useful" includes cut flowers. I have a few totem plants that I've accumulated through the years. Roses, of course, for my middle name. (I'm less enamored of trying to grow heather.) Plum trees. When I was a kid, we each had a fruit tree that was "ours" and mine was the plum tree. I fell in love with my current house before discovering that it had three (3) plum trees on the property. Bay laurel -- I wish I'd been successful in rooting a cutting from the laurel tree I had in Oakland. I grew it from a gallon pot to a tree that had to be pruned ruthlessly to keep it from being two stories tall. Back almost 20 years ago when I moved into the back unit in the Oakland house I started tackling the wilderness that was the back yard. Then my life shifted and I decided to go for a PhD and did some hard thinking about how much work I wanted to put into that yard given that I might end up going for a teaching career and moving somewhere else. I came around to a philosophy that you have to plant your garden wherever and whenever you are. Gardens can't wait. You may be planting it for someone else to enjoy ... and someone else may be planting one for you. But you can't hold back and wait for "some day". Plant your garden as if you're going to live there forever, but don't let the roots bind you if the time comes to leave. My property here in Concord has a quarter acre of land and I have lots of plans for the garden.
Novelist
Interesting that it's specifically "novelist" and not "writer" or "author" because each would mean different things to me. I am a writer in much the same way that I am a human being, or I am an American or I am an omnivore. It may be part essence, part chance, and part choice, but it's an intrinsic part of everything I am and do. But I aspire to become a novelist. Being a novelist is something I would do rather than be.
I've always been a story maker. Not necessarily a story teller -- many of them were for me alone. When I first started writing novel-like objects, around about high school, I would have told you that I had to put them on paper to get them out of my head, because the stories were making my head too crowded. At the time, I wasn't actually very crazy about having other people read my stories. I wasn't so much self-conscious as overly sensitive to self-censoring or self-editing to avoid drawing attention to myself. The year after I graduated high school, when I had an empty year (because we were living in Germany that year and I'd graduated early to avoid having to finish after a gap), I really started writing in volume. I also acquired my first serious reader, my youngest brother (who, to some extent, was simply famished for English-language reading material). We had a deal: once a week I'd hand over everything I'd written that week (because otherwise he had a tendency to hang over me waiting for the next page), he'd read it, and he wouldn't provide any feedback except to keep demanding the next installment. That was all the weight of critique I could handle at the time, the knowledge that a reader enjoyed it enough to keep reading. (The other part of the deal was that I'd dedicate my first book to him, which is why he got the dedication for Baby Names for Dummies. I never promised it would be a novel!)
Eventually my ambition shifted from simply getting the stories out of my head to writing the stories I really wish I'd had available to read for all those years. And that, my friends, is why my novel projects all tend to be fantasy/historical lesbian romances. I don't care about writing the Great American Novel; I don't necessarily care about writing a best-seller (although I wouldn't complain). But I'd like for a younger me out there to be able to walk into a bookstore and buy my stories and think, "Wow -- I can have adventures and a happy ending!" I'm old fashioned enough to want hard-copy publication by a serious publishing house. I may, in the end, settle for something short of that in order to match my novels to the audience they're meant for. But I'm confident that some day I will become a novelist, because I'm a damned good writer and I have some fun stories to tell.
Kalamazoo
What can I say? Kalamazoo is my Pennsic. Kalamazoo is my "next year in Jerusalem". Kalamazoo is one of my annual family reunions. Kalamazoo restoreth my soul. For those who live under a rock, Kalamazoo is the International Congress of Medieval Studies, held annually (on my birthday!) in Kalamazoo, Michigan. If my memory is accurate, I first attended in 2001, a couple years before I finished my dissertation. By that time I knew I wasn't headed for an academic career. (I just couldn't see putting in the years of short-term contracts hoping for a tenure track eventually, given the age I was starting at.) And while the Congress is very definitely an academic conference, it has pockets of specialties that are very welcoming to "independent scholars". I not only recognized it as a niche where I could continue doing academic work as part of a community, but I enjoyed one of my rare successful entries into a new social circle among the textile & clothing geeks there. I think the only year I've missed since I started going was last year when I was (literally) in the middle of closing the sale of the Oakland house at the time.
Inspiration
Gee, this one is actually a toughie. I'm not sure I stop to think much about inspiration. If we're talking about external inspiration (in the "X inspires me to do Y" sense) it isn't really a driving force in my life. Mind you, there are a number of people I find enormously inspiring! (I'm looking at you,
vittoriosa and you, thread_walker among others. And my mother was the most inspiring person I ever knew.) But even when I'd like to have that inspiration push me to create something in their honor, I'm not so good about following through. Honestly, most of my creativity is extremely selfish in its seeds, although often generous in its by-products.If we're talking in more abstract terms about "what sorts of topics inspire me to do/make things" I'd have to say that it's all about cataloging, organizing, and analyzing data. When you look at most of my creative projects, it boils down to: I want to identify all the data that exists about Topic X, sort it out, slice and dice it, tag it, color code it, sort it some more, throw it at some graphs and spreadsheets, and then stand there muttering, "Whoa man, look at all the colors!" That's what the Welsh names project is all about. That's actually what the Surviving Garments project is about (although making costumes is nice too). Heck, it's what my dissertation was all about. And, fortunately for me, it's something that I often end up doing in my day job, where they pay me nicely to do it.
A lot of my project-inspiration is fairly random. Any number of projects have started from a random observation that made me go "Huh!" Next thing I knew I was knee deep in art clips and spreadsheets.
Music
I grew up in a musical family. My mother was an instrumental music teacher in the city schools and we were pretty much expected to pick up an instrument in the same way we were expected to read books. But it was a bit more pervasive than that. My parents would invite friends over for chamber music parties. A few doors down the street, my friend Nancy's dad was the head of the school district music program and was prone to doing things like putting together a neighborhood children's orchestra during the summer (just for fun). All those things your parents say to get you to practice regularly? "Some day you'll be glad you put in an hour every day because you'll be good enough to have fun with music for the rest of your life"? I hate to say it, but they're right. I've never had any interest in being a professional musician, but I'm glad that I had a good enough grounding to be able to enjoy being a musical dilettante without a lot of extra work. I was part of a folk/filk band for a few years. We even recorded an album. I started writing songs (that I was willing to perform in public) in college and had some small success in the filking world before moving on to other interests. I keep thinking I should get back to doing more music (and not just playing with a pick-up SCA dance band a couple times a year) but it's not in the current priority rotation.
My motto concerning music: Music is far too important to be left to professionals. I think society is much richer for having a strong amateur musical culture, and even if I'd rather it involve more analog instruments (rather than digital) I'm glad to see the pendulum swinging back in that direction.
Picnic
I'm assuming this word is in reference to my Historic Picnic Project. This is a perfect example of accidental inspiration. A chain of accidental inspiration, actually. Back in '81 when I happened to be in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, I was sketching various interesting objects and images and one of them was a "pastoral" tapestry, which I noted primarily for some interesting costume features. But many years later when I was answering a random question about people wearing tools and objects hung from belts, I recalled this image because the shepherds, in fact, were wearing an assortment of odd objects tied to a distinctive type of pouch ... or belt ... or something between the two. That led to a long cataloging-analyzing-synthesizing project on a distinctive style of pouch/belt associated with shepherds in certain genres of medieval art. I'm getting to the picnic angle. Really. As I was collecting images of "shepherds" in art, another repeating motif became apparent, which was a group of what appeared to be well-born people playing at dressing up like shepherds and having a picnic lunch out in the countryside. This set of images then popped to mind when I was brainstorming seed-topics for an experimental "collaborative art" project to see if I could capture some of the creative dynamics that had developed during the Perfectly Period Feast project. And ... well, the rest of the idea is expanded on at the Picnic Project website.
The Picnic Project was hampered by two things: its launch coincided with the beginnings of my decision to move from Oakland to Concord, so during the period when I thought I'd be guiding it along, I was distracted and worn down by a lot of other things. Also, rather predictably, I was fine on the initial idea part, but not so good on the follow-through. (Never, never appoint me in charge of something that needs long-term planning and follow-through.) But the Picnic Project was officially a success in that it inspired other people to look into examples of historic picnic-like events, and became part of the inspiration for the Gaston Phoebus hunt-picnic (which, alas, I didn't attend as I had a wedding to go to instead). Since the Picnic Project was designed to be free-form and more of a "process" than a specific end-point, there's no reason I can't pick it up and run it a bit further at some point.
Welsh
I have always had a bit of a knee-jerk avoidance of "running with the crowd". Tell me something's popular and I'll be disposed to dislike it. Show me something everyone is doing and I'll find it boring. So when I started exploring my family tree and discovered that among all my generic northwestern Europe ancestors, the Jones line originated in Wales, my thought was, "That's cool -- now there's a family ancestry that isn't done to death in the US." Yeah, pretty shallow, I suppose. But see my above comments on the random nature of my inspiration. And then in '76 (that same year that we spent in Germany) we bent our touristing through Wales to see if we could turn up any of the sites mentioned in our meagre records of Frances Jones and family. While there, I picked up a little booklet of phrases in Welsh with a bit of description of the language. It caught my interest partly because of that whole "not done to death" thing and partly because it was different enough from the various other languages I'd been exposed to that I wanted to know more. So the next year (when I started college) I picked up a "teach yourself Welsh" book and a dictionary and started exploring the history and language of Wales in the U.C. Davis library. That was also 'round about when I connected with the SCA, so when it came to choosing a culture to base my persona in, I had a natural choice.
Everything else more or less grew out of that. I fell in with the College of Heralds and found that there was a great dearth of available information on historic Welsh naming practices in the SCA and decided to single-handedly remedy that. (Don't laugh too loudly.) Striving for the goal of learning everything there was to be known about medieval Welsh onomastics, I decided I wanted a more formal academic grounding for what I was doing, which was a large part of my decision to go to graduate school, even though my dissertation ended up being on a purely linguistic topic.
And that finishes the seven words.
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Date: 2012-06-15 05:54 am (UTC)musketeers, school, crows, costuming, rain, research, legacy
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Date: 2012-06-15 06:03 am (UTC)feathers, drive, cuisine, house, discipline, roses, drama