Ferns at Soapstone

A month has passed since we left Soapstone, and I am finally ready to say goodbye. Please forgive the lapse in posts – breaking up is hard to do. I know that even escape grows old if it is your daily life, but I hadn’t quite hit the “I’m ready to miss this” moment at Soapstone before we left. What I am (mostly) over missing -  the uninterrupted span of time to write. The daily rituals Kate and I perfected – late mornings of waking to start a fire and stoke a small pot fat with oatmeal, raisins and coconut for our lazy breakfast, trips to Bread and Ocean in Manzanita for coffee and a few good  hours of writing, nighttime in some ocean-side pub for a beer or two and a basket of oysters, and of course, more writing.

I discovered a beautiful thing I’d like to call the One Beer Wonder – poems seemed to just tumble out on their own in the time it took me to polish off a pint of porter. This amounted to 23 new poems during our three week trip, a good number even if poems shouldn’t be quantified. I miss the river and the white noise it made all day and night. I miss spotting coyotes and eagles from the deck of the cabin. I miss the green, green, green of the forest we were blessed to live in.

I know now what a good residency feels like, and I also know that Kate is the best residency mate that any fool could dream up – we got along flawlessly, and helped work each other’s poems into pleasing shapes. The only real bummer of the trip? Kate got sick (from food poisoning, the Noro Virus, or some other evil malady) and the beef stock that she had made the night before illness bore her to the bathroom was promptly put in the freezer. I was pretty excited for Kate and I to make French Onion Soup – but the food you make the night before sickness often gets relegated to the no-eat zone, and this was the case for Kate and the stock.

On a day that I was especially sad over the loss of our magical writing residency, I decided to make some stock of my own to soothe my blues. This stock is an ode to Kate, Soapstone, the coyotes and all the poems we made. Food really is the best way out of sadness, sometimes.

Bones to roast

Beef Stock

Adapted from Gourmet Magazine and Memory

• 4 pounds meaty organic grass fed beef bones (As Kate says, make sure the cow has been hugged to death)
• 2 onions, quartered and left unpeeled
• 2 medium or 1 and a half large carrots, quartered
• 4 fresh flat-leaf parsley sprigs
• 1 fresh thyme bundle (4-5 sprigs)
• 1  bay leaf
• 15 1/2 cups cold water
• 2 celery ribs
• 1 cup dry sherry
• 2 teaspoons salt

Put oven rack in middle position and preheat oven to 450°F.

Spread beef bones, onions, and carrot in a large flameproof roasting pan and roast, turning occasionally, until well browned, about 1 hour.

While shanks roast, wrap parsley, thyme, and bay leaf in kitchen string and tie to make a bouquet garni.

Transfer meat and vegetables to a 6- to 8-quart stockpot. Straddle roasting pan across 2 burners, then add 1 cup sherry and 1 cup water, and deglaze pan by boiling over high heat, stirring and scraping up brown bits, 1 minute. Add deglazing liquid to stockpot along with 14 cups water, celery, salt, and bouquet garni. Bring to a boil and skim froth. Add remaining 1/2 cup water, then bring mixture to a simmer and skim froth. Simmer gently, uncovered, 5 hours.

Pour stock through a fine-mesh sieve into a large bowl, and discard solids. Stock should measure about 8 cups – if you have more than 8 cups, boil until reduced to 8 cups; add water if stock measures less than 8 cups. If using stock right away, skim off and discard fat. If not, cool stock completely, uncovered, before skimming fat (it will be easier to remove when cool), then chill, covered.

Roasted bones

For me, writing is like traveling to multiple dimensions and accidentally coming back very pregnant. When the writing feeling happens, the interstellar me is whisked off to another universe. This wispy version of myself spends the rest of the poem tucking the geography (and iconography) of the place into her pockets so that I can transcribe them through my mostly inert real body. When these two parts of me are rejoined, I’m startled by the big pile of newness that we created. I’m almost always unable to keep writing, and whatever words were born when we got back together just need to take a nap, as far as I can tell.

Sometimes, these poems nap for years. More often, it takes 3-6 months. I check on them every once in awhile to see if they are still breathing, then silently close the nursery drawer.  They have to be able to soothe themselves. If I bring a poem out after 6 months of silence and it is just screaming for attention, I put it away again.

So when Kate misheard my suggestion that we read another person’s poem every night at Soapstone as something like “Let’s read our new poems every night” I was so mortified that I agreed and just ate another oyster. Kate and I are both hard of hearing, which means our time together in poetry group and at this residency is commonly punctuated with “What?” and “Can you say that again?” After years of smiling and nodding through unheard conversations or deftly changing the subject after the third time I’ve asked someone to speak up and I still have absolutely no idea what they are talking about, I’m prone to giving my hearing impaired friends license to re-interpret my words. Some of the best things I’ve ever heard were just the hallucinations of my damaged and dreamy ears. When considering my need to let poems rest for large amounts of time before they are allowed to see the light of day, I do get annoyed at my fussy self. What is all this nonsense about alternate universes and treating poems like breathing creatures that need to form their independence?

Not all of my talents are invested in being a total weirdo, however – I am also remarkably good at procrastinating, and inversely, at being rash. A few days ago, Kate asked if I wanted to email her a few poems so that she could print them out.  So that we could workshop them.  Days after they were written.  I made some sort of semi-plausible excuse about needing to look them over, because they really weren’t poems yet. A couple of days ago, when we were in the freezing cold café with the virgins and jazz music, I looked over one of her poems, but whoops! none of mine were printed. The night before last, I managed to get really involved in an abstract embroidery project I am working on, and we missed our window for the planned workshop. Then, yesterday morning, without having tried to make them into actual poems, I gave up. I woke a few of them up, and escorted them through the printing process.

They did look a little dazed, and one of them seemed to be fighting constipation.  I took them to the table, handed them over to Kate, and waited for the impending tantrums.

And nothing bad happened. In fact, only good things happened. The poems seemed remarkably soothed by the process. One of them came together and is finished.

I don’t know if this early showing of poems will be a practical practice when I get back to the city – perhaps it works better here in the woods. But I am pretty pleased.

And sometimes, I really love being wrong.

For the past five days, I’ve been here:

This charming cabin is the Soapstone Writer’s Residency, a little bit of heaven tucked into the forest on the Oregon Coast near Manzanita. Last sumer, my friend Kate Lebo suggested we apply for the residency together. I agreed that this was a fine idea,  then promptly forgot  about it. Forward to the due-date of the application and you’ll find me in Port Towsend visiting my brand-spanking-new Mother in Law and frantically scrapping together the application instead of sailing in a tiny, bright blue sailboat. Luckily, the sailing came later, after I rushed to the Port Townsend Post Office to find it closed (on a Saturday).  This sort of small town mischief must have blessed my near-tardy application, for here we are!

The cabin sits aside a Soapstone Creek, which looks more convincingly like a river this time of year.

The river is a substitute mother. This means that it is impossible to avoid writing about her, despite my best intentions. And that she sings me to sleep every night with a lovely lisp.  This morning a bald eagle flew right down the middle of the river, flaunting its majestic self while seeming completely unconcerned. I can only hope that I adopt a similar countenance after living with the river for 3 weeks, but after shouting “An Eagle! An EAGLE!!!” while pointing and hopping furiously up and down,  I realize more time might be necessary.

My studio and the main room/kitchen part of the cabin are heated solely by a wood stove named Queenie.

Contrary to her name, she is not standoffish, difficult, or demanding. In fact, she is perfectly accommodating, as far as wood stoves go.

In a past life, I lived in houses that were heated only by wood stoves, so being with Queenie makes me nostalgic for my 19 year old off-the-grid living self. Is there anything more satisfying than a good fire? Not many things, anyway. I adore waking up in the cold morning and stumbling down the stairs to feed Queenie. She’s a champ.

The only problem with this otherwise lovely place? The Ice Cube. No, I’m not referring to a rectangular object one breaks free from a tray in the freezer when making a smart cocktail for a deserving guest – rather, I’m talking about my writing studio, the tiny cube perched charmingly atop the cabin:

Here is where I admit to one of my many inconsistencies – I am terrified of heights. I’m the girl in junior high school who froze in place when attempting to make it to the top of the bleachers with my friends, causing the assembly to be delayed. Yet… I am fantastically obsessed with doing the things I love in high places. Sleeping? Give me a bed suspended by chains from a stories-high ceiling, please. Writing? A forest fire lookout cabin sounds perfect, thanks! So when Kate and I found out we had been accepted for a 3 week residency, I did not hesitate to claim the studio that must be accessed by three separate ladders.

The ladders? No problem. Facing one’s fears is a required part of making art, right? I faced, and climbed, and delighted at the beauty of my new cube studio.

It turns out heat does rise, but becomes stubborn when faced with small hatches that serve as an entryway to your fancy new writing studio.

Even Queenie can’t help heat the cube. There is a space heater, which is less efficient than it is loud. I’m still working out my issues with the cube, and am hoping we can come to some sort of agreeable arrangement. Until then, most of my writing is getting done with Queenie at my side. Fears are great to face as long as they don’t freeze your fingers in place.

With or without the cube, I’ve written four new poems, begun erasures for the winner of the Strangercrombie auction, and I’ve been working on the covers of new blank books for the shop. Here’s a hint for what I’ve created so far – just imagine handsome gray linen and these guys:

Oh, how I love Tawny Frogmouths!

I’ll update the blog with pictures of the new hand-embroidered Tawny Frogmouth cover soon – first I have to figure out how to take better pictures.

I’ll leave you with a couple of poems. Kate, always an encouraging friend, had just posted a poem at a cool new poetry site, and suggested I do the same.  I put up a part of my Seraph poem: here it is. Feel free to rate it generously so that I feel more popular!

See you soon….