Hi. As has become custom on this blog, I'm spending the last day of the year writing a post that sums up my year in writing and wayfaring. Usually I do the top 10 or top 5 blog posts of the year, going by number of hits on each post. But this year I've decided to re-share the links to 4 pieces I had published in 2014 along with the most popular post on my blog for the year. Here's the list:
5.I had two poems published in the Spring 2014 issue of Wilderness House Literary Review. The poems are "Australia" and "The Fading of the Heart." The first one I wrote for a workshop at the Poetry Center in Chicago. At the time, I was a fairly frequent visitor to the poetry slams at the Green Mill in Uptown, and so I think the poem shows that influence in its length and use of alliteration. I had returned from Australia, where I spent about a month in the Outback, less than a couple months before writing this poem. The second poem was written more recently. It's about Ireland, a place where I used to spend a lot of time and loved but also experienced a fair share of heartbreak, frustration, and disappointment. I'll probably return there of course, but it may be a long while.
4. On Easter Sunday in 2014, Literary Orphans released its Irish-themed issue, guest edited by James Claffey. My non-fiction piece "All Apocalypses, Bitter and Sweet" was included. It's a longer piece. I hope people will read it if they haven't already. Looking back, I'm surprised this got accepted, as it's rather local and much of it is about a medieval Irish saint that most people outside of Ireland have never even heard of. I'm glad Literary Orphans took a chance on this anyway, and I hope readers like it.
1. And finally, the most viewed post on this blog for 2014, by a mile, was my post about Second City, the famous improv school and theater here in Chicago: You Can Fail Here. What was the big attraction with this post? Why did it get more than double the hits compared to most of the my other posts in 2014? Beats the hell out of me. Second City is a popular and revered place. So is Chicago in general. And failure is always a winning topic--so many of us can relate. I know I certainly could in 2014, between a truckload of rejections I got for other poems and stories I wrote and a fellowship I applied for as well as a huge fire that nearly wiped out my workplace and displaced me and all my co-workers for more than half the year. On the other hand, I think I had a pretty successful year in terms of getting a few things published--this was my first year of submitting regularly after all. I also got a chance to contribute to a couple new great projects: Rockwell's Camera Phone and Booma: The Bookmapping Project.
Still, I really hope 2015 is a better year. I'll have some thoughts on writing goals for the upcoming year in a post within the next couple weeks, and tomorrow I'll hopefully have a post up that reveals some travel plans. Thanks to those of you who have taken the time to read my writing. I appreciate and am helped by any support and encouragement more than you might know.
Men playing chess in Union Square, NYC, April 2011
Here's my latest travel photo. This picture was taken in New York City in Union Square in the spring of 2011. I was in New York for a few days to visit a friend who was in town from Ireland. It was my first time in NYC. I stayed at a hotel a few blocks from Union Square. This pic was on my last day, a Saturday, before flying back home to Chicago. I was wandering around the neighborhood before taking a cab to the airport. There was a lot going on in Union Square that day--a farmers market, an anti-war protest, a few chess matches, the blooming of spring. If you look closely, you can see all these events on display in this photo.
The center of the photo is of course the men playing chess. The men are both deeply involved in their game, studying the board, while a woman looks on with her hand covering her mouth. I can't tell if the woman has her mouth covered because she's stifling a yawn or because she's deep in concentration about the game too. In the background there are a few other onlookers watching the chess players...or maybe watching me take their picture or watching the other goings-on in the park. They sit under a tree with pink buds forming--this was in early April, when things are just starting to bloom in the U.S. (I remember my friend from Ireland was surprised to see how late spring starts in America compared to Ireland--she'd been expecting everything in New York to be green and colorful already). Beyond the tree is a protest sign--you can just make it out. The protesters were just starting to arrive. Also in the background is a truck for one of the fruit sellers at the farmers market that was going on that day. The market was just about winding down. The chess, though? The chess went on all day, regardless of everything else that was starting and ending in the park. "Chess is life"--Bobby Fischer.
Today is the feast day of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico. Actually, the patron saint of the U.S. and all the Americas. For this day, I'm sharing this pic of a little shrine to the Virgin in Cuernavaca, Mexico. This shrine was set up in a little nook or square cutaway in the wall surrounding the city's cathedral. It was in the part of the wall near the entrance to the Church of the Third Order of St. Francis.
There are at least three images of the Virgin in this shrine: the statue of her on the right, the picture of her hanging on the back, and a small image of her on the front of the vase holding the flowers on the left. If I'd pulled back the camera a bit when I took this pic (in 2010), there would probably be one or two more images of her visible, perhaps on the votive candle holders seen at the bottom of the photo.
The image of the Virgin of Guadalupe is all over the place in Mexico--in homes, in churches, in shops and restaurants, in parks, in the zocalos or plazas that form the center of Mexican cities and towns, in jewelry, on people's bodies, in graffiti, on tee-shirts and skirts and dresses, in people's hearts, in the history books and mythologies of Mexico and the Mexican people. The story goes that the Virgin first appeared to a peasant indigenous man named Juan Diego on December 9th, 1531, on a hill near modern-day Mexico City. She appeared to him 4 times over the next few days, asking him to have a church built in her honor on the site where she appeared. When Juan Diego took her message to the archbishop, he was asked for proof of the Virgin's appearance. So the Virgin healed Juan Diego's uncle and told him to gather Spanish roses from the hilltop where he saw her, even though it was December and Spanish roses didn't grow at the site any time of year. Juan Diego collected the roses in his tilma (a cloak made of rough fabric such as cactus fibers) and took them to the bishop. When he opened his tilma to show the roses, they fell to the floor and an image of the Virgin was visible on the inside of his cloak. The image of the Virgin on the tilma remains visible today, which can be seen at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City.
Apart from its miraculous origins, the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe is striking and significant for the ways her physical appearance differs from depictions of European madonnas. The Virgin of Guadalupe is darker-skinned and wears a mantle of turquoise blue--turquoise being a stone and color native to the Americas and well known to the Aztecs--rather than the traditional Marian blue of European art. Underneath the Virgin and the crescent moon she is standing upon, an angel with eagle's wings holds up her the train of her dress--the eagle being another native species to the Americas, a powerfully symbolic bird to the Aztecs, and a reference to the indigenous name of Juan Diego (Cuauhtlatoatzin, "one who speaks like an eagle"). I'm a fan of the Virgin of Guadalupe. I don't know if the story of her and Juan Diego is true or just a clever conversion story, or if the imaged tilma in the Basilica is the real deal, but I like what Guadalupe represents. I like her style. Even here in the U.S., her image is rather common, especially in communities with large Mexican populations like Chicago. There's a painting by one of my favorite artists, Kelly Vivanco, that reminds me of the Virgin of Guadalupe, though I'm sure there's no relation between the subjects. I also have a friend who is a teacher at a public high school in Chicago, a school in a Latino neighborhood with a large number of Latino students, and she told me a revealing story about an image of the Virgin. Across from the high school is a house with a garage door that kept getting covered in graffiti by some of the students. Every time the door got tagged with graffiti, the owner of the house would paint over the graffiti. Soon as his paint dried, it never failed--the door would get bombed again. Finally, the man (who was Hispanic himself) thought to place a poster or portrait of the Virgin of Guadalupe on his garage door. The kids never tagged it again. This is a woman who commands respect. For English speakers who'd like to read more about the Virgin of Guadalupe, I recommend a book of stories and essays curated by Ana Castilo called Goddess of the Americas. It has some great pieces in there by Castilo, Sandra Cisneros, Richard Rodriguez, Octavio Paz, and many others (my favorite in the collection is Luis Rodriguez' "Forgive Me, Mother, For Ma Vida Loca"). The author Clarissa Pinkola Estes (of Women Who Run with the Wolves fame) also has a book about the Virgin called Untie the Strong Woman--the chapter called "Guadalupe Is a Girl Gang Leader in Heaven" is the best of the bunch.
I love maps and I always have. I love them not just for their informational purpose or even for their beauty, but because I find them intensely revealing and meaningful. For me, looking at a map is like reading a person's private journal. Each and every map ever made reveals as much about its maker, about his or her point of view and sense of standing in the world, as it does about the world itself. For example, a map can be strictly local in outlook or global or universal, just as can an individual's way of thinking, like a map of someone's backyard versus a map of the world or a map of the Milky Way. A map can be evidence of human hope and adventurousness, such as a map of someone's travel itinerary, or of human hubris and greed, such as a map of a dictator's plans of conquest. Maps can be biased or prejudiced, drawn to favor one part of the world over another, as in many Western maps (even the ones in schoolbooks for many years) depicting Africa as significantly smaller than it really is, a representation of Western racism as much as a geographical lie.
Even the rendering of a map says something about its maker, whether his or her choices were determined by time or artistic skill or purpose. A map can be vaguely drawn or highly detailed. It can be flat or round, textured and colored or plain black-and-white with shades of gray, strictly factual or wildly fantastical, mysterious, misleading, or mind-opening. A map can zero in on only one feature of a place--a map of the pubs of Dublin (a massive undertaking, no doubt), a map of all the gas stations in Peoria, a map of the stars' homes in Malibu, a map of literary landmarks in London (another daunting task).
I have an especial affection for the variety of maps that fit that last example--the literary map. Whenever you combine reading, books, travel, and maps, you got me. So a few months ago when I learned through the VIDA: Women in Literary Arts
Facebook page that a new online project was looking for
travel-loving writers who'd like to help map some books, I wanted to find out more and maybe even be a part of it. It was a bonus that the project's founder was especially interested in making sure works by women authors would be included and mapped.
The project is called Booma: The Bookmapping Project, and it's been up and running since June this year, with an inaugural "Daily Spot" entry that maps Robert Hass's San Francisco-set poem "The Harbor at Seattle." The mission of Booma is to map places in the real world that have been described so memorably by writers in their works. The project's interest is in reminding both lovers of books and travel how "the worlds of stories overlap with the real world," and it aims to "provide a platform for building and accessing the world's largest database of geographic information distilled from books." That sounds like quite a long, large, and ambitious project--but as most true bookworms tend to have long, ambitious lists of books they've read or plan to read, and most travel bugs are capable of thinking in long distances and making large, ambitious globe-encircling plans, the Booma project probably has the perfect kind of missionaries to accomplish its mission.
Booma's founder, David Herring, is a Tucson-based educator who explains the motivation behind Booma in his own comments on Booma's first Daily Spot entry. He writes:
"Robert Hass’s attention to location shaped my view of California
long before I ever made my first trip to that storied state, and I
specifically remember craning my neck to look for the steep side of
Telegraph Hill as we drove through San Francisco years ago. More than
with any other writer’s, Hass’s descriptions of place have unexpectedly
bubbled into my consciousness during my travels and reminded me that I
have known some places even before visiting them, which is at the heart
of what Booma is."
So what kind of information does Booma provide for readers and travelers? Booma has so far mapped nearly 80 places and pieces of literature with its interactive Daily Spot feature. These spots each focus on a particular poem, novel, short story, play, or other piece of literature that notably describes a real world place. The named place may be the subject of the entire written work or may be just mentioned in one especially well-turned phrase or memorable chapter or paragraph. In any case, Booma's Daily Spot entries provide a relevant place-based quote from the work along with an interactive map pinpointing where in the world this place of song and story actually is. Booma users can also read a little bit in each entry about the written work (its overall plot, when it was published, or its initial reception by readers, for example) and the place in real life (such as how many people live there, what grows there, what famous events may have occurred there, and anything else that makes that place unique). For users who'd like to learn even more, links to where the written work may be purchased or read in its entirety as well as more info about the author and the place being described are provided. What's especially great is that in the 6 months since Booma has been live, places from all around the planet have been mapped (from Tucson to Tbilisi, from Nigeria to New York City) and writings from all throughout history have been featured (from Homer's The Iliadto Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letterto Roxane Gay's An Untamed Stateand Cheryl Strayed's Wild). There are entries for lovers of Brit lit and lovers of Irish lit (yes, a chairde, there is a difference) and for lovers of poetry and lovers of non-fiction.
Along with the Daily Spots, Booma plans to be a digital resource for mapping longer pieces. Entire long poem and books will be annotated and mapped, such as Cormac McCarthy's southwestern American and Mexican-set novel All The Pretty Horses. Both fans of a book and teachers and students then can use Booma to enhance their study and research of a book or their understanding of and involvement in its story and setting. Herring himself has mapped entire books before, beginning with James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
As I mentioned above, when I first heard about this project, I thought I might like to contribute. So I contacted Herring back in July and have since contributed several Daily Spots, on works by John Millington Synge (Aran Islands, Ireland), Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation, North Dakota), Toni Morrison (Michigan and the Midwest), Frank O'Hara (Manhattan), and Wendell Berry (Kentucky's Red River Gorge). I've really enjoyed writing these entries, as each one has given me the chance to learn more about some of my favorite writers and works and the places that served as their inspiration. I also enjoy reading all the other contributions, whether the subject is a piece of writing or a place I'm familiar with or not.
I also think Booma has the potential to be a valuable resource for teachers and students of creative writing as well as literature. Considering how much the importance of place has been a recurring theme in storytelling and literature--right up there with romantic love, death, and war--I think it's worthwhile to use maps and other information about places as a means to understand a text and the processes of writing and creativity. How does a real-world place serve as a door to creativity? How does the inspiration a writer gets after traveling through this town or looking at that mountain translate itself into words on a page? How do the sights and sounds of a place get successfully rendered in a story or poem, and what is the difference between a place that serves as a mere setting in a work and a place that almost comes to function as an emotion in the reader? Originality is another issue--there are lots of places in the world, but there have been far more people to write about them. In the case of "well-written" places (i.e., places that frequently get written about or chosen as a setting--say Paris or Chicago or the Mississippi River), how does one author navigate between the details of a place differently or more deftly than another? What role does an author's identity or sense of self or era play in how a place is portrayed or described? For example, Booma has a Daily Spot entry on Langston Hughes's poem about the Mississippi "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." How did Hughes, a black American writer of the 20th century, portray the Mississippi differently than Mark Twain, a white American writer of the 19th century who had a lifelong obsession with the river? And if these two men had been mapmakers rather than writers, how would their maps of the Mississippi compare? Whose map would I prefer to follow, if I had to choose one?
What I like about the idea of using maps as a resource for studying literature or for creativity is all the questions and possibilities. The concept of place may not be every writer's door leading into a poem or novel or essay, but it's one door that can lead a writer (and a reader) down multiple paths. (The poet Richard Hugo wrote, much more complexly and knowledgeably than I, about how the idea of a place can be used as a trigger for the imagination in his classic essay "The Triggering Town.") Moreover, in this age of talking GPS devices, text-speak, and 140-character limit thoughts, when there's been a lot of talk and fear about the decline of books and readership and the isolation and confusion that the Internet and technology can foster, any project that uses web technology to promote genuine interaction with literature and maps and encourage curiosity about the real, physical world and the creative poet types who've populated it is to be commended. Booma is a great project. I'm glad to have found out about it and proud to play a little part in it. Check it out at the website and Facebook page.
Back to sharing some travel pics for a few posts. This is a photo taken in 2011 by a friend I met on the Camino de Santiago of another friend I met on the Camino. The picture was taken by a Canadian woman named Marie-Belle, who was traveling with 3 other Canadian ladies. The picture is of a young Italian man walking the Camino, named Andreas. Andreas was from Milan, where he was working as a clown and juggler for sick children. This was his second time walking the Camino in Spain, but this would be the first time he made it all the way to Santiago de Compostela. Here he is a bit earlier on in the Camino, carrying his backpack and a set of juggling pins that he brought along with him. He would carry the pins as far as Los Arcos, where he gave then away to some children.
Andreas on the Camino de Santiago
I met Marie-Belle, the photographer of this pic, my first day on the Camino, while still in France, at the albergue in Orisson. I walked on and off with her and her friends as far as Estella, a village famous for a public fountain that pumps both water and wine. Andreas I ran into off and on as early as the village of Lorca, but actually met at a Franciscan albergue where we both stayed in Tosantos. We kept crossing paths for the rest of the journey, and in a mountain town called Rabanal el Camino he shouted out birthday greetings to me from up the road. He made it to Santiago around the same time as I did, at the end of October 2011.
I like this pic because it shows the individuality of the average pilgrim. It shows a pilgrim walking the Camino with his walking stick and a full pack on his back and a sleeping bag--with his own personal touch and calling card so to speak, the juggling pins. The Camino is a journey for people from all walks of life, people with all sorts of similar and different backgrounds. You hear the same stories over and over on the Camino, and you hear one-of-a-kind stories that you'll never hear the likes of again. You'll meet the same souls on the Camino, and you'll meet one-of-a-kind souls--you'll meet both in the very same pilgrim.
The Camino de Santiago was one of the happiest experiences of my life so far. I was blessed to meet great people like Marie-Belle and her friends, whom I've kept in touch with since, and Andreas, whom I've never seen since but who was one of the most memorable of my many fellow peregrinos.
A new poem of mine is up in the latest issue of Literary Orphans. The poem is called "Golden Day." It's a short one, so I hope people take a minute to check it out and give it a read.
This latest issue of Literary Orphans is the Ingrid issue, after Ingrid Bergman. So I submitted a poem that was partly inspired by Bergman's great performance in the classic wartime love story, Casablanca. If you've never seen Casablanca, well...what's wrong with you? Here are a few scenes to give you an idea of the movie's complex and honest emotion:
Whatever you think of my poem and my ideas, though, please check out Literary Orphans' Ingrid issue. There's loads of beautiful work on offer. I recommend reading Will Viharos' note on Ingrid Bergman as a starter. This is the second time I've had the honor of being published by Literary Orphans. All my thanks to LO's editors and founders, Mike Joyce and Scott Waldyn, for their support.
These pics are from a place in Mexico called Xochimilco.The pictures were taken in February 2010, when I was taking a 2-week course in the city of Cuernavaca. Xochimilco is a place outside Mexico City and an ancient place, built long before Columbus ever came to "the New World" and changed it forever and for better or for worse. Xochimilco means "where the flowers grow" in Aztec. Long ago, the indigenous people of the area built floating gardens out of rafts piled with mud and branches that took root in the bottom of a large lake. They called these floating gardens or little islands chinampas. They grew flowers and crops on them and shipped them via canals to Mexico City. Over the centuries most of these canals and chinampas have disappeared, victims of urbanization. But some remain, and both tourists and locals from Mexico City like to visit them, cruising them on beautiful, colorful, gondola-like boats called trajineras that are given women's names and painted with flowers. The trajineras are steered by men with long poles who push them up and down the canals as riders drink beers and soft drinks and greet the other boats traveling by. Mariachi and maramba bands hop from boat to boat to perform a few songs for riders, and small children and old men and women drift along on small rafts selling flowers, tacos, tortillas, sweets, and chiclets and offering to take photographs of riders with ponchos, sombreros, and flowers.
Xochimilco, like much of Mexico, is a magical place. Anyone expecting a tourist trap will be pleasantly surprised. You never know who might drift by you on the water at Xochimilco--families, wedding parties, teenage lovers kissing passionately on the floor of their hired gondola, old lovers re-creating the scene of a first date, drunken revelers, picnickers, tour groups, Americans, Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, photographers, flower sellers, magazine and newspaper merchants, musicians, singers, animal handlers, romantics, cynics, maybe even the ghost of the great artist Frida Kahlo.
Frida Kahlo at Xochimilco in 1937. Photo by Fritz Henle
All this is to say, I went to Mexico for 2 weeks and loved it. Loved it. The colors, the smells, the sounds, the people--everything impressed me. I visited Xochimilco with my classmates and instructors. We had a great time. Someday I will go back. I will buy some flowers and let my hand touch the waters of ancient Xochimilco.
This picture was taken about a year ago, September 2013, on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, Ireland. It was on the women's tour I led for my old travel company. We'd been lucking out with the weather on the tour, but it was especially important that we have a good day for the full day we were to spend touring the Dingle Peninsula. And we got it. These two ladies were both from Seattle. Carol and Kathy. One is Japanese American, born and raised in Hawaii. The other is Native American, born and raised on a reservation in Washington state. They were great travelers and a lot of fun. Neither had been to Ireland before, and one of them had never been out of the U.S. I'm glad they had a beautiful day to spend in Kerry.
This is in Chicago in the summer of 2008. It's me at the corner of Clark and Edgewater in Andersonville, a neighborhood on the far north side of the city. Andersonville got its name from all the Swedish and other Scandinavian immigrants who had settled there. These days Andersonville is home to one of the largest lesbian and gay communities in Chicago. It's funny that I'm standing at the bus stop looking up at the sign (and I don't know why, because my friend and I weren't using the buses that day) because only a few months after this I would be leaving Chicago and riding Greyhound buses all over the country for a month. I don't remember if I had already made those plans when this picture was taken. But I know I was making plans in general. This picture was taken by my friend Marco. I miss him.
This picture was taken in South America, in Bolivia, in August 2010. It was on the way to the Salar de Uyuni, the world's largest salt flats. I was on a 3-day tour. We traveled from Oruro to the salt flats all the way down to Chile in a Land Cruiser. There were at least 8 of us crammed into the vehicle. We were supposed to go through Uyuni the city, but an internal political problem in the country (a quarrel over a silver mine between the departments of Potosi and Oruro) had caused blockades that spread from Potosi city to Uyuni and forced us to take a back-door route to the salt flats. We were stopped when this picture was taken because we encountered another vehicle that had broken down. There was nothing and no one else around to help. Though this road pictured was one of the more sophisticated roads in Bolivia. By the 2nd day of the tour (this pic is on day 1), we'd find ourselves in territory where a road was pretty much wherever you want it to be.
A poem of mine is now live at Eunoia Review. Thanks to the editor of Eunoia Review, Ian Chung, for accepting it and publishing it. The poem is called "Transference (Middle West)" and it's about my maternal grandfather and the place in the world where we grew up, the American Midwest--which was once the American prairie.
My granddaddy re-visiting the schoolhouse he went to as a child in Iowa
Chicago skyscrapers, looking south from John Hancock Tower
My grandfather's name was William Collins but everyone called him Bernie after his middle name, Bernard. Bernard was also the name of the town (if you can even call it that) where he was born in Iowa in 1900. Where he was born and raised is west of the Mississippi River. He had 3 siblings who survived. He grew up on a farm but his own father lost his farm shortly before the Great Depression. My grandfather found work east of the Mississippi, in Illinois in Rockford, not long before marrying my grandmother, who came from Otter Creek in Iowa, in 1926. After marrying, my grandmother moved to Rockford with him but they didn't stay in Rockford long. My grandfather's boss was a Swedish man who would knock the Irish in back-handed compliments to my grandfather ("Are you sure you're Irish? I never knew any Irishman who worked hard like you.") and my grandfather couldn't tolerate that. So they moved to the south side of Chicago, near Visitation Parish, where it was all Irish, and my grandfather worked in a plastics factory. The stockyards were still around then. My mother says she can still remember the smell.
Railroad work in Iowa. My grandfather is among the 4 down on the tracks, second from right.
Hay making in Iowa
My grandma (second from left) with her parents and some of her siblings in Iowa. Cornfields in background.
In the city now. Chicago, Van Buren Street, southwest side. My grandparents (center) with two religious friends and my aunt Lois, about 1928.
Eventually my grandfather moved his family to the northwest side of the city (where I was born), which was mostly Polish at the time and closer to the city limits. Chicago was already mighty and lively in those days (the 30s and 40s) but it didn't yet have the skyscrapers and the great skyline along Lake Michigan that it's known for today. The skyscrapers would start to come in the 60s and 70s, in my lifetime. My grandparents had moved back to Iowa, to Dubuque, by the time I was born in 1972. We visited them at least twice a year. My grandfather kept a large garden in his backyard where he grew corn, tomatoes, and beans. He had raspberry bushes and a tiny vineyard--just a few grape vines, really--from which he made his own wine. Beer too. Their backyard also had a horse chestnut tree that attracted bats and lightning bugs in the evening. We all loved to stay out in the backyard until dusk when the bats came out.
Granddaddy in Chicago with his 3 daughters. My mother is on the left. My aunts Lois and Betty on the right. They were working class but the fashion and hairstyles were still very different from those of their country cousins back in Iowa.
Chicago skyline in 2013, view from boat on Lake Michigan
Granddaddy with my youngest brother, Eric, and sisters Arla and Bonnie, around 1970. In Iowa alongside a country road, with long prairie grasses still growing on the hillside.
My grandfather died in 1980 when I was 7 from prostate cancer. I admit that I have few real memories of him. I mainly remember him when he was dying, in the hospital and such. I was in the 3rd grade and my teacher made us kids write in journals every day for a half hour or so. When my grandfather was dying, I wrote in my journal about it and said I felt sorry for him. I didn't know what cancer was at that age so I wrote "I think he has the flu." I have some memories of his wake and funeral, the first I ever went to. At first I thought I'd write down some of those memories here but I've decided to keep them to myself, except for the memory of seeing one of my parents (my mother) cry for the first time in my life, during the funeral service, and how it worried me.
We had moved out of Chicago to the suburbs by the time he died. Years later, his wife, my grandmother, would come to live with us after a stroke. Chicago and its suburbs stretched forever by the 80s and stretch even farther today. We have no bats in our area of Chicagoland--but we have cardinal birds (the Illinois state bird) and lightning bugs. We have a horse chestnut in our backyard.
Chicagoland, looking northwest from the Sears Tower
Prairie garden in Lincoln Park in Chicago
There were still some farms and open fields when we moved out here from the city, but they are long gone today. You have to drive longer now to reach the farms. The prairie is mostly gone except for some preserved sections here and there. The people who lived on the prairies before Europeans came are mostly gone too--either assimilated, killed by whites, or pushed north and west onto reservations. In Chicago, there are parks that have tried to revive some of the prairie grasses and flowers that once grew all over the Midwest. In Lincoln Park, for example, you can stand and cast a shadow over prairie flowers while the Hancock Tower stands and casts a shadow over the north side of the city.
The John Hancock Tower downtown with Lincoln Park prairie in foreground
I wrote this poem months ago when I was looking forward to the coming of spring and summer after a very long and even-colder-than-usual winter. This year it seemed to be taking forever for winter to hand the reins over to spring. I suppose I wrote about my grandfather in this way because I don't have too many of my own memories to call upon. I am the youngest of all his grandchildren so there are only a few pictures I can find of me with him. I knew him the shortest amount of time. So I wrote a poem that draws out time in images of what's changed and hasn't changed in the part of the country where my grandfather and I come from. Here's the poem (the link is in the words).
Me sitting on my granddaddy's lap and my grandma, at their 50th wedding anniversary, 1976
Posts on this blog have become few and far between. Life has slowed down considerably for me in the last year, and in the meantime it can take months before I hear back from a publication about something I submitted. I have a poem coming up this week at Eunoia Review, and I've also got a post in the works about another site where I'll be contributing from time to time. But to keep this blog from getting too dusty and dull I thought I'd start sharing a travel photo every few days on here. Some of the photos--maybe even most of them--will be ones I've already included in previous posts. But they may have been shared a few years ago, or with a bunch of pics at once, thereby getting lost in the shuffle. So I'll give each picture I share its own post and its own chance to tell a story. I'll give just a little information about each pic, where it was taken and such. You can supply the rest.
Here's the first:
This is on the Camino de Santiago in Spain. In the El Bierzo region, somewhere between Ponferrada and Cacabelos. I walked the Camino during the harvest season, in October 2011. I passed through many a vineyard in full bloom, so to speak. This was on a particularly dusty and empty road with vineyards stretching wide on either side. These buckets were left on the road with a few piles of grapes around them, and not a soul in sight, not even far off in the fields.
The Second City's facade (gray building on the right) began as the Schiller Theater, the home of the German Opera Company in Chicago, and was designed by Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler in the 1890s. This portion was salvaged when the building was razed in 1960.
One of the best things I ever did for myself as an aspiring writer was take acting classes. It was also one of the best things I ever did for myself as a human being. I'll get to the why of that soon. First I want to fill you in on the where--as in where I took these magical, life-changing acting classes.
In Chicago there's no shortage of places to study acting. Theaters are to Chicago what pubs are to Dublin. "Good puzzle would be cross Dublin without passing a pub," wrote James Joyce in Ulysses about his hometown. "Good puzzle would be cross Chicago without passing a theater (or a hot dog joint)," writes me, here, about my hometown. Some sources put the count of theaters in Chicago at over 200. Some also claim this makes Chicago the true theater capital of the U.S. I don't know enough about American theater to back up or challenge that claim. But I do know that Chicago's contribution to American theater--and world theater--is pretty significant.
Chicago is, after all, the Second City and the home of The Second City, the improvisational theater troupe that revolutionized comedy theater in the U.S. and beyond when it first opened its doors in 1959. The Second City is also where I took those magical acting classes, and where I recently joined up with a walking tour of Chicago's Old Town neighborhood on a brisk Sunday morning.
Balloon house architecture in Chicago's Old Town neighborhood.
In Old Town.
Seen in a chocolate shop window in Old Town. Money, guns, and high cholesterol--the story of Chicago.
Second City alumni John Candy, Dan Aykroyd, Rosemary Radcliffe, Eugene Levy, and Gilda Radner, in 1974, pic on entranceway to The Second City theatre in Chicago.
And that's just from the Mainstage. Famous names who have taken classes at The Second City Training Center (without going on to perform on the Mainstage) include Amy Poehler, Halle Berry, and Jon Favreau. Other improv schools in Chicago, like iO and Annoyance Theatre, can boast of having taught Vince Vaughan, Jason Sudeikis, Seth Meyers, and Jane Lynch (as well as a good few of the names already mentioned above) a thing or two at the start of their careers. After Chicago, many of these actors went on to join the cast or writing crew of "Saturday Night Live," the longest-running sketch comedy show in American television history. From "SNL" it was typically on to Hollywood. In other words, there's an excellent chance that if you've ever had a really good laugh some night watching TV or at the movies in the last 50 years, you've got Chicago to thank for it. (You're welcome, world.)
Considering Chicago improv's solid record of churning out future stars, it only makes sense that the most famous improv theater of all would milk its reputation for tourism purposes. The Second City has long promoted itself as a must-see attraction for visitors to Chicago, and its walking tours of the Old Town area are nothing new--there was a tour on offer by the theater going back at least 10 years ago. After a few years' hiatus of the original Second City tour, the current walking tour was created by Margaret Hicks, a Chicago tour guide, author, and improv performer. Hicks leads the tour twice a week--on Sunday mornings and Wednesday early evenings--from May through October. The tour lasts about an hour and a half to 2 hours and costs only $15 per person. (Hicks has her own tour company that offers a few other walking tours of different areas of Chicago, called Chicago Elevated. She didn't tell me this, as I turned shy and forgot to ask her a few basic questions about herself after the tour, but I stalked, er, Googled her later and found her Twitter account and FB page--I've provided links in case you'd like to stalk her too.)
Margaret Hicks in front of the Twin Anchors. I could not for the life of me get a picture of her with her eyes open this day.
Margaret Hicks shows us a Chicago home with a plaque on it, so naturally we had to stop and look at it.
Hicks's version of the tour offers a bit of general Chicago history (i.e., the Great Fire of 1871, neighborhood architecture, and, ahem, local corruption) along with stuff about the beginnings of The Second City, the rules and philosophy of improv, and gossip about some of The Second City's famous alumni. The gossip is the best part of course. Everyone wants to hear about John Belushi's wild days and genius, about Chris Farley's loyalty to Chicago (even after finding fame in New York and Hollywood) to the end of his life, about Gilda Radner's pure joy for performing and making people laugh, about Harold Ramis's Chicago-based inspiration for his blockbuster Ghostbusters (even though the film was set in New York), and about how Mike Myers and Joan Rivers actually kinda sucked at improv.
St. Michael's Church in Old Town. Part of the church survived the Chicago Fire of 1871. This is also where Second City alum Chris Farley went to mass regularly.
The Twin Anchors bar and restaurant in Old Town. Fans of the films Return to Me and The Dark Knight might recognize this place.
Just a few blocks from The Second City and Piper's Alley, the Twin Anchors was a favorite hangout of Frank Sinatra. By the way, that dude on the right is having his novel made into a movie by Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro.
But is the tour funny? That's the question. The answer is Yes...and. (Improv in-joke there.) Hicks manages to get a lot of mileage--and laughs--out of Chicago's history of violence, corruption, and general weirdness. She gets in a lot of jokes at the expense of New York too...maybe even too many. Like any true Chicagoan, I think New York City is inferior to Chicago, even something of a craphole to be honest. I will never understand why so many foreign visitors who travel to the U.S. consistently limit their sightseeing here to those 4 American hell zones known as New York, DisneyWorld, Las Vegas, and Hollywood, and completely bypass the country's actual gems, such as our national parks and wilderness areas and genuinely lovely and interesting cities like Austin, San Diego, New Orleans, Portland, and yes, Chicago. Saying that, I think too much ribbing or comparison to other places during a tour can wear itself out a bit. Comparing Chicago to New York over and over only tends to expose those infamous "second city" insecurities that earned us the nickname in the first place.
The Sears Tower as seen from an Old Town side street.
Up the street from The Second City,a bit of Old Town and old Chicago history.
In Old Town. Not a theater, this is a horse-and-carriage company and stables.
Comedy competition in Old Town. The difference between a club like Zanies and The Second City is that Zanies is strictly stand-up (i.e., scripted) while The Second City is improv and experimental.
More famous faces.
Speaking of which, Chicago's branding as "the Second City" by Mr. A-Hole J. Liebling back in the 1950s is covered by Hicks on the tour, as she explains how and why The Second City theater appropriated the nickname for itself. And in between the laughs, Hicks does a good job making clear how seriously Chicago takes improv. Before this tour, I never knew of improv's surprising beginnings as a tool invented by Viola Spolin for helping immigrant and inner-city children. Spolin's son, Paul Sills, a student and theater director in the 1950s at the University if Chicago, borrowed his mother's techniques to form the Compass Players, the first improvisational theater group in the United States, and later The Second City. Not content with just making audiences chuckle, the early players and improvisers of The Second City created comedy that satirized and commented on current social and political issues and set down rules for improv that encouraged players to perform as a team, stay in the moment, follow their instincts, keep the momentum of the scene going, and play up to the intelligence of their character and audience.
List of Second City alumni inside the theater building.
Find the famous name.
These rules aren't as easy to bring to the stage as some might think, especially night after night. If you don't believe it, try taking an improv class yourself and see how you fare at it. Along with improv rules, The Second City also created a full-fledged training program for aspiring improvisers, comedians, and actors. Hicks lays it all out on the tour, explaining that while anyone can take beginning improv classes at The Second City, getting to perform on the Mainstage takes several years' commitment and a little bit of good timing. Aspiring players must first take at least a year's worth of improv classes before auditioning for The Second City Conservatory, where they'll learn how to put together sketches for a revue and perform on the school's smaller stages such as Donny's Skybox. After two years with The Conservatory, students can audition for The Second City's touring company and gain a few more years' experience. The end goal of all this apprenticeship is to get hired as one of the resident actors on the Mainstage or with the e.t.c. cast. Getting to the Mainstage is far from a given for Second City alumni. Hicks explains that there are only 12 spots altogether between the Mainstage cast and the e.t.c. cast, and unlike The Conservatory and the touring company, there's no auditioning for the Mainstage. Cast members are instead chosen by a combination of luck, talent, and reputation--i.e., there's a spot open, the theater company knows who you are and has taken notice of your skills and development, and you haven't burned any bridges or stepped on too many toes (but have maybe held onto a few coattails--that's allowed) to get this far. If all these stars are aligned, you might get the tap on your shoulder by the company. Might. If not, I suppose there's always New York or L.A. (Who's the "second city" now, bi-coasters?)
There's another specific requirement on the way to The Second City Mainstage, one that's required even before auditioning for The Conservatory. Improv and comedy writing classes aren't enough. All aspiring Conservatory students must have completed an acting course before auditioning. And that's kinda where my own experience with The Second City comes in...
I've never auditioned for The Conservatory. And I'm not a former improv student. What I am is a woman who had wanted to be an actress when I was a kid, but never pursued it in any way. I was extremely shy for one thing...I still am. Plus it was made clear to me when I was young that such dreams weren't realistic. "You want a nice clean job," I remember my mother telling me when I was young and mentioned something about wanting to be an actress. What she meant was some position in an office or a school maybe, something stable. I didn't have the confidence back then to push ahead with my dreams anyway, but I didn't have the practicality in me to entirely forget them either. And there was the shyness problem anyway--really the biggest obstacle. (In defense of my mother and father, I came to understand that their point of view comes from being born into the Great Depression to uneducated parents and growing up during a world war in urban poverty--in my father's case--and working-class--in my mother's case--with little education of their own beyond high school. They didn't have much stability or financial security growing up. They wanted to be sure their own children did. And one of the last occupations that provides stability or security is acting.)
Outside the Mainstage entrance, by the box office.
Famous faces on the box office wall at Second City.
But in the winter of 2006-07 I made a decision to make some changes in my life. I was living on my own in Chicago with a full-time job and friends and my family living fairly nearby. But I was habitually bored and pretty lonely. A new year was approaching and I decided I'd try to shake things up a little in my life, maybe get out more, meet some people, make some new friends, volunteer somewhere. Some time in 2006 I'd picked up a flyer about acting classes being held at some studio in the city, and I thought 'Maybe you should finally give this a try.' A few months later I was watching an episode of "Cold Case" where a cab driver named Dennis goes after his dream of being an actor, lands a role in a community production of "Cabaret," but then gets rubbed off on opening night. "Dennis was brave," the lady detective taunts the production's musical director, who as it turned out murdered Dennis out of jealousy. 'I wanna be brave,' I remember thinking. So I decided then and there to go ahead and sign up for acting classes somewhere, even if it was sad and cheesy that my inspiration was an episode of "Cold Case."
On the box office wall. Stephen Colbert would be so proud of me turning a night vegging on the couch watching "Cold Case" into the beginning of a creative journey. ;-)
I chose acting classes at The Second City because of the theater's reputation. I didn't consider that such a reputation would probably just make my jitters worse by the time the first class session began. I was a nervous wreck the day I took the Brown Line to the Old Town neighborhood for the first class--and I was a nervous wreck pretty much every class session after. It never got easier for me--the jitters and the fear. I just got a little braver at living through it.
The acting program at The Second City Training Center at that time consisted of 3 levels (I believe they've since added on 1 or 2 more). In a nutshell, in the first level you worked on a monologue, in the second you got a partner and worked on a scene, and in the third you worked on scenes and monologues from a specific, more challenging playwright (in the case of my group, we worked on Tennessee Williams). All 3 levels were taught by Michael Pieper, a theater director from San Diego (by way of Nebraska) who created the acting program at The Second City. He'd probably be embarrassed for me to say it here, but I came to regard Michael as something of an angel. Though a big man with a fullback's physique, he was nothing like the scary and demanding "Master Thespian" type teacher I expected. He was never pretentious, never insulting or unfair. He had no interest in making a student feel inferior or unable or as if he or she had no right to be in his class. Michael taught us acting based on the Method technique, pioneered by Stanislavsky and later Lee Strasberg. We rarely did anything improvisational in class. We worked with scripts, we learned beat work, we memorized lines, we rehearsed, we learned how to audition. That isn't to say we never experimented--Michael in fact encouraged this. I remember one class in the first level where we all practiced our monologues over and over, out loud and at the same time, using different accents, different emotions, different postures and positions, no matter how seemingly inappropriate some of these accents or emotions or movements might be to the scene. The idea was that you never knew what such experimentation and play and creative open-mindedness would trigger in your interpretation of a character and scene, what complexities and nuances might develop. Don't worry about making a fool or failure out of yourself, Michael would tell us. Just play. Use your body. Get out of your head. Live in the moment.
Ordinary Chicago setting, a few blocks from The Second City.
Chicago home.
Our city in a garden. Under the el tracks in Old Town.
In the second level this experimentation and play was used more in service to specific senses and in calling up specific memories to help you emotionally develop the scene. We had exercises where we had to all walk around the room with our eyes closed while trying to identify our scene partner by the sound of her voice or by his smell. Trust was also a big focus in this level, and it was around this time when I began to be aware of how much these classes were helping me. I have a lot of problems with trusting people. And of course, it's had an effect on my relationships with other people. Until acting classes, my not getting to know and connect with other people easily was always something I'd blamed on my shyness. And despite being an emotional person, for years I'd been stuffing my emotions, shutting them down essentially, after a particularly difficult time in my life around 2001. That emotional repression definitely affected my attempts at acting in the first level--Michael summed up my final performance of my monologue (from The Widow's Blind Date by Israel Horowitz) by telling me, "You're holding back." Considering my monologue was of a woman who'd been gang-raped at 18 finally confronting and moving in for revenge on 2 of her attackers 20 years later, there was no place for holding back. (Sidenote: In case you were wondering if we worked on comic plays and scenes in class, what with this being The Second City and all, the preceding sentence should answer your question. No. No, we did not work on funny stuff in class. Not even close.) By then I had already signed up for the second level, and Michael singled me out of everyone else in the first level to tell me, "I'm going to push you. Just so you know. Be prepared."
He wasn't joking. He did push me, and everyone in the second level class. This was the level where you had to start trusting your classmates and scene partner (and really, the audience) by opening up with your emotions. This meant exercises like getting onstage and sharing memories of highly emotional experiences in your past with the entire class. It was scary as hell, but an essential part of moving forward with your creative (and I'd say personal) development. And it created a bond with your classmates that made performing (and for me, coming to class) easier and more natural.
Another thing about our second level classes was that they were held in the Mainstage theater. So every week we
rehearsed onstage alongside the spirits of crazy John Belushi and young Stephen
Colbert and in between the tables and chairs in the audience section. Looking back, I
wish I'd thought to take some pictures during class, even once. But I was always so
nervous before every class, it never occurred to me how fortunate and cool this experience was and that I might take a picture or something for memories' sake.
Piper's Alley marquee advertising Second City productions. Piper's Alley houses The Second City.
Self-explanatory.
Serious face on the facade of Second City's entrance. German novelist Fritz Reuter or Parks and Rec cast member Nick Offerman. You be the judge.
By the third level, our class size had dwindled considerably since the first (which had several sections). By this time, you were sticking with the program either because you were serious about acting or loving the experience of learning about acting...or maybe both. I stuck with it because I knew it was helping me to grow and face up to certain issues in my life. I would also see a change in my writing after these classes--more emotion, more vulnerability, a little more trust. Just play, I try and tell myself when I'm worrying too much about a piece of writing. Use your heart. Get out of your head. I have acting classes to thank for opening me up. And I loved the teacher and my classmates, some of whom I still count as good friends today. In all honesty, I never got over my stage fright or shyness enough to audition--and every time I had to give my final performance of a scene or monologue I struggled to keep my legs from shaking. But I also learned this is normal and typical for a great many actors and performers. One of my classmates was a young woman who studied improv at iO in Chicago who told me she felt like vomiting every night right before she had to go out on stage. You feel sick and nervous not because you're weak or not brave or not prepared, but because you're doing something that you care about, something that matters to you. You're basically presenting a piece of your creative self to an audience, offering them a gift, making yourself vulnerable, and taking a risk of failure as much as success.
Michael told us from the very first class to not be afraid of failure. Failure is just a part of life. It shouldn't stop you from taking risks. If anything, it should free you. If there's a chance you might fail, then you might as well go for it. Michael would say, "If you're gonna fail, at least fail big." And funny enough, Margaret Hicks, the tour guide of The Second City's walking tour, left us with a similar philosophy. The greatest thing about both The Second City and Chicago, she told us at the end of the tour, is that you can fail here. In New York everyone is looking to get ahead. In L.A. everyone is looking for the agent or producer in the audience who might hand them a great career. In Chicago? "In Chicago, no one is watching you," said Margaret. In other words, get over yourself. We're the Second City, the Third Coast, The City That Works...which means we're the city that gets on with it and keeps trying. In Chicago, life, success, failure, all of it is much like improv. Improv differs from other kinds of theater and from stand-up comedy in that it's unscripted. This means that if you're an improv performer and you have a bad night on the stage, you can at least just let it go and not worry about it again--it's gone. But it also means that if you have a great night onstage, you have to let it go and can't relive it again--it's gone. The glory is in the moment and in the risk. "If you fail, fail again and fail better," Margaret tells us at the end of the tour. The beauty is that you can fail here--in the Second City and at The Second City--Chicago won't hold it against you.
Improv was born in this town for a reason. Chicago says, 'We're all improvising, we're all working off script. We're all making it up as we go along. Win or lose, pass or fail, hit or miss, just embrace it. Live in the moment. Enjoy it." That's your Second City, baby--second to none.
Mozart looks out from the facade of The Second City theater. The genius liked a good laugh.
Can't stop, won't stop. Seen on a Chicago street corner.
.jpg)
