April is National Poetry Month. I’ve been thinking about spring a lot lately and surprisingly welcoming it. I am normally the sort of person who closes the curtains the second the sun comes out and is in incredibly good spirits on the gloomiest of days, but for some reason spring has an appeal for me this year.
Anyway, I decided to write a poem. I don’t think I’ve written a poem since high school, and I’ve definitely never written anything that rhymes. But stranger things have happened.
Image to the left is the incredible forest by jmlan. You can buy the print on Etsy here.
Without further ado:
the woman in the woods
in paces way and wandering, footsteps look for light
by the change of seasons, the treetops find them bright
by the curl of flowers,
by the base of oak,
the woman wakes in springtime
withheld from winter’s choke.
in waves her hair unravels, fraught with sticks and blades of grass
her thoughts, a shadow’s hollow, her dreams in color as they pass
winter has not been kind this year
it’s left her hands so cold
even in the rising heat
the leaves around her fold.
her eyes blaze gold and sun-specks
as the ice inside her melts
her bones remember fury
her heart remembers help.
the seasons ask so much of her
and when the spring stops by
she gives herself away in pieces
bound beneath the sky.
a winter witch is never seen
bare white against the snow
but in this green she cannot hide
and has no place to go.
she scrapes the tree bark bare when she rests against its frame
her nails the shade of robin’s egg, her fingers carve her name.
though the warmth is welcome
and the spring begins the year
as she hears the forest waken
she learns the truth of fear.
I turn to lots of places for inspiration. One good thing about the internet – one of the best things, actually – is that talented people from everywhere in the world have the opportunity to show off their work. There’s so much incredible stuff out there that we might not otherwise ever get the chance to see.
I’ve been perusing DeviantArt a lot lately, for a few different projects, and the talent on there never fails to amaze me. I thought I’d share some of the cooler stuff I’ve found lately.
In honor of Game of Thrones returning tonight, this is the dragon edition:
CUTE lil DRAGON HAT by phation
This guy’s stuff is amazing. I love his style – tons of unique characters and a cool twist on a sort of anime/comic style.
Mini Dragon by sakimichan
Stunningly beautiful style. She does some amazing fanart characters and some amazing original ones as well.
Rainbow Dragon by DragonsandBeasties
Okay, making dragon SCULPTURES is a whole nother level of awesome. This truly blows my mind. This person has some absolutely great plushies and figurines.
Steampunk Dragon by pixiecold
This person does absolutely mind-blowingly intricate eye makeup inspired by various things as well as some really beautiful paintings. I’ve never seen this sort of unique makeup before.
Sunny Dragon by Tsvetka
I love this painting because it’s like a girl holding a brand new puppy, a fluffy dachshund or something…but it’s a dragon. Awesome.
Hope you enjoy! Is it unfair to make a blog post out of people who are far more talented than me? Perhaps. But I love scouring the web for amazing inspiration…and there’s tons of it out there! If you have some cool art you think I’d like, comment below!
I don’t typically read book reviews. They give too much away. I’m the same with movies. I really only need to know one thing about a book or movie or show to be interested – an image, a title, a cast member or author, a one-line synopsis, even an adjective. I don’t need to know a lot.
So this isn’t a book review. It’s more of a….discussion. With. Myself. Because I need to think about this book and I need somewhere to do the thinking. So here is as good a place as any. No spoilers.
It’s been awhile since I’ve updated. Things have been busy in many different ways for the last few months and truthfully, I wasn’t sure what all to say.
I’m in Pittsburgh, PA this Christmas to visit family and today we had a massive snowstorm. The last several times I’ve been up here it hasn’t snowed at all; seems like not even really since I was a kid. I was so fascinated by it and watching the snow flurries fall from the white sky and the way it absolutely transformed the outdoors that I wrote a little vignette, and wanted to post it here before I lost my nerve and decided it was terrible. So here it is.
“Winter Arriving”
When Winter rings the doorbell, her eyelashes crystallized into tiny half-moon icicles, her eyes bright, she waits for you on the front porch, hands tucked into her pockets unassumingly.
You peer through the curtain, but see nothing.
She came last night, sometime in between the dog howling next door and the same nightmare you’ve been fighting for weeks. She doesn’t knock until daylight. She’s not cruel.
In the garden down the slope, the red leaf bush that used to look like fire has burned away since fall slipped into a heartless cold, leaving everything bare instead of covering it with a blanket of frost. You’ve barely found a handful of berries on the holly tree this year and you feel guilty for letting down the neighborhood bird population, who are frequent visitors to your yard for a quick meal. The colors have faded from miniature pinks and reds of the rose bushes to shades of blood and sand.
You look down the street for the mail truck breaking the top of the hill, but it remains silent.
Winter’s gaze flits from the front window to the neighbors’ half-open garage to the rusty skeletons of bikes leaning up against trash cans in the driveway. The day is devoid of a breeze but her white hair ruffles at the shoulder. She leans back against the brick siding that encloses your front porch, purses her lips, and finally hops up onto the waist-high wall. Her knee-length coat billows behind her. She crosses her legs at the ankle where her tights reach into her boots and still, she waits.
The past few years, the cold months have come and gone without much notice. The sun hides for awhile, the greenery shrinks into the earth and the people look up at a dry, nervous sky, one that hopes to go unnoticed day in and day out. The nights are bitter and smoky. The stars sleep for the season. When spring comes, everyone lets out a collective sigh of relief.
But right now, spring is still very far away.
A knock at the door resounds again, this one slightly more impatient. Winter blows a stray lock of hair out of her eyes. You approach the door. A curly-haired cocker spaniel on the sofa lifts its head.
One more knock, quicker, louder, and your hands fumble with the lock, twisting the handle hard and swinging it open.
A rush of cold air meets you as you lock eyes with Winter, this girl, this sage, who has come to bring you something very important.
She steps toward you like a breeze in slow motion, wild and drifting and targeted on your eyes, your mouth, and she leans in and suddenly, with a kiss, the world breaks apart.
The sphere explodes from her hand, bursting into a prism that blasts across the neighborhood. Every direction swirls white; not just white but what makes white – every color, reflected in the sky and reversed in the earth, spreading with the fire of a galaxy turned inside out. It whips across the streets, coating the trees and the rooftops and the power lines and the parked cars and the garden gnomes, billowing against kitchen windows and front doors, taking gravel for a spin. It’s a rainbow of stars, dusted with white, trailing the end of the storm.
When the universe reclaims its color, it leaves the world in white.
Snow flurries spring from the sky. As they leap to the earth, you hold out your hand and catch a few large flakes. They crystallize in the warmth of your palm. They do not melt.
Every surface that once had greyed has now been restored to shimmering glory, transformed into its winter coat. Your neighbors leave behind deep footprints as they trek across the streets to look out over a valley of snow, a stretch of trees outlined in white. The cocker spaniel sniffs the air, its chill changed.
You look for Winter, but she is not there; she has kissed you hello and goodbye all at once, and when the spring comes and undoes her work you will hardly remember at all, a quiet visitor on your doorstep.
When you look down at the porch, you see two footprints before you ringed in snow. And when you look up, you see winter before you.
__
Text (c) 2012 Joanna Truman
Lovely header image is NOT mine; it can be found here.
Every year around this time, the days get shorter, the darkness comes faster, the skeletons and ghosts and witches come out to play, and we celebrate.
Halloween is one of my favorite holidays of the year, despite my lack of preparation for my costume every. single. year. and also despite my fear of all things, well, scary. I know this does not seem like a winning combination. HOWEVER. Halloween goes hand in hand with my love for all things fall as it is one of the milestones of fall and cannot be missed! I love things that are spooky and the idea that all the scary things come out to play around Halloween, but my level of scare tolerance is more like a rustling whisper of leaves down a street rather than some kind of terrifying creature emerging for an all-out nightmare fest.
Anyway.
Quickly: an update on my short story “Scrapbook of the Gods” from the WPR Flash Fiction Ghost Story contest: this weekend, I received an email that an excerpt of my story story is being used as the opening to an episode of “To the Best of Our Knowledge”, a nationally syndicated radio program! Nationally!! It’s unbelievably exciting and totally unexpected. You can listen to Patrick Rothfuss himself reading the excerpt from my story here (click the picture):
Ghost Story episode of “To the Best of Our Knowledge”
Just click the button that says “Listen” and it should start playing automatically. I would be so honored if you listen to the opening and I also highly recommend listening to the whole program of course! You can hear some of the other contest winners’ stories and get in perfect mood for Halloween…
Now with all this Halloween fantastic-ness I thought I would make a post to celebrate Halloween in all its wonder and terror….so here it is. It’s kind of long. You’ve been warned.
Websites
There is apparently an embarrassment of riches when it comes to websites, specifically Tumblr accounts, dedicated to the changing of the seasons. Who knew about this internet wonderland? I did not. But now I do, and I love it, because one of the amazingly wonderful things about Tumblr is that it just gives you a bunch of images in a row to enjoy and you enjoy them so very much that you can spend hours and hours just looking at things and doing nothing else with them and probably forgetting them the moment you step away. But in those moments, you very much enjoy them. Here are two of my favorites. You can very easily go down the rabbit hole with finding more if you just click away…
PumpkinGraveyard.Tumblr.com
October-Spice.Tumblr.com
Short Films
Like I said, I don’t really do scary so much as spooky. Here’s a couple wonderful, delightfully creepy short films that strike the absolute perfect mood for Halloween. The first one, “The Green Ruby Pumpkin”, takes place on Halloween night and is the pitch-perfect look at trick-or-treating gone wrong. The second one, “Alma”, is one of my absolute favorite shorts of all time and is not Halloween themed, but you won’t forget its gentle spookiness for a long time.
Music
I recently, after many months of kicking and screaming against it, upgraded to Spotify Premium. I was so against it initially because Spotify for free is so robust and incredible that I felt no need to PAY for the privilege of listening to every song in the entire world at my whim, what kind of world is this?! However, now that I’ve gone Premium I’m not going back. Being able to listen to anything from my phone in the car beats trying to slog through most of the junk on the normal radio stations AND the wonderful experience of having no ads keeps me from going into a rage-fueled madness when a dumb ad interrupts my music. Yes, I know, these are all Very Important Problems (in the way that they are Not At All).
I offer up two Halloween-ish Spotify playlists for you – one not made by me, called “October-Spice” and created by the Tumblr user I linked to above. This is a playlist for FALL, not Halloween – it’s reminiscent of leaves changing colors and trotting through pumpkin patches and watching sunsets over the fields.
The other playlist is one I created that is really just classic Halloween songs and a few wild cards thrown in there. I used it for our pumpkin carving party and it was a smashing success! I recommend putting it on and just hitting “Shuffle” as its in no particular order.
Reading Material
There’s lots of horror stories out there for perusing, but better than that for me is a story that really captures the essence of fall leading up to Halloween – the way it feels, the way it smells, the way you shiver when the sun goes down and not always because it’s cold.
First up is not a book, but a book movement started by Neil Gaiman (let’s face it, this wouldn’t be a post about spooky things if we didn’t include Neil Gaiman and that’s my so excuse so DON’T ARGUE) called All Hallows Read:
I did it last year with some friends and it was so much fun. Give a scary book this Halloween! If you’re not sure who to give one too, buy one of your favorite spooky/scary/fall-themed books and leave it in a public place with a note explaining what it is and why it’s there. I love the idea of public book drops. Neil Gaiman and his wife Amanda Palmer do them every so often and then tweet an obscured photo of the book at the location…first one there gets the book
Next up is a book called (and stay with me here): The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente.
This is a stunning book. People compare it to Alice in Wonderland and while it does have a similar type of journey – a heroine who meets all manner of strange creatures and visits amazing places in a world called Fairyland – I think it’s a bit of an unfair comparison because this book transcends its seeming randomness with its incredible creativity, beautiful writing and awesome characters. It contains a character who I think may be my favorite character in a book ever: a Wyvern named A-Through-L who absolutely loves alphabetizing things, only knows about subjects that start with the letters A through L, and whose father was a library.
Maybe you didn’t hear me quite right. His father. Was a library.
DOESN’T GET MORE ADORABLE THAN THAT, PEOPLE.
The reason I bring up this book is because at one point in the story, the heroine September (a proper fall name) has to visit the land of Autumn in Fairyland, and Cat Valente’s depiction of it is breathtaking. Autumn in this book is a visceral, breathing, heavy place that captures your heart and stirs up warmth and cold all in one. I highly recommend the whole book but you should at least read this chapter. In Autumn, there is a dangerous magic that is every bit autumn and every bit Halloween and every bit perfect. Here’s an excerpt:
Obligatory Cat Pictures
All right. This post is out of control long, so I will leave you with some photos of my black cat Piper with pumpkins. All I wanted this year was to take a properly perfect Halloween photo of Piper surrounded by pumpkins, but she was not so agreeable with the idea and so what I mostly got are some not-so-perfect but still quite adorable photos of Piper and her pumpkins. You can see the closest I got with the picture at the very start of this post, but here are some outtakes. Enjoy.
Today I want to talk about a story that means a lot to me.
You know how people say that when you read a book at the right time in your life, it can change you? Usually ‘the right time’ is during your formative years like high school, which sometimes implies that if you read a book at thirty it won’t change you, which is just not true, but that’s beside the point. To be fair, this story is one that I did find at the right time and that was during high school, so I can’t talk.
Anyway.
I went to a magnet school in south Florida. Frankly, many of the public schools in Florida leave a lot to be desired, so if you want to 1) get a good education and 2) feel relatively safe, your choices are magnet schools, charter schools, or private schools. I went to a private school during middle school where I made a lot of good friends and had a lot of spiritual damage done. For high school, I was desperate to escape to somewhere that I would feel included. That ended up being an amazing arts-focused high school where I majored in communications. Yes, we had majors. It was a wonderful, weird, incredible place.
I really enjoyed high school. I’ll just say that now. I don’t want to pretend like I had this traumatizing high school experience because I know a lot of people actually did have an experience like that and I don’t want to take away from that. But I think everyone, just by virtue of growing up and being a teenager and the utter crazy factory that your brain becomes when you hit high school, goes through periods where they feel out of place. Confused. Angry. Like nobody understands. Even the kids with great families and great opportunities experience self-doubt, fear, feelings they can’t explain. Everyone does stupid things they regret. Everyone treats someone badly. Everyone wishes they could do something differently.
And that’s where this story comes in.
I had a tight-knit group of friends in high school from the creative writing department. I split my time mostly between creative writing and film, but in my senior year there were only about six of us in creative writing and because of budget cuts (unfortunately even in arts school, the arts are the first thing to go when the money runs out) we had no classroom, so we sat in the hallway outside a freshman journalism class and the teacher would occasionally check on us. Sometimes, rarely, we even did a little bit of writing.
One of my friends gave me a copy of The Perks of Being a Wallflower and basically said, “This book will change your life.” When you’re a teenager and you listen to that certain song or read that certain book or see that certain movie, it changes your life. And when you share it with someone, it has to change their life too because it is JUST THAT DAMN IMPORTANT and if they don’t understand, they are dead to you.
So this book did change my life.
Charlie is at the same time a wonderfully unique character as well as a lens that we all look through to try and figure out our messed up feelings and see where we went wrong. For me, the book captured everything I felt – my friends, my family, my head, the times I spent crying for literally no reason at all, the dumb stuff you do that you can never tell anyone for fear they’d never talk to you again, and more. My situation in life is nothing like Charlie’s, but I still identified with him and his friends like I can’t even explain. And that’s when you know a book is special.
The book came to me because it was a copy that got passed around to all our friends. When you were done, you gave it to someone else. You could write in it, underline it, whatever you wanted, but you didn’t keep it – you shared it.
I’ve had a copy of the book since high school and I’m not quite certain if my copy is the one that we all loved, but I know for sure that it was loved.
The movie came out just a few weeks ago and I’ve been out of high school for awhile. I don’t feel the same way I did then. I have new friends, new memories, new ways of looking at things, but you never lose what happens to you during high school and I feel that part of me as strongly as ever.
To say I was skeptical of the movie was putting it lightly. When someone out there presumes to take something you love and turn it into something else, the immediate protectiveness is impossible to shake. Oddly enough, it didn’t even comfort me that Stephen Chbosky, the author of the book, was also writing and directing it. That’s so rare in Hollywood that I had no idea how he finagled it but did this guy know anything about film?! (Turns out yes, he has a ton of film and television experience, so. Crisis averted.)
Then I saw the trailer:
And then I realized everything was going to be okay.
For one thing, this song immediately made it in constant rotation in my life:
For another thing, trailers are an incredible art form. A good trailer can be better than the movie it’s made for. In this case, the trailer gave me the chills. I felt comfortable that the movie would be pretty good, but there’s no way it could live up to the trailer. And I felt fine with that. A movie half as good as the trailer would be a damn good movie.
And then I saw the movie.
And it was perfect.
And I’ll never doubt you again, Stephen Chbosky. I swear.
It’s very rare that a movie is so genuine. I can’t think of any other way to put it. Every scene of the movie is made in a way that is utterly genuine, utterly honest, and comes from a real place of earnest understanding. Yet it never veers into cliche or sap. It’s like having a conversation with a friend you’ve missed. In this case, a friend like Charlie.
I was fortunate enough to see a special screening the day before the movie was released. It had a Q&A with Stephen Chbosky afterward as well as a book signing. He is a kind, gentle, thoughtful, and incredibly intelligent person – the only person who could’ve made this movie. He spoke about how many people and places had tried to buy the rights to the book over the years to make it into a movie and how he had always said no, just waiting for the right time. When asked, “Why now?” he said somewhere in his subconscious, it must have been waiting for this cast to fall into place, for this group of people to come together and play these characters. If he had done it earlier they would’ve been too young (and Emma Watson would’ve been kinda busy on another little project) and if he’d waited, they’d have been too old. It had to be perfect timing. And it was. Somehow, it was.
The filmmaking side of me soaked up his answers about directing, writing, his characters, and more. He talked about how they didn’t have a real rehearsal process before the movie, just a little bit of time when they all arrived before they started shooting, so he immediately put Emma Watson and Ezra Miller together to make up the dance they would do at prom because even though they’d just met, he figured the best way to get close to someone immediately and break down the walls of first meetings was to make up a dance together. He then kept Logan Lerman away from them in the beginning so he would still feel a little bit isolated and then slowly get acclimated to them. Just smart, little things that a director can do without being manipulative or anything to help the cast eventually look like they’d all become best friends.
He also talked about the sequence where they ride through the tunnels. It’s an incredible, cinematic moment in the movie when Sam climbs up on the truck and stands with her arms wide open as they speed through the Pittsburgh tunnels. He said that Emma Watson went into the tunnels as Emma and she came out as Sam. When she got to the other side, emerging from this place into the huge cityscape, she became Sam. And that is really beautiful.
When I met Stephen Chbosky and he was signing my book, I told him about the book we’d passed around through high school as well as my memories associated with the Pittsburgh tunnels. We used to go to Pittsburgh every Christmas to visit my extended family. The ride from the airport to my grandmother’s house is a pretty good distance so I would just sort of zone out and be bored in the car – until we got to the tunnels. When we got to the tunnels, I knew we were close. The view of Pittsburgh when you come out of the tunnels is really just breathtaking. The whole city is laid out before you. And I felt the same feeling when we could come zooming out from under those tunnels and suddenly we’d be over the river and looking at the huge buildings and the smoke and fog and snow in the sky. He captured it well.
Hi guys! I’m going to try and do a better job of updating this blog….maybe everyone who ever starts a blog says that at one point or another, but here is me saying it again.
I have some extremely exciting news to share! The sort of news I always hoped would be the kind of thing I could share on this blog but had never been able to before!
The very awesome people over at Wisconsin Public Radio decided to hold a Flash Fiction Ghost Story Contest in celebration of Halloween! Stories had to be less than 600 words and of course, had to be ghost stories. The way I found out about it is because one of my absolute favorite fantasy authors, and generally amazing/funny/talented guy Patrick Rothfuss, was judging the contest.
This is Patrick Rothfuss:
Patrick wrote these books and has a third one on the way.
Besides the fact that these books make up an amazing fantasy series, they are also New York Times Best-sellers. Which is, frankly, pretty awesome.
Out of about six hundred-fifty entries, nine winners were chosen to have their stories produced and read aloud on the radio! They are also doing an interview with Patrick where he’ll talk about why he chose the stories. The audio for each story will also be available on the website for everyone to listen to.
And I WON!!!!!!!
I honestly can’t believe it. It still hasn’t really sunk in that someone I admire so much has read something I wrote. GAH!
Here is the official announcement. They’ve already got a couple of the stories up to listen to and they are wonderful! I’ll be sure and post when my story “Scrapbook of the Gods” airs on the radio and when it is up on the website as well as the Patrick interview. I hope you all like it!
Jo: Writer, filmmaker, artist, animal lover. Influences include Neil Gaiman, Jonathan Carroll, Michael Chabon, Jeanette Winterson, Anne Lamott, Jim Henson, Hayao Miyazaki, Patrick Wolf, etc et al. Expect some musing about writing, daydreaming, photos, random observations, and excitement.
Any questions/comments, drop me a line:
mail@joannatruman.com
April is National Poetry Month. I’ve been thinking about spring a lot lately and surprisingly welcoming it. I am normally the sort of person who closes the curtains the second the sun comes out and is in incredibly good spirits on the gloomiest of days, but for some reason spring has an appeal for me this year.
