Strawberry Basil Jam

I tried a different kind of writing this afternoon, in honor of my current literary overdose. (I know many writers will insist there is no such thing. But there is.) There comes a weekend-- usually during National Poetry Month-- when there are just too many essays, too many chapters, too many lectures, too many poems. Too many projects, too many letters, too many prompts.

That's not to say I haven't enjoyed the month of poetry. I have. But this coming week is the last of the semester, and I can feel it, even though I have a lot to look forward to in the coming months. Two big announcements, for those of you who may not know already via Facebook:

1) My second chapbook, Quick Draw: Poems from a Soldier's Wife, is being printed and released this summer by Finishing Line Press. Of course, I'm happy to do readings and workshops wherever I am, but right now I'm just trying to get the word out about the book. Please pass the information along to those you think might enjoy or benefit from this work.

To buy a copy: go to Finishing Line Press's website (www.finishinglinepress.com) and click on Bookstore. You can look me up by my pen name, Abby E. Murray, and click on Buy Now. The book is just $12, and any copies purchased during the advance sales period (now through June 13th) will receive a discounted shipping rate of $1.99. Thank you, in advance, for helping me distribute this book! I want to get it into the hands of poets, readers, libraries, book shops, businesses, schools, soldiers, dependents, artists, and everyone else who's been affected by America's role in wars abroad.

2) I've been accepted as a fully funded doctoral candidate for Binghamton University's PhD in English program. I'll be moving from Colorado to New York later this summer to get started, and I couldn't be more excited. I have to force myself to stop thinking about it at night so I can sleep. A new city, new writing community, new house, new opportunities. It's making me giddy... and a little overwhelmed! A little anxious. But every single person I've spoken to from this program has been nothing but kind, welcoming, helpful, and clearly passionate about the study of writing.

Okay.

Back to my new writing this afternoon.

Many of you know that I have a jam-making addiction. It's become a comfort to stay up late at night, even when it's 90 degrees outside and my kitchen ceiling fan can barely keep the house tolerable, stirring a pot of boiling sugar and berries, often adding champagne or rum to the mixture before jarring it and transferring it to a roiling water-bath.

Well, spring and summer time have returned, and so have the perfect ingredients for jam. I'll have you know, though, that I currently own the first two plants I've ever owned for longer than a month without killing. One, a cactus named Evelyn who reminds me of an underwater creature from Mario Bros. The other, a basil plant that survived its six siblings and, now in a pot of its own, is growing two strong, leafy branches alongside some wooden skewers I used to roast marshmallows last summer. I don't know what the deal is with this basil guy, but I figure I should enjoy all the caprese and spaghetti sauce I can before he realizes I'm the one in charge and promptly wilts or turns to ash.

So I decided to make some strawberry basil jam today. I looked up a couple recipes, but I ended up inventing something more or less my own. Behold: my writing that aint a poem:

HOT STRAWBERRY BASIL JAM

4 cups strawberries (hulled and chopped)
3 cups sugar
1 tbsp. butter
1/4 cup lemon juice
1 tsp. lemon zest
2 tbsp. pectin
2-3 finely chopped basil (I used about 7 small/medium sized leaves)
1/2 tsp. ground red pepper*

Get the water bath started before you begin, and prep the jars/lids in the boiling water. Put the strawberries, sugar, and butter in a large pot and stir over medium heat until the sugar becomes fluid. Increase heat to a boil for about five minutes. Add lemon juice, zest, pectin, and red pepper. Here, I run my immersion blender through it while it boils to break down the strawberry pieces, but it's up to you and how you like the consistency. Skim the foam. Add the basil last so it doesn't get totally annihilated once it's incorporated (especially if you blend it). Reduce to a simmer. Get the jars out of the water bath and fill them, put the lids on, and replace in the water bath. Different jar sizes and altitudes determine the boiling time, so... look it up, or something.

*Next time, I think I'll use a few slices of jalapeno instead of ground pepper; I think it'll give it an extra kick. The ground pepper seems too tame to me.

I kept a tablespoon of jam out on the counter to cool and taste. Dang. It's good. Good enough to eat on toast, or biscuits. Good enough to give you the recipe without feeling guilty. And, note the photo of my awesome tablecloth and my sweet little green dishes from the Arc. Also a photo of Mr. Basil: he is alive and well, although slightly skinnier tonight than he was this morning. (Sorry, dude. But you're tasty.)  

DEPLOYMENT - DAY ONE

I seriously can't believe my last blog post was in July, 2011. Where have I been??

Keeping busy, I suppose. I'm still teaching at the community college, still living in Colorado Springs. And, for the second time since I've lived in this town, I'm saying goodbye to my husband so he can fight in a war I have never considered honorable or justified.

We spent the past few weeks prepping pounds of paperwork and setting up our own personal support networks. Most of you know I'm not a huge fan of the "army wife" social scene; I keep to myself or I'm glued to my phone so I can talk to my family in Washington state or my friends in Georgia or Texas or Oregon. That condition of never feeling quite at home follows me to every city I live in, but I remember feeling that way before I married Tom. As a teenager, I used to glamorize the idea of living in a new place every year, of never settling down. I was going to be an actress and live in New York at least once. As soon as I started studying literature, acting went out the window but my wanderlust just concealed itself in a quieter, less obnoxious costume. I started feeling the pangs of homesickness, the lack of familiarity, and the drawbacks of constant relocation. I became comfortable in Eagle River, Anchorage, Vancouver, Atlanta, Columbus - as soon as we packed up to leave. I left hard-earned friends, jobs, and writing groups behind to find myself in a new place with my books and pets to comfort me before Tom's next deployment began.

This morning, at 2am, Tom left for a month of training before his third tour in a combat zone. He'll return for a short break in March, then I'll see him again by Christmas, hopefully. This tour will be, I think, his most challenging.

We remain very different people who have created the only kind of successful marriage I can imagine. Tom's job is important to me only in that it makes him feel happy, needed, confident, and self-aware. Tom is, by himself, a role model and my closest confidant. My job and my writing have a tendency to become (sometimes not-so-fortunately) my identity while he is gone. I overschedule myself and doubt my own work as I practice much too late at night. I back into a safe routine of loneliness and quiet chaos. I clean. I read. I run. I go weeks without being touched or touching others. I sometimes wonder if I'd be in the same profession if I had a husband who was around more, at home for dinner every night and never shot at - my poetry, my second chapbook in fact, is grown from my experience as a sort of pacifist married to a soldier. What would I write about?

I've been working hard with my poetry students this semester on writing what is not created for publication but for exploration of the craft, what is experimental and part of understanding the text we read, what plays with personal experience and the capacity of the imagination. This spreads into my own writing practice, which continues to grapple with deployments and war.

I've missed you guys. You're such good listeners. : )

STRENGTHS & WEAKNESSES

Isn't it funny how all writers have strengths and weaknesses within their own craft? I spent this week teaching my poetry class about surrealism, using both visual (Magritte) and literary (Breton) art to explain my explanations. Funny, because some of the poems I loathe more than any other pieces of literature are explorations in surrealism-- they can so quickly become obscure for the sake of obscurity. In a way, psychoanalysis and the Jungian theory of our unconscious using familiar images and symbols to communicate deeper meaning from the shadowed parts of our minds is... annoying. Just tell me what I need to know. I don't want to connect the dots; I want to see the resulting shape.

It's been a struggle, I think, for my class to go outside what is real and in front of them. I wouldn't necessarily call that a weakness. But it's a struggle worth going through, certainly. In my poems, I enjoy staying outside of what is real. I venture inside realism every now and then, unfortunately, to write war poems and what I call "lady poems" that scratch the surface of how fascinating gender really is. But in the end, realism isn't where I get my high. Letter-writing goldfish, rats gone sailing in umbrellas, and women who grow gills are more stimulating; I write a good poem with one small surrealist twist and I'm on cloud 9 for, oh, I dunno, 48 hours.

Teaching the class has made me realize that my students and I share an opposite, and similar, struggle. I suffer from not feeling comfortable inside what is real. My writing has become, to me, the most beat-up pair of jeans you've ever seen: worn at the knees, wallet print on the back pocket, burn holes, scratches, busted zipper, ripped hems, and about three thousand pockets, each holding something worthless.

At first, that sounds romantic-- limited to the imagination. But, these days, I see it as unproductive and fearful. Poetry that tells a reader what is happening in front of them is powerful. Poetry that is real is powerful. Poetry that gives you the object without making you follow clues is powerful. And sure, I acknowledge the argument for imaginative / fantastic / surreal poetry leading us to new thought as well. I just wish I could write everything. And well. Poets who can grab true grief (or love, or passion, or oppression) by the neck and wrestle it onto the page astonish me.

If anything, I can spend this semester learning from my students, rooted in their personal experiences and unafraid of exploring it with language. I can gulp the fresh air that comes with forcing them outside their comfort zones too. Maybe I'll write what's real when I'm older and I'm more familiar with what it really is.

Right?

Here's a prose poem from today's scratch work:

READING JANE AUSTEN WITH MY YOUNGER SISTER

We put our books down and rifle through the game drawer. Sorry is missing the red and blue men, Monopoly is ridiculous. Let’s play marbles, my younger sister says. Inside the leather pouch is a stick of chalk probably fifty years old, yellow-white, and a lot of pearls, bluish-white. They skitter out of the bag like mice. My sister picks one up to shoot. Maybe we shouldn’t, I say, These are pearls, not marbles. What do you mean, she asks, positioning herself lower to the ground, on her belly, a sniper on the slope of a ditch. They’re pearls, I say. I grab some from the undrawn ring. You’re cheating, she says. What if they were Mom’s? I say, hoping she won’t shoot. These are marbles, she says, They’re glass, They weren’t Mom’s. I snatch the pearl she’s about to shoot with and smash it with Jane Austen’s anthology. There is a sound of breaking teeth. I lift the book slowly and both of us, on all fours, stare at the powdered white. It’s glittering because it was glass, my sister says. I say, it’s glittering because it was worth so much.

MOBILE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

Tom and I have done a lot of traveling in the last month. We flew to Indiana to visit my mom and her husband in Indianapolis (a city that's sort of surprisingly fun), Pennsylvania - Dutch country - to visit Tom's extended family, and in the past two weeks we've hosted my sister and niece from Washington then my in-laws from Alaska. The in-laws leave tomorrow, and we'll finally have a house that might be kind of almost quiet.

(a peony in downtown Indianapolis)

Today, we divided most of our time between the car, driving to Great Sand Dunes National Park, and walking outside, playing in the Arkansas River on the way home, throwing Flynn's ball, and strolling through Salida. It's 9:39pm now, and I've been ready to crawl into bed for the past three hours-- at least.

(Tom, me, and our bully of a dog, Flynn, at Great Sand Dunes NP)

However, I noticed that my blog has been neglected as of late. So, here's a poem I wrote today. Hope you read it, enjoy it, and tell me you enjoyed it. In the morning.

MOBILE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

You said hey

I wonder if ants

dream about

Jacob’s Ladder

not the one

from the bible

but the flower

they’re so beautiful

the flowers

not ants

and I said

get a load of this

pickup going 90

with a Jetta chained

to the hitch

and is that a go-kart

on the Jetta’s roof

That sounds like

the start of

a really bad joke

you said

Ants probably dream

about the bible

as much as we do

I said

A pickup,

a Jetta

and a go-kart

walk into a bar

you said

...

NAPOWRIMO DAY 7 POEM

On Wednesday, Tom came home after his morning PT session and we made breakfast before I left for work. As we sat at our dining room table, Tom suddenly slapped the front page of the newspaper in front of me, blocking my view of peanut butter toast with a fantastic article. "Abby. You HAVE to read this," he said.

And I did read it. And I cut it out and kept it too.

Here's a picture of Luna, the jumping cow. Her owners, a family in Germany, were unable to give their daughter (Regina Mayer) a horse, so Regina decided to go riding on one of their cows... and she taught Luna how to jump.

(photo from Spiegel Online)

I admired what this article captured so much, it influenced my poem for Day #7 of NaPoWriMo. Of course, this wasn't all that influenced it... I started to notice how often I have heard of the surreal or unthinkable taking place, and it's usually happening in modern Germany. Just a couple Christmases ago, Tom and I were staying up late in a friend's living room in Morlaix, France, watching a TV special about how a German man claimed to be able to tell people's fortunes by placing his hands on their naked butts. You've heard of palm-readers? Germany goes one step further by producing a butt-reader. (Our French friends shook their heads and laughed that night, muttering "Only the Germans.")

It all made me wonder whether modern-day Germany was sneaking into the rest of the world's wildest dreams at night, then managing to make a profit off of our off-the-wall thoughts. Why don't we wake up and try out the weird ideas ourselves? It's a valid suggestion... and I have ALWAYS wanted to ride a cow.

SO MANY TIMES I HAVE DREAMED

Napowrimo day #7

So many times

I have dreamed

of accomplishing

the extravagant.

Bouncing on

a small green

saddle atop

the knobby spine

of a dairy cow,

while bystanders

with faces like

flashbulbs look on.

So many times

I have dreamed

of jumping

on my steed

over painted logs

and beer crates,

of landing

on a bed of

newspapers.

So many times

I dream of sailing

through bluish

pastures frosted

with dew

only to wake

and hear it has

all been done,

just last week,

in the German

countryside.

...