The Girl Behind The Red Door

Trip Report: The Leaning Tower of Pizza

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 22:41:16 +0100

After a year's sabbatical, Jonathan and I are back on the wall. It feels good and, to keep our spirits high, I thought I'd do some retrospective chronicling of our past climbs together. LEFT: Me, topped out on Deep Dish on The Leaning Tower of Pizza.

Climbing. It's a sport we picked up together shortly after we'd begun dating in 2003. (As an aside of sorts, I highly recommend that couples just starting out take a stab at indoor climbing. Climbing requires trust, respect, sensitivity, and constant verbal communication. There is no better way to bond with one another.) For the first few years, we stuck to the plastic. Our membership at Diablo Rock Gym in Concord, California was a necessary expenditure every month. Eventually, following the organic progression of climbing, we moved outdoors. In California, that meant easy access to all types of rock almost year-round.

In May of 2009, we took a road trip down the Eastern Sierra, from the east entrance of Yosemite National Park to Joshua Tree National Park, with a pit stop of a few days in and around Bishop.

From our campsite near Big Pine, we drove an hour south to visit the famous Alabama Hills Recreation Area, backdrop for classic TV westerns (The Gene Autry Show and The Lone ranger) and blockbuster films (Iron Man and Transformers). Our car kicked up a dramatic cloud of dust as we rolled along Movie Flat Road; we clenched our jaws tight as we rattled over the washboard.

Objective: Leaning Tower of Pizza

Style: Sport Climbing

Level: Easy/Beginner

Approach: Drive up and park.

Continue reading Trip Report: The Leaning Tower of Pizza.

Get out of my underwear drawer, boys.

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 19:02:27 +0100

The following is a cross-post from my second blog (Feeding the Trolls). I feel strongly about this issue, and I hope that, upon reading my remarks, you will, too.

The United States of America, my home country, is stepping into a new era regarding the availability of health care. Because health care is such an enormous issue, people are bound to have trouble with individual provisions within the larger bills and debates. One of those provisions has to do with Birth Control. I capitalize Birth Control because it is, in my mind, after certain vaccines and quality-of-life-enhancing medications, THE most important health care advancement in history. But even in the U.S., where women are liberated to the point of achieving the majority of advanced degrees offered each year, there is something scary looming large around the availability of contraception: Religion.

Now, I understand that there are countries where women are still considered property, and in those places I wouldn't be at all surprised to see religious leaders refusing to allow contraception to their chattels. But when the Legislative Branch of the United States' government convenes a panel of male religious leaders to weigh in on the availability of Birth Control to American women, I am blown away. And pissed off.

So, I thought I'd write a letter to the eight male witnesses (dominating two panels of ten total witnesses) called by last Thursday:

The Most Reverend William E. Lori (Roman Catholic Bishop of Bridgeport, CT)
The Reverend Dr. Matthew C. Harrison (President, The Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod)
C. Ben Mitchell, Ph.D. (Graves Professor of Moral Philosophy, Union University)
Rabbi Meir Soloveichik (Director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought, Yeshiva University)
Craig Mitchell, Ph.D. (Associate Professor of Ethics, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary)
John H. Garvey (President, The Catholic University of America)
Dr. William K. Thierfelder (President, Belmont Abbey College)
Dr. Samuel W. "Dub" Oliver (President, East Texas Baptist University)

Continue reading Get out of my underwear drawer, boys..

Procrastination

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 11:01:31 +0100

I've been writing every day. That's what you're supposed to do when you're a writer. Everyone says so. Annie Dillard, Stephen King, Pam Houston, Lynn Freed, Michael Chabon, Flannery O'Connor. These are people I listen to. And I always thought taking that kind of intentional step in my writing would be like practicing yoga or something, that it would lead me to a state of bliss. In such a state, I would no longer avoid the big, emotional, core issues at the heart of all good writing. In such a state, I would stop writing elaborately and learn how to cut the "scrollwork and ornament" out of my pieces, the way Hemingway says I should. After a while, those things would become second nature, ingrained in my consciousness and my muscle memory. In such a state, I would no longer shirk my responsibility, but just sit down at my desk and write.

As it turns out, I was wrong.

I've been writing every day, but over the last few weeks I've learned it is possible do that while still managing to avoid writing what I'm supposed to write.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I now offer into self-prosecutorial evidence exhibits A, B, and C:

A) As I move forward with this whole writing thing, it's becoming more and more necessary for me to put my credentials somewhere that is easy for editors and publishers to find, so last month we launched my personal website. www.audreycamp.com. Lots of content. Lots of design. We had fun! But it did take time.

Continue reading Procrastination.

Bound for Geilo

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 23:49:25 +0100

On Saturday we venture to Geilo. It is a city I know little of, save that it is one stop along a famed railway line between Oslo and Bergen, and that it holds an annual Ice Music Festival each February. Our trip will coincide with this festival, a happy coincidence. The temperatures in Geilo are predicted to be lower than anything I've felt yet in my lifetime: -20 to -30 Celsius. I imagine it will be the kind of cold that will make my eyes ache.

If we can summon the spirit, we will head outdoors to ski. At any rate we will lug our equipment along. It is to be a true vacation, so neither of us will mind if we end up in our room most of the time.

We also plan to attend the Ice Music Festival and listen to a concert played forth on instruments of ice. It is something I never would have thought up on my own. After nine months in Norway (a full year for Jonathan) some things are still entirely alien to us.

Continue reading Bound for Geilo.

Announcing Red Door Reviews

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 13:40:44 +0100

What is the import of a splash of milk billowing up gray and beige under the tinted surface of my morning tea? Who can say whether it is better to spend a day on a snowy hillside or in the radiator-heated coziness of my office? And what does it matter to the universe that I want to write a book?

Sometimes my mind gets caught in the web of abstraction. My morning begins with poetry.

I pour tea,
add sugar,
a small, sacred splash
of milk.
I spin it with a spoon,
ridding the sky
of its cumulus clouds.
(Elevation 7,000 feet)
Sip. It is clear
my life begins at conception.

The good news is that, even after my mind is thus entangled, my body (in particular, my typing fingers) can still function in real time.

The tea is too hot. I take up a short stack of good books, ones that resonate months and years after the initial read. I flick pages and stick Post-Its on pages that jump out and say, "Remember me? I once blew your mind!" Then I open a blank Word document and begin to type my review. Keywords, key characters, key characteristics. I write, I prune. Soon I have condensed the plot and my rating to a mere 120 characters.

I know what you're thinking. Audrey? Write something THAT short? No way.

I don't blame you. Here on TGBTRD I have all the room I want to wax philosophical. But Twitter has rules, and I must abide by them. This pet project of mine is finally live! I have just launched my Red Door Reviews:

Tweet-sized offerings on book content and quality. Title, review, link, star rating. A rapier wit as space and context allow.

If you feel so inclined, please follow me @RedDoorReviews on Twitter.

This project began with a simple concept: People who love to read want to know what other people who love to read have read and why. The constraint of 120 characters helps me reduce some of my trademark (hah!) pontifical wandering in favor of true review. Naturally, my reviews are all offered IMHO.

My tea is cold. What exciting new venture will my mind and heart conceive tomorrow?

Continue reading Announcing Red Door Reviews.

Taking The Pomegranate

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 13:36:56 +0100

Poetry is an important art form, and part of that import is in the inherent subjectivity of the genre. What you take away from a given poem will absolutely be different than what I take away from it. And isn't that marvelous? A single stream of thought on the page, an observation, a proverb, a magic trick, can evoke countless reader reactions.

Before a poem can be written or a story can be told, the teller holds her story in the palm of her hand. It sparkles like a cut diamond. When held up to the light and spun, the story's flat, pure faces cast a rainbow of reflections against the far wall. These are the many versions of that story, the vantage points on a single event or series of events. The question for the teller is how she can and should enter that story. And write it down to share.

That same question exists for the reader, too, even after a story is told one way. It is the reader's prerogative to take it from the black velvet cushion of the gift box and raise it once again to the light. To spin it. To read the flashings and points of colored light on the wall the way one might read tea leaves or the shallow, pink creases in the palm of a hand.

This is what makes some stories (the best stories) timeless. Mythology lingers because each generation reads with new eyes, with the benefit of an even longer history.

When I was in sixth grade and learning the Greek myths for the first time, I fell in love with the tale of Persephone. It is a story that was first told hundreds of years B.C. As an American 12-year-old in 1995, my vantage point on the story was immature, but passionate. If you'd asked me then, I would have said it was the tale of a daughter taken from her mother.

That isn't the way I look at it now.

Continue reading Taking The Pomegranate.

A Mug of Kakao

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 11:26:00 +0100

Yesterday, I had lunch with a new friend and her four-year-old niece. The little girl spoke no English, with a couple of pleasant exceptions. "Okay." "Gimme five." "Yo dude."

"Makes sense," I said, sipping my peppermint mocha. "She's spending so much time with a California girl."

"Believe it or not, that wasn't me. My Norwegian sister-in-law actually taught her that one."

While we adults talked, the little one played and played. A toy tube of fake lipstick kept her occupied for a few minutes. Eventually the separate plastic pieces skittered across the floor. Then she scribbled and sketched on a paper placemat. Then she crawled under the table and proceeded to "hide" from us for a while, shrieking with delighted terror when we "found" her.

After a while, though, she'd had enough of our all-English conversation, our low-and-steady adult voices, and she popped up like a gopher, grabbing for the delicate white and black patterned infinity scarf around my friend's neck.

The brain of any child is a mystery to me, but I enjoyed watching her take this scarf through its paces. From one moment to the next the scarf was a hat, a blanket, a hammock, the veil of a spøkelse (ghost). Her voice warbled through the fabric, a haunting howl. When the ghost-game was done (in a matter of less than two minutes), she demanded a dress from her aunt. My friend proceeded to wrap the scarf around the child's tiny waist, covering her red Helly Hansen snow bibs, and then tied and tucked the remaining end, pulling her hands away to reveal a makeshift dress.

The little girl stared down at her new garment in wonder, twisting her head far around both sides to examine it, making sure it was a true dress, that no part of her was left exposed. Determining herself truly elegant, she drew back and hurled herself into her aunt's lap, wrapping her slender arms around my friend's neck. Grateful.

Continue reading A Mug of Kakao.

Resolute

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 23:59:48 +0100

As of midnight on New Year's Eve, I only had one spoken-aloud resolution.

"I want to take the time to sit and eat breakfast each morning before checking my email."

It was a noble, if somewhat unambitious, goal. I've noticed that my heart races and I can't calm my mind at night if I've spent more than a little time before the glowing specter of my computer screen. It's just email. It can wait fifteen minutes for me to make tea and peel a banana.

Day Two dawned and I slipped into my office and began working without a moment's hesitation to boil water for oatmeal.

Resolution Fail.

So, what's important? What am I aiming for this year? After all, there must be a goal, something to work toward and anticipate.

I'd like to post more often here. My thesis work sometimes coincides with first drafts here, but not always. It would be good to take some of the pressure off of myself and write journal entries here, too. After all, daily life just isn't always interesting, inspiring, or memoir-worthy.

_____________

Dear Journal:

Woke up late. Checked my email before breakfast. Resolution Fail. Got caught up with work while listening to Adele belt out Someone Like You on repeat for two straight hours. Her voice haunts me. I switched to Adele after trying the same thing with Maroon 5's Moves Like Jagger, and ended up dreaming about a stomping, gyrating Carson Kressley. The growling of my stomach startled the cat into jumping off my lap around 1:30. Almost forgot to eat lunch. Down to my last frozen bagel, really only a bagel in the literal sense. Round. Risen dough. Works as a vehicle for cream cheese. I'm dying for Noah's.

Especially since the cream cheese is hardly worth chewing my way through a make-believe bagel. I cave and buy reduced-fat Philadelphia Cream Cheese every time I visit the store just because of the look Jonathan gives me when I grab the real thing. Like he knows so much better. Like we'll gain ten thousand pounds if I shop the way I want to. Like I don't know that. So, I buy the reduced-fat garbage and suffer through the oddly rubbered texture of it all for peace at home. And less poundage on my hips. Hips which, as Shakira warned me years ago, do not lie.

Continue reading Resolute.

The Giraffe: An Exercise

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 20:56:50 +0100

A few months ago, I co-launched an expat women's writing group here in Oslo. We have eight talented, enthusiastic members, hailing originally from countries all over the globe. I love my group. Seeing them every other week lifts my spirits and inspires me to write often and better.

(Note: We are not accepting new members at this time because we strive to allow everyone to share their writing at every meeting. With eight people, this is already often a stretch. However, I can attest to how helpful it is to find and link-up with a group of writers wherever you are. My best advice: If you can't find such a group... start one! It's easier than you might think, and always absolutely worth it. I'm happy to share the steps we took to get ours off the ground, so please don't hesitate to contact me with questions about that.)

Occasionally our assigned exercises yield some really fun writing on each of our parts. In particular, I enjoyed the 10-minute exercise we did a couple of weeks ago, and I thought I'd share my response to it here.

10 Minute Exercise: Think of your favorite animal. Why is it your favorite? Tell us about the first memory you have of one, seeing it up close or in a photo, hearing its name.

Now, here I must admit that I cheated a little bit. My actual first memory of a giraffe is a terrifying one. My mother owned a wall-hanging, three giraffes at a watering hole, black paint on bamboo slats, like window blinds without the window. She hung it on the wall of my childhood bedroom, the one I shared with both my little brothers until I was six-years-old. That wall-hanging scared the bajeezus out of me. I believed I saw it come alive at night, and that the giraffes bared their teeth at me. I believed they were going to eat me in my sleep. This was real, blood curdling, screaming-fit fear.

I got over it quickly once I saw giraffes at the zoo, and that's the memory I describe here. The intelligence and analysis are retrospective, of course. The romance of the moment is absolutely real.

Continue reading The Giraffe: An Exercise.

Our Christmas Card

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:45:33 +0100

Christmas cards and Christmas letters, chronicles of our year at a time of supreme reflection, appear to be a very American phenomenon. It's one I like. I have a box of cards collected over the years from my friends, and in the pictures I can see them fall in love. I am reminded up their weddings. I can marvel at the growth of their children and follow their adventures throughout the world.

We may live in a digital age that allows us uniquely (and sometimes disturbingly) intimate access to the lives of friends and acquaintances alike, but these paper cards are important to me. In fact, the more digitized the world becomes, the more special it is that someone would take the time to sit and put pen to paper or lick a stamp and press it to the top corner of an envelope. (I'm exaggerating. No one licks stamps anymore.)

This year, due to the cost of printing and shipping and paying for international postage, I wasn't able to send as many of the paper cards as I have in years past. To make up for that, I thought I'd post the card here, too. After all, if you read my blog, you're important to me. You remind me that my writing is worthwhile. You help hold me accountable. You make me go on.

So... drum roll please...

Continue reading Our Christmas Card.

Evening Star

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 17:00:03 +0100

At first I think it is a plane, the first star in the evening sky. So bright, it seems like the pearled end of a pin stuck through the fabric of the sky to hold it in place. So bright, I can see it even though the sun hasn't entirely set. I am caught by the beam of it, ensnared, drawn in. The sky is banded with the late-afternoon ripeness of the sunset, burnt orange, gray-green, turquoise. But the star shines through, so bright I can see it glitter. I understand why we draw stars the way we do, with flashy points signifying the burst of light in the night.

This is the shortest day of the year. The first day of winter. As I walked home from the grocery store after lunch, the cold numbed my fingers, bare and hooked through the handles of my shopping bags. I hauled home my groceries: milk, juice, soda, a whole chicken for roasting on Christmas Day. I passed dogs wearing bright red sweaters and women in full-length fur coats. And now my neighborhood streets are almost empty, long before dinner time. The darkness has pressed us all indoors.

And perhaps because today has been so short, it has felt like one of the busiest days of all. I have run from one end of my flat to the other putting things away, hanging Christmas decorations, reorganizing cupboards. I have been writing and editing and revising. All the things I writer is supposed to do. My checklist for the day has been looking pretty good.

Then the star caught my eye.

Continue reading Evening Star.

The Fiction Spectrum

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 16:41:29 +0100

The black digits blinked against the fluorescent orange background of our alarm clock. 1:30 a.m. All the bedroom lights were still on. Jonathan and I were sitting up and staring at each other across the rumpled down comforters. Our expressions were heavy, numb, the calm after a storm. For a moment we were absolutely quiet. My cat raised his head sleepily and eyed me as if to ask, "Are you done now? Can we all go to bed like normal people?"

Jonathan yawned and pressed his bookmark back between the pages of his book. I shook my head against the sleepiness and tried to remember how we got here, why we were up so late.

It had started as an ordinary Sunday night. I took my birth control pill while Jonathan refilled his nightstand water cup. He switched on the morning alarm and I peeled off my socks and tossed them into the dirty clothes bin. We eased under our blankets side by side, lamps on, books out. He is re-reading The Lord of the Rings; I'm working my way through Robert Wright's The Evolution of God.

This is, again, pretty typical: Jonathan swimming in a fantasy novel while I root around in a work of non-fiction.

That's sort of what the debate was about.

Continue reading The Fiction Spectrum.

Snow!

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 22:28:11 +0100

A predictable post, I suppose, considering that I'm a California girl at the commencement of her first winter in Norway.

For California kids, certain Christmas songs and lore carry a different kind of mystique. Not only Irving Berlin's White Christmas, but also Jingle Bells, Winter Wonderland, and Frosty the Snowman. We don't understand these things. That is, unless our parents dragged us to the house of a relative who was fortunate enough to live someplace where it snowed. While my Illinois cousins spent the afternoon of Christmas Day throwing snowballs and sledding, my brothers and I were out rollerskating on sunny sidewalks through our neighborhood. Without coats on. And while my cousins might have debated the point, I still say we were the ones who drew the short straw.

So, you can understand my excitement when, after the warmest November Norway has on record, big, fat flakes of white began falling damply and intermittently from the evening sky.

Continue reading Snow!.

Diz & The Santa Hat

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 22:31:06 +0100

Seven years ago I was an undergrad at UC Davis, living in Livermore, California with my husband of four months, and I was a first-time mom to an itty-bitty kitty named Disney. Since then, many things have changed. I'm a graduate student at Lesley University, and I'm living in Oslo, Norway. Oh, and Diz isn't quite as itty or bitty anymore. In fact, he's quite a chunk! But a couple of important things have remained the same:

-- Marriage. Seven years later, Jonathan and I still feel like newlyweds in many ways. Lots of cuteness. (Thankfully the cuteness is woven in with a learned patience, humility, graciousness, and maturity... all things that only time can provide.)

-- Wardrobe. The shirt was $3.50 at Old Navy in 2002. It's a keeper! And the Santa Hat. The bow and ears are Minnie's, of course, and Jon has Mickey's to match. We picked them up on one of our early Disneyland trips in 2003. Again, I think they'll be around for a while. (We'd wear them outside, but we think it's a trifle soon to show the Norwegians our true, dorky colors.)

-- Humor. It lives here with us always. Often at Disney's expense. And if we're lucky and we work really hard at it, the laughter will still be around in 2018, 2025, and beyond.

Merry Christmas!

Continue reading Diz & The Santa Hat.

Bonds. They're necessary.

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 14:21:28 +0100

I don't want anyone out there to think I'm the only writer in my family.

My grandmother was a wiz with words, regularly stomping on us all in Scrabble competitions, and she wrote about our family history and genealogy.

My mom writes professional emails so lengthy and comprehensive, I'm sure if you were to print out a single day's correspondence with her, you could bind it and use it as a doorstop or a ship's anchor.

And my little brother, Curtis, once wrote a story while he was in high school that made our whole family fall over laughing (as it was intended to; we weren't mocking him or anything), and it included an adventure with a kite or something... wish I could remember more.

Then there's my dad. He writes frequently and always from the heart. He signs all of his text messages to me. LD. Love, Dad. So that I'll know they're from him. He shoots off emails for various reasons, most sentimental. I've never needed to wonder whether my dad loved me or was thinking about me. And for that I'm grateful. Even when the things that make him think of me are as... questionable and goofy as the one which triggered the following message from him today.

Things to remember as you read...

Continue reading Bonds. They're necessary..