Tag Archives: cats

Dispatch from Edinburgh #3–CATS!!!!

Posted on by
Reply

The only cat cafe in Scotland (I think)

One of the real privations of spending the summer in Edinburgh is the lack of cats.  I desperately miss my cats back home, but I just miss cats in general.  Since Edinburgh is a city with lots of traffic, people (fortunately) don’t seem to let their cats out of doors (maybe in the suburbs, but not in the city).  Though I did see a white cat with orange spots at the house across the street, but only a flash of it, as it disappeared into the garden and I haven’t seen it since.  The only other cat I’ve seen is Turret, in the Highlands, at the distillery.  Aside from those two, Edinburgh is a dry county when it comes to cats.

Or so I thought.  Last week, my ears pricked up at the faculty dinner when someone mentioned something about a cat café.  So I looked up online and sure enough, Edinburgh has a cat café called Maison de Moggy, and I was determined to go.

For £12 you can go to Maison de Moggy and pet and play with cats for a full hour.  You can also get a snack, and I chose a strawberry lemonade and a slice of carrot cake—but I was there to pet some cats. And pet them I did.

Fleur the Oriental Shorthair and Sebastian (?) the Norwegian Forest Cat

All of the cats were young—I don’t think any were older than a year.  They cavorted and chased after feather wands and jumped on tables and sat on chairs.  A few of them were sleepy and snoozed where they dropped, and no amount of petting could rouse them.  (I did not pet snoozing cats—that’s rude.)

At the table next to mine, a couple had ordered fancy hot chocolates with whipped cream and sprinkles, but they were off playing with some cats when their drinks were delivered. A grey Oriental Shorthair named Fleur saw it as her moment to get on the table and lick some whipped cream. Unfortunately for Fleur, the “cat nanny” who had dropped off the drinks saw what she was about and scooched her off the table. But not for long!  When the couple sat down to drink their hot chocolate, Fleur reappeared and did her best to look deprived and starved, but the couple wasn’t fooled.  So the cat just sat there, hoping, and looking very pathetic.  But also, sleek and beautiful, as all Oriental Shorthairs are.

Maude, Fleur’s sister

There were four pairs of sibling cats—the two Oriental Shorthairs, with Maude the chocolate cat being Fleur’s sister, two Ragdolls, two Norwegian Forest Cats, and two British Short Hairs.  The brown tabby Norwegian (whose name I didn’t get but I think might be Sebastian) let me dangle a feather wand at him, and he caught his little “birdie” a few times.  I almost got to pet his brother Nico, but this little 10 year old child just wouldn’t let me—she just had to get all the cats to herself.  (She kind of chased after them which was bad, flicking her feather wand at them, even when they couldn’t care less.)  I also got to play with one of the Ragdolls (until that little girl chased after the cat into the other room).

I mostly spent time with Fleur because she seemed to appreciate my calm, and my unwillingness to throw the feather wand feather in her face.  She let me pet her, which was nice.  She was very sweet and rather vocal.

Sebastian (?) playing with the cat wand

Gilbert the British Shorthair

I can’t say that my cat needs have been completely assuaged, but I feel less cat-missing and cat-lonely than I was before I went.  Maison de Moggy is in the Grassmarket part of Edinburgh, and it’s a little hidden, so if you go, make sure you pass the Women’s Hostel—it’s kind of—err—cattycorner to the Maison. Meow!

Sleepy kitty whose name begins with D

The other Ragdoll cat who was thinking about jumping onto my table

Bartholo–MEW!

A view of Edinburgh Castle from the Grassmarket

The famous Greyfriars Bobby statue (not a cat, obvs.) on the descent into the Grassmarket.

Return to Rockvale Writers Colony

Posted on by
Reply
An antique brown wood secretary desk with a brown chair, lamp, and a window behind it.

My desk

I am at Rockvale Writers Colony again, working (as ever) on Medea on the Bayou.  I am in the Giles Hill room, which has a four poster bed with curtains, tasteful furnishings including a wonderful antique writing desk, and a huge bathroom and wardrobe. It has been a lovely quiet week, and I’ve gotten both writing and revising done.  Maybe not nearly as much as I would have liked (it always takes a little while to adjust to being in a “room of my own”) but I am pleased with my progress overall.  What I really need right now is a beta reader (or two!)—someone who can give me real, structural-level and poem-level critique.  I’m not sure what the book needs right now.  I have some thoughts about how to make it more Louisiana-ish, but it’s unclear what the book needs to actually be good.

Look, I know I have a confidence issue, but this isn’t that.  My concerns have more to do with how individual poems work as poems.  Sometimes it feels like they are really just prose in disguise.  And that’s problematic for a number of reasons:

  1. This is meant to be a novel-in-verse. Emphasis on verse.  I don’t want to write prose.
  2. Prose is fine as a thing, but the world doesn’t need a novelized version of Medea. (But to be honest, I’m not sure the world needs a book of poems about a play that was already written in verse.)
  3. If I’m not writing poetry, what the hell have I spent the last 3 years doing? (I guess it’s possible that I’ve written another hybrid piece… and we know how well loved those are (not).
A chubby marmalade cat balances on a fence.

Oliver sits on the horse fence.

Anyway, you can see my dilemma.  For the most part, these poems haven’t seen the light of day (though I’ve sent many out, and even published a dozen of them) so I don’t know if they are working.  By the fact that so many of them have been rejected, one could say “they’re probably not working, JC.”  Or maybe they just don’t work as stand-alone poems.  Which is altogether another problem.  I want them to work as stand-alone poems, but sometimes you need exposition, and exposition isn’t very poetic.

The thing I tell my students about writing adaptations is that you have to honor the original source, but in the end the adaptation is a new piece of writing and it’s only about itself  I’m trying to do that; I honor Appolonius of Rhodes and Euripides by recreating scenes from The Argonautika and Medea, but I’m also adding new characters and new scenes and new information so that readers get a fuller image of Medea as a person. And I’m also trying to maintain a strong narrative voice.  How well I’m succeeding, I can’t be for sure.  But I’m trying.

An image of a lean and handsome black cat.

Pip the shy but sweet black cat.

One of the ladies I’ve met here at the colony (Jen Knox, check out her new book, We Arrive Uninvited, available as a signed copy here) read What Magick May Not Alter, which I had left a copy of the last time I was here.  She said she liked it (yay!) especially because of its strong narrative voice.  And I think that’s true about WMMNA—it does have a strong voice and it’s good with character development—but then it should be, because I invented everything.

Here with Medea, I’m not sure I’m delivering on the promise of creating something new and I’m not sure about the narrative voice.  She’s already a known quantity as a character—am I revealing something fresh about her by writing about the early part of her marriage (as well as the plot of the play), or am I just…wasting readers’ time?  I ask myself:  why should anyone read my Medea when Euripides’ play is so perfect?  My go-to answer—“Because I wrote it”—is not what you’d call a particularly compelling response.  Do I think that someday professors teaching a classics and adaptations class will teach my book (this is assuming it finds a publisher)?  Not particularly.  But it would be really cool if they did, right?  Who’s the audience?  People who like poetry and people who like Medea for sure…but is there a broader audience for it?  What if there isn’t?

A tortie cat (black and orange) standing on a wooden deck.

Lucy making a bee-line for my legs to wrap herself around.

I’m not sure what’s brought on this little crisis of faith.  I think it’s because I’m seeing the whole collection (it’s about 96% done) together finally and I’m worried that if it doesn’t work as a collection (or if it’s prose-in-disguise), then I will have wasted my precious writing time writing something that isn’t worth a damn.  Well, ok, it’s worth at least a single damn, but you know what I mean.

I am afraid I might have another albatross around my neck.  Last year, I didn’t sell one copy of WMMNA—not one single, solitary copy.  (In fact, Madville took a net loss of two copies, which were apparently returned.)  I don’t want Medea to be in the same situation. I want her to find an audience.  I want people to know her as someone besides a child-killer. I think my book shows her in a rich full way…I think.  (But what if it doesn’t?)

Anyway, that’s where I am with this project.  I say I’m 96% done because I have a few plot holes that need to be addressed, but I think the collection—whatever it is—is really coming along. (There’s still revising to do, which drops my percentage down to 46% done, but I’m working on that too.)

In other news, tomorrow is Mother’s Day (probably not Medea’s favorite holiday), so make sure that you tell your Moms how much you love them.  They do so much for us—mine is perfect—and they love us just as we are.  Even when what we are is a confidence-lacking, attention seeking, desperate-to-be-adored-by-the-masses writer of poetry.

P.S.  The cats are Rockvale’s super-sweet barn cats.  (Doesn’t it figure that’s what I’d take photos of?)

A large orange marmalade cat with piercing green eyes.

Oliver

A sleek black cat sits in the middle of the grass.

Pip the Panfur in the grass

Saying Goodbye

Posted on by
1

2015

Nov. 2021

Dickens said that life is about meetings and partings; that is the way of it.  Or maybe it was Kermit the Frog.  But the point remains the same:  those who come in to our lives eventually must leave, and we are left behind to somehow muddle on without them.  This week, we said goodbye to our 20-year-old cat TimToms. He was part of our family the moment my Mom showed up with him at our house, back in 2008.

I had just lost Snorky, who had been hit by a car in my neighborhood, and I was distraught without a cat. I did find Jenny, who was maybe 6 months old, left alone in the rain to wander, and I took her in.  That was right around Thanksgiving.  Meanwhile, my Mom’s friend, who was a veterinarian, said she had a 6 year old cat who lived on her porch and was henpecked to death by her other cats.  Would I like him?  I would.

When Mom drove to Atlanta for Christmas that year, she brought this big, fluffy, growling hot mess of a cat with green, human eyes.  He lived under the bathroom sink about two or three months.  We didn’t see him often; we had his box and his food in the bathroom and left him pretty much alone.  Sometimes, I would peer under the sink to see how Thomas (as he was then known) was doing.  He would growl, and I’d leave him alone again.  Meanwhile, Jenny ruled the roost.  After some time, he moved into our bedroom closet and lived there for a few more months.  And then one day, he just decided he no longer wanted to live by himself and came out and joined us.  After that, he never left us alone. He was always out and about and underfoot, looking for anyone to love.

March 2022

TimToms was the kind of cat who never met a stranger.  Sure, he would growl a little (it was a “love growl,”) when my Mom or my sister would come to visit, but after a minute or two, he’d decide that he liked them, and he would jump in their laps and be ready for pets. The same with other guests.  He’d be momentarily shy, but as soon as they showed a modicum of interest, he had found a new friend.

He loved any love that was a love.  Even when you’d push him off of you, he’d come right back, and you’d find yourself petting him despite yourself.  He loved to lick—especially people’s heads. And his purr was loud as a lawnmower.  He could quite happily sit next to you (or on you) as long as you let him.

TimToms & Jenny, March 2020

Initially Jenny wasn’t too keen with him, but he won her over with his persistent good humor (he never fought or bit or engaged in any typical scrabbling for dominance, despite being more than twice her size); he would groom her, and they’d curl up together on the bed or the couch and sleep. She liked him, she decided, and the two became good friends.  (I can tell she misses him, because it seems like she’s looking for him.  She’s also meowing a lot, which isn’t typical for her.)

When Wrigley joined us in 2014 (?), he was thrilled to have someone new to hang with.  Wrigley didn’t take to him as Jenny had, but she also didn’t seem to mind him, and they lived together, if not as friends, at least cordially.

TimToms & Jenny, Aug. 2020

He was our darling boy for 14 years.  He loved nachos and watching football with his Daddy.  He liked to sit on my shoulder when I was crocheting—even when I didn’t want him there!  He made every day better with his joie de vivre and his loving, generous, and forgiving heart.

This last year was hard for him; he’d gone deaf, he pooped everywhere except his box, and he was hungry all the time but losing weight.  But no matter his physical frailties, he stayed full of love and loyalty.  I’m afraid that I wasn’t nearly as patient as I could have been with him this last year, but I know he forgave me, because he followed me everywhere and wanted to be with me as much as I’d let him.

June 2019

And I’ m so brokenhearted that he’s gone.  I know he’s crossed the Rainbow Bridge and he’s happy and whole again—playing with Thad and Baby and The Kins and Snorky and Chubu and all the cats we  loved who’ve crossed before him—and I’m happy that he’s free of pain and limitations.  But I miss his funny personality, and the way he was more doglike than catlike, and the way he bonked and purred and drank water out of the bathroom cup and took his paw and would flick the water on the bathroom mirror with the perfect Harry Potter “swish and flick.”  I miss how he loved to eat, and would get catfood on his nose.  I miss how he would eat plastic bags and bite and chase our toes.  I even miss how he would sleep on my head at night, or sit on my head in the daytime when I was reading.  I just miss him, and while I’m grateful for the 14 years we had him with us, I wish it could have been longer.  Fourteen years doesn’t seem nearly enough.

Rest in peace, sweet TimToms.  Know we’ll always love you.

Here’s a little video with mostly photos of TimToms (and a few with Jenny). (Don’t listen with the sound on though…the soundtrack is annoying.)

Here’s another video with TimToms battling the Christmas tree.

New Poems in Hole in the Head Review

Posted on by
Reply

Well, sadly, I may be back in The ATL again, after my wonderful time at Rockvale, but some good things greeted me on the way back:  Jenny (of course!), and five new poems up in Hole in the Head Review.  So very grateful for their support of writers and their belief in my work!

The poems are kind of a mixed bag–they all belong to several different collections I have going on at the same time.  I was really surprised and delighted they took all of them, especially because they are basically unrelated to each other.  So anyway, if you want to see a range of new work, check out my new poems.

I hope you like them!

Yes, Virginia, I Do Need a Room of One’s Own

Posted on by
Reply

Ah, to be outside one’s typical milieu for the first time in 16 months!

I think about how it is when I am at home, trying to write—the cats are constantly jumping up on me, getting in the way of my computer, sitting on the books I’m using for research, whatever.  There are endless things to clean (not that I get up and clean them, but whatevs, they taunt me).  The phone rings constantly.  The emails and work fires intervene.  Someone in the cul-de-sac invariably manicures on his lawn, the incessant whine and growl of lawnmowers and weed-whackers destroying my concentration. It is hard to find a creative “zone” when too many things make demands on your attention.

Scout, with Sandy petting him

Since I have been here at Rockvale (in Tennessee, 35-ish miles south of Nashville as the crow flies) I have reveled in the almost uninterrupted quiet.  I read here in my “cell” (a beautifully appointed room with a cozy chair and desk and bed with a quilt on it from 1925) or in the fireplace room (which smells of a century of winter fires), and write in a little pool of sunlight on the enclosed porch.  It is almost like I alone have run of the place.  But there are other women here too, working on their own writing, finding their own paths.  Except for a little chitchat in the kitchen when preparing meals, the only noise is the AC turning on and off.  What must it be like to have this kind of quiet all the time?  I think I didn’t realize how exhausted and depleted I’ve been feeling until I rediscovered my own being here in this writer’s colony.  I am truly decompressing.

Mama… a.k.a. Little Mexico

From my window, I can see a paddock, and usually there’s a mama and her foal far out on the other side, nipping the grass.  Today they were over by the fence nearest me, so I went out there and got to pet Scout.  His mama (whose real name is Little Mexico (?)) didn’t come too close, but Scout seemed pretty interested in me, and in debonair Finn and chonky Ollie, the two cats who came running when they saw me.  (I can’t escape cats!)  Scout was so interested that he gave me a big chomp on my forearm—which hurts a bit, but didn’t break the skin.  Still, I’d pet him again if he came to this side of the fence.

Finn

Ollie (who is really Oliver)

I feel grateful to be here.  I think after a year and a half-ish of being shut in the house, I just needed…another house. 😊 I needed a place of clutter-free, basically cat-free peace.  (And wifi and cell service are spotty, so I’m even hard to reach, which actually, I love.) I am hoping to get some good writing done.  I’ve already brainstormed a number of ideas of where to go on my next project, I’ve organized a list of what I have, I’ve done some journaling (I know, what a shocker!) and I’ve read two whole books for research already.

Tomorrow, I’m writing two poems if it kills me.  And maybe I’ll go visit Scout again.