New Orleans – Page 4 – Anne McClane

Back to Running

So, I’ve still been hard at work, putting the finishing touches on the manuscript for The Trouble on Highway One, my second novel, and the follow-up to The Incident Under the Overpass. That’s how I spent the bulk of this past weekend, except for two breaks.

On Sunday, Husband Tim and I saw Black Panther. I really enjoyed it, and found it to be one of the better offerings in the Marvel movie franchise. And the character T’Challa as portrayed by Chadwick Boseman is a definite favorite. (I like to root for the good guys with a sense of humility. And for the record, I’m Team Cap all the way.)

On Saturday, I (mostly) ran the 504k race in Crescent Park. (504 is the area code for New Orleans. And this race is 5.04 kilometers long). For me, having run this race is worth noting for several reasons:

It’s the first race I’ve run in over two years. I really don’t remember the last race I ran. The years started catching up with my legs and lower back roughly two years ago, and I followed an orthopedist’s advice and took a break from running.
Strike that, I do remember the last race I ran. I (mostly) ran one of the two-mile races they hold in City Park over the summer. But that turned out to be an anomaly. Legs or knees or something started bothering me shortly thereafter.
This time around, I followed a physical therapist’s advice and got back into running s-l-o-w-l-y. Like build the miles slowly. Like try running for five minutes, then add a minute a week at a time.

Okay, didn’t mean to go so far into my wonky physiology. What I really wanted to say was how good it feels to be running again, and how much I missed it. And how much fun it was to run a race I’d never run before, in a park I had not yet been to.

Many thanks to my friend Samantha for the entry to the race. She’s on the Board of Directors for Youth Run NOLA, the organizers of the 504k. Youth Run NOLA partners with schools and the community to “help youth develop healthy habits for life through distance running.” All photo credits in this post go to Samantha, too.

Interestingly enough, it’s been about two years since I’ve written about running in this space (I think swimming has made more entries.) Take a look, if you’re interested, it still rings true for me: Writing and Running

February 28, 2018 by Anne McClane

Endymion

The 2018 Mardi Gras season just concluded yesterday. Today is Ash Wednesday, but I’ve written about that before. I marched in the Intergalactic Krewe of Chewbacchus on Saturday, February 3. It’s a sci-fi themed Mardi Gras parade, and it’s a good fit for me. As it was my fourth year participating, I’ve written about that experience before, too.

I realized I’ve never written about Endymion, though. The Krewe of Endymion is one of the self-proclaimed “Super-Krewes,”—gargantuan, extravagant parades that punctuate the days leading up to Mardi Gras. I don’t know the exact parameters of a Super Krewe, or who determines that designation. Growing up, Endymion was always the big parade that rolled the Saturday before Mardi Gras, and Bacchus on that Sunday.

Those two parades still own the Mardi Gras weekend. But in the decade and a half that’s passed since I returned to New Orleans, three other parades have become a pretty big deal. Orpheus, which rolls the night before Mardi Gras (Lundi Gras); Nyx, on Wednesday a week before Mardi Gras, and Muses the next night, Thursday. The Krewe of Muses was the inspiration for local writer Bill Loehfelm’s latest novel, The Devil’s Muse.

It’s one of those things about living in New Orleans, and being from New Orleans, that must seem pretty alien to those not from around these parts. This innate knowledge of all the different krewes, and the components that make up a New Orleans Mardi Gras parade. There is a fountain on the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain, the Mardi Gras fountain, that I used to love as a kid. Our dad would drive us out there some evenings; and when the fountain was turned on, and the lights were a-blazing, it was a pretty impressive sight.

The Mardi Gras fountain. Photo courtesy of Yelp

I took a walk out there this past summer, and perused all the placards that line the fountain. One for each krewe that has paraded during Mardi Gras, going back about a century. Many of those krewes are not around any more. I had a thought of making a blog post about each of those krewes—I’d have more than a year’s worth of material.

But, obviously, I didn’t give it much more than a thought. I knew I’d get bored with the subject matter pretty quickly.

So, anyway, Endymion. This parade runs a different route from all the other big parades in New Orleans. (Chewbacchus also runs a different route, but it’s not a “big” parade.) Whereas the big parades roll Uptown, and along historic St. Charles Avenue, Endymion rolls through Mid City. And for the decade and a half that I’ve been back in New Orleans, I’ve lived right at the start of the Endymion parade.

The parade’s floats line up alongside City Park. This past Saturday, I took a walk with sister-in-law Christie, and mother-in-law Aprill, and captured a few photos of the dormant creations, before they were loaded with riders.

Rain threatened all day, but we managed to stay dry for most of our walk. We only had to employ the umbrella in the last few minutes before we made it back home.

We’re about to conclude the year of the Rooster. Welcome, year of the Dog.

February 14, 2018 by Anne McClane

The Station in Winter

Mere minutes after I posted last week’s story about the International Space Station, I went outside to watch it pass overhead again. 48 hours had passed from the sighting I featured in that post. And what a difference 48 hours made.

Really, it took less time than that for the city of New Orleans to plunge into a deep freeze. Overnight, we had been visited by the winter storm that blew over most of the U.S. last week. It was definitely cold by New Orleans standards, though certainly not as cold as it was further north. But here’s the thing about New Orleans: the city is surrounded by water. Every road into the city passes over some body of water.

And when the temperature goes—and stays—below the point at which water freezes…well, let’s just say things don’t go well for the citizens of this normally fair (and mild climate) city. Last week’s freeze brought us some absolute tragedies: a baby died and his young mother remains hospitalized after their car slid off an icy road into a drainage canal. She was trying to get him to his babysitter so that she could go to work.

For most of us, the consequences weren’t so tragic. Inconvenient, to be sure, and potentially costly, but not tragic. All the Interstate highways into the city were closed—as I mentioned above, every road passes over water—and we learned the truth to those highway signs: “Bridge Ices Before Road.” So, New Orleans was effectively shut off from the outside world, at least via ground transport, for a few days.

And pipes froze all over the city. Ours was a typical story: a pipe underneath our house froze, and when things started to thaw out, same said pipe developed a leak. Unfortunate, but it certainly could have been worse. The pipe only affected the plumbing on the north side of the house—the kitchen sink, dishwasher and laundry (and hot water heater). The bathrooms are on the other side of the house.

With leaks busting out all over the city, it put a drain on our municipal water system. Water pressure dropped, and the city issued a “boil water alert” to ensure the water that managed to come out of the tap was safe to drink.

I worked from home on Wednesday, the first day of the freeze, to keep an eye on the frozen pipe. I drove into work on Thursday morning, only to discover that my employer’s parish (I work in Jefferson Parish / I live in Orleans Parish) had lost water pressure. They didn’t have functioning toilets (among other issues), and Jefferson Parish had issued their own “boil water alert.” So I completed the phone meeting I had driven in for, took my laptop, and worked from home the rest of Thursday. To discover our leaky pipe by the end of that day.

So what does any of this have to do with the Space Station? I wrote the following last week, regarding why I continue to heed the text alerts I receive from NASA, telling me when the International Space Station will be visible in my sky:

“…whatever’s going on in my world, whatever’s causing me anxiety or drama, those alerts are a reminder to look up.”

At that particular moment last week, I already knew we had frozen pipes. I had not yet awoken Husband Tim and informed him of this fact. I already knew the Interstate nearest my house— and the eponymous Overpass from my first novel, The Incident Under the Overpass,—was closed.

If you take a closer look at the picture above, you’ll see the ice on my neighbor’s car, and the ice on the sidewalk. The bright point above and to the left of the Space Station is Jupiter, I believe. But what you can’t see is the cold stillness of those five minutes I spent outside. Or the supreme quiet. I will not likely experience such quiet again this year, as the closed highways meant I couldn’t hear cars in the distance, like I usually do.

The consequences of the freeze were waiting for me that day. But for five minutes in the early morning, I bundled up, watched my space friends track against the sky, and enjoyed the silence. And thought, “I’m sure it’s a lot colder up there.”

January 24, 2018 by Anne McClane

Spot the Station

So, on Monday I saw the International Space Station for the first time this year. I qualify this year—2018—because I’ve been looking for (and usually finding) the ISS in the sky for a couple of years, now. And I’ve been meaning to write about it for a while, too, but something else always seems to bump it back in line.

I began this exercise two years ago, when a friend from work told me you could sign up for alerts, to let you know when the Space Station is visible in your corner of the sky. The alerts are super convenient, because they take all these factors into account:

It has to be dawn or dusk, because the ISS reflects the light of the rising or setting sun. It’s not visible in the middle of the day or night.
The ISS must be 40 degrees or more above the horizon.
It also travels at roughly 17,500 miles (28,000 km) per hour, circling the Earth every 90 minutes. So it’s visible in a pretty tight window, usually anywhere from two to six minutes.

NASA does a good job of tabulating all these things, and sending a text about twelve hours before your next viewing opportunity. Here’s the website where you can sign up, if you’re interested: https://spotthestation.nasa.gov/

For any given opportunity, the only things that keep me from spotting the Station are timing and weather. If it passes overhead while I’m still asleep, or when I’m in the car on my way somewhere, then I’ll miss it. And weather is about the only thing NASA doesn’t include in the alerts—you can’t see the ISS if there’s too much cloud cover.

It was supposed to be visible a bunch of times in late December, at the end of 2017, but I came up empty several days running because it was too cloudy. I took it as a good omen for 2018 that everything was perfect for Monday morning’s sighting—the sky was crystal clear, the air was cold but not too windy, and it wasn’t so terribly early as to be obnoxious. The city of New Orleans needed a good omen, as our beloved Saints just suffered a devastating loss the day before, taking us out of the playoffs.

And here’s the thing (or things), the reasons I keep going outside and looking at the sky to spot our friends in the Space Station. One, it’s a great perspective check: whatever’s going on in my world, whatever’s causing me anxiety or drama (like the collective misery of a city with dashed Super Bowl hopes), those alerts are a reminder to look up. Up in the sky, I know there are six people who are an orbit away from their homes and loved ones, who’ve given up their time and Earth’s gravity for science, for progress, for adventure—I’m sure their reasons are plentiful. It reminds me of the reasons I wake up early to pursue my writing.

Two, it’s an opportunity for a quick meditation. About whatever—perspective, gratitude, ambition. And faith. Faith that even if the sky is cloudy, and I can’t see them, the Space Station and its occupants are still up there. Faith that the next time the weather will be clear and I’ll get to track that little point of light as it zooms across the sky. And if not the next time, then maybe the time after that.

And finally, I’m not only a sci-fi geek, I’m a science geek. Astronomy, geography, geology. The very first thing I ever wanted to be was a cartographer (I’d say “map maker” when I was little). I imagine the occupants of the Space Station, looking down on me as I look up at them, a tiny speck way down in the boot of Louisiana. Each of us thinking how valuable, how fragile, and how momentous our endeavors are. As troubled as things may be, all over the map of the Earth, if we ever stop reaching for the stars, then hope is truly lost.

Per aspera ad astra.

January 17, 2018 by Anne McClane

Here, Winter Is

Wherefore no man grows wise without he have his share of winters—from The Wanderer, an Old English poem

As my first post of 2018, I was going to write something about how I resent New Year’s resolutions, yet feel compelled to make them anyway. And work in something about how I began this year as I began the last, with a walk in New Orleans’ City Park. But how the big difference was the weather.

So, I’ll start there. It’s cold! From the morning of January 1:

Okay, okay, I know this is downright balmy compared to some spots in the Midwest and along the east coast. But it’s all relative, right? The average January temperature in New Orleans is a low somewhere in the ’40s, and a high in the ’60s. (Fahrenheit, of course.) See, my app said it felt like 14 degrees! And apps don’t lie. (Do they?) And how about all those hard freeze warnings!

Anyway, I bundled up and took my walk. It wasn’t so bad, except when the wind started to blow. That’s when it must have felt like 14 degrees. I got some nice wintry pics of City Park, so it felt worthwhile.

On to resolutions. They’re awfully “should-y.” As in, “I should exercise more, I should eat more healthily.” It always makes me think of Yoda’s admonition to Luke in The Empire Strikes Back: “No! Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try.” It’s like the difference between intention and resolution. I had intended (not resolved) to swim some laps (in an indoor heated pool) before work yesterday morning. But it was really cold, and it was tough to get out of bed, and my throat was a little sore (maybe from that cold walk). So I did not swim laps. Thanks to Yoda, and the line of demarcation between intention and resolution, I don’t feel like a failure. If I had resolved to swim laps, and hadn’t, then I might be feeling like a failure.

It’s also why I’m hesitant to apply resolutions to my writing. In 2018, I’ll see the conclusion of my eighth year of this fiction-writing journey. Early on, I made writing resolutions—both New Year’s and Lenten—to write something every day, or to finish a short story. Things along those lines. But as I’ve come to view writing as a vocation, resolving to do these things feels like resolving to show up to work when I’m scheduled. It’s an unnecessary resolution. Showing up at my job is something I just have to do, or do not. And be ready to face the consequences if I do not.

So that’s where I find myself this winter, this extra-cold start to 2018. I’m deep into the re-writes for my second novel. I need to make the time to finish these re-writes, in short order. I intend for my time spent “doing” to far outweigh my time spent “do not-ing.”

I’ll go back to the beginning to conclude this post. That quote about wisdom growing through your share of winters is something I remember from high school. I must have encountered it in English Lit, and it’s something that has stayed with me ever since. I hadn’t remembered that it pre-dates the Norman conquest of England—thanks for that, Google. While I’m not that old, I’ve seen at least thirty winters since I first read that line. I can only hope that I’m wiser now for having seen those winters through.

January 3, 2018 by Anne McClane

On Sale Now!

*Special Tuesday edition!

The Incident Under the Overpass is now available on Amazon! In an attempt at courageous self-promotion, I’ll share some endorsements from early reviews:

“Read It If: you like your supernatural romances set in New Orleans. A delight.” –CravenWild.com

“McClane’s debut novel, set in sultry New Orleans, combines mystery, romance, and a touch of the paranormal…Lacey is an engaging heroine…” -Kirkus Reviews

“Lacey has a wry, self-deprecating narrative voice, enlivened by frequent pop-culture references.” -Kirkus Reviews

“It’s a unique story with great characters and it stands out from many other books in this genre.” –By Hook or By Book

“The backdrop feels familiar enough, but as the pages turn Anne McClane peels away the layers to reveal a tale of intrigue laced with old Louisiana spirit ways.” -Ian McNulty, author of A Season of Night and Louisiana Rambles

And here’s a quick synopsis: When Lacey Becnel awakens under an overpass near her home in New Orleans, she does not yet realize that she’s undergone a profound metamorphosis. Nathan, the dangerously attractive man she discovers at her side, provokes as many questions as answers. As Lacey learns of her emergent abilities, she also finds that nothing will protect her from her growing attraction to Nathan, or his perilous fate.

So here’s the thing about self-promotion–I’ve written in earlier posts (one referenced at the top of this page) how it does not come easily to me. It’s one of the reasons I made sure the review excerpts above are all from people I don’t know personally. Their opinion of the book is not muddied by their opinion of me.

It’s also one of the reasons it’s been so delightful to let After Glows handle the publishing. While I still have a responsibility for promoting my work, it’s no longer all on me.

I’ll conclude with this plug: if The Incident Under the Overpass sounds like a story you might enjoy, I hope you’ll check it out. And if you do, I sure hope the “might enjoy” turns into a “definitely enjoyed.”

*Next week, I’ll return to my regularly-scheduled Wednesday programming. 🙂

September 19, 2017 by Anne McClane

Birthdays and Hurricanes

A cow that escaped its trailer in my sister’s neighborhood

My birthday was yesterday. It was a little hard to savor the start of another year on planet Earth, due to some personal reasons. All reasons entirely outside my control, and most having to do with said planet and its climate. But having no one person or thing to blame really doesn’t lessen the emotional impact.

Blaming Harvey and what he’s done to Houston won’t accomplish much, because, in the end, he’s just weather. Really horrible, destructive, biblical-type weather, but weather just the same. He might have forced my cousin to evacuate her home south of Houston in an airboat, but it wasn’t weather that came to her rescue. It was the good will and good intentions of human first responders.

My sister, west of downtown Houston, is sheltered in place and waiting to see what effect the release of the Addicks reservoir will have on her home and neighborhood.

And completely separate from the weather and half a world away, there was the loss of a very good chap. On Sunday, Tim and I discovered that one of our good friends had died while on vacation, visiting family in the U.K.

I’m used to forgoing birthday celebrations for things far outside my control. When your birthday falls at the height of the hurricane season, you get used to altering plans.

While watching everything unfold in Texas, it’s hard not to recall what happened in New Orleans, on my birthday, twelve years ago. Tim and I were in Shreveport, Louisiana, with a sizeable chunk of his family at Sam’s Town Casino. (That’s where we had evacuated to.)

Just as we’ve done this week, we watched from afar as the catastrophe unleashed. I distinctly remember watching the news on Monday, August 29, 2005, after Katrina had come ashore, and thinking that New Orleans might have escaped the worst of it. It was either that night or the next morning that we received the news of the levee breaches.

I can’t remember precisely what my immediate plans were supposed to be back then. Tim and I had anticipated being back in New Orleans in about three days time, I remember that much. And returning to the normal routine of our lives. Instead, we made it back very slowly, spending the first week of September in Baton Rouge, then the rest of the month outside New Orleans in Metairie, the suburb where we were both raised.

We were back into our 2^nd floor apartment across from City Park in early October, as I recall. (Miraculously, the apartment building was like an island in a vast sea, and never flooded).

I didn’t mean for this post to turn into “Katrina memory time.” And I by no means intend to play compare and contrast. My thoughts and prayers and heart go out to all the people in Houston, my family included, plain and simple. I hope they will accept whatever service I can offer, that would be most useful to them.

The lesson that was so forcefully delivered to me on my birthday twelve years ago was to not take anything in this life for granted. It’s a lesson I hold close, and it’s a lesson that the losses of these past few days have highlighted in garish colors.

August 30, 2017 by Anne McClane

Transformation: Yoga, Vodou, and Mass

Some elements from my writing desk, including the new Ametrine stone. Hey, just thought of something: Ametrine, Ambrose the Writing Mouse, Anne McClane?

I’ve been thinking a lot about transformation lately. Like the caterpillar-to-butterfly kind of transformation, the kind that transitions a creature from crawling to flying.

The “lately” qualifier needs a disclaimer. Truth is, I’ve spent a good bit of my life thinking about that kind of transformation. I’ve had an affinity for butterflies since I was very small—back then it was because they were pretty and delicate and seemed gentle. It wasn’t too long before I caught on to the symbolism of butterflies, and then I was set. Butterflies were going to be a thing for me for life.

Thoughts of transformation were somewhat inescapable this past Saturday.* I went to the New Orleans Healing Center for a yoga class. First aside: the New Orleans Healing Center is a location in both novels I’ve written so far—just seemed like a natural fit for a protagonist who discovers she has a supernatural healing ability. Second aside: I’ve been practicing more yoga as my body transforms (with age). I can no longer run as often as I might like, ever since my legs and lower back decided to shout out their displeasure over the prolonged pounding. The meditative aspects of yoga have helped fill one of the voids I’ve felt from running less.

After class, I asked the instructor to clarify one of the words he had used as part of an incantation. It was prana, the breath—the “life force” or “vital principle” in Hindu philosophy (it didn’t sound like prana to me). We chatted for a little bit, and he mentioned the particular Upanishad where I could find the incantation. But here’s the thing I found remarkable: how quickly I offered up the fact that I’m a writer. I said something like “I’m a writer, so words matter to me.”

There’s definitely some transformation at work. Even just a few short months ago, I’m not so sure I would offer up that facet of my life so quickly. Yeah, so, I’ve had this blog for two years; but bringing up my writing in this safe space is an entirely different matter than talking about it in public.

And I did it again; just moments later at the “Island of Salvation Botanica” shop on the first floor of the Healing Center. Third aside: a renowned Vodou priestess runs this shop. (She is ordained into the Haitian voodoo tradition, or “Vodou,” which is why I’m using that spelling.)

In addition to butterflies, I also dig rocks and stones, and I was perusing the nice selection of crystals and stones for sale. I picked out a piece of Ametrine, which the helpful card describing all the stones told me is “a very rare quartz based crystal in which Amethyst and Citrine have formed within the same crystalline structure allowing them to amplify and augment each other; bringing strength and luck in equal measure.”

I asked the Vodou priestess about the Ametrine and one other stone, I don’t remember which one now, but yet again, I volunteered something like “I’m a writer on the verge of publication, so the transformative properties of the Ametrine sound pretty good to me.” She agreed, and I am now the proud owner of a lovely piece of opaque lavender-hued Ametrine. (A bargain at $5)

Finally, late Saturday afternoon found me at Vigil Mass (the Catholic Church offers a Saturday church-going option). And wouldn’t you know it, it just happened to be the Feast of Transfiguration. I’m by no means an expert on these matters, but my understanding of the Transfiguration is that it was when Jesus’s divinity was revealed to the apostles.

I’m also by no means comparing my transformation into confessed writer with any kind of divine event whatsoever. I just thought it was interesting that Little Rabbit Foo Foo kept bopping this field mouse over the head with transformation stuff.

And finally finally, back to the beginning, what did I notice fluttering above me as I entered the New Orleans Healing Center? You guessed it—a butterfly. 🦋 🦋 🦋

* I can’t mention this past Saturday in New Orleans without mentioning the transformation of our roads into rivers on the very same day. A deluge was beginning just as I was leaving my neighborhood to go to Mass. While I was away, streets in my area of the city became impassable, and many businesses (and parked cars) flooded. In my neighborhood, several cars were totaled by the flood water and the sunken areas of a few homes took on inches of water. I hung out at my brother Jerry’s house, in an unaffected neighborhood, until I was able to return home late, late, in the evening. Thing is, this was not a hundred-year-event. A similar, though less severe “rain event” occurred just two weeks prior. Have you ever heard the song “New Orleans is Sinking”? Well, it’s true.

August 9, 2017 by Anne McClane

The Writer’s Almanac

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch. ®

“Be well, do good work, and keep in touch” is Garrison Keillor’s sign-off for each edition of The Writer’s Almanac. I assume it’s trademarked by either Minnesota Public Radio or American Public Media, who distributes the daily five-minute program.

I know of Garrison Keillor through The Writer’s Almanac. I’ve never listened to A Prairie Home Companion. I’ve never even seen the movie, which is my usual cheat to acquaint myself with things I feel I should know more about.

As it is, The Writer’s Almanac is such a rare treat for me. New Orleans’s public radio station, WWNO, plays it around 9am each morning, right at the end of their broadcast of NPR’s Morning Edition and right before On Point. I’m usually at my job by that time, and I don’t listen to radio (or anything else non-job related, really) when I’m at my desk.

I always get a little charge when I hear the opening piano notes for the program. (Wikipedia tells me it’s a version of a Swedish song, performed by Richard Dworsky). And it was rare indeed that I heard it twice in a week—last Friday and this Monday. I took the day off Friday, and was late into work on Monday because of an eye doctor’s appointment.

My mind always feels a little more expanded when I get to hear The Writer’s Almanac. I hear poems that I’m not likely to encounter anywhere else, and hear of fascinating people who would not otherwise cross my frame of reference. Unless they showed up in a Google Doodle.

One of my favorite poems—John Updike’s “December, Outdoors”—was first introduced to me via the program. And June 30—Friday—was the birthday of poet Czeslaw Milosz, someone I’d never heard of before. He was born in Lithuania in 1911, and raised in Poland. He moved to the United States around 1960, and wrote the following about this country:

“What splendor! What poverty! What humanity! What inhumanity! What mutual good will! What individual isolation! What loyalty to the ideal! What hypocrisy! What a triumph of conscience! What perversity!”

That kind of resonated with me. Especially considering the inhumanity Milosz witnessed in his lifetime.

Anyway, after hearing The Writer’s Almanac on Friday, I was inspired to do something a little off my routine. I went for a walk along the lakefront—that’s how New Orleanians refer to a certain section of Lake Pontchartrain’s shoreline. I could go on about this shallow, brackish, body of water; how it and the Mississippi River define the geography of New Orleans; how it pervaded the dreams of my youth. But maybe that’s a post for another time.

So, I’ll conclude with this: I always consider it a small success when I’m able to “be well, do good work, and keep in touch.” In the past week, I’ve gotten my eyes checked out (they’re healthy), I’ve written about some things I find inspirational, and I’ve posted here. If I can keep myself from worrying about either the magnitude or measurement of these actions, then I will have truly succeeded.

Here are some more pictures from Friday’s walk:

July 5, 2017 by Anne McClane

Solstice and Solnit

Sunrise / Moonset in San Luis Obispo. Around the time of summer’s end, last year.

Last night at 11:24 pm (Central Time), summer began. It feels a bit ironic that the point when we mark the most daylight in the Northern Hemisphere—the most we’re going to get in 2017—happens in the middle of the night here. I think this has something to do with New Orleans being five hours behind the prime meridian, but I could be wrong.

I wrote a few weeks ago about looking forward to the solstice. I’ve always been a summer person. Maybe the thing I like most about the summer is the sunlight. When things feel uncertain—and so much about everything feels uncertain right now—I’m grateful that abundant daylight can illuminate the shadows.

To mention a few geographically-specific uncertainties: there’s a tropical storm (named Cindy) currently headed for our coast. And one of southern Louisiana’s Congressmen lies in serious condition in a hospital in Washington, DC, after a horrific shooting. These are some bleak shadows. While I don’t need to hope that the sun will come out after this storm (because barring something catastrophic, it will); I am hoping that abundant light and goodwill will help Congressman Scalise to a rapid recovery.

There’s another thing I like about summer. It may be a holdover from my school days, but I still appreciate the freedom summer affords. To learn outside of textbooks or prescribed courses. I write this even though I’ve been out of school a really long time—by now, I’ve been out of school longer than I was ever in school. But I have a mighty long memory.

Speaking of learning and shining a light, an essay from the writer Rebecca Solnit popped up in my social media feeds last week. There’s a specific reason I hold Rebecca Solnit in high regard, but I’ll get to that in a bit. The piece that was making the rounds was a very eloquent essay on our President. Here’s a link to it, but fair warning: if you are pro-this-particular-President, it is not a complimentary assessment.

One of the reasons why I know of Rebecca Solnit: she co-wrote a book titled Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas. I don’t own this book, but I have given it as a gift. But here’s the real source of my admiration: she wrote an essay last fall that I keep (permanently) on my phone’s browser. It’s called: “How to be a Writer: 10 Tips from Rebecca Solnit.”

I refer to it whenever I need to shine a light on my writing habits. Or just need a little encouragement. Every bit of advice in it is thoughtful, useful, and truthful. I’m hard-pressed to excerpt a “favorite,” but No. 9 feels particularly salient for a little-known writer with earnest intentions (guess who?)

“What we call success is very nice and comes with useful byproducts, but success is not love, or at least it is at best the result of love of the work and not of you, so don’t confuse the two. Cultivating love for others and maybe receiving some for yourself is another job and an important one. The process of making art is the process of becoming a person with agency, with independent thought, a producer of meaning rather than a consumer of meanings that may be at odds with your soul, your destiny, your humanity, so there’s another kind of success in becoming conscious that matters and that is up to you and nobody else and within your reach.”

Illuminating words, indeed.

June 21, 2017 by Anne McClane