Today’s Game Plan: Life Coaching Roger Clemens

Can A Non-Believer Date a Practicing Christian?

Today’s Game Plan: Resisting Retirement, Favre-Style

Blows my mind.

It’s one trick, Nancy, to manifest exactly what you want.

It’s another to bring about something even better.

Leave the door open,
    The Universe

How? Expect miracles, Nancy. Don’t attach to unimportant details. Don’t insist “how” your dreams will come true. Prepare to be amazed. Feel the joy when you daydream. Take baby steps in the dark. Every single day physically do something about your dreams. And most important, saunter.

It’s the birthday of writer Annie Proulx, who also goes by E.A. Proulx or E. Annie Proulx, born Edna Annie Proulx in Norwich, Connecticut (1935). Her father was French Canadian and worked at a textile mill. Her mother, a painter, came from a family that had lived in Connecticut for 300 years. Proulx said that her mother taught her how to observe “everything — from the wale of the corduroy to the broken button to the loose thread to the disheveled mustache to the clouded eye.”

She went to college, dropped out, then went back, got a master’s, then dropped out of her Ph.D. program. Throughout those years, she got married and divorced three times, had children, worked as a waitress, worked for the post office, and wrote articles for magazines. She wrote about all kinds of things. She made a living, supporting herself and her three sons. She lived in remote places, for a while in a shack in northern Vermont where she foraged, hunted, and fished. She said, “I can do these little chores — getting in my wood or planting in the garden — and feel quite enriched.”

And occasionally, she took all that training in observation and wrote short stories. She was so busy that she only averaged about two a year, but she never had trouble getting them published. Finally, she had enough to put together a book, Heart Songs (1988). Her editor was writing up the contract for it and he suggested they put in a novel because she would probably be good at it. Proulx just laughed at him and said she had no idea how to write a novel. But after a while, another editor suggested the same thing, and she said, “I sat down, and within a half-hour, the whole of Postcards was in my head.”

Postcards was published in 1992, got great reviews, and she won the PEN/Faulkner Award, the first woman ever to win it. One year later, she published The Shipping News (1993), set in Newfoundland, and she won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. She moved to Wyoming in 1994, and published short stories inspired by her new home. Close Range: Wyoming Stories (1999) included the story “Brokeback Mountain,” which was made into a hit film in 2005. Her most recent book is Fine Just the Way It Is (2008), another set of Wyoming stories.

She firmly disagrees with the advice “write what you know.” She says it produces “tiresome middle-class novels of people who I think are writing about things they know, but you wish to God they didn’t. My thing is, learn what you want to write about. Find out about it.”

She said, “I believe if you get the landscape right, the characters will step out of it, and they’ll be in the right place. The story will come from the landscape.”

And Proulx said: “I read omnivorously, I always have, my entire life. I would rather be dead than not read. So, there’s always time for that. I read while I eat, and our whole family did. We all had very bad manners at the table. All of our books are stained with spaghetti sauce, and that sort of thing.”

I’m convinced that this anxiety running through my life is the tension between what I “should be” and what I am. My anxiety doesn’t come from thinking about the future but from wanting to control it. It seems to begin whenever I smuggle into my mind an expectation about how I or others should be. It is the tension between my desire to control the world and the recognition that I can’t. “I will be what I will be” — where is the anxiety in that? Anxiety is the recognition that I might not reach the rung on the opinion-ladder I have just set for myself. I fear death most when I am about to exceed what I believe others think of me; then death threatens to cut me off from myself, because “myself” is not yet.

Today’s Game Plan: St. Peter Weighs in on the Mosque

Gilbert’s journey is one of metamorphosis, a transformative process that requires work and focus that many are unwilling to do. OK, but why diss people who have the courage to take on the challenge? If the story doesn’t speak to you, then say so. Why the hate? Yikes. Maybe it just means you’re the ripest candidate of all for a journey inward. Just sayin’.

Today’s Game Plan: Eat Pray Love … and Break Free.