Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

Stuff gets done here

recent posts

  • A writer’s long game, stitched a word at a time

    A writer’s long game, stitched a word at a time

    Quarter-inch stitching on a queen-sized quilt. Photo by Susan Palmer

    Oregon author Ken Kesey knew well what practicing noveists learn: Writing a novel, regardless of its quality, is hard.

    Truth.

    I’ve written four. The first one found a small regional publisher and came out to positive reviews and modest success. The second one, with the help of a New York agent, circulated the halls of the big five publishers for a year, got no traction and became part of my learning-to-write novels curve. The third one will be published this year. The fourth one is awaiting a polish.

    I’m speaking from experience, two kinds, not one. Developing long-project completion chops in the real world also builds long-game muscles in creative work. These aren’t separate silos.

    My examples: re-upholstering a barrel chair I love. Talk about terra incognita. That project involved a new power tool. But I managed to keep from stapling my hand to the chair.

    And then there was the quilt. That began with excited-naive me buying a gorgeous hunk of fabric and falling in love with a swirling stitch pattern. Hand stitching the thing took a year. The picture above shows it on the dining room table at the basting stage, the bright red thread binding the cotton batting and the backing fabric together before the actual stitching could begin. It required more than 71,000 individual stitches, roughly a quarter-inch-long (I counted a square foot of it and estimated. Yes. I did. A person needs the data.).

    I wish writing a novel didn’t take me as long as it does, but there you are.

    Finished quilt. Complete. Usable. By Susan Palmer

  • Rudbeckia wants to please you, dammit

    Courtesy of Oregon State University

    Why isn’t it enough to enjoy the beauty in other people’s gardens? You walk by and drink it in. All the pleasure. None of the work.

    Other people’s gardens full of black-eyed susans got me started with this color-saturated perennial and its dense drifts of bright blossoms. Desire drove me like a toddler who wants the other kid’s toy. I tucked three or four starts from the garden store toward the back of the dahlia bed for a little extra color. (And I do feel the dahlia lovers shaking their heads going “You stuck that in with your perfect chic dahlias?”)

    My bad.

    Rudbeckia did not understand the assignment. At all. Two years later, I am weeding the exponential growth. Black-eyed susans send out runners in every direction. If you don’t stop them, they form these matts of new starts in the spring. The slugs love to hide from the sun under them. When you’ve cleared them, the struggling dahlias trying to fight their way up have been all chewed on by slugs, who don’t bother eating the Rudbeckia.

    Photo by Susan Palmer

    I’m about half done. I would offer these starts to some other gardener. Trouble is I like all the gardeners I know.

    Wanting vs. having. There’s some wisdom buried in there. Maybe it’ll come to me while I’m weeding.

  • Vertigo knocked me down. Dance is picking me back up

    Debbie-Lee, me and Kellie Chambers at my white belt awards ceremony. Photo by Nanou

    The first time vertigo hit, I didn’t believe it. Shook my head, got a hand on a wall, looked around. Holy hell, vertigo is a real thing. How can I, the most vertically stable person I know, have this?

    Then I learned about the little crystals that can form and wander around the inner ear. Then I discovered odd but useful head maneuvers to convince the crystals to move into a safe zone in the inner ear. Have you ever seen a model of the inner ear? It’s the definition of a complex structure. I bow to the mysteries of evolution while wanting to slap it. Simpler, dude! Make life elegantly, functionally simple. Please. Not only asking for a friend.

    You can’t dance with vertigo. Well, you probably can. But the stomach won’t like it and that gets messy.

    I’m a devoted practitioner of Nia, a fusion dance practice that melds martial arts, modern dance and healing arts. I’ve been dancing for almost seven years, two or three times a week. I’ve done seven day retreats. I once danced and blogged about it every day for 52 days (it corresponds with the 52 moves of Nia.) The daily dose brought out the full range of emotion that dance makes available. All up and down the scale, joy to a far cry from joy

    Weeks of no-dancing ensued while I got myself sorted. About the same time, I signed a book contract with a publisher for a novel. Damned exciting. The publisher’s window to get the book into production meant I had a few months to give it another polish.. My best creative work time runs at the same hours as the Nia classes in my region and I kept choosing the writing desk, not the dance floor even after the vertigo departed.

    The months of no-dancing built their own momentum. I was all in. Until I wasn’t. I don’t fully understand the lack of willingness to go back. But I do understand the value of being willing to be willing.

    It’s not just “dance your today body” as we like to say in Nia, it’s also dance your today mind. Even when the mind seems to be all “no,” somewhere in there is a snippet of “yes.” And I am finding it.