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

Have I done it? Hell Yes. Luckily, the more readings I do, the more I’ve been able to transmute most of my pre-reading jitters into something called excitement, and my early days of apologizing seem to be over.

Welcome to today!  I really want to show you some photos of some of the visual things I’ve been working on here at the residency, but I just can’t figure out my camera. I’m sorry! I am showing you pictures anyway, and they are not that great. Please be nice.

We haven’t had anything that even resembles winter in the Northwest this year, and I think this first piece is my embroidery aubade to the snowy mornings we’ve missed. It is an abstract piece on natural colored linen with cut-work in steely light blue silk, embroidered with many tiny french knots:

Future Book Cover: Icy Abstract Embroidery

Side view, Icy Abstract Book Cover Embroidery

My process for taking pictures at home is a magical mix of:

1. A very fancy camera
2. A tutorial-giving husband that knows how to use said camera
3. The ability to hand over said camera to said husband when I get frustrated

Here at the Res, I have a small, non-fancy camera that I am still trying to make sense of. I can’t get closeups, so all the details in the work will have to be imagined. I fantasize about having David and Heather Gilson show up, armed with their cheery dispositions, camera knowledge, and baked goods. Well, we will have to eat while they make me a good photographer, right?

I promise to post much better pictures of the finished products after I return home.

I also promise to clap extra loud for the pre-reading apologists, now that I’ve put you through this.

Here are the finished Tawny Frogmouths, also in icy colors:

Tawny Frogmouths

Before I left home, I started this Roseate Spoonbill. She’s lovely – a little shy, but willing to scratch your back her beak after a little sweet talk.

Roseate Spoonbill

Now, into more fiery climes. This abstract piece is on seafoam colored linen with cut-work in rusty orange-red silk, embroidered with many tiny french knots and circles. From some angles, it looks like a figure sprinting, which is a nice enough metaphor for fire:

Future Book Cover: Rust Abstract Embroidery

Months ago, I told Kate I’d make her a book for her birthday. When asked about the cover art, she responded that she loves cats, cherries, chickens, rosemary, and pine cones. We decided to go with a chicken – a rooster, actually. He’s a Rhode Island Red. I embroidered him on mustard-colored linen. I wish I could get a good detail photo of his tail feathers – they are shot through with blues, an homage to a rooster I once had. His name was Cornelius. Kate has named her Rooster Emmet.

Emmet Crows

Sing it, Emmet!

As good of a shot as I could manage with his tail:

Tailfeathers should be one word.

]]> http://www.tickerfinch.com/archives/129/feed 2 http://www.tickerfinch.com/archives/81#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed http://www.tickerfinch.com/archives/81#comments Mon, 25 Jan 2010 09:46:36 +0000 Jennifer Borges Foster http://www.tickerfinch.com/?p=81 It is almost 2 in the morning, and for some reason I am wide awake. In this questionable state, I posted an older poem that I’ve never tried to publish before on Ink Node. Go check it out!

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.

After a couple of hours, we went for a walk to the beach:

If you are planning on spending 3 weeks alone in the woods with someone, I suggest you follow my lead and choose a specimen as funny, kind, and good-looking as my friend Kate. If nothing else, go for someone hot so that you can capture photos in which seagulls are staring longingly at the person in question.

Later, on our walk,  I found a delightful mushroom bog:

I should probably be practicing by budding embroidery skills on a site specific project, like recreating the lovely colors in these mushrooms, or trying to emulate this moss found just steps from the residency:

Instead, I’ve been working on the re-imagined Tawny Frogmouths.

Kate encapsulated the residency with the  photo above. It has my laptop, a beer, crafting supplies, and two cookbooks. Are we lucky, or what? The Frogmouths  seem to think so. Here is a closer shot of them in an unfinished state:

Not tawny, you say? This is simply an exercise in artistic license. After the Frogmouths were finished, I found out that albino versions of them do exist, as seen at the bottom of this post. The bodies of my Frogmouths are sewn with a light blue linen thread, which might make them the arctic version. Real Tawny Frogmouths freeze when startled, and have the magnificent ability to transform themselves into branches. These guys are more about being seen – just look at the one on the right, he’s giving you the eye.

I’ll take pictures of the finished embroidery today in the morning light.

The next steps for this project are to back the linen with paper, assemble the cover, fold the signatures, and bind the book. I’m going with my favorite buttonhole binding, and haven’t yet decided what color thread to use for the binding. Any suggestions?