Collaboration

For the year 2012 my mom and I designed our own block exchange. We'd done this before. When I first started quilting, in 1992 after moving from California to Minnesota, she sent me fabric, and eventually suggested we exchange 6" blocks. She was then, and she is now, a more proficient, technically adept sewist than I am, and being in an exchange with her pushed me to work harder.

Those blocks eventually became a quilt, one that Cora has claimed as her own (as has happened with so many things, especially those that are handmade). Many of my blocks in that exchange were sewn by hand, and my first attempts at applique are in that quilt.

So, here we were, about 20 years later, undertaking another exchange. We decided we (she in California and I in North Dakota) would make star blocks - any design, any size, so long as they were stars. We would use neutral backgrounds - anything from white to tan. Any colors were fair game; our color preferences have quite a bit of overlap, so this was no great risk. We would make two the same - keep one and mail the other. We figured that around about August we would be able to see where more of one color or another were needed to create more of a bridge or connection.

Each month brought new bursts of color, exciting envelopes to open. One or the other of us might fall behind one month or another, but all in all we kept up with each other. She is still a better sewist.

So, January 2013 found me with 24 star blocks ranging from 4.5" to 18" square. I waited a few months, and then in March I started thinking about layout and how to deal with all these different sizes. I laid them out on the floor, sketched out a plan, and designed a title block, rather than a label. I named my quilt "some of us are looking at the stars" after the Oscar Wilde quote: "All of us are lying in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." I used alphabet stamps and fabric ink and a little embroidery.

This past Sunday I had a sewing date with a friend and finished putting the quilt top together. I stuck mainly to my plan, though due to some faulty measurements I had adjustments to make along the way. I had planned to use some spacer blocks made up of half-square triangles that would be trimmed as needed, giving them a wonky feel, and I really like the way that turned out.

I love this quilt top - I love its story. I love the way I see my mom in her blocks. I love the way our blocks fit together. I love it when Mom and I are able to make beautiful things together.

This weekend's project

Well, there is never only one project, is there? Never in this house, anyway.

But the one on my mind is the project of putting together a new chapbook manuscript to send off to a competition on Monday. I had planned to send the one I already have together, but a little searching through the records revealed that I had already submitted that one two years ago. The judge is different, of course, but maybe the preliminary readers are the same. Better to go with a new one than the same one - that one can go to other competitions this fall.

Earlier this week I went through the poems to see what possible themes I could pull out and have a) enough poems for a chapbook while maintaining b) a cohesive focus. I'm looking at the intersection of two themes - being in the world and explaining/portioning out the world to a child. Because sometimes you can't explain the world, and sometimes you don't want to. Sometimes both.

But then the problem is that eventually you have to - and how do you know, how do you judge correctly, the right time? It is hard enough to explain conventional warfare - how do you even approach the idea of child soldiers? We inch our way into topics, waiting to see how each morsel of information is taken. Last December after the shootings in Newtown I provided minimal information - until it became clear other kids had gone to school with much more information. And then the only thing to do is to talk it through, piece by piece carefully and honestly.

Now that we have such a reader on our hands, a little 7-year-old word-vacuum, curious about everything and always eager to read over my shoulder, this becomes more commonplace. Things on the radio, conversations overheard, newspaper headlines, titles of books around the house, it all works itself into her questions eventually. Meanwhile, there is this space, this small space of time where her understanding of the world is still largely shaped by the information she gets from us. I've never been comfortable with painting too rosy a picture, but I also don't want to plunge her into knowledge she isn't ready for. The calibration of knowledge has been a preoccupation of both my parenting and writing lately, and that is also the space I mean to fill this chapbook.

Irons in the fire

For many years I kept a blog that was more oriented towards my life as a mom - there were posts about teaching and writing and cooking and making things, too, but mostly it was a way to share my daughter's early years with my far-flung family. Now she is seven and starting to say what I should or shouldn't write about her. In her summer class she is keeping her own blog. And I feel it is time to have my own blog again, too.

We moved to North Dakota in the fall of 2010. Starting in a new city is hard - I missed my friends, my church, my teaching, my colleagues, my house, my favorite restaurants, my writing group, and my writing. I often feel like I stopped writing for nearly three years. I have to remind myself that I did NaNoWriMo  each year. I did ScriptFrenzy. I edited scores of essays. I edited a textbook. But I only wrote about four poems.

Now I'm looking at having classes to teach in fall and spring semesters - huge improvement in my outlook! I applied for a ND Council on the Arts grant, and got it. I've found a friend to write and talk writing with. I have a great new editing project that I'm excited about.

A couple weeks ago I looked around and realized how many boxes I never unpacked and how transitional our apartment looks.

I've been burrowing and burrowing, but look, here's light again.