Blog
Posts about either cool things I’ve done, articles I’ve written, with a few listicles and how-to pieces thrown in for good measure.
Eucalyptus Steam-Room Hack
Allergies and sinus-infections are rampant right now, and lately at the gym, all I really want to do is hit the eucalyptus steam room. A few weeks ago, I wrote about how to do an hourlong detox bath ritual, but when you've only got a few minutes to spare, this refreshing and sinus-clearing eucalyptus shower is a great sub. Not to mention, it wakes you right the hell up. See DIY instructions below.
Allergies and sinus-infections are rampant right now, and lately at the gym, all I really want to do is hit the eucalyptus steam room. A few weeks ago, I wrote about how to do an hourlong detox bath ritual, but when you've only got a few minutes to spare, this refreshing and sinus-clearing eucalyptus shower is a great sub. Not to mention, it wakes you right the hell up. See DIY instructions below.
Buy a bunch of eucalytpus; flower shops and floral departments at grocery stores keep them behind the counter as filler; a bunch is $5-$8. Mount it somewhere around your shower (using floral twine if you've got it; rubber bands or string otherwise). Sprinkle 15-20 drops of eucalyptus and any other of the essential oils listed below on the sides of the tub. Turn the shower on hot, close the door, wait for five minutes and return to your own personal spa/steam room. Breathe deeply.
Supplies:
Fresh eucalyptus
Eucalyptus essential oil
(Opt) Peppermint essential oil
(Opt) Rosemary essential oil
Booty from Jaffa markets in Tel Aviv
Last week in Tel Aviv, I explored the markets in Old Jaffa. The olives and dried fruit made me drool, but it was overwhelming with so many to choose from. So, I confined my purchases to an olive sampling and some irresistable dried roses--that cost mere pennies--pictured below. They smelled divine, and now that they're smuggled home (Tel Aviv security either didn't see them rolled up in my t-shirt, or decided not to care), I'm not sure what to do with them, apart from making sachets for my lingerie, sock, and sweater drawers. I'm taking ideas!
Custom Perfumer in Tel Aviv
I'm in Tel Aviv for a travel story, and went to this Jaffa perfumerie, Zielinski & Rozen, that offers custom-blended perfums based on not only your scent preferences, but also one's own personal scent and lifestyle--exactly the way I like to pick out scent. It's tucked away on a side street, (and basically doesn't advertise), so going inside feels like discovering a secret. The owner, Erez Rozen, compares building an individual scent to building a pyramid, using the traditional concepts of high, middle, and base notes. Apart from the Dead Sea and the desert fortress Masada, this was probably my favorite experience in Israel.
Natural Botanical Perfumery class at Chicago Botanic Gardens
I've taken soap- and candle-making classes at various organizations including Abbey Brown, and I'm also very interested in natural botanical perfumemaking. A year ago, I read a wonderful book about the history of NBP, Essence and Alchemy, by perfumer Mandy Aftelier. Among other things, it goes into the "primal" nature of scent, the history of perfume and why she chooses not to use synthetics (a unique perfumery choice.)
Today's natural botanical perfumery class at the Chicago Botanic Gardens, taught by the talented and generous Jessica Hannah, (who has studied with Mandy and is influenced by her). I learned so much, and love the vetiver-heavy custom perfume I made today. Jessica spoke passionately and emotionally about the proper and sustainable use of essential oils, and got me even more excited about delving into this world of NBP. Now, I feel ready to make some blends of my own; starting with a mosquito-repelling blend (using things like cedar, lavender, citrus--all proven to repel the pests).
"My Writing Process" blog post
I was invited by the spectacular author/professor Goldie Goldbloom to participate in the "My Writing Process blog tour." You can read Goldie's entry here. Since I'm finishing my MFA thesis and completely reworking how I think about my writing, my processes have done a 180 in the past few months.
1) What am I working on?
I’m in the last throes of completing my thesis for my MFA program at Northwestern University. After four years in the program, I’m ready to be done! It’s 150 pages--about 70 pages are short stories with an urban-decay setting and a magical-realism fairy-tale bent. The other 80 pages are an excerpt from my novel about a young woman who’s grown up at a radical flower farm commune founded by her parents.
2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?
My work takes place in an urban, post-industrial setting but has this fairy-tale backdrop. I’ve been told that the combination of those two things is unusual, I think because most people don’t think of such a bleak setting providing a backdrop for magical elements. But I see the nature and potential for things like curses and spells to take place amidst factories and mills.
3) Why do I write what I do?
The industrial landscape in this current work comes from my childhood in industrial Indiana, on the Chicago border. And I was a huge reader as a kid, devouring Grimm, folk tales, fables, and Biblical stories, so the writing that comes most naturally to me is basically an outgrowth of that.
4) How does your writing process work?
I’ve learned a lot about “how I work,” in the past four years of grad school. I’ve gotten better about procrastination, which used to be a big problem, by doing Julia Cameron’s “morning pages” from The Artist’s Way. Doing the morning pages seems to clear out my mental clutter and get me ready to write the real stuff. I try to write daily, on the commute to my day job and it’s MUCH easier to get back into the work when I *am* writing daily.
I’ve also recently discovered Robert Olen Butler’s From Where You Dream, and the “dreamstorming” process detailed in that book has been helping me a lot lately. It’s best for bigger projects, like novels, and is a way to both inhabit the “dream space” of a novel, while also making big decisions that help move the story forward. (It seems I’m not the only one who gets paralyzed when it comes to making major decisions that affect the whole storyline...but if you don’t make those decisions, you wind up with competing or contradictory threads.) Dreamstorming is a great way to address this: It helps you tap into the subconscious and figure out what the story is “about” but also rein things in enough so that the amount of rewriting you have to do is minimized. I'm just sad I didn't discover it sooner.
NEXT UP:
Mark Rader's first published story was about a spunky one-armed cave boy named Little Runner who saves his clan from a bear attack. It was in a kid's magazine when he was a kid. Now a grown man, Mark's stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, Epoch, LIT, and The Southern Review, and been short-listed for a Pushcart Prize, O. Henry Award, and inclusion in the Best American Non-Required Reading anthology. He holds an MFA from Cornell University and currently teaches creative writing part-time at the University of Chicago's Graham School. He has a number of long-in-the-making manuscripts nearly completed, he's pretty sure. Look for his post at: http://www.markrader.com/
Dana Norris is the founder of Story Club, a monthly storytelling show in Chicago, Boston, and Minneapolis. She teaches at StoryStudio Chicago. She has been published in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, The Rumpus, the Tampa Review, and her stories have been featured on Chicago Public Radio. You may see her upcoming performance schedule at dananorris.net, and she'll publish her post on her Facebook page.
"Mapping" a fictional place
I'm in the process of writing my first novel and it's...daunting. I've never embarked on such a large work and it's taking much more time than I anticipated to figure out how anyone goes about getting started. Beyond simply considering, "what's the story and who are the characters?," and "Am I a writer who creates detailed outlines or shoots from the hip?," my professor has REALLY been stressing the importance of place/setting. Luckily, the novel I'm writing about a town on the southernmost tip of Illinois, (where the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers meet), originated by my fascination with that location, but Goldie Goldbloom has been pressing me to work with that in a much more detailed, thought-out way.
For example, Goldie has tasked me with making an uber-detailed map of my novel's landscape. Not just the simple geography, but also the more "micro" locations in the story where my characters spend time -- interiors of houses, backyards, fields, Main Streets, bridges, etc. Beyond creating maps, Goldie recommends that we find images of our setting and pin them up at our writing desk, and listen to music relevant to the story's timeline and setting, to get even more engrossed in our stories. Full and complete immersion in story and place, in other words. These things might sound small, or obvious, but they're not, they're huge. After starting these practices, I've begun to feel much more oriented in my story. And I think readers can tell when the writer has a concrete sense of their setting; i.e., "authorial confidence." (Still, if anyone has any idea of what people in southern Illinois might've been listening to in the early 1970s and early 1990s, help a lady out.)
Writing from the senses 1-day class
Tomorrow, I'm teaching a one-hour class as a requirement of the teaching seminar for my MFA studies at Northwestern. The class is one I designed, titled "Writing from the Senses." My class, and about 10 others taught by my classmates, will be offered free of charge to the public, since it's a way for us to practice our teaching skills, so the crowd will be a friendly, receptive one. Still, I'm nervous, so I'm easing my anxiety by WAY over-preparing. Before we do the writing exercises, I'll distribute sensory prompts; i.e., so I'll pass around essential oils, a box filled with tactile objects, some music snippets, a number of odd images, and a few flavorful nuts and seeds. We'll also read some Proust aloud, natch.
Elizabeth Gilbert on Nurturing Creativity
“That’s the kind of thought that could lead a person to start drinking gin at 9 in the morning.” A poignant & thought-provoking talk on genius and Socratic “daemons” living in artists’ walls to help them with their work. Yeah, Gilbert wrote Eat, Pray, Love. This still rocks.
Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity | Video on TED.com
www.ted.com
TED Talks Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses -- and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person "being" a genius, all of us "have" a genius. It's a funny, personal and surprisingly moving talk.
Glorious Artist Residency at Ragdale
In November 2009, I received a Ragdale Artist Residency and just spent a spectacular three weeks there, working on my short fiction collection in Lake Forest, Illinois, writing, thinking, dreaming. Some pics are attached, and here's a Literago post I wrote on my time there.