Rue des Pensées: Channeling

I love my pug Stella. I think she must be sent by the Gods to keep me on my path. She is my very own Hermes. Her job is to wake me up at 5 AM to feed her, let her out, and most importantly to get me writing. And now that I have my very own cafe where I can drink my morning coffee and share my thoughts she dutifully follows me there and goes back to sleep. I have decided that my new cyberspace retreat is really the recesses of my writer's soul. So, as I lay - not dying, though that is another of my favorites: As I Lay Dying, by William Falkner - summoning my body to move, I recall a visit some years ago I made to Madame Tussauds Wax Museum. Besides the celebrities, and politicians, to my delight I walked into a parlor of writers. Hemingway was there and my jaw dropped. I quickly went into Janis-as-a-little-girl-mode and sat down next to Ernest pretending to be his guest. I hoped that if I wished really hard, like I did as a child who wanted her bicycle to morph into a station wagon, or her Thumbelina doll to become a real baby, that Hemingway would talk to me, encourage me, share with me his writing process. My daughter, who had accompanied me to Madame Tussauds that day, nudged me out of my fantasy, "Mom, what are your doing?!" I embarrassed her I am sure because her now husband then boyfriend might have been wondering why I had planted myself there and why did I look as if I was in a trance. "Take a picture?" I asked. I'd post the picture if I knew where it was, but believe me it was highly disappointing. In any case, all these years later while researching Hemingway I found a Hemingway interview by George Plimpton for the Paris Review. Hemingway, like another favorite of mine, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote standing up! And, I was very happy to read that he wrote from when the sun was just coming up till about noon. That's what I do! I pictured myself sitting next to the waxen Hemingway and thought; maybe my Janis-as-a-little-girl technique did work that day and it just took a long time to materialize! Voila - and then I got to thinking, just like this space on the Rue des Pensees, my own Field of Dreams if you like, if I imagine it, it will come.

The link to the Plimpton interview with Hemingway is here, to the right. Enjoy.