A to Z Blogging Challenge: H is for Hindbrain



Alligators in H2O at St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge



H is for Hindbrain

Hindbrain thinking isn't a hot topic, I'll wager. Everyone these days seems to know what left- and right-brain thinking are all about. You've probably seen that image of a dancer spinning around. Supposedly, if you see her spinning clockwise, you're more right-brain oriented, meaning that your imagination rules your thoughts. You're also more impetuous and not opposed to taking risks. Yes, I can see that. But thought can't be that simple. And the brain isn't political. It's not one side or the other.

The brain, after all, isn't composed of just two halves. It has other lobes, other parts which affect thought and reason. Here's a document that explains much better than I can what all the parts do for you and where they are located. Take that hindbrain, for instance. Pons, medulla, and cerebellum. Together, these structures keep us moving, staying upright, sleeping when it's time to do so, breathing, and carrying on all those other bodily functions necessary to life that we're not usually aware of, like digestion. So what about emotions and feelings of love, hate, aggression...?

You've probably watched that scene with Adam Sandler and the professor in The Waterboy:

Contrary to what the professor says about the medulla oblongata (maybe the waterboy was justified in tackling him), and according to medical experts, it's what's happening in the amygdala and limbic system that makes us happy, sad, or whatever. We're a bit more complicated than alligators and maybe more than what those experts claim.

If thinking isn't dominated by just one lobe or the other but comes from a combination of activities going on simultaneously throughout the brain, then writing must do the same. It should be as automatic as breathing, as hidden and mysterious as blood cell formation, as simple as sleeping, as complicated as playing the piano. Or acting the part of a hilariously funny, swamp-dwelling football player in a comedic film. How many alligators--or medical experts, for that matter--can do that?

Please see A to Z Blogging Challenge for links to more "H's" from Challenge sponsors and other writers.

A to Z Blogging Challenge: G is for (What Else?) Gardening

Leaffooted bug nymphs on pear tomatoes

G is for Gardening

Writers who have successfully navigated that sea--or plowed that field--of publishing tribulation usually advise you to write what you know. Okay. But not many people would be interested in reading stuff like: Keeping a marriage and family intact during a time when the economy was busting out of its britches and our president was caught with his pants down. Or watching the health care crisis unfold among untold transcribed pages of medical reports. Or learning something very unscientific about what plants/methods/chants work or don't work in a home garden.

Once I realized just how many big fish were already angling for publishers' attention, I gave up the idea of becoming a garden guru and decided to try the fiction waters instead. It can't be much more frustrating than seeing the first tomatoes of the season covered with these suckers. Right?

How does your garden or writing grow? Does Contrary-Mary slip in and mess with things, or do those maids always look pretty and toe the line for you?

Please see A to Z Blogging Challenge for links to more "G's" from Challenge sponsors and other writers.

A to Z Blogging Challenge: F is for Florida



Cirsium horridulum, "Horrible thistle," commonly found in Florida's disturbed areas



F is for Florida

Florida in all of its many flavors takes the cake for occupying my thoughts most of the time now. Don't worry, Southern Illinois, I'm not abandoning you when it comes to this blog or any other writing. It's only natural for a writer to focus and feed on what's front and center.

When we were just tourists here in years past, I never gave much thought to how much the landscape was being changed to accommodate our family and others like us who would visit the state or decided to stay. Swamps were drained. Native plants were supplanted by more appealing but often aggressively spreading ones. As new houses, hotels, restaurants, and other businesses were built, freshwater usage increased. More wells were drilled into aquifers that supply that fresh water. Hard surfaces like parking lots and driveways increased polluting runoff like lawn and agricultural chemicals into streams and other surficial water sources that feed those aquifers. More and more sinkholes appeared as fragile limestone support underground collapsed under the weight of all that consumption.

I've always admired writing that allows landscape to be uninhibited. From Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, to Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and then on to Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer, landscape becomes a prominent voice telling its own story. Imagine, if you will, characters who are not carrying the tale but are vehicles being driven by what surrounds them. Interestingly, that driving force moves not only the characters. It also approaches and attempts to scale manmade boundaries. Societal structures such as familial stability and moral values crumble.

Cactus found along a St. George Island trail

Remember the dinosaurs brought to life in the cinema version of Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park? Dr. Ian Malcolm, a scientist invited to visit the park and give it his stamp of approval concludes that "life will not be contained. Life breaks free, expands to new territory, and crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously." Dr. Malcolm is someone quite familiar with unpredictability in nature as well as humans. He describes himself as ever ready to meet the next ex-Mrs. Malcolm. Stability be damned.

Things go awry when wilderness is hemmed in or otherwise "tampered" with. Nature takes over and tells the story. It's a powerful voice. Is it allowed to speak in any of your stories?



St. George Island Lighthouse

Please see A to Z Blogging Challenge for links to more "F's" from Challenge sponsors and other writers.

A to Z Blogging Challenge: E is for Emerson and Essays



Image of Ralph Waldo Emerson borrowed from this site

What's the first thing that comes to mind with the word "essay"? Ugh! It's that theme paper I had to write in Composition class, the one where I had to make a point and defend it. No wonder essays went the way of horse-drawn carriages. They're kind of fun to read for nostalgia's sake but not consumed on a regular basis by the reading public. It's more relaxing to do stuff like look for Waldo in a picture than try to see things from another Waldo's (Ralph W. Emerson's) perspective. Take a deep breath and think happy thoughts. Don't tax your brain. It is April, you know, and by now we've all had enough of taxes.

Who writes essays anymore? Actors and musicians are idolized, but other arts are ignored. Yes, writing is an art, even the nonfiction kind. The mind of a writer paints in colors imagined by the reader, with brushes assembled hair-by-hair in experience. That experience can be personal and/or gathered from other writers. A written story continues--while adding to--someone else's story, a thread picked up and added to a skein of yarns:

There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand.

Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent. 

Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius is illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history...This human mind wrote history, and this must read it. The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience. There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time...We as we read must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner, must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly...

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays (First Series), "History," 1841

What are you taxing your brain with or adding to the skein today?

See A to Z Blogging Challenge for links to more "E's" from Challenge sponsors and other writers.

A to Z Blogging Challenge: D is for Daughter-in-law

D is for Daughter-in-law

I'm back on my diet of shorter posts. The one I fixed for yesterday was certainly more than a mouthful.

Whoever thought up the term "daughter-in-law" must not have been on good terms with one. Don't you think it sounds like someone who's just an entity in a legal contract? It's too cold and impersonal for my tastes. Thankfully, I can say that in our family's case, being on good terms with our son's wife and mother of our grandson has been delightfully easy and a real blessing.

We don't have the same heritage. We may not always agree on everything. We do share a common love and bond that's too strong for human willfulness to break. I think our differences make us stronger.

The term "daughter-in-law" in Spanish is hija politica. I don't care for it either. Politica? Yuck! An emphatic No! to that word. I've decided to give our Peruvian lady in question a much better title: nuestra Dios, la hija de. I hope it's okay, grammatically, that is. It sounds downright poetic, I think. Now we're speakin' the same language.

Cumpleanos feliz, Daughter of Our God!

See A to Z Blogging Challenge for links to more "D's" from Challenge sponsors and other writers.

A to Z Blogging Challenge: C is for Chiasmus

Eastern Fence Lizard, Sceloporus undulatus, seen on a Fort Braden trail near Tallahassee

C is for Chiasmus

Pattern defines Nature and Nature defines Pattern. In the chiastic nature of things, some animals' longevity derives from their ability to reflect or mimic their surroundings. If an animal doesn't blend in but stands out in its surroundings or looks out of place, like this lizard on a trail marker, it's liable to be spotted by a predator or a curiosity seeker and picked off the tree. And, of course, it would have trouble hiding itself from its prey, losing the element of surprise when looking to snatch its next meal. I know I might be taking this analogy a bit too far, but if it weren't for the orange paint, you would see that the lizard conceals itself in a tree bark's pattern, and a tree bark's pattern conceals itself in the lizard.

Writing that makes use of chiasmus gathers strength from a similar principle, especially if it explores an uncomfortable, unpopular idea. The more obvious chiasmus is, the more likely it is trying to elicit support for--or at least response to--something. Take, for example, John F. Kennedy's famous call for volunteerism: "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." Humans by nature don't usually jump at the chance to help unless asked nicely or forced to do so. All it took was a little chiastic, patriotic reminder from a popular President to get people on board with him and spur them into action. Of course, that was back in the days when love of their country and its ideals came naturally to most Americans. 

Some writers prefer a subtler approach to broaching a controversial subject or two. In Ernest Hemingway's short story "Hills Like White Elephants," he takes on Prohibition and abortion with one swell foop. Both of those taboo topics eventually appear, but they don't just jump out at you. Time means everything to this story. It was written in 1927. Prohibition in America was in effect from 1919 until 1933. It's no wonder there were so many expats running around Europe then. Censors in this country were keeping close watch on anything that reeked of Prohibition criticism, and of course pregnancy was not something that people talked about in public. Abortion? Forget it. The publication of Hemingway's story would not have been possible if not for a little sneakiness on his part to get past the censorship and attract attention, the kind of attention that would sell his story and get him book deals.

You realize--if you're in the habit of looking closely at stories--that the setting here is a train station, something often associated with 20th century progressivism. (You can read what that's all about here and here.) That point is obvious in the first paragraph. What's not so apparent but stands out, if you know what to look for, is Hemingway's use of descriptive and syntactic reversal in the first two lines: "The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun." Not only the setting described but also the pattern of the first sentence (order of nouns, verbs, prepositional phrases) is at odds with yet somehow mirroring the next one, right off the bat.

You know how your right hand suddenly becomes your left one in a mirror image? What's natural becomes manmade, prepositional phrases are suddenly at the fore, and passive voice in both sentences parallels the "two lines of rails" which are empty at the moment. Nothing is happening in this mirror image! Or is it? The taboo topics get presented beneath the censors' radar, and the story sells. The power of chi. It's Greek to me. It's Chinese to someone else. Either way, it's a force to reckon with in storytelling as well as storyselling. 

See A to Z Blogging Challenge for links to more "C's" from Challenge sponsors and other writers.