Author Archives: lizshine74

About lizshine74

Liz Shine wrote and read her way out of small-minded, small-town doom. We’re not talking about riches here. We’re talking about how a practice like writing can save a person. How it can give hope, shape identity, and ignite purpose. She hopes to write stories and poems that move readers the way certain works have made all the difference to her. She lives in Olympia, WA in the USA. She believes in the power of practice and has been practicing writing since some time in the early 90s when she became an adult in the rain-soaked city of Aberdeen. Writing began with journaling, as a way to understand a confusing, sometimes violent coming-of-age. She writes mostly fiction, some nonfiction, and poetry, and holds an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writers Workshop. She has published in Shark Reef, Dual Coast, and Blue Crow Magazine. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press.

Last Night At The Lobster by Stewart O’Nan

Year 2 of MFA. Critical Paper #1

So what lessons can I take away from Stewart O’Nan’s Last Night At The Lobster as a writer studying other writers to become a better writer? I couldn’t sympathize with the main character. In fact, I found him annoying. I didn’t feel like the no-plot plot worked. So, what is there to draw from? I’m mulling over this. In fact, it’s making me a little crazy, because I have to get this paper written, after all. And then I remember. I remember the hope and wonder I’d felt as I read the first three pages, thinking that this was going to be a really great book. So, I look at those pages. What do I see? I see a lot. How O’Nan creates mood through imagery in these opening passages and in truth, throughout the entire novel, is wow—super cool.
Mall traffic on a gray winter’s day, stalled. Midmorning and the streetlights are still on, weakly. Scattered flakes drift down like ash, but for now the roads are dry. It’s the holidays—a garbage truck stopped at the light has a big wreath wired to its grille, complete with a red velvet bow. The turning lane waits for the green arrow above to blink on, and a line of salted cars takes a left into the mall entrance, splitting as the sniff for parking spots.
One goes on alone across the far vastness of the lot, where a bulldozed mound of old snow towers like a dirty iceberg. A white shitbox of a buick, the kind a grandmother might leave behind, the driver’s door missing a strip of molding. The Regal keeps to the designated lane along the edge, stopping at the stop sign, though there’s nothing out here but empty spaces, and off in a distant corner, as if anchoring the lot, the Regal’s destination, a dark stick-framed box with its own segregated parking and unlit sign facing the highway—a Red Lobster. (1)
The dominant color of the scene is gray. Even the white is a dirty white (grayish). The one color that stands out in this is a blinking green arrow and a red velvet bow, highlight the fact that things are just not all that gay for some on this particular Christmas holiday. Words like stalled, weakly, drift, waits, stopped, empty, and distant contribute to the lifeless feel of this scene. And it is truly lifeless! There are cars, a few, moving slow, but their drivers are not mentioned. , these cars seem to move on their own, without feeling or intention. The one lifelike description of the cars that move into and around this mall parking lot is contained in the line “splitting as they sniffed for parking spots”, which is a very basic, small-brained function of life. The Red Lobster, the place where the rest of the story will take place is described as a “dark stick-framed box”. How stifled! How bleak! A garbage truck ironically adorned with a brightly colored bow, a “shitbox of a buick”, things are broken, creaping along the edges, moving in dull, lifeless patterns.
This level of description is consistent throughout. I was drawn in to the description of the restaurant. It reminded me of the many jobs I’ve had in the food service industry. O’Nan got so many details right. The coddling mother, the spoiled child, the retired teacher ( a regular there), the retiree sitting at the head of a large party of guests—all these people– these scenes–added to the bleakness, the pointless routine, the unconscious way we can go about our lives, “From here it’s all checklist. He turns up the house lights, turns on the fake-stained glass lamps over the tables in all four sections…Window by window he gently tugs on the cords and lets in the gray light of day” (29). Within each scene, as in this one, the question seems to be, where is the hope? where is the light? So, in the end, I think I can take much from this book, though I didn’t love the story. You see, in this second draft I’m working on, I’m interested in expanding scenes. It seems to me that my first draft is rather skeletal at times. I wrote the first time through terrified that there would be no end when I got to the end, and so wrote just the bones of the story down. So, as I’m working on this second draft, I want to keep these questions in mind. What mood does this scene convey and why? How does is this scene important beyond just what happens—how does it contribute to a larger theme?

Buy my books here. 

Interested in hiring me as a coach to get you boosted with your writing goals?
Find free resources and information here.
Some past posts to keep you making time: 
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell

Black Swan Green
A year in the life of Jason Taylor: thirteen, British, equally naïve and gifted with insight, and a stammerer. Love this book! Honest. Well-crafted. Full of popular culture references from the early eighties. On page 211, Holly Deblin (who later becomes Jason’s first kiss), gives him some advice that sums up what the step Jason must ultimately take to grow beyond what he struggles with in this book, “You’re not a maggot. Don’t let dickheads decide what you are” (211).
The novel is told from Jason’s point of view with lots of interior monologue that demonstrates his naivete (he’s only 13!), his keen power of observation and insight into life and relationships, and his common struggle to be the person he most wants to be. The book is funny, poignant, and full of delightful comparisons that lift the words off the page, creating powerful images and associations.
There is a fitting allusion to Lord of the Flies in which Jason has to read aloud, thus exposing his stammer to all and humiliating him. The author does not shy from just how cruel children can be to each other without unrealistically demonizing the bully. The story seeks to empower the individual against society, a theme that is clearly laid out by the poem Jason finds on his English teacher’s desk when going to retrieve his whistle,”Don’t laugh at what you don’t find funny./ Don’t support and opinion you don’t hold./ The independent befriend the independent./ Adolescence dies in its fourth year. You live to be eighty” (213).
I am awed by how well this book is written, how real Jason Taylor felt to me. As a parent of a bright, sometimes shy thirteen-year-old boy, my question now is: How can I get him to read this book? I want to buy copies by the dozens and pass them out in the hallway at the high school where I teach. There are lots of stories about bullies. This is the most intelligent, real, and empowering treatment of the subject I’ve ever come across.

A few good lines:

“It’s easier to change your eyeballs than to change your nickname” (16).
“Who decides which defects are funny and which ones tragic? Nobody laughs at blind people or makes iron lung jokes” (36).
“A cow of an awkward pause mooed” (52).
“Hate smells of burnt dead fireworks” (74).
“Stewy air stroked Dawn Madden’s white chocolate throat” (83).
“The earth’s a door, if you press your ear against it” (91).
“The last days of freedom rattle like a nearly empty box of Tic Tacs” (191).

So many more…

Buy my books here. 

Interested in hiring me as a coach to get you boosted with your writing goals?
Find free resources and information here.
Some past posts to keep you making time: 
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone

Quote from Burn this Book (Toni Morrison)

From Burn This Book (Edited by Toni Morrison):

“Writers—journalists, essayists, bloggers, poets, playwrights—can disturb the social oppression that functions like a coma on the population, a coma despots call peace; and they stanch the blood flow of war that hawks and profiteers thrill to.”

Buy my books here. 

Interested in hiring me as a coach to get you boosted with your writing goals?
Find free resources and information here.
Some past posts to keep you making time: 
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone

Day 4, Journey of the Heart, and lady friends

Carrie left this morning. So, now it’s just me and the dog here. One more day of writing and enjoying this protected creative space. I’m preparing now to write for as long as I can this morning and this evening I’ll take a drive out to Pacific Beach to have dinner with a long-time friend and her family. I finished Journey of the Heart this morning and want to share some of my thoughts on this book that truly came to me at just the right time.
There was a point in reading this book when I became so enthralled that my eyes followed one word to the next with eagerness. This was not at the beginning. I wonder in fact if the book should have started at Chapter 3. It’s a short book and can be read in a day if one was so inclined.
The gist of the book is revealed in the subtitle, “The Path of Conscious Love”. Wellwood proposes an eyes—and heart—wide open kind of love.
The last text my freshmen read this year was Romeo and Juliet. And in teaching this play, I am always surprised to realize both how much and how little things have changed. We are always wanting love to happen to us, to persist without our effort. Or, like Mercutio, we are skeptical of love at all, reducing it to the physical act of sex or scorning the idea of it at all. We are, as Wellwood writes, al of us wounded and wanting in love. The core of Wellwood’s idea is that love is Romeo’s heaven and Mercutio’s earth and that it doesn’t happen, but keeps happening, and can only reach it’s full potential with our open and honest participation. This resonates with me and in reading this work I both came across some new ways of looking at things as was reminded of some ideas that I have long held inside and were happy to be pulled to the surface in a new context.
I think this book may be a crucial text for our time. The state of relationships between men and women does not seem to me to be becoming more liberated as some would argue. There is a glaring imbalance that our current popular culture feeds and extends. I’m not sure how to quite put my finger on this, but I see the signs of it all around me. How many books are being published with titles resembling, “Women Who Do Too Much”? Many! And oh ladies, in our liberation and our obsession with being all we can be, what have we left for the men? At my son’s eighth grade graduation I could not help but notice that all the girls wore make-up, formal dresses—many in heels. Yet, I did not see one boy dressed up, and while the girls strutted confidently around, the boys slouched. The female ego has grown bold. And how will these two halves come together in love? How will they learn to find their own unique and diverse selves amidst all that they are told they can and should be?
Here are some of my favorite quotes from Wellwood’s book, which urges us to place all of our previous patterns and beliefs out on the proverbial table and to select with honesty and consciousness what aspects of ourselves will allow both individuals in a relationship to reach their full potential and experience a deeper connection to each other.
“Relating to passion in a sane and healthy way is one the first and one of the greatest challenges in a relationship” (58).
“The deeper a soul-connection goes, however, the more it brings our karmic patterns and personal neuroses to the surface” (89).
“Real intimacy, in short, brings upour unfinished business—all the rough spots in ourselves and our partner that still need to be polished, refined, and further developed” (90).
“Furthermore, we come to believe that our story accurately represents the way things really are. Yet in truth it is only a dream, a conditioned pattern of beliefs that keeps creating the kind of situation that wounded us in the first place” (109).
“No matter how close to another person we may be, part of us is radically and forever alone and, in its own way, wild and free” (116).
“That is where an awareness practice such as mindfulness or meditation pr present-centered psychotherapy can be particularly useful. These disciplines slow down the busy mind. By sharpening our awareness and discernment, they can help us separate our immediate experience from our stories” (126).
“If a couple is willing to let the patterns their relationship has settled into die, it can keep being reborn” (132).
“The love between man and woman can provide powerful glimpses of sacred vision” (139).
“The profound question love poses is, ‘Can you face your life as it is; can you look at all the pain and darkness as well as the power and light in the human soul, and still say yes?’” (140).
“tyranny of the orgasm” (175).

This is a book about acting out of our conscious mind, out of intention, an idea I’ve some across in my study and practice of yoga time and again. But to see it here in this new context—this more specific context—in this book that celebrates the paradoxes and the possibilities between us, that offers up the notion that love is something we cultivate and participate in—this–makes me happy it was passed on to me, that is now part of the pool of my experience.
All right, getting back to the novel now… 🙂

A few hours later…

This evening I went out to Sara’s place in Pacific Beach. I was able to see her beautiful family, home, and garden and see another old Friend (Jen). What a great way to end this trip. Love these two beautiful ladies!

Buy my books here. 

Interested in hiring me as a coach to get you boosted with your writing goals?
Find free resources and information here.
Some past posts to keep you making time: 
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone

Everything to gain

Slept in til 6! The sun was persistent coming through the window, lighting on where I was sleeping on the couch. Ajax whined while I downed a cup of coffee, scratching at the door, gazing at me with his begging eyes.
We ran down to the water’s edge. The tide was way out. I collected three intact sand dollars, a sturdy, smooth black rock and half a large clam shell along the way. Ajax chased the birds and bathed in the water and I felt the gift of the moment. To be running along the ocean, the day mine to create.
I got little writing done hooked into the wireless at Cafe Amici, gave in to the distractions of email and Facebook, then strolled back to her our “home”.
I’ve been writing now for a couple of hours, have rewritten everything I lost due to a technology glitch yesterday, and am now moving forward again in this story. I’m cognizant today of how difficult it is sometimes to beat back the voices that keep us from believing in our stories and feeling I have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Happy summer y’all!
Back to the writing…

Buy my books here.

Interested in hiring me as a coach to get you boosted with your writing goals?
Find free resources and information here.
Some past posts to keep you making time: 
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone

Day 2: Baby Feet

Strolling on the beach at 5:30 this morning with Ajax, ideas relevant to both my novel and my life came to me not by brain but by inspiration. Two walks on the beach now have left the skin on my feet more like the skin I was born in, more willing to ask the right questions without fear.
I was awfully hungry when I woke this morning, but had only a cup of coffee before heading out on the beach. It felt good to feel hungry and I was thinking then that I’d like to feel hungry more often. After an hour on the beach, I washed a bowl full of strawberries. Those may have been the sweetest strawberries I’ve ever eaten.
Getting down to writing now. Working on my blog first. Adding some fiction, which you should check out here.

Buy my books here. 

Interested in hiring me as a coach to get you boosted with your writing goals?
Find free resources and information here.
Some past posts to keep you making time: 
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone

Arriving at the Beach: Let the writing begin!

Friday night:
It seemed at one point today that I might never get out of my classroom and out of town. My son, who was supposed to catch a 7:30 flight to San Francisco missed his flight by three minutes because his aunt thought there was adequate time to stop to buy him a donut. Knowing that he was on his way, that by the time I checked out for the school year, he would have safely landed at the San Francisco International Airport and be spending time with his cherished grade school friends was something that I’d expected, depended on to relax into the long drive I had ahead of me to Ocean Shores. We worked it out. He finally did get on a flight, but only after I’d already made the long drive and settled in to my temporary home. He’s probably right now eating pizza, playing Xbox and catching up with his closest friends.
Long drive you say? Ocean Shores isn’t too far from Olympia. Ah, but I have a driving phobia that I have fed and affirmed for many years. The distance from Olympia to Ocean Shores seems vast when you are singing for your life, to fend off an anxiety attack, to will the calm, cool, collected person you long to be into being. I chanted mantras. I sang old folk songs. I mused poetic with Fiona Apple. And, I made it!
This is the second annual end of the school year beach writing retreat, and I am so thrilled to be here. Upon arriving in our cozy little chalet, complete with kitchen, living room, dining room, and wood stove, I immediately put all my stuff away, tucked my things into the right corners, in the right rooms—in short, nested. And this is a cozy little place, even if it looks like someone put the entire clearance bin from a pop art and frame store all over the walls. And I do mean all over. There are framed pictures of beaches, planes, bunnies on roller skates, travel ads, Disney characters, roses in a vase—I tried finding a theme to connect them all, but came up with only cheap art. After settling in and acclimating, I rolled out for a run on the beach with the dog to think about just what my writerly goals were going to be between now and Tuesday morning.
Improving and expanding my blog is part of the plan. After Ajax and I take a run on the beach in the morning each day, I’ll stroll on over to Café Amici to hook into their wireless: do some blogging, check my email, and pop on over and check on my peeps on Facebook. I want to add some more poetry to my poetry blog and set up a fiction blog, where I’ll post several short stories I’ve written.
After this warm-up, the real work begins. My primary goal here is to work on my novel. And I will do this for the rest of the day each day until I just can’t stand it. Then, I’ll take a walk and write some more. Eventually, I’ll have to sleep and start this process all over again. In there I’ll throw in some yoga sessions and some tinkering around on my guitar (I am a baby at guitar, but really enjoying the practice, particularly since it’s something I’ve aspired to for years, though I only ever started and then stopped after little progress).

Buy my books here. 

Interested in hiring me as a coach to get you boosted with your writing goals?
Find free resources and information here.
Some past posts to keep you making time: 
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone

Today a poem happened.

My students were taking their final and I was reading a book recommended by a friend (Journey of the Heart by John Wellwood) when a poem happened to me.

Linger Love

Whether you and I
observe,
lying in the cool grass of evening–
your leg crossing mine–
my fingers brushing your palm,
the moon will glow.

Whether we take that switchback
trail at dawn, laughing into
the open space our bodies created
around us and between us
under the moon’s light-blanket,
the stream whose flowing sound inspires us now
will play its part in the earth’s concert.

Oh love! Linger here
even when–especially when–
I alone observe the moon,
stroll singular beside the chattering stream.

Buy my books here. 

Interested in hiring me as a coach to get you boosted with your writing goals?
Find free resources and information here.
Some past posts to keep you making time: 
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone

Writing poems when I should be grading papers….

In high school, I was the worst student. Couldn’t bring myself to read or do anything that I didn’t feel like doing. Some things never change. Spent an hour this morning writing this poem, when I really ought to have been grading papers.

Thanks Kristina, for the inspiration!

Pecan Pie

Seed pods in the mortar,
I think of the way the word
cardamom
tickles my lips.

Elbow-grinding with a marble pestle,
I pull three cinnamon sticks
from that spice jar we bought in Santa Fe,
and laugh at how we were then:
a short laugh, abruptly ended,
because you’re long gone and that feeling
is worse than dead: Alive, but homeless.

Crust ephemeral, flaky,
of course pecans and
corn syrup and eggs.
i
You critiqued my pecan pie with lke a pro,
and I offered unflinching advice on your barbecue,
because when it comes to cooking–we knew–
Four hands are better than two.

It’s 2 A.M.
I’m baking a fucking pie!
An oft used diversion from prurience.

Sitting on the sun-porch
in the warm midsummer air,
pie in the oven,
I’m thinking that the way we cooked
is also the way to build homes and make love:
Four hands, one heart.

Buy my books here. 

Interested in hiring me as a coach to get you boosted with your writing goals?
Find free resources and information here.
Some past posts to keep you making time: 
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone

Last paper–Postmodern American Fiction

While fall turned to an unprecedented winter here in Washington, and then a wet, violent spring, and only now the promise of summer is in the air, I read and considered many books from the angle of the writer: How does this work contribute to the great body of literature that fuels and defines the art of writing?
I’ve tried to remain objective, non-judgmental, a scholar-observer because I know that I have been blessed with a unique opportunity to grow and learn through the support and demands of this MFA program. The book I chose to read for my final—and 24th!—critical reading assignment was Norton’s Postmodern American Fiction. Though it is long and the selections are so varied that at times I felt jostled, I do believe that the reading of this collection brought some ideas together that will carry me into this second year of MFA work and strengthened my identity as a writer.
As I read the bold and varied selection in this anthology, I found myself being more judgmental. Brautigan (who I loved at sixteen!) is clever and I like reading him, but Vonnegut has more moral sense, which is ultimately more admirable. The Paley story “Pale Pink Roast” was literary dessert, full of immaculate language and powerful subtext, but Silko’s selection from Ceremony felt more human, less intentionally artful. The editor’s in the introduction to the excerpt from Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, quoted him as saying, “I’m not interested in imitating a style or structure I’ve used before. I’ll never write another book like Trout Fishing in America. I dismantled that old machine when I finished with it and left the pieces lying around in the backyard to rust in the rain” (38).
This insistence on innovation seems to be the way of things in the “high art” of writing in the post-modern era! To be always breaking old frames for fiction. To take risks. To scramble the narrative. To incorporate other art forms: digital, visual, performance—anything goes! While this is liberating, I think it is easy for a writer to lose heart and perspective, to innovate for the sake of innovation, not because it will make the work more meaningful. Mark Leyner’s “Tooth Imprints On A Corn Dog” details the activity of a writer trying to write a poem he’s been commissioned to write in twenty four hours, “1,000 lines of free verse in the poete maudit tradition of Arthur Rimbaud, but infused with the ebullience and joie de vivre that made ABBA so popular in the 1970’s” (242). This is so clearly absurd. The writer (in the story) so vain and self-indulgent that I wanted to shake him and ask: But what is the god damn point? And what is the point?
Why have I aspired to write more and better since I was eight years old? Why am I (when I’m poor to begin with) racking up more student loan debt in order to earn my MFA in fiction writing? And this program requires a lot of work! More than I realized it would. I’m accustomed to hard work, but this year has tested the limits of what I am capable of taking on—for sure! In reading the works in this anthology, an answer to these questions rose to the surface: to communicate and to make meaning for myself—to contribute a verse.
I’m curious, but not romanced by literary dogma. And though I’d like to see my work in print—I won’t lie—that’s not a driving force for me at all. In fact, I find the whole business of it tedious and frustrating. I do; however, feel privileged to live during a time in which such a rich and varied tradition of literature exists.
What I’ve gained from all I read this year is an appreciation for the individual work itself. A desire and an intention. A desire to cultivate patience in my writing, to slow down the sentence building, because this is an area where I can improve. An intention to allow form to shape from the piece itself, which includes a willingness to experiment with and change ideas I have going into a piece of writing about how the story will be told for the sake of the story itself. To always return back to the breath of the story—the life force—the central idea.

Buy my books here. 

Interested in hiring me as a coach to get you boosted with your writing goals?
Find free resources and information here.
Some past posts to keep you making time: 
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone