Chris LaTray – Fscottwrites

Keep a look out for love

Port has been implanted. It is a miracle that medicine has come this far, that I will not have to go get poked on regularly for chemo. For some reason, I was really nervous about the procedure. I’ve had a few surgeries: appendicitis, c-section, hysterectomy, knee surgery. For all those, I was out, under anesthesia.

I was awake for the port, given valium and numbed at the site (near right collarbone). The “cocktail” nurse was right by my side offering up any cocktail that might be needed. Another attending nurse, asked if I wanted music, “sure” I said. I was smiling, rocking my feet back and forth, taken back to good times with my high school/college sweetheart as Earth, Wind and Fire sang September. No telling how many times we danced to Earth, Wind and Fire even seeing them live in Memphis. My sweetheart is no longer alive. Maybe it was the valium, but I sensed he was with me, letting me know it would all be OK. I trust him, it was all fine.
Cancer has made me hyper aware of when love is present. Friends from as far back as elementary school have reached out offering support, my community of local friends check in regularly offering any help I may need, house mates take me out for a high protein meal before the pet scan. Packages of goodies show up from an out of town friend. Our house cat who prefers to sleep at the end of my bed (no snuggling) has been making a habit of laying right next to my bum.

Yesterday, a sunny fall day, I walked a few blocks to pick up my car at the hospital. From the middle of the crosswalk, I heard my name blaring out of a car. The boys I occasionally watch were waving arms, yelling, excited to see me in this random place, sharing they had been in the homecoming parade earlier. A couple of more blocks, I ran into a dear friend’s son. We hugged while he announced he would be bringing me houseplants to purify the air.

It’s another clear fall day. I think I’ll take a stroll, watch for love, feed a cat and head to Fact & Fiction at 5:00 for Second Wind reading with Chris LaTray and Mark Schoenfeld.

Chemo/radiation begin tomorrow. I’ve been told side effects may not take effect for a week. Maybe they won’t be too bad.
I have some low key cat sitting gigs lined up. They will be a welcomed distraction.

Thank you all for reading. Watch out for love out there.

Books To Read in 2022

This is my short list for now. It will grow.

Lit by Mary Karr – the last of her memoir trilogy, completing my read of her memoirs.

The Ploughmen by Kim Zupan – an avid reader friend who works with many writers, feels this is one of the most beautifully written classic westerns set in Montana. When I met Kim, he struck me a kind man, and yes kindness influences me.

Bad Feminist by Roxanne Gay – A New York Times bestseller, a collection of essays spanning politics, criticism, and feminism from one of the most-watched young cultural observers of her generation.

Chris LaTray’s One Sentence Journal, Short Poems and Essay on the World at Large. Chris is a local Missoulian and member of Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians His newsletter, An Irritable Metis, is always a gift in my email. I encourage you to subscribe. He has a new book, Becoming Little Shell coming in 2022 that I very much look forward to reading.

Lily Dancyger’s Negative Space, A memoir from the editor of Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger, Negative Space explores Dancyger’s own anger, grief, and artistic inheritance as she sets out to illuminate the darkness that was hidden from her.

Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative by Melissa Febos – available March, 2022. “The most necessary book about memoir I’ve read. Daring, honest, psychologically insightful, and absolutely whip smart. A must read for anybody shoving a pen across paper or staring into a screen or a past.” —Mary Karr

If you have books you are looking forward to reading, suggest them in the comments.

I’m in a doing mode, cooking, walking dogs, etc and reading of course. Writing is taking a nap and will wake up at some point.

Thanks for reading and subscribing to my blog. Stay safe for sure.

Borrowing someone else’s words

I discovered Chris La Tray a few months ago. Yes, I shared his substack link with you before. He is nearly finished with his book, Becoming Little Shell.

As I work on memoir, I find it all consuming mostly. Going back over journals, photos, emails, etc. Then putting it down on paper for my memoir coach and I to fine tune. It has broken me open. My heart is tender, trying to reconcile how all has come to be, losing my daughter and grandchildren and my part in it. Chris’s post today felt relevant as they often do.

Excerpt from his writing today, Broken Open:
“The thing about being broken open is a lot of love pours through too. Love coming in, and intense love reflected back out. It sounds overly sentimental but love can heal the world. Or at least our human place in it. It is the only thing that can! But we have to move beyond the definitions of what love is as just this airy thing and create an active love in the world. It’s like hope, it’s meaningless if one just shrugs and throws it to the universe to solve whatever problem while we just go on with our business. The business of hurling ourselves into the grinder of doing the same thing over and over until only shreds of what we began as remain. The universe does provide but it takes work. Sometimes toil. Sometimes setting aside what is easier, or what we think we want, to show love as courtesy. Love as simple kindness. Love that can be inconvenient. Love that challenges us. If we all did a little more of that, how much better would we get along? That’s what I try and teach these kids about poetry. It is what I am trying to teach myself but I’m not very good at it at all. I’m too angry all the time.”

On writing, it’s magic and sharing writing

I love Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings. It’s the perfect size book to keep by my bed or carry in my purse for a possible wait. Eudora was born and lived in Jackson, MS, my home town. Once we were buying underwear at the same time in McRae’s department store. That’s the closest I ever got to her. I was in awe. The old Sears building in downtown Jackson eventually converted to a library, The Eudora Welty Library.

The first chapter of One Writer’s Beginnings evokes a sense of peace, looking back at simpler times, her growing up in a home where reading was like breathing. Eudora reflects, “I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of the day, was there to read in, or to be read to.” I am green with envy, wondering what would my life have been like if reading was encouraged, even a part of our everyday lives growing up. I don’t have any memories of books, of being read to. My introduction to books came in high school, from my older sisters who read Kathleen Woodiwiss, The Flame and the Flower, The Wolf and the Dove. We referred to her books as crotch burners. But I was reading and that got me going.

I was in heaven working at Lemuria bookstore in my late twenties, surrounded by books, overwhelmed with what to read next, meeting and talking with writers who came for readings and signings. Tom McGuane, Tom Robbins, Willie Morris, John Grisham, Jimmy Buffett, Lorri Moore, Tim O’Brien, Rick Bass, Mark Childress, Kaye Gibbons, and Jim Harrison are just some of the writer’s I was blessed to meet. My daughter was lucky to reap the benefits of my time working at Lemuria. Books were what she sleep with, not stuffed animals. I toted the boxes of children’s’ books I had acquired every where I moved to, so she would always have them and could pass them down to her own children. It was somewhat of a relief to hand off those heavy boxes once my twin grandchildren were born.

“It has been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass.” Eudora Welty

This morning I read Chris LaTray’s newsletter, reflecting on the past four years of Presidential office and the new office we are entering. I find him gifted, able to put into words what I am feeling sometimes, a natural wonder. Read and find out for yourself.