Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

A writer takes a minute for a closer look

recent posts

  • La Vie Dansante

    I expect everyone has their favorite Jimmy Buffett song, and there are so many lively ones to choose from. I bonded most with the entire album “Son of a Son of a Sailor.” because of its mix of lively and melancholy lyrics.

    I wasn’t thinking of the master of Margaritaville when I wanted music to accompany my morning five stages routine, which my Nia pals all know is a great stretching, wriggling thing that makes all the joints happy.

    But queued up as though waiting for me was Buffett’s “La Vie Dansante,” French for “the dancing life.” It was perfect on a beautiful spring morning, upbeat but with an undercurrent of melancholy.

    Lyrics to live by:

    Feel it all with a willing heart
    Every stop, theres a place to start
    If you know how to play the part with feeling
    I play with feeling

    Why don’t you wander and follow the dancing life
    On the night wind that takes you just where you want
    Thats all you want

    Here’s Aaron Neville’s version, which has its own fine cadence.

  • More garden whimsy

    Living in the Friendly neighborhood (named for Friendly Street, which runs through it, which was named to honor 19th-century era Eugene mayor Sam Friendly) is wonderful. It’s a mix of starter homes and fancy ones. It includes two schools, four parks and some churches. Families with little ones walk here. Elders with their dogs walk here. Teens on skateboards and scooters and other weird contraptions angst out, laugh, play incomprehensible music. Some neighbors keep chickens. We’re in walking distance of grocery stores, food trucks, restaurants.

    And the gardens. I so love the gardens. You just never know what you’re going to see. We walk by the yard pictured above three or four times a week. Today we noticed that the cutest geese seem to have taken over. I love the ones at the top of the wall, peering down on the others.

    So grateful that we are not constrained by the rules of a homeowners association.

  • The guts of narrative

    Editing guru Callie Stoker

    Pondering two and a half days at the Pikes Peak Writers Conference, I’m appreciating how the inner scaffolding of a story impacts the enjoyment and resonance for readers.

    Perhaps it came home to me most in Callie Stoker’s presentation titled “Allegory in Your Subtext.”

    She chose the film “Jurassic Park” to illustrate what she means by allegory with an eye to showing what it can do. What’s the film about when examined through the allegory lens? It’s about preparing for parenthood, Stoker said. She went on to show how Dr. Adam Grant’s thoughts about children and behavior toward them evolve through the film. I didn’t know this but there are many discussions about this aspect of the film to be found online.

    That example and others have me examining my own work through the allegory lens, both work that I consider finished and projects that are in process.

    Stoker, who’s CEO of an editing service company titled The Manuscript Doctor, offered three workshops, all of them full of ideas for how I can think more deeply about the connective tissue in my stories.