The fabulous program Vali created is called “Act Like a Grrrl,” and it’s been my great pleasure and privilege to participate in a small way over the past couple of years.
This fall Vali took her “ALAG” program behind bars, applying her creative writing/performance model to a semester-long class at the Tennessee Prison for Women. The final performance, featuring personal essays written by TPW inmates, happens this Saturday night, and I’ll be sure and update you on how it goes. Based on previous performances I’ve seen Vali’s ALAG girls pull off, this one is sure to be an unforgettable and deeply moving experience. Tune in next week for an update.
And for all of you who are dying to give me a gift this December holiday, please feel free to donate to Act Like a Grrrl instead.
To hear Vali and some of the girls talk about the “ALAG” experience, please listen to this Nashville Public Radio piece I produced in the summer of 2008 about the camp (along with several amazing “This I Believe” essays the girls wrote and recorded) at the WPLN archive.
In my humble opinion, Japanese maples are superior to any other plant in the garden. They have more delicacy than the rarest of hybridized daylilies, more dignity than the sturdiest oak, and more variety than the much cross-bred hosta. But their cost often leaves us gasping
With patience, however, you can have a grove of (gasp) free Japanese maples. That is the up-side. The down-side is that you never know what you’re going to get because the rare ‘Geisha’ or ‘Emerald Lace’ from which you harvested the seeds is a hybrid grafted to the root stock of a common variety. Chances are that ten seeds from the same tree will result in ten trees with subtle differences. You have only one guarantee: the offspring may only resemble the parent plant; it will not be a clone. The process is a protracted one but not difficult.
J. maple seeds
Here are the steps to reliable germination of Japanese maple seeds:
• Harvest the seeds when they begin to dry in October or November.
• Lay them out and allow them to dry completely in a cool, dry place.
• Rip off the wings and store until 90-100 days before you plan to plant them.
• Count back 90-100 days before planting; then soak the seeds in hot tap water, leaving them overnight. (Merry Christmas!)
• Poke holes in a clear plastic bag and fill with vermiculite or sterile potting soil.
• Add enough water to dampen the medium without its being soggy.
• Mix the seeds into the medium and keep the bags in the refrigerator until planting time. Do not allow the mixture to dry completely.
These steps approximate nature’s seed striation and prepare for germination.
I plant my seeds in pots inside and place them under grow-lights or in a sunny window, allowing them to dry only slightly between waterings.
Voila! You will soon have tiny seedlings with the quality of Shakespeare’s woman—infinite variety. Baby them along, and when the nights are reliably above fifty degrees, begin hardening them off in a shady, protected spot where critters and wind cannot get to them. I usually bring them in at night for a couple of weeks.
Under no circumstances should you put your precious seedlings where the family pet can use them for snacks. The first time that I germinated Japanese maple seeds, about a dozen of them, my cat ate every seedling except one. Never the greedy one, she left the runt for me. -FG
“How long does a radio story take?” people sometimes ask me. Answer: Like a gas, it expands to fill the space available. With a firm deadline and some luck, it takes a few days to turn a story around. Other stories somehow manage to spread out over weeks or months, and some never get finished at all.
Elle Macho - Photo by Heidi Ross
Last winter I started following the fabulous Elle Macho around on their “Popular Music Tour”…of Nashville. Years from now, only a few of us will be able to saw we saw Elle Macho at Loudhouse Coffee in Greenbrier, TN. (They opened for the inimitable Rowena of the Glen. Let’s just say, in the Venn diagram, the circle of Rowena’s followers never intersects with the Elle Macho fan circle.)
So how long did it take me to finish this 5-minute radio story about a band’s refusal to take itself seriously? Well, I did the first interviews with Butterfly, David, and Lindsay last January. Ridiculous, no? What’s more, I wrote at least four drafts of the script over a period of a month and a half before my editor and I finally agreed on what the essence of this story was.
Why did it take so long? Sometimes a story is too close, or it’s too complicated, so that you can’t sum it up in a sentence or two. Try it sometime; it’s harder than you think: explain in one sentence what your favorite movie’s about. One sentence. Not as easy as it sounds.
So, what was the story of Elle Macho? Was it a music business piece about a band rejecting the record label lottery plan and going it alone using social media and on-a-shoestring home-recording techniques, “building their own machine,” as Lindsay would say? That’s what I thought at first. But a lot of bands are doing that.
The more I talked with a couple of my editors about this piece, the more it became obvious that what fascinated them most was Elle Macho’s approach to musicmaking–the “let’s not take it all so seriously” attitude, smack in the middle of Nashville, “We Are Really Damn Serious About Music,” Tennessee. The hilarious French-Spanglish band name, website, and FB posts. The tour of their hometown. Playing at ridiculous music venues like an underage punk club on the highway. And the videos. Who doesn’t LOVE the videos?
Does Lindsay Jamieson not utterly master the earnest-but-fatuous faded rocker? The man is channeling Ricky Gervais, as far as I can tell.
And so finally, after ten months, four drafts, a lot of self-loathing and procrastination, and about a milion cups of coffee, the Elle Macho story found the airwaves this morning on Nashville Public Radio. You can hear it here.
Why was it such a difficult story? I had no problem finishing stories this year about a symphony conductors’ showcase and a digital music festival in a week or less. But that’s just it: explaining what those stories were about in one short phrase was no problem. But Elle Macho’s essence, I found harder to pin down. I finally realized I couldn’t finish the radio piece back in February or July, because the story of Elle Macho hadn’t taken shape yet. I wasn’t exactly sure what their story was eight months ago because even for them, it was a work in progress. This fall, everything seemed to fall into place: the EP, the Popular Music Tour webisodes release, the National Comeback Tour.
Suddenly, they had a story, and so did I. It’s been lots of fun to watch it unfurl. Can’t wait to see what’s next.
Seven or eight years ago, I was thinking about my friends Manuel and Aida Terán, a wonderful couple from the indigenous Quichua region of Ecuador who travel to Nashville most winters to sell their handmade alpaca sweaters and scarves. They work very hard when they are here, standing outside for sometimes 10 to 12 hours a day in front of La Hacienda and at the Farmer’s Market, hoping to sell enough to educate their kids back home.
I also thought about my good friend J, whose paintings and pottery I admire, but who (at the time) wasn’t sure how to sell herself, how to get her work displayed at a gallery or coffeehouse. I considered my mom’s beautiful stained-glass art and my dad’s lathe-turned pens. And the idea struck me: “One thing I know how to do is throw a party.” Put the party together with the artists, I thought, and see what happens.
That’s how the idea for HalcyArt was born, back in 2002 or so. I saw it as a way for artist friends to show and sell their creative work, a seasonal gathering place for a neighborhood still in its pioneering honeymoon phase, and a fun way to convince people to bypass the malls and big boxes and patronize our creative friends and neighbors in the holiday shopping season. I figured I’d bribe people with food and wine, and buying would follow. Nothing major. It’s not exactly a new idea. But it kinda took off.
By the fifth and final HalcyArt a couple of years ago, five hundred people moshed through my and my intrepid next-door neighbors’ houses on the December night in question. More than thirty-five artists offered their work for sale, and the guests plowed through about seven cases of wine. Comedy flashes into my mind at times like these–in this case, an image from “Planet of the Apes, the scene where Charlton Heston gets hosed down in the ape prison in Planet of the Apes and screams hammily, “It’s a mad house! A maaaaaaad house!” And so it was.
HalcyArt is dead, long live HalcyArt. I loved it, but I can’t face 1,000 feet in my house anymore. The structure does not, technically, rest on a foundation. All that wine was getting expensive. What’s more, the artists who got their feet wet at HalcyArt (and thus learned that people will pay money for their work) do not need me anymore (if ever), and the established ones never did in the first place.
A lot of people still ask me about HalcyArt. They say it was a great idea and a lot of fun. I say it was an OK idea, an annual that self-seeds and multiplies with a little encouragement, but ultimately has a limited lifespan. A lot of ideas grow and multiply beyond the cultivator’s ability to control them. The profoundly bad ideas, the ones fueled by panic or ignorance or venality, proliferate like bamboo and destroy everything in range. Whose bright idea were credit default swaps? And who first thought to teach illiterate kids* that blowing themselves and other people up was a ticket to paradise?
Unfortunately, the best ideas of all don’t always seem to spread like kudzu. They take longer to set deep roots, even longer to reach far and wide above the surface. It took Greg Mortenson more than a decade to gain the attention his work deserved. Through most of the nineties, he labored quietly at making relationships with ordinary people in remote Pakistani villages and helping them build secular schools there.
He wasn’t flashy. He wasn’t slick or media savvy, and he had no money. He was tired and rumpled most of the time. Mostly, he was too damn busy building schools to worry about what he looked like or who noticed.
Then came the New York Times bestseller. Mortenson never wanted all that attention, but he needed it. How else could he ever dream of raising the kind of money he would need to counter a parallel growth, one of a far more invasive and insidious kind? The proliferation of fundamentalist madrassas in the region, funded by millions of Saudi oil dollars, worried him. The idea that had become his life, which he’d already been acting on for years, finally found words: the best way to work against the rise of violent Islamic extremism in Pakistan and Afghanistan, to his mind, was to provide kids an opportunity for education. They wanted it; he’d seen that in the hundreds of villages he visited and thousands of people he’d met. And nobody was getting the job done…except fundamentalists with a dark and cynical agenda. And he is there still, building, building.
It seems to me that the people with the biggest ideas, the people doing a lot of the really important work in this world, are the ones you don’t notice. They’re the ones with the stained thrift-store t-shirt on, the ones who look harried and exhausted because they have so much work to do; because once you get the big idea, once you notice what needs to be done, there is never any rest.
Act Like a Grrrl camping trip with Vali last summer
I’ve seen that look. I see it when I visit my friend Jude at Renewal House, the amazing nonprofit she runs, which helps mothers with addiction problems get off the streets and make a home for their children. Most recently, I saw it in Vali Forrister’s weary-but-happy look last summer, during the busiest days of “Act Like a Grrrl,” an autobiographical writing camp for teen girls which she created a few years ago.
Check back next time for more about Jude and Vali and what they do in our community. And pick up a copy of HER Nashville in December to read my essay about my unforgettable (and ongoing) experiences with Act Like a Grrrl and my forever girl-crush on Vali. -KG
*It has since come to my attention (in one of the studies cited in “Superfreakonomics”) that many suicide bombers are not illiterate. In fact, in the studies mentioned (statistics of Lebanese and Palestinian “martyrs”), they are on average better educated and from slightly more affluent families than the general population.Like Lenin, Trotsky, Pol Pot, and Che — some other guys who thought ideas mattered more than people.
Wrong. It’s time to put the garden to bed and prepare for spring. If winter ever comes, that is. . .
It’s tempting to look at the ruin in October and November with arms akimbo, sigh in exasperation, and leave it for spring. To do so would allow the ground ivy to scramble at will and the wild violets to multiply promiscuously. Such promiscuity wreaks havoc to the purity of a bed of choice perennials.
My first consideration is seed gathering. Some annuals are far too easy to grow from seed to purchase as plants. Among them are cosmos, marigolds, and most annual vines. When you gather the seed pods, separate the seeds and lay them out to dry. Then put them in a container where they will remain dry, relatively cool, and out of sight until April, when you can scatter them with a light covering of warm soil in situ.
Pull up and toss the annual plants into the compost bin along with all those pesky leaves. If you shread the garden debris, it will break down faster into black gold. Some people put it directly on the garden as cheap mulch; however, while it will indeed inhibit some weeds and break down and enrich the soil, it can also cause disease and harbor seeds that need only a little sunlight to germinate.
Next, deadhead or cut to the ground perennials that have gone to seed. Most of those beauties are hybrids and will not grow true to the form of the parent plant. That ‘Kim’s Kneehigh’ echinacea which grew to a diminutive eighteen inches could very well morph into a three-foot ‘Magnus’ if it self-seeds. Leaving the seedheads for the birds sounds good in theory, but in fact those seeds promise many unwanted plants. And don’t forget that a weed is anything that grows where you don’t want it.
Which perennials to leave for winter interest depends on the taste of individual gardeners. Certainly leave the sedum ‘Autumn Joy’ for its golden blooms, but even that begins to flop over. I like to cut them back because sedum is the first perennial in my garden to emerge in the spring, sometimes as early as February. The grasses are beautiful in the winter, with the dried plumes and browning blades moving gracefully with just a whisper of wind. However, even grasses can create unwanted debris because they tend to break off and litter the garden. Whatever you choose to do, be sure to cut grasses to about six inches before new growth begins in early spring.
There’s no avoiding the bane of every gardener’s life—weeding. If you dig the root rather than merely pulling the foliage, you can save yourself many hours of weeding in the future. In the frenzy of cutting and weeding, avoid pruning trees and bushes in the fall. Pruning encourages tender new growth that will fall victim to the first killing frost and perhaps risk the health of the plant.
Of course, leave plants that keep their foliage throughout the winter, although it’s a good idea to clip the dead undergrowth that could rot in cold dampness and encourage disease. Among this category are heucheras, hellebores, and arum.
In theory you can plant perennials whenever the ground is not frozen, but they really need time to begin establishing a root system before the chill of winter brings on dormancy. Gardeners usually advise planting perennials in our zone after Easter and before Halloween. Whenever you dig in your new babies, throw a little root stimulator at them to begin building a good foundation for vulnerable new plants.
Ah! Now comes the crowning task, and the most rewarding one at that—mulching. I like pine needles rather than shredded or chipped wood because it breaks down faster, is cheaper, and doesn’t encourage termites. Whatever you use, remember that it provides a blanket for your garden from the most punishing temperatures, discourages weeds, and adds a beautiful, finished look.
So you’re done. You have only to stand in your garden, again with arms akimbo, this time with satisfaction in the knowledge that all except the most cold-hardy sorts will be gathering strength during dormancy in preparation for the spring show. Then you can say, as did Robert Frost, “Goodbye, and Keep Cold.”
Like my favorite gardener-poet Robert Frost, I leave my winter garden to the vagaries of the season, knowing, “One thing about it, it must not get warm. . . [but] Something has to be left to God.” To that I must add what someone else once said: “Some say the world cannot be lost as long as it is touched by Frost.” -FG
Most everything, for good or ill, grows, including the themes and ideas in this blog. Hal and I have been trying to change our thinking lately, to re-set our paths on a course that points somewhere. Maybe we’ll fail, but there’s great adventure in the trying. In the next few weeks, I’ll touch on a few of the above topics.
Look for a series of upcoming posts on admiration and innovation: the big-thinkers in our community whom I’ve come to respect for their vision and fearlessness. Reading “Three Cups of Tea” has reminded me to pay attention to the people who jump in the deep end, doing their best to change our world for the better.
Oh…and of course, I’ll sometimes write something about plants, too.
A garden teaches many things: how to dig in and get dirt under your fingernails; the art of patience; and the constancy of impermanence.
My friend and hero Anna Timofeyeva-Yegorova, the wonderful Soviet combat airwoman whose memoir I edited, taught me those lessons as well.
For more than half a year I lived inside her mind, burying myself in her story day after day, trying to tell it in a way that felt true. Her sheer tenacity fascinated and awed me, sometimes even more than her physical courage did.
In one chapter, she lands her wooden Po-2 biplane in a village that’s being shelled, soon to be overrun. Instead of abandoning it and evacuating with the other Soviet troops, she borrows a horse to tow and hide it for the night. In the morning it won’t start, so she drains the oil, heats it over a peasant woman’s stove, and pours it back in. She and her biplane live to fly another day. Good lord, who else would go to that kind of effort?
That’s what I call getting your hands dirty. That’s what I call patience. Time after time, she refuses to abandon her craft to the Nazis, to take “no” for an answer when she’s told the skies are no place for her, or to allow herself to be grounded regardless of blizzards or physical exhaustion.
I thought about these things whenever I felt overwhelmed by this project I’d agreed to do, whenever I felt I’d gotten in over my head. I thought about the promise I made to an 87-year old lady who’d braved Nazi bullets and blizzards in an open cockpit wood-and-fabric biplane, and then anti-aircraft fire in the Il-2.
And then I shut the heck up, put my @$$ in a chair in front of the computer for half a year, and slogged through the 415 typewritten pages until the job was done.
I learned a lot about sheer doggedness from Anna’s example, and then did my best to apply it in the re-telling of her story. I still have a lot to learn in the tenacity department compared to that great lady, but at least there’s one more journey behind me, thanks to her.
Impermanence, however, has been more difficult for me to accept. I don’t suffer loss easily. When a Japanese maple withers and dies, I plunge into self-recrimination, bemoan my failures as a gardener.
Far worse, the loss of a beloved person sends me into self-absorbed waves of guilt and regret. I become obsessed with opportunities lost forever, phone calls not returned.
Maybe it’s some kind of magical thinking that prevented me from believing in the necessary impermanence of a 91-year old war hero, especially after the sudden, awful death this year of a dear and wonderful friend less than half Anna’s age.
If you had met Anna, you’d understand. The clear gray eyes of a woman who’s survived hundreds of combat missions in the bloodiest war zone in history, a Nazi POW camp, and tortures by Soviet secret policemen are the structures of Stonehenge, the craters of the moon, the Grand Tetons. Such a person seems as all-enduring as earth and stone.
And now she is gone. Last Thursday my Russian friend Lydia Yakovlevna called to tell me that Anna Alexandrovna died that morning. She was buried at Donskoi Cemetery on Monday, near a 16th Century monastery that also will not last forever.
Sunlight is angling across my backyard garden as I write this, suffusing the autumn leaves of Japanese maples and witch hazel with a golden fire. Gilded afternoon light on a shining autumn day always seems to kindle this ache for the people I miss most. Forgive me if, for comfort, I fall back on a simple poem I enjoyed as a child, by Robert Frost.
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
One day last summer Hal bounced an idea off me. He does this often, because he’s an idea kind of guy. It was a great concept, so I got excited with him about it: a series for the public radio business program, Marketplace, told from the point of view of a Nashville Private Investigator. “What if we had Marketplace call [FIND] Investigations and hire us to look into how the economy affects crime?”
It’s one thing to have a great idea, quite another to deploy it. A blank canvas or empty page can be a terrifying prospect, especially when there are absolutely no limits or guidelines as to what you can fill it with. Infinite choice can paralyze.
As it turns out, nearly a half a year has gone by, and we somehow managed to make this good idea happen. Now that Marketplace series, Part 1 exists, it’s easy to imagine that it always did, that it had to exist, that it was inevitable that such an idea should succeed on its very merits. But that ain’t how it works, folks.
Nine years ago next week Hal and I bought our little Halcyon house, a complete mess of a Victorian-era cottage with a trash heap and muddy weed bed for a yard. It was a full season before we’d progressed enough on the internal renovations for Mom and me to even consider taking on the landscaping. I remember looking at the blank slate of a yard–no, scratch that, it was worse than a blank slate. We had to chain-saw down tree-sized Devil’s Walking Stick weeds and load out mounds of concrete litter before the place could be called “blank” with any honesty.
I remember looking at that bloody mess of a yard and thinking, more in the form of a sinking feeling than of actual words, where do we start? It was going to be years before we saw any real progress in a place this @#$%&* up, I thought. And I do not kid you when I say that I did not know the difference between an annual and a perennial.
My mom is a freaking dynamo
Fortunately, my mom does not find herself paralyzed by big jobs. She pushes her trowel into the ground, and Voila! The job is begun. I followed suit.
Nine years later, the yard is a masterpiece of some kind, depending on your point of view. Lovers of simplicity and tidy lawns would see it as a series of dire problems to eliminate with Roundup, whereas kids, cats, and anybody who enjoys a certain amount of chaos would find themselves right at home.
Visitors to the garden, and sometimes even I, see it as a thing that’s always been, and after years of classes and reading and planting, I view myself as a knowledgeable plant person. But it wasn’t always so, and it wasn’t ever inevitable. It started with the first hole we dug and marched slowly forward from there.
Cemetery monument on Gallatin Rd. - I loved it so much I wanted it to be in the story, raising an "ice cream cone of hope" for our difficult times. Needless to say, that idea never made it.
It’s like that with any bold idea, any project considered, any seed cast. Some germinate, others languish. I’ve already forgotten a lot of the ideas we had that never saw the sun and plants we dug in that withered and died. Or more importantly, plants we never got around to planting.
But I want to remember them. When I hear the second and third parts of the upcoming Marketplace series, (I speak with hope here…) I want to remind myself of the many months it took for the idea to take shape, months of driving aimlessly up and down Gallatin Road with a camera and notepad, coming up with ideas; of trying to interview people who wouldn’t talk to us; of notepads full of words and outlines describing shapes for the story that never materialized.
I want to remember it for the next time I think moving a bunch of zebra grass that looks stupid where I planted it is way too much effort, for the next time I can’t figure out how to fill the empty page, for the next time an idea is too big and bold to know where to plunge the trowel in.
The idea’s not the thing. The digging’s the thing. (I keep having to learn this.)
P.S. When a story is overlittered with garden metaphor, does that make it a “trope-iary”?
Nothing Gold Can Stay
