Moguls skier Alex Bilodeau won the first Gold medal for Canada at the Vancouver Olympic Games and credited his older brother who has cerebral palsy.

At the last Olympics, American skater Evan Lysacek had a disastrous short program performance that took him out of any contention for a medal. This time he won the Gold medal beating reigning Olympic Champion, Yevgeny Pleshenko.

19-year old figure skater Kim Yu-Na from South Korea carried the hopes of a nation and the heavy expectations of gold as she took the ice and turned in two of the most spectacular performances in the history of Olympic Women’s Figure Skating.

So, what does this have to do with writing? What can novelists, poets and writers of non-fiction learn from the experiences of these athletes?

While I was up into the wee hours of far too many mornings these last two weeks witnessing the “do it or die” performances of a lifetime – some lasting only fifteen seconds – I thought about the lessons they’ve learned to become Champions and how valuable those lessons can be for writers. Here are just a few:

Find Your Source of Motivation – and Use it!
A Champion’s performance is the culmination of a lifetime of daily practice – not just going through the mindless motions of a sport, but improving specific mental, physical, strategic and technical aspects of the game. They are like muscles that must be strengthened every day. So it is with writers, too. Establishing a daily practice that continually sharpens your craft trains your brain and body so the muse will speak, the words will flow and you can strengthen your writing with those necessary edits.

But what motivates an athlete to start training at 6a.m. each day, doing workouts that hurt and burn while mixing in school, homework, jobs and parenthood?

For Gold medalist, Alex Bilodeau, his inspiration was his older brother, Frederic. Throughout his life, Alex has watched Frederic wake up every morning with his huge grin, though Frederic now struggles to talk and can no longer walk without falling due to cerebral palsy. He never complains. Alex said that when his back and legs were so sore he nearly stopped a workout, he’d think of Frederic and continue training. When he thought of complaining, he’d think of Frederic. “I tell myself I should just shut up and swallow and go train,” Alex said. “I’ve got that chance to one day be an Olympic Champion.”

As a writer, what compels you to sit your butt in a chair, strap yourself in and write those words only to go through the seemingly endless revisions? What is the inspiration you can use to get out of bed early in the morning, write your novel on your ferry rides to and from work, and continue putting those words down on the page daily in spite of distractions or wanting to quit when you’re frustrated, tired or have lost your passion?

Focus On: The Present, Your Performance and On What You Can Control
Champions have learned that playing the “bad movies” of your past mistakes only dooms you to repeat them. What you see in your mind’s eye is what you will do. And focusing on the future – on winning a Gold medal, getting that book contract, or even worrying about what might happen if you don’t – only increases pressure and fear. Both kill your ability to perform well.

The key is to focus on the Present and on what we call Performance Goals – those specific things under your control that you can do right here, right now to execute well from the first moment to the last. Focusing on Performance Goals gives you the best chance to be successful and the good news is, you’ll feel less anxiety, pressure, and fear!

The importance of focus played out dramatically in this year’s Figure Skating events. Evan Lysacek could have easily scared himself by replaying that bad movie of his disastrous Olympic performance four years ago. Instead, he set a performance goal: to skate two clean performances. As he took the ice, he focused on completing each element of his program to the best of his ability and turned in two Gold medal-winning performances of a lifetime.

South Korean skater, Kim Yu-Na, carried the heavy burden of her nation’s expectations of Gold, and her fear that if she did not perform well, her country would turn its back on her. But instead of getting paralyzed by the weight of other people’s expectations, she chose to focus on what she could control: to skate two complete, clean programs. Like Lysacek, she focused on each graceful element of her two spell-binding performances and won the Olympic Gold medal.

As I’m writing this, I’m struck by the importance of having specific performance goals to focus on when we sit down to write that book of our dreams. It’s so easy to scare ourselves into inaction by focusing on the big outcome goals like writing that novel, getting an agent, or selling your book proposal to a publisher. I’m going to write a checklist of my performance goals and sharpen up my source of motivation to improve my daily writing practice. How about you?

Cheryl McLaughlin is the President of McLaughlin Human Performance Institute, a writer and speaker, and the founder of The Buzz Professor, who is going to use Performance Goals to accomplish her far-too-long, to-do list of writing tasks!

On a sunny July day in Fecamp, Normandy, I stood in front of the stony corpse of an 11th century ducal palace, studying the ruin before me with the eyes of an Independent Scholar. That’s an impressive way of saying that I was a history student without the benefit of credentials, university affiliation, or professors.

So, what kind of historical inquiry was a former Lit Major with a minimal grasp of French and a dreadful accent conducting in a fishing village on Normandy’s Alabaster Coast? I was doing background research for a novel, of course.

Having blithely disregarded the standard “write what you know” advice drummed into me in college, I had decided to write a novel set in the 11th century, about which, when I started the book, I had known precisely nothing. The first task I set myself was to research the period feverishly, reading history texts and poring over dusty translations of primary sources written by guys with names like Dudo and Wulfstan. Still, after a year of independent study I’d concluded that I needed a boots-on- the-ground approach as well. So I had come to Normandy to explore first hand the setting where my novel would take place and where my real-life heroine had grown up.

This palace at Fecamp, I had determined, was where my story would begin.
In front of me, the favorite retreat of the early Norman dukes looked desolate, even in bright sunshine. Ivy climbed up the broken walls from below to meet leggy shrubs cascading down from above. Three square, roofless towers guarded the outer ramparts, but the threat of invasion had disappeared centuries ago. The ducal palace held little interest, these days, for anybody but ghosts. Nature had been allowed to run riot within the walls, and since no one from Disney had come along to transform this ruin into a replica of its former glory, it was clear that I was going to have to do it myself. Camera and notebook in hand, I slipped past the flimsy barricade strung across the entrance to take a closer look.

I realized right away that I was seeing only a fraction of what had been here a millennium ago. In 1002 there would have been guesthouses, kitchens, stables, storerooms, an armory, animal pens, dovecots – all vanished now. Meantime, the detritus of centuries hid much of what was left. The ground had risen up around the castle walls, burying their foundations several yards below my feet. In the great hall where William the Conqueror held a feast in 1067 to celebrate his narrow victory at Hastings, a couple of good-sized trees grew in the spot where a huge central hearth would have been. I had to step carefully over tree roots, shrubs, and broken stones to make my way around what must once have been a magnificent and elaborate chamber. In a silence broken only by traffic noise and birdsong, there was no echo of the family members, retainers and servants who must once have filled this space.

Clambering up to stand in one of the square towers, I looked out through a narrow window embrasure cut into walls that were several feet thick. Had the roof been intact, the tower room where I stood would have been dark and cold, even in July. Mentally rolling up my sleeves I set to work, imagining the solid roof into place, its wooden beams intricately carved and gilded. I clothed the walls in plaster, painted them with limewash, and hung them with embroidered tapestries. I furnished the room with several beds, wooden coffers for storage, charcoal braziers for heat, and thick beeswax candles for light. I divided the beds among the duke’s daughters, and imagined one of them peering out that tiny window slit towards the river.

If she looked to her right she would see the grounds of an abbey founded in the 7th century, its ancient church rebuilt again and again. Looking at it myself I could see, on either side of the church door, massive statues of the first two Norman dukes gazing back at me. But the statues and the church façade were recent additions, I reminded myself, only three hundred years old. To see the abbey church that had stood there a thousand years ago, I had to time shift, to re-focus my vision and imagine a smaller building studded with cloisters and surrounded by green fields instead of stone walls and asphalt roadways.

Leaving the palace I made my way to the nearby shore, to a white, shingled beach below a chalk headland – the mirror image of Dover’s white cliffs. I imagined a fifteen-year-old girl surrounded by a crowd of servants and family as she was escorted aboard a longship, its high prow pointed towards England and a royal wedding. Would my heroine have looked forward with eager anticipation to those cliffs across the water, or backwards with regret at the cliffs of her home? That was the question that would lie at the heart of my novel.

Now, two years later, the book has been written, its opening scenes set in that Fecamp palace. In the writing of it I consulted photographs that documented my visit, but what my camera recorded that day and what I envisioned were two very different things.

A friend asked me once where I would go if I could travel anywhere I wished.  I didn’t even have to think about it. I would go into the past, I replied, back a thousand years like a character in some time travel novel. I wouldn’t want to stay for very long, because I’ve learned enough to know how dangerous it would be. But I’d be willing to hazard a week there, in the distant past – just long enough to discover if I’d imagined any of it right.

Patricia Bracewell’s novel, “Royal Hostage”, is under consideration by publishers in New York and London. An essayist as well as a novelist, Patricia is the editor of Roadwork.  LCW members who wish to submit to the Roadwork column should contact her at Roadwork@LeftCoastWriters.com.

The tiny Calistoga airport sits at one end of the Napa Valley town of Calistoga, a tourist resort known for its hot springs.  Along the town’s one main street are the spas boasting various treatments: mud baths, hot whirlpools, massage.  My mother and I have come here for my 30th birthday, but not to seek the waters.  I long to soar, to lift into quiet far above the world’s din, and Mom is giving me the gift of flight: a glider ride in one of those motorless little planes.

My mother is scared of heights.  She has had phobias since I was a child.  I remember her arms and back stiffening as she drove on highway overpasses, bridges, and narrow roads with drop-offs.  When Mom got in one of those states, all I could do from my passenger seat was put my hand on her lap and chant, “it’s okay, Mom, it’s okay.”  Sometimes that wasn’t enough, and she just froze up altogether, somehow managing to pull the car onto the shoulder and sit there, hyperventilating.

Now, my mother wants her daughter to fly.  At least, she makes a brave show of it, smiling at me before I walk off toward the plane.  I know her fear lurks underneath, but we both ignore it as she says cheerily, “Have a great time!”

I walk onto the tarmac where the pilot waits next to the glider. It looks like a blown-up toy, a narrow white fiberglass body with long thin wings and a domed clear hood.  The pilot adjusts something in the tiny cockpit, then ushers me into my seat directly in front of him, gets in and closes the Plexiglas lid that bubbles over our heads.  The clear nose of the glider encases my legs.  After I strap myself in, I can’t even turn to see the pilot behind me, and it’s as if it’s just me and this tiny bubble of plane.

The small twin-engine aircraft that will lift us aloft taxis into position in front of us, and with a rough tug we’re pulled down the runway.  I watch the tow plane lift, and then we rise.  Just before the hills, the plane cuts us loose and banks away.  We’re catching the thermals that let gliders soar, those warm pockets of air that rise from the valley up the mountainsides.  The noisy plane disappears, leaving us in the quiet, the hills green and brown below me.

The whoosh of the air currents over the wings is the only sound.  I know my mother is down there on earth, waiting for me, but as the glider dips, sensation roars through my capillaries—drowning out anything but the moment.  To be free to forget my mother is her greatest gift to me.  She has reclaimed her own happiness, and I have let go of vigilance to a depressed mother.  In childhood I slept with my ears attuned for the thud of her falling, woozy on too many sleeping pills; I’d jolt upright out of sleep, and rush to lift her.  Now, she’s been well for over ten years, though her phobia of heights remains.

Hawk-like, we swoop and glide, taking in the hills below, the tiny rows of vineyard grapes, the dots of houses.  I am filled with wind, sound, and light.  I must have laughed, the joy bursting out of me.  The pilot, who has been respectfully silent, asks, “Would you like to do some stunts?”

“Sure,” I blithely respond.

Barely a beat passes and the pilot puts the plane into a full dive. The Plexiglas nose in front of me is now headed directly for the earth.  Nausea lurches in my stomach.  My intestines are both jelly and hard knots.  If my chest-belt is digging in, I don’t feel it, because I am screaming like a middle-schooler on a roller-coaster ride, full-out roaring.  When I find words, I yell, “STOP STOP!”  The pilot pulls us out of the dive.

“I guess-that’s-why-I’ve-never-been–on-a roller coaster,” is all I manage to choke out.  I think of my mother then, her breathless terror of heights, the silence of it.  There were never any screams.  I have a sense of it now: how it must have felt in her frozen body, stiff and sweating, with her choked breath, her panicked eyes.  I remember the sour smell of her fear.  Oh, Mom.  My banging heart regains some of its steadiness as the glider resumes its gentle arcs.  I release my own breath, come back to pleasure in the soaring.

Mom is waiting for me.  She is standing next to her car in the parking lot that butts right up against the airstrip.  One hand is shading her forehead, as if she has been squinting into the distance for a long time.  A lit cigarette dangles from her other hand. When she sees me coming toward her, she drops the cigarette and stomps it into the gravel, then smiles at me.  I can tell from her smile she has not seen the plane suddenly dive toward the earth.  We must have been on the other side of the ridge.  Still, I imagine she must have been nervous, searching the empty sky for her daughter.

“How was it?” she asks.

I hesitate, just for a moment.  Then I tell her the truth, “It was the most amazing thing ever.”

Her face breaks open, fully lit, and we stand there a moment, beaming at each other.  “I’m so glad, sweetheart.”

Chana Wilson is a psychotherapist and writer who lives in Oakland, California.  She is published in the journals “The Sun” and “Sinister Wisdom”, and in several anthologies, including “The Next Step: Out From Under, Mentsh: On Being Jewish and Queer”, and “I’m Home: What It is Like to Love a Woman”.  “Calistoga” is adapted from the memoir she is currently completing. Contact her at chanawilson@comcast.net

January 21, 2009…For forty years I have been going to the National Mall to celebrate, to witness and to participate in history. I’ve been there to see marathons and hootenannies, Grandmothers for Peace, Students for the Earth, reunions of the Peace Corps, and a Million Men’s March.

In the early days, the days of Lyndon Johnson in the late ‘60’s, the country was torn asunder by what was perceived as an unjust war. Led by youth – and I was then young – thousands came to march against the relentless killing in Southeast Asia in a fruitless and seemingly endless war. Among those who were dying were thousands of my own generation, drafted, disillusioned, and angry.

I was living in Washington at the time, my young husband having been drafted and serving in the Naval Medical Corps. I was impressed that, from all over the country, people of all ages, races, and backgrounds poured into the Capital to march – peacefully, but determined to make their voices heard.

When citizens exercise their lawful right to protest peacefully during times of hardening lines between the government and the people, there is always tension. In those days, tension gave way to lawlessness – in my experience, on the part of the police. I remember vividly days when all of downtown seemed overrun with armed cops in riot gear, their faces impersonal behind their blue masks and shields. I remember marching peacefully with thousands of others crowding onto the Mall near Constitution Avenue, one of my babies in my arms while my husband had the other. Something happened toward the edges of the crowd – police bullying, someone said, but I didn’t see it myself. Everyone started running, panicked. I feared a stampede and with our children there, felt a fear I have rarely experienced.

In those days one did not even need to be marching to get arrested, but merely to be on the wrong street at the wrong time. I remember riding on a bus through a rundown section of town near the Capitol and seeing SWAT-like teams of riot cops sweep in front of the bus, rounding up and sometimes bludgeoning anybody who happened to be on the street. Most of the residents in that neighborhood were black, but on that day and in that mood, the cops were truly ecumenical. Later, thousands in the sweep were arrested without charges and held in RFK Stadium. By that time of course, LBJ was gone and we had moved on to Richard Nixon.

Over the years I went to the Mall on countless other occasions. I went for Smithsonian Folk Life festivals every summer, for Cherry Blossom Festivals in spring (even when it snowed), and, in recent years, to protest another unjust war. Every year that I lived in Washington I went for my favorite Mall holiday, the Fourth of July, with its picnics, long sunsets, bands, merry-making and the crescendo of huge fireworks. The music pretty much reflected the regime; sometimes it rocked, sometimes it was hokey, sometimes it made you sing and dance. On one Fourth during the Reagan years the Beach Boys were uninvited to the party – for being suspected dissidents!

Yesterday I went back to that old neighborhood, or as close as I could get to it at 17th and Constitution. Yesterday I experienced something almost impossible to imagine forty years ago. Yesterday I went down with the multitudes to celebrate the first official event of Barack Obama’s Inauguration as the 44th President of the United States: the Concert on the Mall, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Like all the festivals and celebrations, like all the Fourth of Julys, it was joyful. Like all the marches and protests, it was full of soul and heart and feeling. But unlike the others, tension was replaced by calm; fear gave way to hope. And mostly there was love in a way I have never experienced it in my country.

To witness this and celebrate it, the superstars were there: Bruce Springsteen backed by a gospel choir, and Mary J. Blige making her smooth moves in her snakeskin boots; old guys like James Taylor and John Mellincamp who sang “Ain’t That America,” and Pete Seeger who sang “This Land is Your Land” with all the verses from the Great Depression; Bon Jovi was there, and U2, and Queen Latifah who introduced the voice of Marion Anderson; Stevie Wonder rocked on the piano and Shakira rocked in leather pants; that wild trio, Sheryl Crow and Herbie Hancock and Will.I.Am in his dreds and Scottish tartan. Then, Barack and Michelle Obama singing along with Garth Brooks doing an “American Pie” medley. And finally Beyonce finished it all off with “America the Beautiful.” Not a dry eye in the house.

But as Obama said, “this is not about me,” and it wasn’t about them, really, either. It was about us, the thousands of folks who waited in the grey winter light, who shivered in the January cold, who stood for hours to celebrate this moment, to hear these voices, yes, but mostly just to be there. With each other. The family behind me, black, who had driven the day before all the way from Michigan. The young women in front of me, white, who had come from Utah and were so pleased with themselves for getting tickets to the Inauguration. “Think about it. They’re all Republicans in Utah and they’re not coming to this. No big deal to get tickets from our Republican Congressman.” The black woman in the long black fur coat and black hat who stood next to a blond white woman in a white coat and furry white hat who kept hugging each other. The people of every size, color, and contour who spontaneously linked arms, swayed and sang together.

This time was different, maybe because for the first time in my memory all those people were for something – the same thing – rather than against something. This time was different because people were unselfconsciously waving flags when at other times they might have been tearing, wearing or burning them. This time was different because in my memory, the living memory of most folks there, times have never been worse. And somehow we – all of us there, I sensed – never felt better or more hopeful. Nobody, none of us, had ever experienced, or maybe even imagined such a day.

Joanna Biggar lives in Oakland and is a teacher, writer, and traveler whose special places of the heart include the California coast and the South of France. A professional writer for more than 25 years, her poetry, fiction, personal essays, feature, news and travel articles have appeared in hundreds of publications.

Alpes-Maritimes, France

The Cote d’Azur brings to mind luxurious hotels and the cachet of the Mediterranean coast stretching from Cannes to Menton, yet this strip of land is connected to another world. To the north, a mountainous backcountry offers a diversity of cultures and outdoor activities.

Both elegant coast and wild backcountry are part of the Alpes-Maritimes departement, which is tucked along the Italian border in southeastern France. This area of Provence possesses the seaside, the mountains (as high as Mt. Gelas at 10,300 feet) with an alpine landscape of fir forests, and the high rocky land of the Mercantour National Park. So why not enjoy it all? Stay in deluxe hotels, discover ancient hillside villages, puzzle over ancient pictographs, and hike in nature so dramatic it will knock your socks off.

Although the Riviera boasts its famous hilltop villages, such as Eze and Saint-Paul-de-Vence, the backcountry has its share of ancient villages with narrow cobblestone streets and stone houses. It takes just an hour driving north to reach them. In the Roya Valley, the lovely village of Saorge (11th century) has medieval houses strung together like a necklace across the mountainside. The streets are beautifully hand-paved with water-smoothed oblong river-pebbles. The hillside village of Venanson seems to float on a ridge, and gives spectacular views overlooking the Vesubie Valley River. And in Breil-sur-Roya, tall, narrow, attached houses have retained their medieval character. This town is only 24 kilometers from the Mediterranean.

For centuries these villages were completely isolated as the main road by-passed them. Instead it ran farther west, over the Tende Pass through the village of Sospel, with its 11th century bridge, which sprouts a medieval watchtower in the middle of the span. The new road was constructed some 30 years ago, bringing the modern world closer.

The Roya Valley has been described as Italian, but with a French accent and sense of discipline. Constant reminders of this mix are evident: flat bread covered with tomato paste (like pizza), espresso coffee drunk strong and black with lots of sugar, and the Breil dialect that incorporates Latin words. On some “newer” buildings (16th, 17th & 18th century), decorative accents and walls painted with warm pinks and yellows give an Italianate flair reminiscent of the Italian Riviera.

History explains this blend, as for centuries the Roya Valley was half French and half Italian. Part belonged to the Duke of Savoy, who favored his land as the best hunting ground. In fact, the upper Valley of the Roya only became part of France in 1947 after World War II, when the people of Tende and La Brigue asked to become part of France. Some of the Riviera, including Nice, did the same in 1860.

In the Alpes-Maritimes, nature has taken its course with great dramatic appeal, cutting away at mountainsides and leaving behind steep canyons with a palette of colors. For example, the Roya Valley has areas of purple rocks with green striations, while the cliffs of the Daluis Gorge are an antique, ruby red, and the nearby Cians is yellow. Some gorges north of Puget-Theniers are black, as if sprinkled with ash, and the Gorge du Paganen’s  grey rock would fit right into Dante’s underworld.

In the Mercantour National Park, thousands of engravings dating from the Bronze Age (1800-1500 BC) adorn rocks, for this high place was sacred to the ancient inhabitants of the valley. The surprisingly small drawings were scratched into ochre-colored flat schist rocks that had been smoothed by ice during the Glacial Age. Professional guides lead hikes to the most interesting sites in Vallee des Merveilles (Valley of Marvels) and Fontanalbe and can interpret the engravings. A visit to either site is a full day’s outing. For these trips and other outdoor sports contact professional guides in Saint-Martin-Vesubie and Breil-sur-Roya, north of Menton. Another way is to drive north from Nice on the N202.

Whatever one wishes for – gurgling streams, perhaps, or deep, dramatic ravines – one is sure to be able to find it here. This includes swimming, kayaking and other water sports, fishing, rock climbing, horse riding, and mountain biking. Within the Mercantour’s rocky terrain lie 4,000 kilometers of marked trails for walkers, hikers, and bikers. The Roya Valley alone has 25 mountain lakes, so gorgeous scenery is a given.

Before World War II, Saint-Martin-Vesubie was a fashionable resort with ten hotels, but during the post-war economic slump tourism fell off. Today, with only two hotels, the place is unknown, when compared to the Riviera. Yet this town, cradled between fir-covered hills, is a perfect base for hiking in spring and fall. Le Boreon, also for hikers, offers cross-country skiing in winter. Alpine skiing is found at La Colmiane.

The spiritual distance of the mountains is greater than the hour it takes to get back down to the coast and its deluxe hotels. Beaulieu-sur-Mer, between Monaco and Nice, has ultra luxurious La Reserve de Beaulieu, resembling an Italian Renaissance villa, with hand-painted furniture heightening the décor of the rooms. Restaurants, rooms, and the heated salt-water pool, are a splash away from the sea. In Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, the deluxe Royal Riviera Hotel claims the largest pool on the coast as well as a private beach. These hotels’ gourmet restaurants attract European royalty.

Local tourist sites include the Italian-style palatial villa and gardens of the Baroness Ephrussi de Rothschild in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. In Beaulieu-sur-Mer, the Villa Kerylos is a pure re-creation of an ancient Greek mansion.

Along the waterfront in Nice and Cannes, locals stroll the palm-lined promenades. In legendary hotels such as the Carlton and stucco mansions, champagne corks pop at breakfast. The towns offer lively outdoor food and flower markets.

The Alpes-Maritimes certainly has something for everyone.

THE DETAILS: Spring and fall are the best times for hiking. Guides are in Breil-sur-Roya and Saint-Martin-Vesubie.
French Government Tourist Office: www.franceguide.com
Air France : www.airfrance.us
Castel du Roy hotel in Breil-sur-Roya: www.castelduroy.com
La Reserve de Beaulieu: www.reservebeaulieu.com
The Royal Riviera www.royalriviera.com

Patricia Woeber was born in Cape Town, South Africa, and moved to the United States at the age of 21. Her travel articles have been published throughout the United States and Canada. In 2004, the French Government awarded her the Medaille d’Or du Tourisme (Gold Medal) for her extensive articles on France.  At the moment, she is polishing her book of travel adventures filled with stories of extraordinary situations ranging from wonderful to dangerous.

Is there a better launching off point for positive change than New Year’s Day? Nope, not much beats January 1st as the beginning of the new you. A whole new year awaits for the writer in you to make your mark.  Fresh and unspoiled by editor rejections and by your own sketchy writing habits, that fat January is all about possibilities.  All the excess of the holiday season, the “might as well wait ‘till the first of the year” procrastination, and the sludgy sloth are but a faint memory after midnight December 31st.  You have improvement plans for this New Year.  This year you will finish that novel, this year you will send out that stack of short stories languishing in the drawer; hell, this year you’re going to quit smoking, lose weight, get fit, and find your soul mate.

What’s that you say?  Here it is the second week of January and already you’ve missed your sunrise yoga class for the third time and got lost reading a book instead of working on yours. You do this every year. You suck.

But don’t despair. The New Year, though powerful, is but one of many occasions you can use to identify the beginning of the new you.  Chinese New Year comes soon enough in February, and if that passes you by there is always that fire starter, sun-moving-into-Aries first day of spring. Fresh starts crave a precise moment to mark the spot when old bad habits are shed like a crusty scab revealing the glowing newness underneath.  Well, maybe that’s a microdermabrasion facial, but you get the picture.

More importantly though, why do we need this totem, a day on the calendar that captures our best selves?  I have a theory.

I have a friend who believes in everything––no, wait a minute, that’s me––but let’s just say that everything in the universe is either yin or yang.  You know, female/male, expansive/contractive, sweet pink vodka cosmopolitan/deep fried pork sausage.  Surely we writers are expansive yin beings.  (I’m surprised poets can keep their corporeal form and not just fly away in a beam of pure light.) Thus we need yang energy to balance us, to bring us down to earth. Self-imposed structure demonstrates our attempt to ground ourselves with powerful yang energy. Brilliant yin ideas need some butt-in-the-chair yang work ethic to reach fruition. Every day we seek balance. But if we were completely successful existing on steady sameness, brown rice, and goodness, where would the murder scenes come from? Or tales of the steamy sex of betrayal?

Today I decided to take an inventory of my accomplishments, to see how far I have come with all the personal and professional growth I set out to manufacture last January.  I think I was on four diets last year, and I am happy to say that I weigh exactly the same as I did last January.  Early in the year, as I channel surfed for the Australian Open (procrastinating on my book proposal) I landed on the best thing I ever saw.  Good-looking, happy, sweaty people gyrated to a salsa beat.  Exercise? How could it be exercise––it looked like so much fun? I ordered the Zumba tapes with the free Zumba sticks (an unbelievable offer) before the hard-bodied dancers were done dancing across my TV screen.  Now, a year later, the unopened box sits on a shelf, a cluttered shelf.  Oh yeah, that’s right, that was another thing I was planning on doing.  “Clear the clutter” was high on the resolution list at the onset of 2008.

Why do we make these resolutions? Because we’re dreamers. And let’s just give it up to the creative universe for that!  Writers are imaginers. We can see flesh and blood on a cold blank page.  We can feel the pain of a life not lived or the joy of a mother’s love in people who don’t even exist.  We can chronicle our lives and, maybe without realizing it, land on universal truths that resonate with our readers.

Last year at this time I had a few pages about many things, which was the start of my woman-coming-of-a-certain-age food memoir.  I was flailing, trying to herd squirrels of thought with little success.  I was yinned out.  My story was so ethereal and all over the place it was on the verge of disappearing, taking my vision of me as a writer with it.  And then the magic happened.  The universe delivered someone to help me, a special editor/coach goddess, who incidentally has very tangy yang energy. This January I have three fat chapters and a real honest-to-goodness book proposal.  The heft of it in my hand feels like a newborn baby. It feels like a miracle to me. That’s what creation is.

January is the month for fresh starts. That’s the generous, expansive yin of it. January is also a fallow winter month, a time of reflection and a time to draw together.  That’s the tightening yang of it.  What I learned in this last year is that positive change (the new year theme) doesn’t need to be directed by a judgmental taskmaster.  That Zumba guy wasn’t bitching at anybody. That’s what drew me to him in the first place.  He and his band of zumba-cisers were working hard, sweat beading up on their six-pack abs, but they were having fun.  They were dialed in to their creative energy.

So this new year, instead of eliminating things that give you pleasure, make a list of resolutions to celebrate and savor the wonderful unique qualities that make you you. Take a deep breath of your divine essence, dear reader, and instead of starting the next to-do list, look at all that you have done. I think you will be surprised. 

Toni Piccinini is a Marin-based writer and the creator and original owner of Mescolanza, a San Francisco Chronicle Top 100 Bay Area Restaurant.  When Toni is not teaching Italian cooking classes, (bellatoni@lacucinasemplice.com) or shaking her Zumba sticks, she is looking for an agent to represent her coming-of-age food memoir “A Simple Year”.

YOUR BABIES

You care for them
soap their backs
pick nits from
each strand of hair;
nourish and starve
them for their own
good; discipline
them into line;

They grow, get
rowdy, take on
lives of their own,
so you send
them off make
their way
in the world, earn
some dough.

Then you wait,
and wait and wait
for the news;
Will there be a
train crash?
A cure for cancer
or maybe
the Swine Flu?

Until some
Grad student editor
not much older
than them
(but much, much
younger
than you)

deigns to respond,
No thank you,
in a letter
sealed in
an envelope
stamped and
addressed
in your
own hand.

HOMEMAKER POET

The relationship between poetry and pastry
is sadly quite inverse.

Do one well, the other suffers. An hour
for the villanelle subverts

the flaky crust, but still I keep my hands
in both; I give thanks

for publication that’s been broad and deep
in family praise, and that

for extracting smiles from kids half dead
with ennui

I’ve earned my Pulitzer in pies.

VILLANELLE GENERATOR

It randomly generates end-rhyme
and regular meter, plans for each stress,
gives infinite choices for first and third lines.

A real workhorse muse, it draws tandem lines,
searching each website and database;
it eats text and excretes it as end-rhyme,

slant, near or true.  In a few seconds’ time
tercets are teeming.  It breeds words like a virus,
spawns infinite choices for first and third lines.

Poetic pirouettes whirl en pointe on a dime
with no mental strain; nuanced phrase after phrase.
While it effortlessly generates end-rhyme.

Quality will rise, as in a short time
programs imprint preferences, continually revise
available choices for first and third lines

and sieve out the drek.  Hack poets will wane,
will wander disconsolate the Boolean maze
of the randomly generated end-rhymes.

Here fire derived from an algorithm burns
and warms the icicle heart even of Isosceles
who reads the roulette-wheel spun end-rhymes,
and triages choices for first and third lines.

Rebecca Foust won the 2007 and 2008 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prizes and was a finalist for Poetry’s 2007 Emily Dickinson Award.  Nominated for two 2008 Pushcart Prizes, Foust’s recent poetry appers or is forthcoming in Atlanta Review, Nimrod, North American Review, Spoon River, Women’s Review of Books and elsewhere.

Do you know that in Australia the globes are just like American ones, with Australia on the bottom? It boggles my imagination to think about all those people Down Under knowing they live on the bottom of the world, knowing they’re walking around upside down all the time. This would not be the case, of course, if they simply re-drew all the globes to show the southern hemisphere at the top.  Why not do this?

What does it feel like to live Down Under? Is it just another aspect of living in a world filled with exported American culture: McDonalds and Coca Cola in every country? What does it take for an American to begin to understand the rest of the world?

What’s Up Down Under, a collection of travel stories, began as a series of letters sent home to friends during the year that I lived and worked in Melbourne. I loved it that our two countries were so similar on the surface, yet Australia presented me with a never-ending series of surprising cultural and linguistic differences. There was an Alice-in-Wonderland-like quality to living in a place where English was spoken, yet often not having a clue what people were talking about:

You’re flying to cans?

He’s wearing a bag of fruit?

I should pass you a tinny?

Between the accents, country-specific peculiarities, and incomprehensible rhyming slang, I was often befuddled. And I enjoyed trying to figure things out. During that year in Australia I caught the travel bug. Soon afterward, I found myself visiting other countries – mostly in the southern hemisphere, many “developing”.

Things do look different when you are not on top. Things look different when yours is not the dominant culture, when you are not white and well fed, or when you have only one set of clothing, which is ragged and dirty and displays the logo of a foreign country’s football team. They look very different when you don’t have access to clean water or electricity, when members of your family suffer from malaria, or when your city has been reduced to rubble by an occupying army.

I met families living at subsistence level in Madagascar. They had to compete with foreign scientists – and their precious endangered species – for the right to live as local families have for generations, eking a living from the small parcel of forest in which they gather firewood, harvest plants, and trap small animals to eat. Same location, but the scientists and the locals may as well be living in parallel universes.

Similarly, I may as well be in a parallel universe when I travel to a place where I don’t speak the language or understand the customs, don’t know how to get around, and don’t enjoy the security and support of a network of extended family and friends.

What’s Up Down Under is an exploration of ways in which to experience the world. The best way I know to do that is to put myself into new situations, new worlds. Worlds where I don’t know what’s going on or who is safe to travel with, where my legs are covered with leeches and I’m slipping down a mountain, where I am confused or frightened or simply have very little sense of context.

Not every story in this book took place south of the equator, but each was entered into with a spirit of adventure and exploration, and with the hope of learning about the world in a new way. I travel in order to have those experiences, and I write in an attempt to understand them. Because in the same way that traveling dislocates, travel writing locates. As a portrait of place, or person in place, travel writing provides a structure for examining and making sense of the unfamiliar, for becoming familiar with the foreign.

Travel has introduced me to what had been foreign. I don’t know what it’s like to live in a city pockmarked by shrapnel, reminded every day of occupation, hunger, and death, but being lost in Sarajevo certainly evoked a different kind of fear than I have ever experienced before. And I have never had to wear other people’s clothing because everything I owned was destroyed, but I now have a sense of what it must be like, and a deep admiration for the courage and resourcefulness of those who live through a direct experience of war.

What has impressed me most is the kindness of people around the world, their generosity, hospitality and eagerness to communicate. In one case it was dramatic: strangers rescuing me from a kidnapper! In others it was more subtle: a rainforest guide quietly slicing lianas to make my hike easier, a museum curator providing special access to ancient goddess figures hidden away in a closet, or a restaurateur whispering a secret recipe for Irish brown soda bread.

I have enjoyed and been inspired by people around the world, and hope you’ll feel some of that inspiration as you read these stories.

Laurie McAndish King’s collection of travel stories, What’s Up Down Under, is a work in progress.  Her essays have been published by Lonely Planet, Travelers’ Tales, and the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine. Laurie is the publisher of Travel Writers News and co-editor, with Linda Watanabe McFerrin, of two volumes of Left Coast Writers’ Hot Flashes: Sexy Little Stories and Poems.

© 2008 Wendy Nelson Tokunaga

I was addicted.

Unlike the mid-1990s, when I first started on the long road of attempting to get a novel published, in the 2000’s it was possible to query literary agents by email. No more dropping snail mail query letters with a SASE into the post box and waiting weeks or months for a reply. No more wear and tear on my printer, and no need to schlep to the post office to send out a partial or, if I were lucky, a full manuscript. Now when an agent asked to see all or part of my novel, I could send it as an attachment, or paste an excerpt in the email itself.

When my writing life wasn’t going too well (which, unfortunately, was a lot of the time), I’d send out email queries, about a dozen at a time, to brighten my spirits, hoping a miracle would happen—that I would find the agent who wanted to sell my book. I’d click on the “Send” button as if pulling the arm of a slot machine, then sit back to await my fate. Maybe this was the day my life would change. I fixated on my computer screen like a day trader, watching for the slightest stock movement, clicking the “Get Mail” icon every few seconds to see if a reply had come through.

By early 2006, in the midst of querying on my fifth novel, with the hundreds of rejections of the four previous novels behind me, I had become a full-fledged email query addict. And I was getting results. Along with the quick responses (some received in less than two minutes after sending the query) of “thanks, but not for me,” my luck was improving. Some agents were asking for the full manuscript.

One morning I sent an email query to “Agent X.” A big New York agent and a popular one, I’d been reluctant to pitch to her. This isn’t her kind of book, I thought, while another voice in my head said, “What have you got to lose? It’s just an email.” I held my breath, hit “Send,” and waited.

A reply flew back. “Can you send me the first three chapters by email?”

Uh, sure. In less than a minute she had them.

Next reply, about fifteen minutes later: “I *love* this! Can you send me the rest?”

Stunned, I loaded up the attachment of my 245-page manuscript and sent it on its way.

The weeks that passed turned into a couple of months, and I had yet to hear from Agent X. In the meantime other agents I’d sent the novel to were getting back to me, some with praise, but not one taker; more rejections to add to the not insignificant pile. But I had yet to get a rejection from Agent X.

As luck would have it, Agent X was going to be at a writers conference I was to attend in a few weeks. She, along with fifteen other agents, would be participating in something called Speed Dating with Agents.

I was not a virgin when it came to agent speed dating. At another writers conference a few years before, where I’d been pitching Novel #3, I paid twenty-five dollars for the privilege of crowding into a hotel ballroom with about two hundred other desperate-to-be-published writers, standing for over an hour in haphazard, zig-zagging lines for the chance of having five minutes with an agent. Twenty of them sat at desks lining the periphery of the room, kings and queens holding court, awaiting pitches from the masses. The only difference between this ballroom and the Harris cattle ranch I’d passed many times on Highway 5 on the way to Los Angeles was the absence of the smell of manure. However, I’m sure a plentiful amount of b.s. was being thrown around in that room just the same.

But this was a different conference, a different speed-dating experience, and this was Novel #5. The organizers promised the event would be civilized, not a cattle call. You would sign up for three agents ahead of time and receive a ticket for each, then visit each one in order. A proctor would ring a bell after your five minutes were up, and you’d go on to the next agent on your list.

I’d considered contacting Agent X before the conference, telling her I would be there, but I didn’t want to pester her. Agents don’t like pests, I’d been told many times. She was a busy New York agent and she probably hadn’t even finished reading the manuscript. Besides, she said she loved it—at least the first three chapters. I was nervous, but still held out hope. I hadn’t heard back, but no rejection had arrived either.

As I took the seat across from Agent X at the Speed Dating with Agents event she looked at my name tag with interest. I introduced myself, told her the title of my book, and asked if she remembered me.

She smiled and said, “Of course I remember you. I really liked your book.”

She really liked the book.

“Wow. Thanks. So, I haven’t heard back yet and. . .” I stammered.

“Oh! I guess you didn’t receive the rejection email yet.”

It took a moment for me to process what she’d said. “No, I guess I didn’t.”

“My assistant was sending out a whole bunch when I left for here.”

“I see. Well, was there any part of the book you felt needed to be changed? The voice, maybe?”

“No, the voice was lovely.”

“The protagonist?”

“Charming.”

“The part with the gangsters?”

“No, I liked that.”

“Then, ah. . .”

She looked me straight in the eye. “It’s a wonderful book, but it just didn’t have that certain something.”

But you said you loved it, I wanted to say, but kept quiet. Like dating, it seemed that a novel needed to have chemistry with an agent or else it was just not to be. Clearly this was only a coffee date, with no chance of it turning into a fancy dinner leading to romance.

That evening in my hotel room I called my husband.

“So how was it?” he asked, an urgent tone to his voice.

“Great. Agent X said my book was wonderful.”

“Really? She’s going to take it?”

“No,” I said. “But it was a really positive rejection.”

“But she’s not taking it.”

“No, she’s not taking it.”

I guess you have to be a writer to understand the comfort of a “positive rejection,” and to appreciate the obsession of querying by email to search for that one agent who has to be out there, the one who thinks your book has that certain something.

A few months later Wendy Nelson Tokunaga found a wonderful agent who got her a two-book deal with St. Martin’s. Her debut novel, MIDORI BY MOONLIGHT, was published in September 2007. Her next book, WISHING ON A KIRA-KIRA STAR, is due out in Spring 2009. She is set to receive her MFA in Writing from University of San Francisco in Fall 2008. Visit Wendy’s Web site at: www.WendyTokunaga.com.