Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

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  • Everybody needs an editor

    I wrote a farewell piece to a chef and a restaurant that closed at the end of the year. The place is just a few blocks from where I live. Craig and I probably ate there once a week over the last five years. Cozy ambiance, friendly staff, amazingly delicious food: It was hard to say goodbye.

    Eugene’s scrappy weekly (slogan: We’ve got issues) published the piece, and it got a fine edit from Camilla Mortensen.

    Lessons:

    1. Everybody needs an editor.
    2. I am longwinded at the beginning, essentially clearing my throat with way more wordage than actually needed.

    My writing group can also be good for this reminder. At our last meeting, the first 600 or so words of a short story I’m working on did not pass muster. But the writing group can be ignored. (What the heck do these veteran and well-published writers know?) The editor of an actual publication cannot be. I confess I mentally harrumphed at Camilla’s notes, but once I made the changes I agreed with her. So, um, on that short story…back to the drawing board.

    Being edited also reminds me of the overlap between beginner’s mind, where we are at play, and expert’s mind, where we employ the skills we’ve honed while at play.

    Photo above by writer/editor/photographer/friend Bob Keefer. (If you don’t know Bob’s work, do yourself a favor and check out his web site.)

  • Let the basting begin

    I cannot pass a fabric store, especially one of the touristy kind where they lure you in with gorgeous stuff in the window and half an hour later you walk out with $100 worth of product that you tell yourself you will sew into a quilt even though you haven’t been involved in quilting since you were in high school.

    OK. That was last June in Ashland Oregon at Sew Creative. Now here we are in January and I am resolved to start quilting. It’s a single fabric quilt, not something I have to piece together so I can jump right into layering the front and back with the cotton batting middle. Lacking a quilting frame, this is not the easiest task but I found a wonderful quilter, Sharon Schamber whose video tutorial walks you through a clear way to combine the layers and baste them in place. I say “clear,” but do not for a minute think “easy.” It involves wrapping the two pieces of fabric around flat straight 3-inch boards to reduce wrinkling. You slip the cotton between them and then baste in manageable sections.

    The good news is that I have a large enough dining room table to lay this queen-sized quilt project out on (wrapped around the boards). The other good news (in the lemonade-out-of-lemons category) is that since the pandemic continues with us, I won’t mind commandeering the dining room table for a while. The first photo shows the fabric wrapped on the boards and the first section rolled out for basting. The next photo shows that first section basted.

    The basting will hold the three layers together so that I can hand quilt using a hoop. In my project completion fantasy it will be gorgeous. I’m blogging my progress so that I will have a hope of actually making progress.

  • Follow your curiosity

    screen capture

    I like serendipitous encounters. I had been trying to get my mind around a particular area of quantum physics and stumbled on Roger Penrose, the Nobel prize-winning physicist who shared a Wolf prize with Stephen Hawking and who did the math on how stars collapse to form black holes. I found a YouTube video interview with Roger Penrose that I completely could not follow, and as I was sitting there feeling dumb, YouTube dished up another random video, a Ted Talk with Dominic Walliman, whose specialty is explaining quantum physics to kids. There were many fine moments in his 15-minute talk, but my favorite came at the end when he said: “You know, science shouldn’t be about whether you’re good at it or not. It should only be about whether you’re interested. …. There’s so much good information out there these days, just pick a subject that you’re interested in, find some material and then from there, follow your curiosity.”

    I think “Follow your curiosity” will be my mission statement for 2022.