The Play’s the Thing
August 27, 2008 | 11:51 am
So if you thought you haven’t heard from me in a while, you’re right: I just spent a week in the Catskill Mountains of New York State — and what a gorgeous place that is! — at what was billed as a playwriting “retreat” so that I could come to grips with a stage adaptation of a novel that I’ve been commissioned to do. Didn’t do any geocaching — no time for it — but there’s a good chance I’ll be back again to check out Slider Mountain.
I placed the word retreat in quotation marks, because it was, in fact, more like a playwriting boot camp. Up early, workshopping all morning, individual meetings with the instructor and writing time in the afternoon, discussions and performances in the evenings, with new material to be written and presented daily. Didn’t see much of the beautiful Catskills, but did get a handle on the play I’m writing. So that’s all good.
This play has stretched my skills and has been the focus of a lot of reflection. It’s an adaptation of a novel called The Pact, written (and wonderfully written, at that) by Jodi Picoult and concerning adolescent despair and suicide. I loved the book and welcomed the opportunity to work with it. I deliberately haven’t watched the made-for-Hallmark-TV movie (though the DVD is sitting on my writing table as we speak) so that I’m not influenced by it as I wrestle the characters off the page and onto the stage.
To quote my stepdaughter Anastasia at a younger and more helpless stage of her development, “it’s hard!”
Capturing an author’s intent in a completely different medium, with different constraints and a different timeframe, has proven more difficult than I’d anticipated. My instructor on the retreat, noted playwright and author Jeffrey Sweet, remarked upon hearing about my task, “You’re really wrestling with a bear here,” and indeed that is what it feels like. But the pages are appearing, so perhaps the bear is ready to take a snooze soon.
It’s taught me something about creativity, this task. About how to find one’s own voice within someone else’s voice. About how to create one’s own “take” on a story that was born in someone else’s mind and heart. And about what, exactly, constitutes a personal take on what is in essence a collaborative work.
None of it was easy. But as I finish the first draft and turn my mind to my next task, I realize that everything we do informs the next project, and the one after that, and the one after that, building up a library of richness of technique, vacabulary, and sensitivity.
The play is, indeed, the thing.
Jeannette Cézanne
Open Your Heart with Reading, Open Your Heart with Geocaching
Posted by: Something completely different, Opening the heart, growth — jcezanne
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Changing the World One Book at a Time: Conference Information
June 18, 2008 | 11:00 am
This notice comes to me from my colleague Charles Patterson, author of a startling and well-worth-reading book called Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust:
Want to Change the World? The San Francisco Writing for Change Conference Can Help!
Gay Hendricks, coauthor of You’ve Got to Read this Book!, will be a keynoter at the Second San Francisco Writing for Change Conference, Saturday and Sunday, August l6 & l7 at the Hotel Kabuki.
The SFW4CC is the first conference devoted to nonfiction writing about any kind of change, from the personal to the planetary, including the environment, politics, health, culture, and spirituality.
The theme of the conference this year is “Changing the World One Book at a Time.”
New and published writers will be able to learn from bestselling authors, editors, and agents, and get feedback on their work.
Registration is a mere $395, including meals.
For information and registration, visit www.SFWritingforChange.org.
Quite up the Open Your Heart alley, I’d say, and you may see some of our west-coast DreamTime authors there. In any case, consider going — because who can afford to not think about changing the world?
Jeannette Cézanne
Open Your Heart with Reading
Posted by: reading, reading books, Something completely different, Opening the heart, Being Peace — jcezanne
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A pause for applause
May 27, 2008 | 8:42 pm
May 27, 2008
A break here from my weekly blog to talk about the book behind it.
“Open Your Heart with Gardens” recently garnered kudos from the publishing industry. The Midwest Book Review, one of the prestigious reviewing organizations, released this commentary:
“Growing your own garden, raising the plants to maturity and then enjoying the spoils of your long, hard, arduous labors can create quite the sense of accomplishment in you — it can almost be explained as enlightening. ‘Open Your Heart with Gardens: Mastering Life Through Love of Plants’ is here to help those who seek this sense of accomplishment and enlightenment achieve those very feelings using the hobby of gardening. Promoting tips on how you can benefit from gardens emotionally even if it isn’t your own, the unusual quirks of gardening, and the other benefits the garden can promote for its’ gardeners. ‘Open Your Heart with Gardens: Mastering Life Through Love of Plants’ is highly recommended for both self-help and gardening community library collections, and for any amateur gardener hoping to get something intangible yet invaluable out of their gardens.”
Wow! Thanks, guys!
On the heels of this review, the Indie Book Awards announced their 2008 results — and OYHG was a finalist in both the Home/Garden and Nature/Environment categories!
(Fellow Dreamtime authors also fared well: Shawn Rohrbach won the Fitness/Sports/Recreation category, and finaled in Motivational, with “Open Your Heart with Bicycling,” while Janice Phelps Williams also doubled-finaled, in Animals/Pets and Inspiration, with “Open Your Heart with Pets.”)
Per the IBA website (http://www.indiebookawards.com): “The Indie Book Awards was established to recognize and honor the most exceptional independently published books in 70 different categories, for the year, and is presented by Independent Book Publishing Professionals Group (www.IBPPG.com) in cooperation with Marilyn Allen of Allen O’Shea Literary Agency.
Big score for DreamTime, having 3 of its authors place or win in 5 categories! Remember that DreamTime is only two-and-change years old.
For myself, over on the magazine side: my profile of novelist Archer Mayor will appear in the August issue of The Writer magazine. Mayor is the author of the esteemed Joe Gunther police procedural series set in Vermont. I recommend his books to anyone who enjoys high-quality fiction, especially mysteries with a literary texture.
Next week, back to our regularly scheduled programming.
–Carolyn
Posted by: Uncategorized, Pets, pet books, bicycling books, writing books, Something completely different, Publishing, Opening the heart, gardens, gardening, yard, plants, cultivation — Carolyn Haley
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Opening Your Heart to New Things
January 23, 2008 | 9:10 am
That’s what I’ve been thinking about lately. I was given an iTunes gift card for Christmas (thank you, pre Noel!) and wondered what, in my vast shopping cart, I’d choose to buy. I spend a fair amount of time in my car, traveling either to Connecticut for a site visit to a client or to Provincetown for my own times of feeding my soul, and so the tunes I put on my iPod are carefully chosen.
I like to howl along as I drive, you see.
But this time I hesitated. I looked in my journal where I’d written a few musicians’ names with question marks beside them. I remembered the NPR story about another artist I’d heard recently. And so, after thinking abou adding these new voices to my world, I listened to the scraps iTunes allows, and I spent my gift card.
Last night I drove down to Provincetown and listened to all my New Music. And the experience proved to be both challenging and exhilarating: not knowing what was next on the playlist. Okay, so for most people that is probably not a big deal; but there’s more than a little obsessive-compulsive disorder in me, and it was a stretch.
And maybe that’s the best word to use for that sort of thing: stretch. I’m seeing a physical therapist for headaches, and he is working with me to stretch my neck, to improve my range of motion. Very uncomfortable indeed, but my muscles — like my musical repertoire — could do with a little stretching.
What would be a stretch for you today? Can you challenge yourself in one small thing, step outside of your comfort zone, try something new or different? The stretch isn’t comfortable, but most of the good things in life aren’t.
So that’s my challenge to you this week: find a place where you can stretch your boundaries, your assumptions, your comfort zone. And tell me how it goes!
– Jeannette Czanne
http://www.JeannetteCezanne.com
Posted by: Something completely different, Opening the heart, Learning something new, Difficulty — jcezanne
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Happy 2008!
January 1, 2008 | 11:43 am
I’m working on a novel right now that takes place in 1942, and recently accessed a stack of newspapers from June of that year. Each copy cost five cents, though one is invited to subscribe for a year for two dollars. A strawberry social is announced at the Unitarian church. A local boy is featured in a children’s book about a dog. Tourists are in town, though pedaling bicycles rather than riding in cars. The community center is being remodeled to provide brighter and cheerier places for servicemen to attend dances and other functions. And the dragger Liberty is towed in by the dragger Stella when she develops clutch problems out at sea.
Josephine Tey wrote that history is not in accounts, but in account-books. And she is so right. I’ve read dozens of books now about World War II, about 1942 in particular, about the homefront in New England; but these newspapers are what really make me feel I understand the time in which my character lived.
What does that have to do with opening your heart? Plenty. As the new year begins, it’s a good reminder to look behind the easily accessible information, behind the obvious, and see what’s really there. To not be contented with the “accounts” we receive from biased sources — about news, about individuals, about situations — and see what the people really experiencing them have to say.
It’s going to be a great year for opening the heart!
– Jeannette Czanne
http://www.JeannetteCezanne.com
Posted by: Something completely different, Opening the heart, Learning something new — jcezanne
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Pleasant Surprises
December 6, 2007 | 8:36 am
I had a very pleasant surprise this week indeed. I was attending a conference in Boston, and happened to sit beside a woman from Texas during one of the sessions. “Everyone’s so nice here,” she said at the break in the lecture.
“Huh?” I wasn’t sure I’d heard her correctly. We in New England are known for being cold and surly, by comparison with the rest of the country … certainly not “nice.”
“Oh, yes,” she affirmed. “Everyone’s been kind, has gone out of their way to help me. Nicer than they are at home. People in the street, when I ask for directions …”
More amazing still. It snowed recently, it’s freezing cold, and sidewalks in Boston are iced over. And in that climate people are taking time to be helpful?
It gave me hope, that encounter. That maybe people are nicer than the news would have us believe. That we all still have the capacity to be kind to a stranger. And I found myself inspired by it, smiling more at people throughout the day, stopping to give money to a shivering homeless man on my way to the subway, not getting quite as upset as I normally might when I realized I’d lost one of my gloves at the conference.
It’s contagious, this “nice” thing. Wouldn’t it be great if we could all catch a little?
– Jeannette Czanne
http://www.JeannetteCezanne.com
Posted by: Something completely different, Opening the heart, Happiness, Being Peace — jcezanne
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Happy Thanksgiving Anyway!
November 22, 2007 | 11:55 am
I have to admit that when it comes to Thanksgiving, I’m a bit of a bah-humbug sort of person. I don’t celebrate the holiday and it makes me vaguely uncomfortable, as you’ll see in a moment.
But I do want to say that taking time off to acknowledge everything for which we are thankful is an excellent idea, and one we should implement all year, not just on one day. I’m grateful this year for Meg and for DreamTime Publishing; this company has been in existence for less than two years, and already there are a significant number of titles from which readers can choose. Meg is an amazing woman, filled with infectious joy and energy, and I am thankful, every day, that she’s in my life.
As for the rest … well, I explain my attitude best in this op-ed I wrote that appeared in last week’s Provincetown Banner:
Thanksgiving, Provincetown-Style
Having decided not to travel for the holiday (the sanest course of action when one considers how difficult flying anywhere has become), I found myself recently wondering how to spend it. While Im totally onboard with the general sentiment of the time its an incontestably Good Thing to stop and feel gratitude for all we have and all we are, and an even Better Thing to thank people who have been good to us this year Ive never been able to feel right about celebrating a holiday that has its historical roots in a genocide.
So how does one mark the day?
At one time the Wampanoag did a sort of anti-Thanksgiving at Plimoth Plantation, but Ive not been able to find anything out about it in recent years. And while one could of course go to one of the local restaurants and gorge oneself, it seems a little pointless. So I was delighted when the solution was suggested to me: perhaps I should celebrate Thanksgiving exactly like the first Europeans did!
You dont have to go far to research the roots of the holiday: the museum up at the Provincetown Monument tells the story. The Pilgrims, we learn via a diorama there, were close to starvation and despair when they suddenly found some corn! It was carefully stacked and well preserved, apparently just waiting for them. They rejoiced over that discovery, took the corn back to their ships, and thus famously survived the winter.
So heres my plan: on Thanksgiving morning, Im going to break into the Grand Union grocery store over on Shankpainter Road. Im going to proceed to the canned vegetables aisle (it is, after all, past the season for fresh vegetables) and take the corn I find stacked there. Surely the store owners and the local police will understand, just as no doubt the rightful owners of that original harvest did, right? Stealing is, apparently, a holiday tradition.
Okay, so Im not going to really do it, but its a tempting thought. After all, as long as you get to write the history books, you can apparently do whatever you want. Happy Thanksgiving!
Happy Thanksgiving indeed, on this and on every day!
— Jeannette Czanne
http://www.JeannetteCezanne.com
Posted by: Something completely different, Opening the heart, Joy — jcezanne
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