Just in case...

So in case anyone is still (trying) to read this blog, here's the scoop: I'm not blogging anymore. At all. As if you couldn't tell. But if you want to see what I'm writing and publishing these days, here is the place to look. It's my website, for now, and it has lots of links. I've simply realized that I'm not a blogger at heart, and that I can't make myself become one. I'm not much of a blog-reader anymore either, actually, save for one or two.

Happy September to all (four) of you!

Website

I've finally created a non-bloggy website, which you'll find here. It's rather bare-bones, but it'll do. I don't rightly know if I'll keep blogging here or not--guess we'll all find out. Right now, during Lent, I'm doing a Lent cum Ramadan Internet fast where I try not to check email and do anything internetish between sun-up and sun-down. I'm mostly failing miserably, but at least I'm admitting to myself the extent of my dependency on the internet. Anyway: if you want to see things I'm writing, you'll more easily find them at this new website than on the margins of this blog.

Exactly four years

My youngest son was born exactly four years and ten minutes ago. I am going to resist doing the "I can't believe where time went!" schtick. I am. I am.

But I won't resist telling a cute story about him. I am completely in shock over this, but it is true: it is now 3:25 pm on his 4th birthday, and Henry has not yet asked when he is going to get his presents. Not once. I think he has forgotten that you get presents on your birthday. Last night, when I asked him what he was excited for about his birthday, he said, "Cake." (Which reminds me: it's half-iced in the kitchen and I have to make this post short so I can finish it.) I waited for him to say presents, and he never did.

The other thing that shocks me is that neither older brother has yet reminded Henry that you get presents on your birthday. In fact, that shocks me more than the fact that Henry himself seems to have forgotten. The older brothers are much wiser to the ways of the world, and are all too acquisitive when it comes to their own birthdays. But even a gander at Henry's photo album this morning didn't seem to jog anyone's memory.

I think I could construct my kids' forgetfulness about presents as some sort of anti-consumerist parenting victory, but considering all our other failings in that regard (more on that in another post), I think I better not. I think I better take the stance of some friends with regard to how their adult children have turned out: "We take no credit. We take no blame."

Instead, I'm just going to be grateful for a small reprieve from my children's seemingly endless consumer desire, and hope that when we do give him our gift tonight (and his grandparents' gifts) that they don't take away the innocence and pleasures of the day thus far: a morning with Dad. Books. Baking a cake. Watching a brother get a tooth extracted at the dentist.

Okay, now it's four years exactly.

Almost three months

I considered waiting until Friday to post to make it an even three months since I posted last, but hey, here I am at the computer, with one son napping and one at school and the other playing a computer game. Since I've started using my blog as kind of an update on my writing/publishing life (maybe it should be called a "brag" rather than a "blog"), I thought I'd post something great that came in the mail today. I got my 2009 copy of Pushcart Prize XXXIII today, a collection of writings that won a Pushcart Prize, for which I was nominated. Well, here's the good news part: toward the end of the book, under a section called "Special Mention" with a note "The editors also wish to mention the following important works published by small presses last year," is my name! Yep, there it is: "Holding Baby Birds"--Valerie Weaver-Zercher (Brain, Child). So while I'm not sure what it means, I think it means I've made it to some netherworld between a Nominee and a Winner. I'll take it. Especially because that "Special Mention" netherworld is also inhabited by people like Wendell Berry, Joyce Carol Oates, Mark Jarman, Derek Walcott, and Alan Cheuse this year. (All of these are, of course, a helluva lot better writers than I, with lots of other publications and honors and readers to prove it. I'm still happy.)

Other publishing news: I've started writing reviews for Publishers Weekly. Names of authors never appear with the review, and I won't tell you which ones I've written, but when you read the little reviews on amazon or other places, you can wonder whether I wrote it. My essay about leftovers is coming out in the January issue of Central PA, and an article about parenting and consumerism shows up in Sojourners in their January issue as well (it's already up on their website, an includes an audio interview with me that I haven't listened to yet; I'm still too nervous to click on it). An essay of mine will show up on Literary Mama sometime in February, and another one in Brain, Child in their Winter 2009 issue.

Most of these are pieces I wrote a long time ago. I haven't been writing much these days, in part because I'm finishing up teaching a course for a prof at Messiah College who had to have surgery mid-semester. So no one tell my students, but I'm busy reading short stories a night or so before I teach them... Oh well, I guess that's what my students are doing too. I've also been doing some copyediting for several presses and scholars working on manuscripts.

The computer game-playing son is now ready to be a Yahtzee-playing son, which requires my actual parenting rather than parenting-while-blogging. More later.

Paying the Toll

I should have known that several weeks of blissful morning writing could not come without cost. So now I'm paying: I'm idling at the toll booth of the Carpal Tunnel, I think, and it feels like it might be an expensive ride. My right arm is going alternately tingly and numb, and I have this wrist bone that looks like it's planning to check out of my skin and into the world. I've gotten carpal tunnel syndrome before, years ago when I worked for a magazine, and the human resources director gave me a brace that seemed to help. So I'm off in several minutes to try to find such a brace, hoping that I can keep the toll low enough to get the whole way through this tunnel before having to exit.

I actually know very little about the anatomical realities of carpal tunnel, nor even what a carpal tunnel really is, but I do know that I like the image of it: a small, dark tunnel running somewhere under my skin, like a vein except more mysterious. Maybe it's made of bone, or muscle, or even ice? Maybe it has interesting lighting inside it, the kind that gives the inside of your car that eerie bluish tinge when you drive through it. Maybe you can hold your breath the whole way through it, like my son tries to do through the Blue Mountain Tunnel on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Maybe it is collapsing even as I type, as I'm sometimes afraid tunnels will do at the very moment that we are hurtling through them in our minivan.

Or maybe the carpal tunnel runs all the way from my brain to my fingernails, like down through my neck, over my shoulder, and straight on down through my wrist. Maybe my carpal tunnel is the conduit for any creativity that actually makes its way to my computer, the connector tube that is the only route for ideas to take save that faulty cul-de-sac of my mouth.

I think I better just go buy the darn brace...

Back in Blogsville

I haven't blogged for so long I almost forgot my password just now. I haven't blogged for so long that I forget why I decided to blog in the first place. Maybe I'll remember some day. I keep forgetting about my blog until someone tags me on theirs (thanks, Jenell; now we'll wait and see whether I ever respond...), or someone tells me they like reading my blog (I have one?).

My blog-avoiding has been counterbalanced by an intense spell of writing, which has felt really good. Summer around our house means Mama walking out the front door at around 8 am and not returning until 2 pm, and Daddy staying home with the kids. No one really knows exactly what Mama does while she's away--she's at a library, and she's working on something, but what it is no one can guess, including Daddy (and sometimes Mama herself). The kids are getting used to the new arrangement, and they think their dad is much more fun to play with than their mom (although my heart was warmed when the three-year-old told me the other night, with feeling,"Mama, I really like you." I think he misses me.)

So recently I've written essays on watercress, leftovers, swimming lessons, wrestling, income envy, bunk beds, and kill fees. The leftovers and bunk beds have been accepted, but no one has yet bitten on the others. I've also been advertising my freelance editing services to a variety of scholars and publishers, and have had a couple nibbles on that front. Between some editing jobs, some book reviews coming due, and these odd scratchings about all things trivial and domestic (I mean, watercress?), it's been a fulfilling summer of work.

The rest of summer continues apace around here as well, with a trip to Knoebels Amusement Park, swimming lessons, the beginning of cello lessons for the middle son, a trip to NH and NY, and lots of fun times with grandparents and cousins and aunts and uncles. Don't know what happened to my commitment to the Unscheduled Child, but I think it went the way of Supermom and Urban Activist.

Links to My Other Life

No birds this post, I promise. I thought I'd link to a couple recent or upcoming writing-related projects of mine.

--My review of Sonya Huber's creative nonfiction book, Opa Nobody, appears today on Christian Century's website.

--A book that contains a chapter by yours truly is now less than a month away from publication. The Maternal is Political: Women Writers at the Intersection of Motherhood and Social Change will be released June 1 by Seal Press. If you go to amazon.com and enlarge the cover for closer viewing, you'll see some of the other contributors that I'm completely thrilled to appear beside: Anna Quindlen, Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Kingsolver, Anne Lamott, Cindy Sheehan, and Benazir Bhutto, to name a few. Until I saw the cover I kind of expected everyone else in the collection to be struggling young B- or C- or Z-list writers like me. Guess not.

--Another recent thrill was to discover that I've been accepted at the Collegeville Institute's summer writing workshop. I'm ecstatic about the prospect of spending a week in Minnesota working on a manuscript, talking to other writers, and actually getting paid to do it. (Oh, and not making food for anyone or cleaning any toilets). I've been re-reading Kathleen Norris' The Cloister Walk in preparation; Norris spent two nine-month residencies at Collegeville and the associated abbey as she was writing her book.

--A couple other assorted projects: A piece of mine on Mennonites and the suburbs will be appearing in The Mennonite sometime in May; a prayer of mine will appear in a forthcoming book by Orbis Books called Resist! Christian Dissent for the Twenty-First Century; and two books I'm reviewing in the near future include Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land by Amy Irvine and Conceiving Parenthood by Amy Laura Hall.

That all ends up making me sound much more productive than I actually am. But I do so like to remember that I have a life apart from my day job as "Loretta" (as my five-year-old sometimes likes to call me, just to make me laugh). Loretta is a quite capable waitress, bottom-wiper, cook, and laundress. She's generally happy and content and servile, but she can't write sh*t.

Only Valerie can do that.