Last summer I had the pleasure of visiting Hillwood Museum and Gardens in Washington, DC. The museum consists of the former home of Marjorie Merriweather Post, heiress, businesswoman, and art collector extraordinaire. I spent the afternoon gazing at priceless porcelain and dazzling jewels and wandering gardens filled with too many varieties of flower to name under a perfect blue sky.
Yes, the collection was remarkable, the setting splendid, and the home itself opulent. And yet what I came away most impressed by the recognition that seizing beauty isn’t something to postpone.
At the end of my visit I lingered in the gift shop. After seeing Marjorie’s fabulous collection, I wanted something beautiful of my own. I dithered and fretted, balking at the price of a Russian porcelain teacup.
“Just get it,” my friend Ali said.
I took her at her word, and she was a good sport as I spent the next 15 minutes deliberating which design I needed to bring home.
I’m now the proud owner of a teacup and saucer that cost more than some of my college textbooks. But self-indulgence wasn’t the point, not really. It was about giving myself permission to go after beauty and allow it into my everyday life. It was about permission to pause, to create a ritual that allowed moments to be savored.
In a world where we move from activity to activity seemingly second by second, we may need rituals more than ever.
Rituals anchor us. They provide focus in days that are often unpredictable. They offer time that is our own, to shape as we choose.
Rituals calm us. They offer comfort. They offer a moment to look forward to. They create space that allows mind and body to be still.
And powerfully, and perhaps counter to what we may often imagine in the creative process, rituals provide stability. Stability promotes routine, routine promotes consistency, and consistency means things get done.
Do you have a favorite ritual that has helped to foster your creativity? Drop a line in the comments!
Last month, my husband and I celebrated our 5th anniversary. We are a nontraditional couple in many ways, and our married life fittingly enough began with a secret flight to Las Vegas and a wedding conducted at Graceland Wedding Chapel (Bon Jovi was also married here, and I figured if it was good enough for him, it was good enough for me! And to their credit, the staff did a lovely job.)
Photo by Gina Fasciani.
I naturally felt affinity for Kate Cochrane, heroine of my forthcoming novel, who also eloped. And despite the fact that elopements are much maligned, I believe there’s something powerful in couples who chose to dispense with ceremony. I believe there’s something powerful in couples who choose to begin their marriage with only each other.
In America, we are often guilty of falsely equating the size and scope of the wedding with the value the couple places on their marriage.
If a couple elopes or has a civil ceremony, there’s the nagging assumption that they were too indifferent or too impolite to give the event its due. Wrong. And if you’re thinking of marriage, via elopement or otherwise, I offer the following thoughts:
A wedding is not a chance to prove anything. Not how rich you (or your parents) are. Not how much sophistication and good taste you show. Not how many friends you have.
A wedding is not the culmination of your relationship. The road does not end at the altar. Your relationship is ever-evolving. A wedding marks the beginning of a new iteration of that relationship. Get ready for it – and open yourself to change and flexibility and growth.
A wedding is no guarantee. Don’t think that a wedding will fix anything. Don’t think that a wedding will make you happy. Don’t think that a wedding will prove that you are loved. Please don’t misunderstand me – weddings are important. Committing to a marriage is the most powerful, dynamic, thrilling, challenging commitment that two humans can make to each other. But weddings only mean that if you are all in.
For me, the biggest danger is that wedding planning can suck the energy and attention into things completely unrelated to the quality of your marriage. Do you really need to serve four kinds of artisinal salad dressing at your beachside buffet? Do your bridesmaids really need to wear lemon yellow strapless chiffon? Do you need a fairytale setting because you think perfect is the only path to happy?
Whenever you make a decision about your upcoming nuptials, ask yourself where your energy is going – to the wedding, or towards the marriage? If it is the latter, good on you. And if it’s the former, take a deep breath, make a choice, and remember the reason that you’re doing this.
P.S. After our Las Vegas elopement, my husband and I did have a traditional wedding ceremony attended by family and friends. I’m not anti-wedding, and I love a good party. The whole thing was as DIY as we could make it (My sister and I made the centerpieces ourselves, I did my own makeup, and one of my dad’s buddies was a champ and served as our bartender. My friends and in-laws set up the décor, and we had no wedding party to speak of but both of our sisters did readings.) We rented out a barn and a BBQ food truck, served beer and wine that we hand-selected from local offerings, and danced until the fireflies came out.
This morning I walked along the Atlantic coast. The sun had not long risen, and yellow light sliced through gray and pink clouds. I thought of how artists have always been drawn to the sea, and the waters that are always mesmerizing, always changing, always the same.
I have seen many oceans. The Atlantic was the first, but also the North Sea along the English coast, the Mediterranean that circles the Greek islands of Naxos and Santorini, the aquamarine-blue Caribbean. Then the Pacific along Nicaragua, and then later off the coast of California, and finally the reaches of the Pacific along the northwest coast, along the old whaling towns off Bainbridge Island.
I could not know, as a child catching her first look at the sea, that I would one day write a book where the waves and storms and mists become as much of the fabric of the story as any character. All of those seaside walks, the early morning digging oysters in Wellfleet, the squall on the Mediterranean that had me ferrying ginger ale and aspirin to seasick passengers – those all invisibly built something in my mind that years later, came spilling out onto pages.
We all have a place that we know so well, it has become part of us, consciously or not.
We’ve all read stories, too, where place becomes a presence that seems to influence or even drive the behavior of the characters – for good or ill. Novels like:
My political commentary generally relates to events two centuries ago, and in other countries. However, this week’s events have compelled me to break with precedent and write something about the 2016 presidential election.
My parents grew up in the 1960s. They were college students in Ohio during the Kent State shootings; they had classmates who went to Vietnam and never came home. I asked my mother once what she thought of the social protests, if she had ever joined the marches for civil rights, for women’s rights, for peace. She said no. She kept her head down and stayed out of it. She was afraid of being expelled from school. I remember being disappointed in her answer, ashamed of her fear.
Forty-six years later, I can’t sit this one out.
Let me start by saying that I wish our president-elect the best of success. Ready or not, he must lead. I hope that he is able to step up to that great responsibility and lead well. Though I have – often – disagreed with the policies of presidents of both parties, I have always respected the office.
His job will not be an easy one. There are many Americas. We are a fractured country – and have been fracturing in ways visible and not-so-visible for a long time. In 2010 I spent nearly a month driving through the America those on the coasts call the “fly-over states.” Even then I saw towns all but abandoned, empty store after empty store along empty streets. I come from an Appalachian state with pockets of deep and documented poverty, poverty that is mocked and misunderstood, poverty that the people living there can’t simply drive through.
For some, like the 1 in 6 American men who are not working, the economic recovery has been something that other people experienced, and not them. There is a colossal distrust of the American political establishment. In the summer of 2016, Congressional approval ratings dropped to unprecedented lows as constituents expressed disappointment not only with Congress overall but with their own representatives’ performance.
But these trends only show statistics, and this election was won on emotion. Anger, fear, hope, uncertainty. The voting block with more anger than hope spoke, and though they do not speak for all Americans, they decided for all of us who the next president will be.
Some of their anger, I understand. These are the people I come from, and like the author of Hillybilly Elegy J.D. Vance, I’ve moved away but I cannot forget. And yet not all poverty is treated as innocent poverty, and whites may disproportionately use it as an extenuating circumstance for other ills. As an op-ed piece in the Globe and Mail noted, “You may have noticed that, the story goes, white people are on drugs because they have no jobs, but black people have no jobs because they are on drugs.”
Economics is a factor but it is not the only factor. Gender is a factor but it is not the only factor. Race is a factor but it is not the only factor. We desperately want an explanation for the unexplainable, but seizing on a simple one only places more blinders around truths that we struggle to acknowledge.
This election, perhaps more than any presidential election in recent memory, is at the intersection of the personal and the political. Now we are all reckoning with the aftermath. Some are feeling joyful and affirmed, others are mourning. We are coming to terms with this new America in our different ways, some with vigils and protests, some by writing, some by carrying signs, some by seeking solidarity. Some methods take us out of ourselves, and others drive us inward.
I hope that none drive us to hate. I confess that this America is a country that I struggle to recognize. I woke up on the morning of November 9 feeling as if I’d been hit with a very ugly family secret. I had believed that the American people had learned from our past mistakes, that we could do better than our institutions, which I will be among the first to admit are flawed.
The path to creating a more perfect union is not merely feeling, but acting. Voting is a small act, but it is a powerful one. Why else would those who had it put in decades of efforts and intimidation and brutality to keep it out of the hands of minorities and out of the hands of women? For many the opportunity to vote was won the hard way. Though it is your right to abstain, please don’t. Too many people sat out this election. We as a nation lost their voices.
Last night I was at the vigil-turned-march in downtown Washington, DC. I left the house with a warm coat and a fresh coat of lipstick. Someone handed me a safety pin and I pinned it onto my jacket. Though some commentators have derided this action, I disagree. Wearing a safety pin doesn’t make me feel better. It makes me feel worse. It reminds me that too many of my fellow citizens cannot feel safe in the country that they call their own, that they have as much of a right to as I do.
Wearing a safety pin reminds me that I should be prepared to keep the promise that the pin signifies. My world has many kinds of people in it, and some may need my help. Mr. Trump has made vicious comments about women, people of color, people with disabilities, LGBTQ community members, people of non-Christian faiths, veterans. Those comments have emboldened an ideology that I cannot and will not ever tolerate. I cannot ever think that this is not my battle. I’m reminded of the Muslim photographer who made me laugh during three days of long photoshoots in DC, of the woman at my gym who works out in a headscarf. Of my sister and her wife. Of my husband, born overseas, and a naturalized citizen who gave over a decade of service to the United Stated Navy.
I think of the time I was on my way to meet a black friend after work and one of my car tires blew out. Someone stopped almost immediately to help – but if our places have been reversed, would someone have stopped for her? Would the helpfulness I encountered in the Midwest have extended to me had my face been a different color?
I don’t know and I cannot know the answer to these questions. I can only try to let the America that I grew up believing in not slip away, and I can only be humble, to not think that by trying to do the right thing that I am righteous.
And I can hope. I can hope America will indeed be great again, but not in the way that Mr. Trump imagines.
November is National Novel Writing Month (also known as NaNoWriMo) – but any time of year is a good time to read quotes on writing and inspiration by great writers.
“When you’re writing, you’re conjuring. It’s a ritual, and you need to be brave and respectful and sometimes get out of the way of whatever it is that you’re inviting into the room.”
~Tom Waits
“I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the hearts affections and the truth of imagination – what the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth, whether it existed before or not.”
~ John Keats
“Don’t be a writer. Be writing.”
~ William Faulkner
“If there is a book you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
~ Toni Morrison
“Every book is holy. Every single one of them, even the bad ones. Every single book has at least one good idea about how to be a human being.” ~ Sherman Alexie (read the complete interview on The Lightning Notes)
Three years ago, my backyard hens laid their first eggs. To commemorate the occasion (and because I get a lot of questions about the hens) here are some words on backyard chickens.
Raising chickens was not my idea. They arrived in my life after I made a passing comment to my husband that having backyard poultry might be “interesting.” Not long after, I came home to discover eight day-old peeps cheeping under a heat lamp in the laundry room.
Our chihuahua Taco herding the baby peeps.
From there, the innocent balls of fluff took over our lives. They got messy. Their adorable yellow fuzz turned into gangly half-formed feathers. They got bigger – and rowdier. They scattered food and water everywhere in their incubator. Within a few weeks they had to be moved from the incubator into a “brooder” in the sunroom (a brooder is sort of a halfway house for adolescent poultry until they are old enough to live outside.)
Meanwhile, my husband worked on a contractor-grade outdoor coop that would become the chickens permanent home. It had a working window, tile flooring (for easier cleaning), built-in next boxes and roost, and an insulated roof. The thing took four months to build and countless trips to Lowes’. One afternoon mid-build the chickens escaped from their brooder and ran amok in our sunroom. I arrived home from work to discover the chickens perching atop my graduate school thesis and family photos, feathers and poop everywhere, cheerfully oblivious to the mayhem they caused.
Our chicken experiment nearly ended then and there – via an impromptu and immediate chicken pot pie – but reason intervened and we captured the wayward chickens and returned them to the brooder. Soon after, they moved to their outdoor quarters, where they have remained ever since.
Eggs from our backyard hens.
What have I learned from all this?
Chickens are messy. Not only do they poop a lot and shed feathers, they also shed a fine white dander. That alone is enough for me to refrain from treating them as cuddly pets – though some chicken owners feel otherwise (see this fascinating article on a CDC advisory telling owners to stop hugging their chickens).
Chickens have personality. The pecking order is real! We have the boss hen, Sophia, who pushes the other hens around. She’s first in line for the food and will peck the others back into their places. Newcomer Alice was shy at first but hung in there for the #2 spot, with the twin Americuana hens Matilda and Myrtle deferring to their more aggressive companions.
Chicken psychology is real. Like people, chickens can be upset by changes in their environment or stressful circumstances. For instance, food or water shortages will cause the hens to stop laying, as will being frightened by predators like foxes. Myrtle has a propensity for “broodiness” (stubbornly sitting in the nest box when there are no eggs to hatch; this can be dangerous as broody hens often don’t get enough food and water because they insist on sitting in the nest.) When we place Myrtle in a special coop to break her broody cycle, the other hens tend to not lay as well.
Chickens get you close to your food. It is thrilling to see fresh eggs! Because our hens lay eggs in different colors and shapes, we are often able to tell whose egg it is. We originally had four roosters from that set of 8 chicks; we aren’t able to keep roosters, so one by one, we harvested and ate them. This may sound cruel, but it actuality it is only removing the commercial poultry farms and butchery from the equation. It seems a more honest way to eat meat.
Chickens are great for “going green.” Between our compost piles, chickens, and recycling, we have very little actual trash. Chickens are excellent means of using food scraps that might otherwise be thrown away. Vegetable peels, stale breads and rolls, strawberry hulls, apple cores…chickens love it all! These scraps add variety and extra nutrition to their diet of commercial poultry feed, and it reduces our food waste. It is pretty amazing to think that I know every single thing those chickens have eaten since they were a day old! Also, we are able to raise the chickens in comfortable, more natural circumstances and in a far more humane way that is generally practiced in commercial poultry operations.
Sophia and the flock hunting for bugs.
The chickens are not saving us money when it comes to food or providing an endless supply of fresh eggs (production dwindles as the chickens age as well as with the seasons – in fall and winter, we may only get an egg a week), but they have been a worthwhile experiment, and a source of endless dinner party conversation.
Got a chicken question? Ask in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer!
View of the Puget Sound from the top of the Seattle Space Needle.
Last month I had the privilege of visiting Seattle – and incredibly, of seeing the city under consistently sunny skies.
Since moving to the Washington, DC area twelve years ago, I’ve become accustomed to seeing tourists. Rarely do I have the novelty of being a tourist myself! Seattle reminded me of what it is like to see a place for the first time, for every experience in that place to be your first, and for the wonderful mix of curiosity and bewilderment and surprise that being a “tourist” can offer.
My favorite moment in Seattle was taking the ferry to Bainbridge Island, just over the Puget Sound. While there I rented a bike from Classic Cycle and had an exhilarating afternoon pedaling around the island.
One year ago I packed my bag and my laptop and hopped a plane to London, and from there, traveled by train to Edinburgh, Scotland. My journey allowed me to retrace the footsteps of Katherine Cochrane, whose story is at the center of my forthcoming novel, The Admiral’s Wife. I walked in Regents’ Park, the London neighborhood where she lived for a time, read her letters at the National Records of Scotland, and visited Culross Abbey House, the Scottish estate where her husband had lived as a boy and which she visited with him many years later. These pictures capture the places I visited and provided a thrilling opportunity to step into Kate and Thomas’ world.
This week – October 12, to be precise – is Kate Cochrane’s birthday (on the evidence of a greeting her husband sent to her in one of their many letters.) What better time to introduce the lady herself and some of her exploits?
A secret elopement. Intrigues in South America. A knife fight with a would-be assassin. Crawls across rope bridges in the Andes. A four-month sea voyage with a teething infant.
Such adventures, one might think, would make a woman famous, especially if she undertook them 200 years ago, when a woman’s chances of attempting even one such feat were considerably more circumscribed. Kate Cochrane did them all.
I came across her accidentally – and admittedly, through reading about her husband. (Admiral Lord Thomas Cochrane served as a model for the literary exploits of Horatio Hornblower and Jack Aubrey, and several instances in the film Master and Commander were inspired by Thomas Cochrane’s naval actions.)
Detail of a portrait showing Kate Cochrane and her daughter Elizabeth. Private collection.
Kate and Thomas’ relationship likewise rarely lacked for dramatic flair. He was a dashing war hero, aged 37, of an illustrious but bankrupt Scottish family – and he would someday be an earl. Kate was approximately 20 years his junior, a beautiful orphan living in the care of her relatives. They chanced across each other in London, and Thomas was smitten. After multiple proposals and multiple refusals, Kate eventually agree to marry him. The couple hurried off to Scotland by coach and were wed in a hasty ceremony that Thomas tried, but failed, to keep secret from his family. When Thomas’ father and uncle learned of the elopement, they withdrew a sizable inheritance. Kate went back to live with her aunt; it was many months before the couple set up their own establishment and Thomas publicly acknowledged Kate as his wife.
From this rocky yet romantic start, Kate’s adventures began. Little is known of her early life due to a dearth of historical records. It is uncertain what year she was born, although 1795 or 1796 seems likely, given that she was said to be 69 at the time of her death in January of 1865. She was born the daughter of Thomas Barnes. There is some ambiguity surrounding her mother; some sources identify her as Frances Corbett, while a number of Cochrane biographers speculate that Kate was illegitimate. Kate’s father died while she was young, and she spent her later childhood and teen years being raised by relatives. She was living with a widowed aunt in a fashionable area of London when she met Thomas.
After their elopement, Kate and Thomas eventually set up house together and soon welcomed the birth of the first of their six children. It was a difficult birth for Kate – she had been gravely ill with scarlet fever, and her survival and the child’s were in question. But Kate, not yet twenty, came through the ordeal, and the little boy, christened Thomas Barnes Cochrane, lived as well.
Portrait of Thomas Cochrane, c. 1807, five years before he wed Kate.
Kate’s troubles, however, were only beginning. Two months after the birth of the couple’s son, Thomas was convicted in a financial scandal and sentenced to serve a term in the King’s Bench Prison. He had had no commission for several years, and with the prize money he’d won in his earlier career not being replenished, Kate and the child were left in straitened circumstances. Kate visited Thomas as she could, and the couple exchanged regular letters. Upon his release, Thomas accepted an offer to lead the fledging Chilean Navy in the nation’s fight for independence from Spain.
Kate set sail with Thomas for South American in early autumn of 1818, with four-year-old Tom and his infant brother Horace in tow. While Thomas waged audacious attacks on Spanish ships and fortifications, Kate traveled on horseback through the Andes, visiting Mayan ruins and paying visits to the regional gentry. On one of these occasions, she crawled across a rope bridge with the newest addition to the family, a daughter named Elizabeth, strapped to her chest.
The family kept a house in the port city of Valparaiso, as well as an estate in the Quintero Valley gifted to them from the Chilean government. While there, an assassin sent by the Spanish chanced upon Kate. The man threatened her with a knife, but Kate gamely held him off until her shouts brought some of the servants to her aid. There is some suggestion that Kate was more than a bystander to the revolution, and that she carried messages and dispatches on behalf of Bernardo O’Higgins, Chile’s Supreme Director. However, the assassin was likely seeking information on Thomas’ orders rather than attempting to thwart Kate’s intrigues.
Valparaiso, Chile – and its harbor – as it looked in the early 1800s.
By the mid-1830s the family had returned to London. After several decades of unsuccessful attempts to persuade the Admiralty and the British crown to grant Thomas a pardon for his earlier conviction, Kate’s efforts – which included personal meetings with the prime minister – eventually carried the day. Thomas had also inherited the title of 10th Earl of Dundonald, and Kate rose to the rank of countess. With the money from Thomas’ exploits in South America, the family purchased an elegant villa, Hanover Lodge, in Regents Park. There Kate entertained in style, and for the first time in many, many years, the Cochranes had a settled residence where they could live in comfort.
Hanover Lodge, an Italian-inspired villa in Regent’s Park where Kate Cochrane and her family lived in the 1830s.
Sadly, not all of their children survived to benefit from the family’s improved circumstances. Little Elizabeth died in Chile around her first birthday, and Kate later lost another infant who was stillborn. Five children did live to adulthood: Tom, Horace, Arthur, Katherine Elizabeth (aka “Lizzie”) and Ernest.
Disparities in age and temperament, which had previously strained the Cochrane’s marriage, now led to irreconcilable differences that resulted in Kate living in France. The couple remained cordial – and never divorced – with Thomas sending financial support and paying occasional visits. They continued to exchange letters. When Thomas penned his autobiography late in life with the help of a ghostwriter, Kate’s actions in South America feature in it, and he writes admiringly of his wife’s courage.
Kate did not cross the Channel to attend her husband’s funeral when Thomas died in 1860, though she spoke warmly of his memory afterwards. She spent her final years in the French seaside town of Boulogne-sur-Mer, suffering from bouts of ill health, and died in 1865. She is buried at St. Mary the Virgin, Kent, beneath a simple headstone. Thomas Cochrane was interred at Westminster Abbey.
Headstone marking the grave of Lady Katherine Cochrane.
With a larger-than-life figure like Thomas Cochrane for a husband – radical MP, eventual Earl of Dundonald, and contemporary of men such as Napoleon and Lord Nelson – it is understandable, though unfortunate, that Kate’s story had been subsumed within her husband’s colorful career. Now at last, she is figuring as the heroine of her own story – The Admiral’s Wife.
Sources:
Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1, by Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald. The Project Gutenberg eBook.
Cochrane: The Real Master and Commander, David Cordingly. Bloomsbury USA, 2007.
Cochrane: The Life and Exploits of a Fighting Captain, Robert Harvey. Carroll & Graf, 2000.
Correspondence. GD233: Cochrane Family, Earls of Dundonald (Dundonald Muniments.) National Records of Scotland.
“If you want to be a successful writer, you must be able to describe it, and in a way that will cause your reader to prickle with recognition….Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.” – Stephen King
Stephen King needs no introduction, and this infographic contains 14 of the bestselling author’s top tips on writing:
Last summer I had the pleasure of visiting Hillwood Museum and Gardens in Washington, DC. The museum consists of the former home of Marjorie Merriweather Post, heiress, businesswoman, and art collector extraordinaire. I spent the afternoon gazing at priceless porcelain and dazzling jewels and wandering gardens filled with too many varieties of flower to name under a perfect blue sky.
