Hope Filled Jars

Wishing All of You A Scone 2012

2012-01-02T15:38:00.000-08:00

Fill 'em up with all things good.

This work by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Santa Ju at Metz & Co - Amsterdam

2011-12-23T11:20:00.000-08:00

A long time ago, I worked at Metz & Co, a small department store in Amsterdam, as the assistant to Cok de Rooy (since 1992 co-owner of The Frozen Fountain a haven for designers and lovers of Design in Amsterdam. The following is my memory of Holiday Season 1977.

SANTA JU and DOCTORANDUS P

Nine sharp I enter the buyers' office. Technically I'm in time, but you could also argue that I'm late, after all, I still have to hang up my coat. To my surprise the office isn't empty as usual when I arrive. Mr. Henselein the general manager of Metz & Co, leans into the conference table in the middle of the room where designers and artisans eager to sell to Metz, get to display their creations. I've only seen Mr. H once or twice before.

"Morning," he smiles at me without showing his teeth. "Like I said de Rooy, it means extra attention for our Christmas Market."
"Judith," Cok raises his eyebrows as a greeting.
I feel caught.
"Don't tell me, your mother called?"
Mr. H looks puzzled from Cok to me and back again.
If he weren't present, I'd tell Cok I'm in time because Mama didn't call me. Without her interference I can be in and out of the shower, dressed and on my bicycle to work in twenty-five minutes, add ten minutes of shortcuts through alleys and pedestrian areas, avoiding all traffic lights, and I'm at the Keizersgracht, locking my bike three minutes to nine. Cok must have left early to beat traffic himself, he usually arrives after I've sat down at my desk, but why is Mr. H. so early and what's he so exited about? I'll have to ask Cok.
Mister H answers my question himself. "Heinz Polzer is popular. Man he may have his Master's in Economics, he's the best known singing poet in the country. We'll get all kinds of good exposure by having him present that book of antique postcards to the Press here, at Metz."
Who's a singing poet with a Master's in Economics?
Seeing the question mark on my face Cok says, "You surely know Doctorandus P? That's the pseudonym of this Polzer fellow."
"Oh, Doctorandus P of course I know about him. He's that absentminded professor-type with a really bad voice that sings all those funny songs. I just heard his, "Troika here, troika there", on the radio. But he's also known for higgledy piggledy."
"Higgledy Piggledy? Oh, you mean Ollekebolleke," Mr. H grins, "That's it, you see Cok, even your assistant knows Doctorandus P."
"That doesn't mean a thing. Judith knows everybody. Anyway, that’s beside the point." He turns to me, "Tiebosch has published Doctorandus P's collection of antique postcards. You can tear the cards out of the book and send them like regular postcards. That it's a gift article rather than just a book justifies us selling copies in the store."
"We're going to have Santa Claus present Doctorandus P's book to the press here at Metz," H says.
"Why Santa Claus? Dutch children believe in Sinterklaas not in Santa," I say.
"Smart girl. You've got a point there. But using Santa will bring extra attention to our Christmas Market." Mr. H rises and slaps his hand on Cok's desk, "It just occurs to me we don't need an extra budget for a model, your assistant here, will make a wonderful Santa. I'll say it once more, and I won't say it again, it'll be great advertising for the holiday season."
Santa? Me? He sure knows how to compliment a girl.
"She's got enough work as is," Cok says.
"Didn't you re-write the job description? I'm sure you'll work it out together," Mr. H winks at me.

How does the boss know?
I thought that arrangement was something between Cok and me. The moment he saw the photo he took of me, bent over paperwork, he felt sorry that I had to do all the invoice administration, and so on, by myself. He decided that we'd split the paperwork so that I could take on some of the more creative responsibilities.

"Piece of cake for you Judith. You can walk over to the costume rental place, it's just a few houses down the canal. They'll get you fitted for the costume, the wig and the beard. With those rosy cheeks you'll hardly need any make-up."
"All right then. It's up to Judith," Cok taps his pencil on his calendar. "Like I said, she's got plenty to do as is." He clearly isn't that crazy about the idea. But if it's really up to me, I'll do anything that'll take me away from my desk. Besides, meeting Doctorandus P is a real opportunity.

Cyclists who encounter me in the street, the short distance from the costume rental to Metz & Co smile at me, but the sales women inside the store look at me like I'm an intruder or a bum.
"What?" I want to grumble, "Do you think I'll pull out a flask?" But I don't. On my way to the 6th floor I say nothing but "Ho, ho, ho," each time a customer steps into the elevator.

"Must have come in from Liberty's of London," someone says.
I pat my character's thick waist. I'm wearing my own clothes underneath the flannel suit and the rolled up excess material of the men's size pants makes me look extra chubby.

Cok and Mr. H meet me in the Rietveld cupola, they introduce me to the photographer and a stylist. The latter has me get on my knees between the Christmas display tables, to wrap a copy of Drs. P's book in Christmas paper. I'm a professional wrapper. That's what got me started working for Bullock's in Westwood in 1974, so I know it's looking good.

Doctorandus P arrives, and he and I step onto the flat roof beside the cupola. I give it my best, want to be noticed by this man, but to him I'm Santa, not a young woman waiting to be recognized for her acting talents. He doesn't even look me in the eye. But Mr. H is pleased.

Within an hour of leaving the costume rental place as a Santa, I'm sitting in the window at Berkhoff's the bakery/ tearoom across the canal, in my regular clothes, sucking whipped cream off my hot cocoa, and digging into the flaky pastry surrounding the baked apple, not a worry about my waist.

Happy Holiday Season to You All! A Season to Share Memories - Care to Share Yours? Leave a comment!

This work by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Triggers of Imagination for Writer

2011-11-26T14:40:00.000-08:00

What's my favorite photo?

That's hard to say, the answer changes from moment to moment. I had prepped a certain picture to write about, but I look up, and there's my father in a relaxed pose, his weight on his left leg, he is leaning against a door post, his shirttails out, hands in pants' pockets, pipe in his mouth. This must be a photo of him I've studied the least. I've got to get up from my desk and take the garrrish framed picture (why on earth did my mother chose such an ornate molded metal design?) from "Papa's Chest" —most of the inherited furniture I've shipped across the ocean has similar possessive descriptions— to take a closer look.

No, I was wrong, no hanging shirttails, he's wearing a light colored, 3/4 unzipped jacket on a white tee-shirt and dark slacks. From the sheen and cut, I take it the jacket material could be a lightweight suede, but it could also be a gabardine. The trousers still have the high waistband, the buckle of his belt is positioned under his midrif. I like his shoes, are they suede? He looks trim and tan, he has a short moustache, and his hair is short, but growing out.

At first glance it seems he's standing just outside the door of a shop, behind the store's window you can see frames, is it a frame shop? The brick wall brings to the surface another photograph though, one where he's seated on a chair of a rustic terrace set, he used on the porch of his beach front house in Zandvoort. No, no, no. Stay with the first picture!

There's a small plaque on the door jamb, underneath that a simple white on black push bell. this could be a store or a home, I don't know and most likely will never know. My father was born in 1898 and died in 1969, his contemporaries are all dead. Still, I try to fit the pieces of his life together, bit by bit an image of a man I only new for a short time, appears. This framed photograph is the one my mother chose to have out in the open. Illness, old age and death took that man away from her, and yet, what remains is the memory. This may be how my father looked when my mother first set eyes on him. And so my story starts ...

Writers are often told to write what they know, but don't we really write to discover what we don't know? I for one am always searching for the hidden message, whether it's truth or just a figment of my imagination.

This work by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Remembering Photos From Lost Album

2011-11-25T12:31:00.000-08:00

My friend Anastasia Ashman has made use of Storify to deconstruct the logo of Global Niche. Great idea, I write to her, I'm going to do the same for the cover of my book Creative Acts of Healing. I head for the shelf in my husband's music room, where I know our photo albums and boxes filled with slides. I've got to find the photos Milka Henriques de Castro shot, a whole series of me drinking coffee from forest green, gold rimmed cups.

In 1993 I photo copied and blew up one of those photos for a collage in which I combined the echoscopy of our unborn child, the only live picture we would have of our baby daughter. I can't find the album. For days I'm in distress. I wake up twice thinking about the album, I wake up seeing the cover, a graphic design in shocking pink, turquoise and yellow, and vividly remember some of the pictures, images of my past.

The missing album was the first I filled with photographs made with the first camera I could call my own, a Ricoh 500 GX. I'm thinking of the photos that are lost with the album, and try to remember them. To my surprise many exist in my memory.

My friend Anita Löwenhardt at Terrace of Scheltema or de Swart in Amsterdam.
More pictures of Amsterdam street life.
The 500-year-old Huguenots "mas" of Annie de Rot Hazard's in Les Baux, and her dogs, water reservoir on the roof, unimagined luxury behind centuries old walls of what looks like humble dwelling, the rest is hacked out into the rocks of the hill. Walls of natural rock, all windows barred, the faucets in the bathroom gilded.
The dark haired smiling olive seller, who flirted with Annie and me at market in St. Remy, de Provence.
A metal bowl the seller filled with vegetables I chose at his stall.
The juggler in red leggings, and long sleeved tee shirt, decorated with stars, a cap on his head, at a market in Arles.
Man on stilts
Woman with chicken in crates.
The park steps leading to street on higher level.
Plaque about Van Gogh.
Poster on ancient stone wall patched with cement, about the bull fights.
Picture of the arena (I visited again with Gary in 2002).
Interior of Mas at Les Baux
Narrow and winding steep streets, more corridors between rows of buildings, of Les Baux
The courtyard of Annie's L'Herbier de Province store, in St. Remy, de Provence, picture perfect with the table, chairs and baskets filled with hand-milled soaps.
The mute boy in the house of Pat Pringle's mistress on Fomenter (from slide?)=
The olive grove I slept in, near Ingie Pringle's summer dwelling (from slide?)
Ingie and friends and children plus me in the woods, hippie chicks (from slide?)
Parasols on beach in Majorca (from slide)
Railing of (empty) cruise ship Mediterranean, I was the only traveler.
Exhibitionist on bluff (no photo, just memory)
Majorca stormy weather, hotel room, sunstroke

Black and white photos I developed myself:

Olav in flat on Ferdinand Bol str. with broken leg
My black cat Spooky Tooth at Olav's home, in easy chair (upholstered in pink velvet in my memory)
Judith in Olav's kitchen behind stove in Guernsey sweater holding Dutch oven.

Again color prints:

Christmas at Jeannette's with children, Simone, Niels, Han + my collapsed coffee soufflé
St. Nicolas at Jeannette's with Robert van der Hoop
John Leerdam playing chess with Niel's friends

Black and white photos made by photographer Marjan Schelvis

The Turkish actor and me, modeling for Marjan Schelvis on the roof terrace at 3rd Wittenburgerdwarsstraat in Amsterdam. So young, so fun, me in shopping cart, dressed in sweat pants and tee-shirt, my hair a mop. The PROOST sign of the paper factory in the background.

Days go by and I'm still thinking of the album, more images and memories in black and white surface.

Mamado in door opening between kitchen and dining/living room, with soup cup on saucer, Papa's wood carved chests in sight.
Sophie at a bus stop somewhere, dressed in her leather 3/4 coat
Judith in vieux rose, padded winter jacket without a hood, at the same bus stop.

It occurs to me that I have the same look of concentration on my face in regards to the Dutch oven in the kitchen at Olav's home, as my mother carrying that cup of soup to the dinner table.
Me, My mother, myself, I, a memory mixture of a book by Nancy Friday I recognized myself in, and a song by Joan Armatrading I listened to over and over.

The best photo I've ever taken may be lost with the album, it exists in my memory.

This work by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Remembering 9/11

2011-09-11T16:10:00.000-07:00

Still Life September 9, 2001

Second week of September 2001, I'm painting sunflowers from my P-Patch at the top of Queen Anne Hill, in my studio at the Work Lofts on Western Avenue in Seattle.

Still Life September 10, 2001

Flowers age in vase
seed heads heavy with promise

Still Life September 11, 2001

Nature's hopeful signs.

Still Life Remembering 9/11

Paint, imagery —my tears

on paper. And yet, hope for the

future lies in the seeds.

This work by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Learning about Addison's

2011-08-16T13:56:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you hurt someone's feelings without being aware of it. Often you never know you did. Thankfully some people do tell you where you went in the wrong.

Someone I follow on Twitter appeared to have a new portrait picture. I didn't remember seeing the sunny tan before. Since this person tweeted about an upgrade, I complimented in return: upgrade = extra tan?

Mind you, it may be winter on the other side of the globe, it's high summer in the western hemisphere, so how wrong could that remark have been? Quite wrong. A rare disease called Addison's makes a person's skin turn a reddish brown, and that's not all, as I found out Online. Addison's is not something to joke about. Thanks to the Tweep's response I now know a little bit about the disease.

The incident made me think of grief and how mourners are sadly the ones who have to educate the others. Thanks to the TV series "House MD" viewers are introduced more and more to hitherto barely known diseases. I've read that members of patients' support groups have written letters to the producers of "House MD" to thank them for educating viewers about diseases that are often unknown and not understood. As far as I know they haven't covered Addison's.

The next time I see a person with an unseasonable tan, I'll be reminded of what I found out today.

Knowledge may result in compassion.

HealthScouter Addison's Disease: Addison Disease Symptoms and Addison's Disease Treatment

2009 Conquering Addison's Disease - The Empowered Patient's Complete Reference - Diagnosis, Treatment Options, Prognosis (Two CD-ROM Set)

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Asian Pacific Islander American Writers

2011-08-01T13:11:00.000-07:00

This summer the International Examiner published the annual Pacific Reader which includes a Literary Supplement of APIA book reviews.

What the hell is APIA?

You know you're an outsider when you have to look up the meaning of an acronym. Yes, I did. So much for having been the IE's Arts writer from 2004 - 2006 and so much for having interviewed Asian American authors and written reviews of their books. My excuse? I'm a white Western woman who hails from the Netherlands, an ESL writer and reader.

What the hell is ESL, I hear my Dutch friends think (yes, you, I'll give the answer at the bottom of this post).

The heading APIA Literature that Influenced Me made me think about the effect the books I've read and reviewed for the International Examiner and the Pacific Reader had on me.

Here are a few of the titles:

Looking Like the Enemy : My Story of Imprisonment in Japanese-American Internment camps by Mary Gruenwald.

As a Dutch national I have friends who lived in Indonesia at the onset of WWII. Fathers were hauled away, mothers and children imprisoned in camps by Japanese soldiers. My Dutch - Japanese American friend Giotta Tajiri wondered about the attitude of Dutch people toward "the Japanese". That her father Shinkichi had fought with the American 442nd Regimental Combat Team against Nazis in Europe came as a total surprise to me at the time. I was quite surprised to learn that Shinkichi's family was imprisoned by fellow American citizens, while other Dutch friends of mine were tortured (their relatives killed) by Japanese soldiers in Indonesia. Gruenwald's book only added to my understanding how important it is to read widely, because the title says it all, and yet may come as a surprise.

Sightseeing by Rattawut Lapcharoensap

Tsunami Years, Hilo Rains, Honolulu Park and the Pepsodent Smile and Other Stories by Juliet Kono

Anshu: Dark Sorrow

Long for This World: A Novel by Sonya Chung bridges the distance between cultures and continents.

As an English as a Second Language Reader I gain tremendous understanding of American culture by reading across the border, by taking in stories written by immigrants and expats, by foreigners and nationals. Reading is fundamental, reading is powerful, reading is a must.

work

Judith van Praag

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Looking Like the Enemy - Memoir about Imprisonment in Japanese-American Internment Camps

2011-07-31T08:46:00.000-07:00

Many of us have a story within that begs to be told. We put it off, and off, telling ourselves: "One day, I'll sit down and write it down." Often we need a little push.

Around 1990, Mary Gruenewald Matsuda's son and middle child said, "Mom you have never told us about Grandma and Grandpa and Uncle Yonei." Gruenewald (65 at the time) figured that if her own three children, and her brother Yoneichi's four daughters (their father died in 1985) were interested in their family history, it was up to her to tell the story.

She started by listing the facts as she knew them. In January of 1999, Gruenewald's daughter-in-law mentioned author and teacher Brenda Peterson was leading a writers group in Seattle. Until she joined the group, Gruenewald's writing had been all-inclusive. Peterson suggested she ought to write a memoir focused on the war years and her camp experience. She advised her student to make a laundry list, of everything she wished to address.

That done, the writer listed years —starting with 1941— on a stretch of butcher paper, laid out on the floor. Next she added the items from the laundry list; content for scenes and chapters. In Peterson's class she learned how to apply tools of fiction: adding character, dialogue and story line to her factual material.

In Looking Like the Enemy (The Young Reader's Edition: My story of Imprisonment in Japanese-American Internment Camps, Gruenewald doesn't just relate her own story in an engaging manner, her writing is a tribute to the mother whose wisdom she wishes to share with people who aren't lucky enough to have (had) such a wise parent. Exposing her heart and soul on paper was not easy. Gruenewald remembers how Trip, a fellow writing student said: “Mary we came to class ready to read your words about Mama-san and you dismissed her in 200 words!"

In this case interview with the author.

Gruenewald then knew she had to go back to her desk, write with all the beautiful detail she had learned to use, excavating the painful as well as dear memories. Double hard because: "Culturally it was not done to reveal." And yet writing has proven to be rewarding and gratifying to the now octogenarian author. Gruenewald says she's not same person she was, before she started to write her memoir. She had for instance been prejudiced against "No, no!" people (those against Japanese young men fighting for US army). Mary's family belonged to the "Yes, yes!" sayers.

While working on the book, she came to understand that both sides were living according to their convictions, each equally valuable and difficult. The "No, no!" sayers had to withstand rejection, they were ostracized. Gruenewald remembers situations in the camp, where a father was pro Japan, and the son was not: "Families got torn apart that way."

Writing gave Mary respect for those who thought differently. She learned to appreciate the value of democracy, where you have the right to dissent.

"During the 70's and 80's there was a movement to extract an apology from the US Government. Less than 1% of the Japanese American population stood up."

That this movement did not bring the people together pains Gruenewald till today. She states that both the soldiers of the 442nd, and the "No-no!" sayers, need to be honored next to each other. "We need both of them, those loyal and critics."

Gruenewald cried a lot while writing her war memoir, but it was cathartic, and she recommends writing —getting that story down on paper— to others. She says that people have been coming out of the woodwork since her book was published, people from her past, people she grew up with. She talks more now, than ever; her heart is lighter and she's been told that she smiles more.

A senior friend showed her his life story, 25 written pages. Remembering her own starting point, and knowing that each paragraph could be made into one whole chapter, she told her friend: "Have courage! Be brave!" For that's what it takes to write in all honesty, delve deep into one's own, and family's past.

Gruenewald's advice for those who want to embark on a similar adventure: "Enroll in a writing group, write with people. You learn from each other. Come with pages to class. You get notes and a different perspective on your material, while you remain the authority."

Reconciled with her past, the author of the beautifully crafted memoir plans visited Japan in the spring of 2006 to share here story there. Finally.

Previously published on October 5, 2005 in the International Examiner.
© 2005 Judith van Praag, All Rights Reserved

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Nazis Lecture Farmers on Bolshewism

2011-07-02T10:56:00.001-07:00

Friese meisjes tegen het Bolsjewisme, a photo by NIOD Instituut voor Oorlogs-, Holocaust en Genocid on Flickr.

Frisian Girls Against Bolshewism?

The caption placed with the photograph is most suggestive. No wonder an American visitor thought the photo must have been made right after WWII, when the Red Scare and fear of Bolshewiks colored many a Westerner's paranoid view of the world. Even if it wasn't the intention of the NIOD, the words play right into the old fear of Marxist and Leninist theory and communist practice.

In reality the Frisian girls were part of a 1941 gathering of farmers in Rolde, a hamlet in Drenthe, one of the three northern provinces in the Netherlands. The speaker was Arthur Seyss-Inquart, an Austrian Nazi who ruled over the Netherlands during the German occupation. By scaring the farmers with what the Bolshewiks might do to the country, the Nazis hoped to gain followers and collaborators.

He used his I.Q. of 141 (he was tested at the Nurenburg Trials) in a cunning way. After the German fighter planes bombed the hell out of Rotterdam, Seyss Inquart sent homeless children on vacation to Gmunden in his heimat or homeland Austria, which was called Ostmark during the German ruling. When the children return to The Hague, they spoke German and some shook hands with Seyss-Inquart, who told them to give their parents his regards.

During his inauguration speech Seyss-Inquart didn't mince words. The help given to the Dutch was not charity, but a means to create goodwill —a political tool, he stressed.

Seyss-Inquart was successful, a large number of farmers in the three northern provinces joined the NSB, the National Socialist Party, which should not be confused with the Labor Party. The NSB started as a regular political party, but soon adopted the Nazi ideology. Hundreds of NSB members would eventually join the Dutch fraction of the SS.

This work by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Theatre Institute Netherlands Forced to Close?

2011-06-20T09:48:00.000-07:00

Studying theater design at the Rietveld academy in Amsterdam involved regular visits to the Netherlands Theatre Institute as TIN (Theater Instituut Nederland) was called back then. The ITI was the place to borrow published plays, books on theater history, costuming, set design and the likes. The institute made a tremendous impression on me.

ITI then /TIN now: Theater Arts are Important!

Today you can find TIN on the Sarphatistraat, back then the Amsterdam institution was situated in a monumental building on the Herengracht that breathed history, even before you had opened a book, or laid eyes on the museum collection. ITI was about the past, the present and the future of Dutch theater arts. At the time my questions were answered by Hanna Oberman, a budding dramaturge who fulfilled her internship at the ITI library. Oberman who already held a Law degree, did not take her oratory talents to the court stage, but co-created with Rob Klinkenberg the indispensable handbook of monologues for actors "Nu ben ik alleen" (Now I'm by myself). It's not difficult to guess where the authors (pre-Internet) conducted part of their research ...

The role of ITI as an international liaison became clear when I joined Taller Amsterdam, an artists collective headed by Armando Bergallo and Hector Vilche. When we took Taller's multimedia show The Desert to Le Théâtre des Amandiers in Nanterre, a suburb of Paris, we ran into a big problem. The incoming director, Patrice Chéreau, was going to bring in his own people and fire staff members. The ensuing strike threatened to keep our show from opening. Ruud Engelander the representative of the International Theatre Institute in the Netherlands came to our rescue and The Desert did have its premiere in Nanterre.

ITI was one of the destinations to take visitors from out of town and abroad, to share highlights in the museum collections, and watch registrations of avant garde as well as traditional theater performances stored in the video bank. And one summer I worked a few days as a costumer with the touring company of the American Repertory Theatre, no doubt thanks to my connections at ITI.

Theater Instituut Nederland is the hub for theater lovers and theater makers, national and international thespians alike.

Over the years TIN has become a more and more important player in the international theater world. And yet Halbe Zeilstra, Secretary of State for Culture wants to cut the subsidies for this institution. Completely. The gall!

Sign the petition for the Government to reconsider!

Tweet your solidarity #steunTIN (#supportTIN).

This work by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Trust30 | Power is in the Numbers

2011-06-10T23:50:00.000-07:00

There's a fellow, long dead, who has a Facebook page, 740 people (make that 1,002 on 6/30/2011) who like him and a book that sells like hot cakes. His fans are posting on his wall on a daily basis, engage in discussions and recommend his book to each other, their friends, and probably to everybody else and their grandmothers. The author's initials are: RWE and if you didn't guess his name, all his info is just a click on the link away.

RWE's Facebook Page is part of a marketing campaign that's so clever it give me the chills.

Pleased to introduce myself...

RWE wrote an essay titled: Self-Reliance which has been re-published by Seth Godin, the marketing expert and entrepreneur. His publishing venture —powered by Amazon—is called The Domino Project. Curious how it works? Radio host Nora Young interviewed Godin about the Domino Project for Spark a weekly audio blog.

How do you get people to talk about a book (or any product for that matter) day-in day-out for 30 days in a row?

You engage them, by inviting them to participate in a project that helps them to trust in their own abilities. You give them something to look forward to, and make them part of a tribe. That's exactly what Amber Rae the "chief evangelist" of The Domino Project has done by inviting her readers to the Trust Yourself (#Trust30) Writing Challenge.

"#Trust30 is an online initiative and 30-day writing challenge that encourages you to look within and trust yourself. Use this as an opportunity to reflect on your now, and to create direction for your future. 30 prompts from inspiring thought-leaders will guide you on your writing journey."

The participants who have taken a pledge to respond to the daily prompt, link with the "authors" of the prompts, by means of Twitter and the authors' websites.

It's a win-win situation.

The 30 "authors" who sit close to the fire get a huge exposure, and new followers on Twitter. In principle the same is true for the participants. The blogs where they post their response to the prompts may be read by other participants and along the way they become part of the #Trust30 tribe.

And meanwhile Seth Godin is selling more copies of Self-Reliance, the essay by the long dead Facebook member, the poet, philosopher, preacher Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Is this a creative marketing campaign or what?

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Choose 5 Fictional Characters for a Dinner Party

2011-05-30T09:55:00.000-07:00

Kim Koning aka Girl with a quill asked me to do just that in an interview early May 2011.

My answer:

1 - Clara Forsythe Allen, Augustus “Gus” McCrae’s old sweetheart in Larry McMurtry’s epic novel Lonesome Dove. Clara lives with her comatose husband Bob and their children on the Platte, near Ogalalla, Nebraska. She’s a great example of the strong American frontier women, pioneers who lived under the toughest circumstances, buried children and stood by their men, while being their own person as well.

2 – Asher Lev, the young Jewish painter in Chaim Potok’s novel My Name is Asher Lev. Asher Lev refuses to let his artistic talent go unexplored and as important even, unrecognized. I appreciate the difficult path he has chosen.

3 – Sarah P. Worth, voice in John Updike’s S. I’ve been in similar situations as Sarah and I think we would have great fun schmoozing together. Also would like to hear what she thinks of Updike taking on the project to tell a woman’s story. If there’s anything she would like to change or add.

4 – Kinsey Millhone, the sleuth in Sue Grafton’s alphabet mystery series. Just love her and want to sit her next to number 5 whom I think she must admire as much as I do. And perhaps she also feels as sorry for him as I, and will amuse him. Not completely sure about the latter, since we’re talking Old World Male and California Wild Card. But you never know and opposites do attract. Just really, really want to make up for all the hardship caused by that big B of wife of his.

5 - George Smiley, the middle aged spy I’ve come to adore reading John Le Carre‘s oeuvre.

Which characters would you choose?

Care to share in a comment and as a post on your own blog?

Kim Koning introduced me to the Facebook Word Warriors. The dedication of this group's members to NaNoWriMo helped me finish the first draft of my novel Forgiveness last November. Kim set out to interview members of the group and I'm thankful for her attention and inquisitive questions. Kim's most recent publication is the short story A Ring of Fire which you can find in the anthology Tales for Canterbury.

The above interview section was previously published on May 11, 2011 in Dragonfly Scrolls.

This work by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Privilege of Remembering Baby

2011-05-26T10:21:00.000-07:00

The headline reads: Mother Sues Hospital over Photos Dead Son.

According to News5 at WTWLdotcom "someone" sent Heather Werth a photo album with pictures of her prematurely born son who died at sixteen weeks. The young mother is suing the hospital over Abuse of a Corpse. The female anchor person on News5 asked her colleague, "Why did she (the mother) keep the pictures if they were so upsetting to her?"

The answer could give ammunition to the hospital's lawyer and those who recommend the making of pictures after a baby has died. They'll say: "She may not want them now, but she'll be happy she has them later.

To which I would say, that doesn't matter. What matters is the way the album was delivered, especially since Heather Werth told the hospital staff she didn't want them to take the pictures.

I can very well imagine Werth's shock opening the album and seeing pictures of her baby dressed up and modeled in different poses.

We have two Polaroid® pictures taken of Ariane Eira by Margreet the delivery nurse. Anneke our delivery coach took a few photographs of us holding our sweet little girl. Those pictures are precious and we keep them in a special place. But we can choose when to see them. And let me tell you, there have been times where looking at them was unbearable.

To send an album in the mail the way the hospital did defeats the purpose of memorial photography. There's no solace in receiving such a present.

To repeatedly re-experience a traumatic delivery is not at all uncommon. Penny Simkin founder of DONA likened this to PTSD. This is a "natural" occurrence. To have the imagery pushed upon you may trigger episodes that may been tapering off. In Heather Werth's case to wake up and go to bed "seeing" the pictures of her dead son in her mind may not be the same as PTSD linked to a traumatic delivery, the effect is the same.

Incidentally Tracey Hill-Bensalem told me the other day that she wrote about her research for a story in which a baby is stillborn. She Google-ed "what does a stillborn child look like?" looked at pages upon pages, and was touched by the sadness of it all. In response to her post I wrote how I (and I'll add here like to) remember our little girl.

Our Ariane Eira's eyes were closed, her lips burgundy rose petals dropped on pale smooth skin, she had the tiniest blond curls as if set around sprigs. Her limbs, fingers and toes were long, like her daddy's, her nails mother of pearl. No peep, no breath, still sheer perfection.

For some reason suing is the M.O. in America to get attention for unwanted practices, I don't know if that's the way to go when doing so may only prolong the suffering, but I do think a reprimand at the address of the hospital is in place, if only to make clear not everyone wants the same.

This work by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

New Zealand Authors Tell Canterbury Tales of Hope and Aid

2011-05-23T18:15:00.000-07:00

Remember the natural disaster that hit Christchurch, New Zealand?

Writers performed creative acts of healing...

RJ Astruc, Philippa Ballantine, Jesse Bullington, Anna Caro, Cat Connor, Brenda Cooper, Debbie Cowens, Matt Cowens, Merrilee Faber, AJ Fitzwater, Janis Freegard, Neil Gaiman, Cassie Hart, A.M. Harte, Karen Healey, Leigh K. Hunt, Lynne Jamneck, Patty Jansen, Gwyneth Jones, Tim Jones, Kim Koning, Jay Lake, Helen Lowe, Kate Mahony, Tina Makereti, Juliet Marillier, Angel Leigh McCoy, Linda Niccol, Ripley Patton, Simon Petrie, Grant Stone, Jeff Vandermeer, Mary Victoria and Sean Williams.

They sign for:

Click on the tree to the left to learn more.

The short story anthology Tales for Canterbury is loosely themed around survival, hope and the future ...

All profits of this anthology will be donated to the Red Cross Earthquake Appeal.

Cristos Tsiolkas's Greek Drama Down Under

2011-05-17T10:44:00.000-07:00

The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Someone I talked to at the library (a librarian in training) was surprised to hear I loved this book. She said she didn't like the characters, the things they thought and did. I didn't like them that much myself, jerks and traitors, old and young chauvinists, victimized women and whining children... But my goodness some of them are sexy!
Cristos Tsiolkas is without a doubt the master of portraying the flawed persona, and he shows no fear to admit that all these folks are his brain children. Which of course does not mean he thinks as they do. Authors are too often burdened with responsibility of their character's points of view, the author is not equal to the narrators! Let that be clear!

Using the word persona, with its Greek origin, is appropriate when discussion the work of a Greek Australian author who writes about a community of immigrants from Hellas.

Aren't we all actors on a stage, either created or adopted? The only character I really felt for was a teenaged boy who questions his sexual orientation, and struggles to find his own place on the stage of life. Other than him, I recognized most all of the people —for yes that's what they are, real people— in Tsiolkas's drama. Am I not, aren't we all a combination of the good and the bad and the ugly, combined with love and affection, covered up with a smile or grunt. What is hiding behind the mask? That's what it's all about.

As a writer with a background in the theater I enjoyed thoroughly how Tsiolkas lets the chorus of his drama tell the story, one by one. Each and every one relating the events in deep point of view, which is no small feat.

Take that to the bank Christos Tsiolkas!

View all my reviews

This work by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Portfolio Resurfaces at Swap Meet

2011-05-13T18:43:00.000-07:00

This work by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Take NOTA it's Fun

2011-05-13T18:11:00.000-07:00

This is an experiment.

This work by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

ScriptFrenzy Fuels Passion for Scenario Writing

2011-05-01T10:48:00.000-07:00

If there was any doubt in your mind that writing a film script in less than one month may be likened to climbing the Mount Everest, check out the stats below. That my friends is a steep incline if I ever saw one. The Stairmaster® at my gym has nothing on that baby! Except for the exercise manufacturer's motto: Real Work Real Results

Don't think I didn't do nothing the first 19 days. I was thinking about another writing project, a manuscript I whipped out during the NaNoWriMo of 2010, that I wanted to use as inspiration for the film script. On April 1st I published a post on FaceBook and on Twitter, stating:

My screenplay "Counterfeit" has been optioned still very hush-hush. Can see both Adam Sandler and Ben Stiller as MC, oh boy I could SCREAM!

That first day of ScriptFrenzy I wrote 3 pages. Just writing the scenes made me want to finish reading through the draft of the "Forgiveness" manuscript for more useful sections. On April 19 I picked up the screenplay where I left off. In order to finish on April 30th I had to write at least 10 pages per day. Did I? No, not right away, but the closer the peak came in sight, the faster I typed.

How thankful I was to remember Lia Keyes' tip during the NaNoWriMo sprint: "Don't delete, everything you type adds up for your word count." How hard it is to control the urge to delete when you're an incorrigible editor though!

Using the Forgiveness WIP I gained insight in my manuscript's characters' motivation and actions. Alongside that I discovered how much "back story" and character make-up is present in the monologues written during NaNoWriMo. Plus, I returned to an old lover, scenario writing. All in all a fantastic experience. Onward and upward, forward. There's some tweaking to be done, another 20 or so pages to be written, but then my friends, I'll have the 120 standard for a feature film.

Many thanks to the office of LETTERS AND LIGHT (and Dawn the Script Frenzy Municipal Liaison for Seattle) for support and inspiration!

Do you switch between genres or formats? If so, how does one influence the other?

This work by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Living Here and Now - Writing about the Past

2011-04-26T11:04:00.000-07:00

Traveling, in time, in space, in your mind.

Lino-cut Tibetan Tiger Rug

Just before Chinese New Year I wrote a guest post for writing-artist Rose Deniz's blog. Back in Turkey, after visiting her Midwest childhood home, Rose wrote about jet lag and living in present tense. Reading her post today I uncovered thoughts about my own sentiments in regards to living in the present while writing primarily about the past.

Some find an artist or writer's preoccupation with the past disconcerting. "You lose out on the present, if you think that much of what has been," they say.

There's no loss, only gain, I argue. Writing about things that may have happened in the past, making up details of my parents' romance, getting to know relatives I never knew; bringing to life grandmothers, aunts and uncles, cousins, their friends and even pets, using my own experience in the here and now, I'm constantly mixing my present tense life with what's remained behind, both in time and location.

That's the big picture.

In "Forgiveness" the novel, suitcases play an important role

Traveling to me always means my spirit either zips ahead of my physical being, part of me gone while I'm still saying goodbye to my present home and friends or lags behind. Returning from the old country, I need about three months to feel I'm really back. I cherish the mementos I carry back with me, newspapers and magazines in my native language, the books to be saved for last or later, so I can savor the flavor, aroma, and sounds of nostalgia.

What I like best about jet lag is being awake in the small hours, going to all-night diners, prolonging the feeling of being a traveler, on my way back or from a new or old place, my spirit dancing, free and unencumbered, testing me, treating me to that —in between time— where everyday routine is the element that's foreign, alien —not me.

This work by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Stylish to the Tee

2011-04-25T16:56:00.000-07:00

The other day debragirlwithpen asked on Twitter "what do feminist toddlers wear ?" I have to admit, I didn't click on the accompanying link (I might have lost myself in Deborah Siegel's blog The Pink & Blue Diaries, and I'm in ScriptFrenzy mode) but responded off the cuff with: black for both boys and girls. This may or may not account for the fact that I received the classy white on black Stylish Blogger Award. As a matter of fact, the award was issued earlier, but I missed the message since, yes, indeed, I've got my head in characters, scenes, dialogue, action etc.

Last week I was tickled pink for having been called a Homo Universalis and Versatile, or at least I was, in regards to my blog.

Today I'm touched by the magic wand that makes me belong to a crew of bloggers that operates on yet another level.

These days I'm running with a stylish pack.

For someone who sits alone most every day in her writer's den in her homebody's garb, someone who has had to decide whether Skype-ing —and be seen— is really such a good thing, this is big. To dress for work, or not is the question.

Yet, what I want to stress is that style my friends, is in our writing, our presentation of posts, our subjects and approach.

Style is not just about what can be seen ...

Style isn't about color, style isn't black & white, or pink & blue, style is what you make your own with distinction.

So it is with great pleasure that I accept the The Stylish Blogger Award from my Word Warrior friend TG Ayer and with equal pleasure that I pass it on to other writers who approach their place in the blogosphere with a certain flair and distinction.

♡Look them up, take in what they share and pass it on!

Judy Shintani- Kitsune

Sezin Koehler - Zuzu's Petals

Jocelyn Eikenburg - Speaking of China

E.Victoria Flynn - Penny Jars

As for black & white garb for babies, Deborah noted that would be very N.Y.

This work by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Homo Universalis = Versatile Blogger

2011-04-17T18:52:00.000-07:00

♡I'm tickled pink!

My global community rocks and the members of this worldwide web indisputably add to the quality of my life! Today, on a cold, damp April Sunday, Peter-Paul de Baar in the Netherlands and Kim Koning on the other side of the world in New Zealand managed to warm my heart and soul.

Peter-Paul, editor in chief of my fave Dutch publication Ons Amsterdam, said I am a Homo Universalis as he recommended my new Page on Facebook. I've been called a polymath by the brothers Youtz, so the feeling one gets being called names is not new, it keeps a person humble.

Kim, Word Warrior par excellence and mistress of the Dragon Fly Scrolls (check out and follow her blog!) surprised me with the Versatile Blogger Award. To receive this award at a time when I regularly wonder about the catch-all nature of this here Hope Filled Jars is most rewarding!

It used to be writers had to get their work published in Literary magazines. Seeing your name in print not just a thrill for you, but proof to the publisher that another editor had already deemed your work good enough to pass their scrutiny, meaning you'd passed the first firewall.

These days writers have to have author pages on platforms such as Facebook and GoodReads, they have to tweet and they have to be bloggers. I am and do all of the above. The material I post on Hope Filled Jars is as varied as the interests of a generalist.
To receive a blogging award and accolades for exactly those reasons, is a tremendous thrill!

In order to receive The Versatile Blogger Award the recipient —that's me— has to agree to share 7 things that the reader —that's you— doesn't know yet.

That's not that easy considering I've put my whole lifestory on my Website, but here goes:

1. All the toys I played with as a child were antiques.

2. Tights that are to short in the crotch make me have an instant bad temper tantrum.

3. Starting with Kindergarten I've not finished any school, I'm a true autodidact.

4. For a while I was a tasteless chef.

5. I have very sharp ears, but not pointed, deduction, I'm not an elf.

6. Queen Beatrix told me that my sets and costumes for "The Blacks" were most inventive.

7. My favorite times to sleep: a few hours in the afternoon and a few between midnight and sunrise.

♡Thank you to Kim for surprising me with the award and ♡to P-P for accolades! I'm aglow!

Am passing on the ♥Love♥ to some of the Versatile Bloggers that I follow:

1. Julie Jeffs - Beginning Life at 50

2. Tiffany Jansen - Clogs and Tulips: an American in Holland

3. Kathryn Brown - Crystal Jigsaw

4. Elizabeth Munroz - Moon Rose

5. Rose Deniz - Love Rose

This work by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Writers Keep on Writing

2011-04-17T14:13:00.000-07:00

New routine after waking up:

Hold on to those brilliant early morning thoughts, jot them down, make tea, go to writer's den. Open a Word document and start working. Do NoT oPen EmAil oR bRowSe oN tHe iNterneT!

In reply to my rant the other day, Anastasia Ashman posted a question. My answer: Per definition the road has been more important to me than the destination. And that's exactly why I need to focus on getting my book(s) finished. Been humming this homesick blues on my own long enough. Time to share my discoveries!

Talking about the things we do in life my friend Joost Elffers said a while back: "We build a house of cards ..."

"And then what, we build another, and another?" I asked, the image of a colorful, mind boggling building constructed out of all of Joost's published books and cards on my mind. He laughed out loud. "No," he said, "then we die."

There's a certain urgency that sets in when one turns 50.

Folks who have been putting off what they wanted to do until later, realize there's no time like the present. Those who've been enjoying their path and see no need to take another direction, such as yours truly, figure it's time to tidy up, focus on finishing what's been started a long time ago.

To you regular visitors, expect the illustration I am a Tree to appear again on this blog, but next time with blossoms, and the time after that the fruit should be ripe, ready to pick.

You can bet your boots(*) on that one!

(*) Love listening to the London Homesick Blues by Gary P.Nunn, follow the link for a fun version with him and Jerry Jeff Walker. What's your fave music to listen to while at work?

This work by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

How are you writing — While trying to keep up with your social platforms?

2011-04-13T15:20:00.000-07:00

Danger, danger, land sharks! I'm having a moment. That kind of moment where I know there's so much more in life that I enjoy doing than just keeping up with my Social Media platforms.

Ouch! Some of my best friends live on the Internet, we've never met IRL. I love them. Ouch! There's so much of interest to link to, one can continue clicking on and on, without ever really feeling there's an end to that fascinating network. And there isn't.

I nearly typed S&M for Social Media, thinking of the times I pass through my studio on my way to the loo from my writer's den, seeing tools of the artist's trade —and actual projects that don't get any attention— beckon. Remember us? We used to have such fun!

The Social Media are jealous lovers, they'll let you sniff at something. Yes, you may glance in passing, yes you may temporarily lose yourself, but don't have the nerve to really get involved. Ai-ai-ai.

Don't get me wrong, I love the interlinked platforms and the endless possibilities of engagements as much as every other creative entrepreneur, designing personal and fan Facebook pages, tweeting and blogging for business, for a cause or just plain to stay in touch.
But, no matter how efficient your process, your marketing plan, there's always the text that needs to be conceived of, written and published. If you're a writer, you spend your time creating content to market something you may never finish because you're so busy promoting your abstractions.

There's got to be a way to check whether what you're doing makes sense, whether you're not spinning your wheels and really losing precious time. Mari Smith has some ideas about that. Check out her post on measuring your Facebook engagement.

I'm going to publish this post and get back to my "Forgiveness" WIP lest it becomes the never ending novel, marketed and promoted but not existing IRL.

Do you experience moments when you've had it with all the Online business? How do you deal? Do you go off line, get out of town, visit a slow dial-up coffee house, or do you use/choose "Freedom!"?

This work by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

I am a Tree

2011-04-09T22:14:00.000-07:00

Not One Star * A Galaxy

2011-03-21T13:33:00.000-07:00

* CONSOLATION * CONSTELLATION *

Recently I became a more active member on GoodReads

This would be a good way to connect with readers, I learned from Lia Keyes' blog post "Writers: How to Connect with Readers on GoodReads". Lia is the founder of the NaNoWriMo Word Warrior, a FaceBook group I joined last November and let me tell you, the lady knows her stuff. Cool, I thought, that should be helpful when you sell "Forgiveness" (yep, there's another book in the works).

I signed up and applied for an author's page

That done it turned out I already had an account going back to 2007 with quite a few "read books" on my list, but not one friend —I was a lot more shy regarding Online "friends" in 2007 than I am these days. No problem, the good folks at GoodReads solved the problem. I lost my entered titles, but I did get to keep my FB and Word Warrior friends whom I connected with on GoodReads.

So far, so good

That is, until my one and only book, my self published baby popped up with a star. With one star, that is. Let me tell you, that's not a happy moment for a writer. One * on GoodReads while I've got 4+ on Amazon.com? How the hell did that happen? Why would this one reader rate my book so poorly? Did she not see we are sisters in our loss? Well, no, clearly not and it is understandable why a young religious woman with a lot of kids wouldn't care for a book by someone who's life and lifestyle is so far removed from her own reality.

As an artist I learned early on that taste is subjective

Not everyone, sometimes nobody, will always like what you create. The same is of course true for a writer. There's a lesson to be learned from this: artists and writers have to grow thick skin.

My hurt self says: "But this was my baby! And what's more, I wanted to help other mothers, make them see..."

My reasonable self responds: "There you go, we can't make people see what they don't want to see, or can't see. If they don't relate, they don't relate.

All we can do as artists and writers is to be true, stick our heads out, hope for the best, duck in time; and yes, grow thick skin.

Creative Acts of Healing: After a Baby Dies by Judith van Praag

Well, what can I say? That I've read this book countless times; that I find the characters believable and the story sad beyond words? Truth is, I've lived the story. The title is blunt, in your face, not a book you take to a dinner party to give to the hostess to thank her for a nice evening. Like the experience implied in the title this is not a book you want to push on anybody, or wish for anyone to need. Still, if you know of people who have suffered a similar loss as the author this book like others in its genre may bring solace, or rather, I know it has.

Oh, and by the way Dr. Nassim Assefi added this title to the recommended reading list in her novel Aria. Dr. Gayle Peterson wrote: "...a beautiful story of loss, love and healing."

Update:
Thanks to my reader-friends this title has collected more stars, so thankful to know readers can have a writer's back!

This work by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Sustainism As Natural as Elephant Dung and Dutch Apple Pie

2011-03-04T06:56:00.000-08:00

The year was 1987, my new friend and possible future business associate Zia and I were waiting in a first class lounge at Schiphol airport for the boarding time of her flight back to Bombay to be announced. She recapped the things we had done in the week that had passed and presented me with a gift to thank me for my assistance with her business venture in the Netherlands.

The folder she handed me was made of rough, handmade heavyweight paper decorated with white line drawings that depicted villagers dancing in a circle at a life cycle ceremony; the folder held three paintings of similar drawings on a dark brown background on much smoother paper.

Zia told me the artists originally made paper of elephant dung and that they used rice paste to draw images on a painted background colored rusty brown with a natural pigment (or paint made from the same resource). Since the production of the paper was laborious (and the ingredients questionable to potential buyers) Zia had the artists paint on more easily obtained paper which allowed the artists to create more sheets, sell more art and thus make more money.

The prospects Zia painted at this last meeting about me getting my designs produced in India, combined with strong Dutch coffee, made me jittery and in my excitement I dropped a wallop of whipped cream from my apple pie onto the folder. Without thinking, I swiped the cream up with my finger and stuck it in my mouth.

Zia's hand flew to her lips, she seemed in shock.
"What's the matter?" I said.
"The folder..." she nodded at the port folio on the coffee table.
"I don't think it's going to leave a spot," embarrassed by my clumsiness I used my napkin to rub the rough paper. "See, it doesn't show at all!"
"That's not it, it's, it's..."
Why was she so concerned?
"The folder's material is made of elephant dung, remember?"
Time for me to bring my hand to my lips.

Today there are no worries about the resources, on the contrary, in 2008 the makers of the elephant dung paper received a The Green Business Award for their sustainable project.

The Times They Are A-Changing, but what remains true through the times: one person's trash is another person's treasure.

There must be more stories about straw spun to gold and sh.t turned into a sustainable business. What's yours?

This work by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Janice Eidus Gives Voice to Adolescent Virgin Vampire

2011-02-03T08:41:00.000-08:00

The Last Jewish Virgin: A Novel of Fate by Janice Eidus

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Lilith, her feminist mother Beth, art teacher Mr. Rock and fellow student Colin, they could be the regular cast for a Young Adult coming of age story. That is, if it wasn't for the intriguing introductory paragraph. Soon after I started reading I forgot about the foreshadowing (or is it a flash-back?) of the age-old mystery that surrounds the life and death of vampires. Yes, The Last Jewish Virgin is a vampire story, and if you're a fan of the genre you'll probably be focused on that. But on another level, Janice Eidus, who has an uncanny way with the voice of adolescence, presents what could be just another foray into adulthood.

To read a first person account in the voice of an adolescent that doesn't depend on the all encompassing "like", is a relief! That the author spices the narrative with adverbs instead, is something even a reader who is usually allergic to words ending with "-ly" can accept as a worthy and useful alternative to run-of-the-mill Ado Convo Lingo.

As for accompanying Lilith to Bennett School for Art and Design, it was as though I got to re-visit the art academy I attended. And again, while fans of vampire stories will look at The Last Jewish Virgin for signs of the undead, I was constantly reminded of memories of mere mortals that live on.

View all my reviews

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Remembering a Tiger Rug Sanctuary

2011-01-31T13:01:00.000-08:00

Fellow artist and writer Rose Deniz makes her home in Turkey.

At the moment and the coming weeks Rose will be spreading her love "state side" as she calls the U.S.

I'm thrilled Rose invited me to write a guest post for her blog.

With the end of the Year of the Tiger in sight I delved in my vault and dug out remembrances of things past.

Let me invite you to Love, Rose where I'll introduce you to my totem, roll up the rug, and bring in the Year of the Rabbit.

This work by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Destiny 1-11-11 or Destiny 1-11-2011

2011-01-11T23:51:00.000-08:00

We choose how to read, literally, figuratively, and/or between the lines. Today's date can be read as 1-11-11 Five times one equals FIVE.

If you opt for 1-11-2011 the story changes. The difference between one and the other is TWO since 1 + 11 + 2011 = SEVEN

Likewise opting to add the number values of a given name, a chosen name or a nick name can make all of a difference in a person's life. How? Numerology has the answer. On a day such as today one or millions opt to publish a post, just for the sake of noting numbers. What's up with that? Nutty notions? Sure.

What's destiny but a number of figures added up?

I just had to publish something on this ominous day, 9 minutes before midnight, go!

Did you feel compulsive need about doing a certain thing on 1-11-11?

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Number One Wish 1-1-11

2011-01-01T12:05:00.000-08:00

1. HAPPY NEW YEAR

How sharp that serif on the number 1 on this card sent nearly 100 years ago, on the 1st of January, 1918.

Such a clever design, the number created by cutting away access imagery. The postcard (often called ansicht in Dutch) was printed in Saxon, the text at the bottom could have read Gutes Neues Jahr, but instead Gelukkig Nieuwjaar, Happy New Year was applied by hand with a stamp.

A card suitable to be sold anywhere, for people all over the world to wish each other all the best in the year to come.

How do you say Happy New Year in your mother tongue?

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Water Lanterns for Sandra "Everlasting" Jones

2010-12-18T13:34:00.000-08:00

Today is the birth date of American writer and poet Sandra E. Jones, born December 18, 1948 in Philadelphia, PA. passed away on November 27, 2010 in Seattle, surrounded by loved ones.

This morning I woke up with Sandi's smile and her love for Style-ish colors on my mind. And yes, Garrison Keillor's voice in my head. His unmistakable sound accounts for the above starting lines.
Sandi and I met only five times and she left an indelible impression. The first time she surprised me before Aunt Mama's Story Hour at a coffee shop, by saying "You're Judith?" For a moment I thought the lady in cobalt blue was clairvoyant, but then I realized we'd made our first acquaintance on the SheWrites site, where I had my profile picture posted, but she didn't. Not long after that she attended SheWrites' 1st anniversary party, followed by a book launch for her writing teacher Priscilla Long, and yet again at Aunt Mama's (where she plugged Priscilla's book) and finally I got to enjoy Sandra E. Jones' reading... no, performance at the book launch party for Sunday Ink.

Let me tell you, the lady stood up and delivered.

Last night Sandi's family of friends gathered at Greenlake in Seattle for Toro nagashi the Buddhist custom of floating lanterns on water, usually practiced on the last day of the Bon or Obon Festival, to honor ancestors or send off the spirits of departed loved ones.

If I may continue with Keillor's voice in his program The Writer's Almanac I'd say some of her short stories can be found in the just published anthology Sunday Ink: Work by Uptown Writers.
And I'd like to add what can be read in the notes about Sunday Ink writers:
"Her poem Ladybug was featured in Terri Casey's book Pride and Joy: The Lives and Passions of Women Without Children. Her stories and poems were given special prominence by the Seattle arts organization SOIL and the Los Angeles POST Theatre. She volunteered as a teacher in the Seattle School District's Powerful Writers Literacy program."

Sandra "Everlasting" Jones did not let illness get in her way.

To get back to Greenlake, Sandi's writer friends PK, Geri and Stacy set up a small altar and supplied floating lantern kits. Some came with their eulogies, written memories and collages prepared, some of us crouched on the moving boat dock to write our thoughts for Sandi on thin paper shades.

Here I'm taking a chance by sharing Sandi's haiku Ladybug, used as epigraph by Princess Jackon-Smit for her contribution (page 51-57) to Pride and Joy: The Lives and Passions of Women without Children.

Black, well read, busy:
Spotted without small children,
Lady bug wings it.

Sandra E. Jones

She winged it, And she did it so well!

Japanese lanterns, incense, Jahrzeit candles, "The It" (or would that be ID, or idea?) of spirituality was present as we said our goodbyes, sharing stories, anecdotes, pinking away tears and laughing in remembrance. A gentle breeze set sail to decorated lanterns we followed with our eyes. Flickering lights, getting smaller and smaller, until they were but reflections, or memories of stars.

She shines.

Visit the memorial site for Sandra E. Jones

Do you have a "Mensch" in your life who shows by example how to be here now and live life to the fullest? How do you honor her or him?

This work by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Multi-Tasking | Ultra Focused | Hyper Sensitive

2010-12-01T17:47:00.000-08:00


Gallery Dutchess Abroad - Art, Literature & Guidance by Judith van Praag

A book starts by writing one word.

Last month, on the 1st of November, one minute past midnight Pacific Standard Time, I typed the first word of what had to become a 50,000 word manuscript by November 30. Thanks to exhausting and exhilarating Word Wars initiated by Lia Keyes between NaNoWriMo Warriors on Facebook, I passed the 50K word count on the 21st.

December 1st finds me adding and editing, filling in the gaps, paying attention to all senses and tenses, past present and future. Today the word count is 63,333, I'm at page 80 of the present total of 309.
Imagine that, one month ago, there was one word, the title Forgiveness.
A good moment if ever to capture the screen that illustrates the title of this post, or rather, what it takes to write a complex story. I'll keep you posted here of the developments concerning this novel, while I continue to share hopeful thoughts on art, culture and transcendence.

Which screen captures best what you are doing, who you are, what you stand for?

NaNoWriMo Winners Celebrate the Season

2010-11-26T14:22:00.000-08:00

Today is Black Friday which has nothing to do with Good Friday even although Wikipedia seems to want to mention both in one mouthful. All Black Friday has to do with religion is that it's the official beginning of the Christmas holiday shopping season.

Friday is Challah Day

Thanks to the weather gods we were able to make it to our friends' house for Thanksgiving. The arctic storm that crippled most of greater Seattle had us running a high cabin fever after nearly four days spent at our own home. While I feel no urge to participate in Black Friday shopping sprees (which can start as early as 3:00 a.m.), I did wake up at 4:00 a.m. and a friend who lives nearby, noted that his toddler woke up at 4:40 a.m. babbling non-stop until 11:00. Makes you wonder what's in the air.

You may have noticed I rely heavily on html links to explain whatever strange or foreign notions I introduce in my posts. This of course to cut down on the number of words I have to type myself. Economy is a cherished word when it comes down to running a message home. Editors, especially those who have limited funds/ space love contributors who know how to be concise.

That you may and can use more words than strictly necessary, as is the case when writing a first draft for a novel, can be a surprising notion for well trained journalists. But when will they ever experience such liberating moments? The answer to that question is November. Participants in the National Novel Writing Month, the so called NaNo Writers, don't have to deal with the restrictions of word count, at least not on the low side. The more words you type, the merrier. After all, the aim is to write 50,000 within a 30-day frame. In order to make the score by November 30th a writer has to produce 1,667 words per day.

Never thought I could write a novel in a month, but November 21st marks the day when I scored my 50K. Since I wasn't finished with my story, I kept on writing. The day before Thanksgiving I used Scrivener to compile my 48 sections into one long Word document, which I scrambled and uploaded at the NaNoWriMo site for word verification. On Thanksgiving my green word count bar turned purple with 59,484 words (at the time) the DutchessAbroad was a or as my number one supporter and fan said "his number one weener". I'm pretty sure he means Wiener cause a weener is a looser, but then, I'm the writer in our family, he's the musician. As long as he sings his songs for me, I won't hold it against him.

To be honest, I became hooked on writing an average of 2288 words a day, so much better than my earlier 500 word count average. So I continued joining my Online NaNoWriMo Warrior friends to continue hammering out the words, even on Thanksgiving day.

Today, on Black Friday however, I set down for the 10 a.m. Word War and instead of writing new material, I started reading my manuscript. I know there's still a lot of work ahead of me, editing, rewrite or revision, moving scenes around, filling in, and a lot of cutting. Still, I know I'm on a roll, thanks to NaNoWriMo the Black Friday starts a new season, no shopping involved merely hunkering down, letting out the critic, honoring my editor and writing on.

What writerly adventures are you starting continuing or embarking on this season?

This work by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

NaNoWriMo Editor/Devil - Git Friendly or Git!

2010-11-18T15:06:00.000-08:00

Hi, my name is Judith and I'm an editor

Initially I wrote incorrigible editor, but that would have been too funny. Eternal editor comes close, it sounds like a sentence for life, or a life sentence. Internal editor, I could settle for that, but for the fact that "I am an internal editor", doesn't really cut it. I would have to change the beginning and make it something like: "My eternal editor has woken up", or, "this morning my internal editor woke me up and started arguing right off the bat." Whichever way I put it, my eternal editor started bashing the internal one, and since my Ego and ID were caught in between, I had to get up.

If you think the editor in me is keeping me from writing you're mistaken.

Nobody can keep me from writing. Not even the little devil that sits on my shoulder impersonating everyone I've ever known, who has said that there's nobody in hell (or on earth for that matter) who could be interested in one more original story.

"What could you possibly have to tell (that's new)?" in other words, "There's nothing new under the sun", or the unintentional (one hopes) "There's enough BS being published already."

A real road block is thrown in the writer's path by relatives exclaiming "I don't want to know (read: the world to know) that my uncle was a crook."

The editor in me lets me write up a storm, but on a different level, she starts correcting my words and sentences, or challenging me, saying: what if this or that happened in such and so way. This is something I can live with any other day, week, or month, but not during NaNoWriMo.

The whole idea of participating in National Novel Writing Month is that you go with the Flow and write like the devil is after your very own butt. For most writers that's not a hard notion to imagine.

Until Day #15 I was doing fine, every now and then I'd start dreaming during a Word War (when NaNo Warriors who have found each other on FaceBook start writing like fiends at the word GO and compare word count when TIME is called after one hour) but I'd whip myself back on track.

On Day #16 I was struggling with how and where I wanted the story to go. Was Sophie going to force Nita to tell Jake the truth while visiting her parental home, or could I delay that moment, or was the keeper of the gate who guards my own family's secrets trying to throw me for a loop.

Too Much Information (is this me or my internal editor, the cute little pesky devil on my shoulder, or the devil in disguise saying this?). I started reading instead of writing and before I knew it time was up and my word count had dwindled.

Day #17 I confronted my personal antagonists, told them to either shut up, or work for me, that I wouldn't stand for their B.S. anymore. Help me or Git Already! Got that!

At the end of the day I entered my last total word count, which was 37,161 or a daily average of 2,185 which isn't bad at all considering that you have to produce an average of 1,667 per day to reach the aim of 50,000 words by November 30.

So, notwithstanding adversaries like internal editors and critical little devils, I'm still ahead of the game. I've got my ducks lined up and go with the Flow once more. Today's word count (so far) is 3,088 —what does that tell you?).

How do you get them internal and external editors, critics and devils to shut up or become your allies?

This work by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

NaNoWriMo YAY or NAY Sayers -Git Already!

2010-11-07T08:59:00.000-08:00

Who's confused by National Novel Writing Month?

Don't you ever do —have you never done— any kind of timed writing? How about the Dadaists' automatic hand writing, how about the Flow, the good old meditative stream of consciousness stuff that informed and inspired the popular Writing Down the Bones, Morning Pages and all that Jazz?

You mean to say you sit there poised for the right word, pen on paper fingers on the keys, thumbs on the phone pad, thinking hard, harder, hardest, slow and carefully for-mu-la-ting that thing, that one and own-ly word that will do?

~~~~~~~~~~Been there, done that, still do it —when the time is ripe— says the NaNoWriMo enthusiast. Get there after I've got the idea down, after I've grabbed the sucker and hammered the notion, letter by letter, key-by-key, so the essence, the heart of the matter won't escape me, won't fly off, disappear into thin air ~~~~~~~~~~

"Ideas lie in the gutter by the hundreds, the trick is to pick them up and do something with them," said Hector Vilche a brilliant creator who painstakingly filled tiny squares in different hues of the same color, side by side, while contemplating larger paintings, sculptures, art installations and bigger than life staged productions.

Troubadour and visual artist Bobby Bridger wove hundreds of seed beads in intricate patterns or dotted canvases the Aboriginal way, while composing rhymes and music for his epic Ballad or musical fairy tale in his head.

Creative minds such as Vilche and Bridger understand the dynamics of creativity.

Whether you sew, paint or write, the seeds of your effort will germinate and come harvest time, you're well prepared to add the finishing touch.

While still known as NaNoWriMo it's no longer just a National wordsmiths' effort to finish at least the scaffolding for a Novel by Writing 50,000 words in one Month. NaNo-ists down under in New Zealand were the first to start typing the night after Halloween, one minute into the 1st of November.

Groups such as NaNoWarriors participate in Word Wars. Triggering writers all over the world take their seats close to the whole hour four times per 24-hours waiting for a fellow member to give the GO! sign followed by TIME-UP! one hour later. It's nothing but "timed writing" y'all!

So, get down with your bad shit and turn on the timer, git with it already, the words are waiting! If you need more encouragement check out The NaNoWriMo Daily!

What do you say, nay or yay?

This work by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Count-Down to NaNoWriMo Madness

2010-10-26T11:04:00.000-07:00

First Tweet of the day: @WrimoSea 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31 six days till NaNoWeen kick-off party at #Denny's in #Overlake #inSeattle! #NaNoWriMo.

The first time I heard about NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) was in 2003 during Dorothy Allison's workshop at Centrum's Port Townsend Writers' Conference. Go for it! was Dorothy's suggestion. But I wasn't ready, not then, not the following seven years. Before I knew where my story could go I had to write a memoir (or two, three). Now I am ready. I've already announced (said it out loud, posted it in the Diary to Fiction or Memoir SW Group that I'm writing a novel, inspired by my memoir writing.
Yesterday I came up with the title: Forgiveness.

On Facebook I promise to let my hair grow out for the HalloNaNoWeen at Denny's Restaurant in Seattle's Overlake neighborhood. No matter it's way out of my normal axis radius, I will cross that floating bridge, I will go to the Eastside, the other side of the lake, just to get started right, at midnight on October the 31st.

These last few days I'll be working on the outline for my novel "Forgiveness". Ever since my arrival in Seattle in 1994, when I discovered Gabriele Rico's book "Writing the Natural Way" I've been using her cluster method to get to the point, to get my stories down. These last days of October I'll cluster my way through beginning, middle and end of the storyline, creating an arch that'll help me get through the tough 2nd and 3rd weeks of the NaNoWri Month.

Saturday November 13 Seattle NaNo Writers will get together for an all day (9 a.m. - 6 p.m.) Half-Way Party, I'm putting it on my calendar now. Before y'all think I'm a party animal —I did after all organize the Seattle SW Birthday Party— this coming out of my writing den is rare. The only times I'm away from my desk (or couch) is: when I'm presenting architectural tours of the Seattle Central Public Library, when I volunteer my help at authors' events at said library, when I drive my hubby to work, when I run errands or when I walk the dog.

Initially I thought NaNoWriMo would just help me get the first 50,000 word skeleton draft of my novel out as quickly as possible. But the moment I started my Dutchessabroad account, something shifted. Something unforeseen happened. By signing up I became a member of a community. A nationwide, no worldwide community. And as it turns out to be, right here, in Seattle, there's a whole lot of other most likely usually solitary writers like me, who are coming out of their dens, their attics, their niches, their closets (Murphy no doubt) to join in the madness.

The fever has started.

Will you follow me,if anything my blog posts on what is going to be my very first NaNoWriMo?

This work by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Dutch Theatermaker Dea Koert about Polish Artist Rafal Betlejewski

2010-10-16T10:07:00.000-07:00

Some time ago an image of an art installation by Rafal Betlejewski started circulating on the Internet. In the photo a man is seated on a straight backed chair placed on brownish-green, un-mowed grass of a hillside. The man, at ease, legs crossed, his hands folded in his lap, appears to be waiting for someone to sit on the sheepskin hide draped across an armchair beside him.
A building and trees in the background are obscured by fog and a slanted white text is superimposed on the imagery, graffiti on air.

I miss you, Jew ✡ I miss you in Poland ✡ In all these villages and big cities ✡ You left a vacuum there ✡ Both in space and my heart ✡ I just wanted you to know that ✡

—POLAK—

On September 26, 2010 theater maker Dea Koert attended Betlejewski's lecture, "Coming out of the Jewish ignorance. The story of a regular Pole" at the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam.

Guest blogger Dea Koert writes:

Rafal Beteljewski, who is not Jewish, was born in Poland in 1969. For me, having been born in the Netherlands in 1947 the paradigm change as presented by this young Pole's ongoing art project Tesknie Za Toba Zydzie (I Love You Jew) was striking.

He paints these words in graffiti style on walls in villages all over Poland. By using this seemingly simple text he reclaims the presence of Jews in his country. Rafal is an unprejudiced, relaxed kind of guy who seeks and longs for a connection with what he misses in Polish daily life.

He'll place an empty armchair with a Kippah (skullcap) on the seat in streets of Polish villages and invites people tot sit down. Those who agree then have their photograph taken.

He asks them: "Jewish people, where are they?"

Betlejewski fights ignorance (about the role the Polish played during the Holocaust) with his empty chair project and with the art installation/ performance ''The Burning Barn" (triggered by a massacre that took place in 1941) which he presented in Zawada in July of 2010.

Members of the audience/ participants wrote their names on a white pieces of paper (symbolizing negative thoughts about Jews that would be burned inside the barn) adding NO to ignorance and NO to further denying of the Polish past. By doing so they acknowledged missing them (the Jews) as well. Like Rafal, they wished for a kind of Utopian connection that should speak to all people scattered around the world.

That a barn burning can be problematic within this context is shown in photographs and videos and was apparent in the small meeting room at JHM in Amsterdam. Some people were really shocked, they could not understand the underlying motive.

"Why burning?" asked a lady who could have been my grandmother. "Rafal, why a burning barn? That burning is problematic for me - when the ghetto of Warzawa was burning, the Polish people pushed us back into the fire."

Rafal explained his intention. I can only hope she understood.

I myself visited Poland for the first time as a student in 1972. Everybody around me was going to the West, so I want to go East. What drew me was a theatre workshop lead by Jerzy Grotowsky in Wroclaw (now Breslau).

Having witnessed the major post WWII clean-up in the Netherlands in the 1950s, I was surprised by the visible remnants of that war all over Poland. A fascinating experience. Everything looked gray. I saw a lot of invalids in odd looking wheelchairs on the streets, ruins of houses, I witnessed an ugly political regime, and unhappy poor people. Poland was a country in mourning. But most bewildering was the total silence about the fate of the Jews. Before 1939 one tenth of the Poles were Jewish. The ignorance was complete, there were no signs, no memorials. The scarce remnants of Jewish burial sites had been transformed into dumping grounds for garbage. People overtly made anti-Semitic jokes. But not a Jew to be seen. What's going on here? I wondered back then.

With a bunch of Russian fellow students in a bus, more or less clandestine (I did not speak one word of their language) I visited the camps of Auschwitz.

I can still hear the echo of their partisan songs amidst the barracks.

In 1980 I used my experience in Poland for the theater piece "Nagalm" or Reverberation, a co-production with Jenn Ben Yakov at the Mickery Theatre in Amsterdam.

Now, in 2010, all of a sudden there's a third generation, with Rafal Betlejewski (my gosh, even the word Jew is embedded in his family name) who makes such a fantastic art statement.

This is hopeful, I presume. 

Can art change perceptions, can art change the world? If yes, how?

Dea Koert, born in the Noord-Oost Polder, the first reclaimed land province in the Netherlands is a theater maker, actor and drama coach. She's known for both intimate and large scale productions, often triggered by her emotional reaction to injustice.

Sketch of Dea Koert ©Judith van Praag

This work by Dea Koert with Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Fifteen Books to Remember

2010-10-12T11:48:00.000-07:00

The other day I promised to post the 15 books (read by myself), that will always stick with me.

Thinking of books that left lasting impressions, a tornado comes to mind. A whirlwind of printed matters of all sizes and design, whirling around me, the reader.

I/ the eye of the storm, the dreamer, ascending and descending a literary Tower of Babel; a mind boggling building created of hard covers and paperback novels, of fairy tales and mysteries, of chapter books and Russian classics, of dead and alive poets, of poetry anthologies, published plays and even film scenarios.

Memories of titles a whirlwind of letters, strung words, printed materials, begging for attention, leaving me breathless, stranded outside an unknown house, along a dry river bed, in a country I never visited but on those travels triggered by words grabbed from the mind of the author, planted firmly on paper, black on white.

Covers, plot lines, memorable characters fly by, voices calling out: Mention, me, me, me!

Here goes, 15 titles, Dutch, Austrian, English (with an accent, posh, foreign, immigrant, artistic) and American. And this my friends, is only the beginning.

Sans Famille - (Alleen op de wereld, Nobody's Boy) by Hector Malot
Scheepsmaat Woeltje by Klaas Norel
Het achterhuis - (Diary of ) by Anne Frank - Take a look inside the hiding place.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
Reigen (Hands Out - a play) by Arthur Schnitzler
De Ondergang - Jacques Presser
Timebends - Arthur Miller
Diaries by Anaïs Nin
Plexus, Sexus, Nexus by Henry Miller
Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth
My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok
The Family Moskat by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Gaglow by Esther Freud
The Clothes On Their Backs by Linda Grant

What does this list tell you about me? What does your list say about you? Care to share?

Please do!

This work by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Chain Letters and Important Books

2010-10-05T07:37:00.000-07:00

Letter writing is something I've always done. Thinking of letter writing makes me remember my mother's insistence that I first try-out what I wanted to write on scratch paper, to be more exact, on my HEMA kladblok. They call it the "memoblok" these days and it's sold out.

Even if you can't read the language, do click on the HEMA link. turn up the volume and watch the company's Online commercial, it's fun.

To get back to letters, you get the point, I've pretty much been a correspondent all my life. From the early thank-you notes to an aunt who gifted me with a box of crayons and a new sketchpad with real white drawing paper, up to missives I send by email these days.

The first time I moved abroad was as an adolescent, as I followed my post-doc spouse to Los Angeles. Back then I wrote weekly letters to my mom and she wrote back pronto. The year I lived in L.A. as a a single adult, I wrote to about 40 people back home who wanted to be kept abreast of my adventures. Of those maybe three wrote back. My mother for sure (we wrote each other every few weeks), and perhaps a friend or two. Even although I would have liked to receive more letters in return, and had my ears perked to hear the mailman arrive, I never liked chain letters. Perhaps because of the threats that often accompanies such writing. That is, I tend to read the promises to get rich fast, as threats of what may happen if I don't do what's suggested. Send this letter to ten of your friends. You'll start receiving dollar bills in the mail becomes:

If you don't do it, and you walk underneath a ladder the painter will inadvertently drop a paint bucket on your head. Up side down. Or, you'll find out too late there's no toilet paper left in the honey bucket. You are on your own. Or, you're out of sugar and the neighbor isn't home. Your cake will self-destruct in ten minutes.

To state that I don't like chain letters is an understatement, I dare say I don't do chain letters.
That is, until now. A few days back I received a request on FaceBook from my Dialogue2010 friend in Prague Sezin Koehler, I have to admit, at first all I saw scanning her request was "15 friends", that was enough to scare me off. But then our Dialogue2010 partner Anastasia Ashman in Istanbul who'd been one of Sezin's addressees included me in the 15 friends she addressed and seeing the list of her books, my eye catching authors whose work I hadn't read, something clicked. This is how the message read:

List fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. Don't take too long to think about it. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Tag fifteen friends, including me, because I'm interested in seeing what books my friends choose. (To do this, go to your Notes tab on your profile page, paste rules in a new note, cast your fifteen picks, and tag people in the note.) Do yours before you read anyone else's!

The only threat involved in this chain —reaction— I'd like to call it, is that you start thinking and writing about the books that made an impression on you so profound that you still remember them, their drift, the time you read them, what you were eating while you read, how heavy the paper was, what the book smelled like, where you got it, at the library, from the book store, from a relative, or a friend, found in a hotel lobby, on the bus, at a garage sale.

Care to share a book or two, or fifteen? Send me a note, post a comment, a tiny letter, I love hearing from you!

If you start with the first decade of your life, which children's book made the greatest impression on you as a child reader?

This work by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Bloggin' for Money or a Cause

2010-09-08T13:33:00.000-07:00

In 2004 I started what turned out to be the beginning of a new career as the Arts Writer for the International Examiner in Seattle. Concerned to be taken seriously I didn't want to publish anything anymore without being paid. Self respecting professionals didn't work for free, unless they were volunteering their expertise and time for a "good cause". There you go, I said it. Meanwhile I continued posting what I didn't think would sell but deserved attention on my blog Hope Filled Jars, and as a ghostwriter for the garden blog Tuin van de Marienhof.

Seeing my name in print in a newspaper (as the reporter) was relatively new to me. Earlier I'd published an article in a glossy for men and written for paper newsletters of infant loss support groups. After I published a book on grief I was invited to write a column and book reviews for a Dutch parental Internet magazine Ouders Online. Still I hadn't dared consider myself a journalist until someone I was chatting with at a party stopped mid-sentence, took a look at me and said he wasn't "going to divulge any more 'secrets'", since I was a journalist. Oh, wow, he thinks I'm a journalist, well, then I must be.

It was with the curiosity of the journalist that I answered an ad on Craig's list calling for bloggers. I wondered whether HotelsByCity's promise that bloggers could make money Online was true, and in March of 2007 I took the plunge, in order to find out. All I had to do was enter two posts per week about my home town, sharing hidden gems with visitors.

HotelsByCity informed me by email they made use of Google Adsense to monetize visits to their site and would pay bloggers 75% of "revenue generated through your blog". Earning reports would be sent at the end of each month and payments would be made 30 days after the completion of each calendar month. After setting up my own Adsense account I found out a "hit" amounted to one penny, or 0.75 dollar cents earned.

How could HotelsByCity offer writers 75% of the revenue? Well for one, we are talking peanuts. More importantly, HotelByCity is a hotel broker. The money generated by "our blog" does not equal the money generated by visitors making reservations for hotel rooms through the broker. HotelsByCity doesn't need the quarter penny per hit, they need the traffic to the HotelByCity sites that's generated by the bloggers who work for less than peanuts. Worse, they work for free, for recognition, and get some pennies, or if they work really hard, a voucher tossed at them. We're not talking one blog maintained by one blogger, but a group-blog per city, filled with interesting content provided by several or many bloggers. There's a HotelsByCity site for practically every large city in the world.

Today's smart bloggers create their own platforms, choose the ads Google Adsense places in the margin or banners and write content to attract readers, be it to introduce visitors to their writing, or to something else they're trying to sell, apples, oranges, any kind of knowledge. Those who are really good at hooking visitors to their posts, can make money Online, but most of the time it's not by adding up the hits on Google ads, but by selling their own product.

At some point the HotelsByCity Seattle blog entries got a bit confused, posts by SeattleBlogman09 and mine (Seattleblogger29) got mixed up, our hotel reviews credited to one or the other, but never quite right. Finally I even lost access to my account. By that time I'd lost interest in writing an article about making money Online as well. Still, I thought I'd better collect what I'd written and archive the posts on my Seattle Blog History, a blog I started in 2008 especially for that purpose, and then I forgot about it again. Until I got a response on an post at HotelsByCity about Tea at the Teacup in Seattle and Go-go Goats...
Which proves that good blog content continues generating traffic.

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention Google Adsense doesn't pay revenue until the moment you've accumulated $100 which for me arrived at the end of 2009.

Have you found a way to hit the Google Adsense jackpot? If so, care to share how?

This work by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Writing on Loss

2010-08-22T10:30:00.000-07:00

A post by Deborah Siegel about the loss of a dear family friend triggered some thoughts on the death of my father, my child, friends and other relatives.

Reading about David's death at age 69 I can't help but think of my own father's death in '69 when we, my mother (52 at the time) and I, considered him gone too soon, when I was only 13 and he two days short of 71. I was the child that had to make up for all those killed during the Holocaust and my father asked me not to forget his story, history.

I promised him I would not, and up to today I consider his wish a command (I'm working on it Dad).
What story exactly? His story is my story, our history, my past and present and yes, my future. Yet, I have always felt more comfortable making visible the stories of others (as a designer for multicultural theater) than sharing my family's.

A visit around 1980 with a woman who practiced "automatic handwriting" helped me with my first attempts to grasp the extend of the influence of early loss of my father on my life. While automatic handwriting did open the gate, started the flow, I only shared my poetry. I did not think I could write worth while full sentences.

It wasn't until the loss of our baby daughter Ariane Eira in 1993, that I really started writing about my own loss and later in response to other people's losses. My husband called me the Ann Landers of Grief.

I don't know how I could have survived without writing down my feelings, or rather the translation in words of sensations. Writing about a baby's death the first as last question that remains unanswered even if the clinical reason for the demise is clear, is Why?
My father was an artist the last twenty years of his life. He painted and created objects in clay. One of his sculptures shows a man addressing G.d in despair, asking Why? Why hast thou forsaken me?

Writing about loss gives us besides a place to unload, to try and make sense, or to try and accept, a gauge to measure our development in the mourning process. Acknowledging our own or an other person's loss is never futile, it's all about remembering, paying respect, offering condolences. Remembering a person on the page is of great importance to those who are left behind.

When someone I've known, someone dear to my heart has died, I write down her name, cluster in Gabriele Rico's fashion around the name, bringing to the surface memories, deeper and further from the present time, I cluster about moments between back when and right now until a mental shift gives me the sentence that makes up the essence of what was or is most important about my relationship with the deceased.

I write letters to those who remain, or publish a blog post and when appropriate I send the poem Claribel Alegria wrote after her husband had died. Her books is among those that make me believe writing is a Creative Act of Healing.

Salí a buscarte

atravesé valles

y montañas

surqué mares lejanos

le pregunté a las nubes

y al viento

inútil todo

inútil

dentro de mí estabas.

Searching for You

I went out searching for you

crossing valleys

and mountains

ploughing distant seas

asking of the clouds

and the wind your whereabouts

it was all useless

useless

you were within me.

Claribel Alegría

from Sorrow
Curbstone Press 1999

How do you find solace? Do you write about your own or other people's losses?

This work (prose) by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

We Write History Today

2010-08-11T07:30:00.000-07:00

HYBRID AMBASSADORS: a blog-ring project of Dialogue2010 This spring you listened in or read about our multinational cultural roundtable discussion on hybrid life at expat+HAREM. Now we're back with interconnected blog posts, a shared reaction to a recent polarizing book promotion at the writing network SheWrites. Join the discussion on Twitter using #HybridAmbassadors or #Dialogue2010

Introduction for White Readers to Black Authors

Borders Books Seattle

Carleen Brice author of Orange Mint & Honey is an ambassador for black authors and their books. On her blog she reminds readers that August the 29th is the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and she shares some compelling titles related to that natural and civic disaster.

To buy these books Online, all you have to do is click on a link, it'll get you to the requested title. If you go to a real bookstore however, one you enter through the front door, you may not find novels by Afro- or African American authors in the regular fiction department. You'll discover there's an African American Interest section where all Af Am writers are grouped together. At least, that's the case at the chain bookstores such as Borders and its subsidiary Waldenbooks.

The Indie bookstores I frequent in Seattle don't show segregated shelves for work by novelists of color. Nor is this the case at the Tattered Cover where Brice filmed her fictional video. (If you watch her video now, you'll see a disclaimer). Good booksellers will assist customers in finding what they are looking for, the best are able to direct book lovers in new directions.

Welcome White Folks

Elliott Bay Book Company

Last month, in the SheWrites TalkRadio program White Readers, Meet Black Authors: How Women Writers of Color are Read, Received and Reviewed Brice told SW founder Kamy Wicoff that white readers emailed her saying they felt people would look at them funny if they visited the African American Interest section at a book store. They felt that section was for blacks only. In order to deal with this misunderstanding she created a (she says tongue in cheek) video with the hope that watching it will make people think twice before walking past the African-American Interest section at a chain book store in the future (click on video in menu bar at WelcomeWhiteFolks if link above doesn't work for you).

Wanted White Ambassadors to Help Black Author Cross Over

Between Friends - Sandy Bell-Lundy

June 29, a day after the TalkRadio show, Kamy Wicoff called white SheWrites members on their lack of participation in the discussion with beside Wicoff and Brice Virginia De Berry, Bernice McFadden and Martha Southgate. At the end of her post she offered some suggestions of action to take.

One of the aims of the founders of SheWrites is to offer members a possibility to promote their upcoming titles by keeping the membership abreast of developments leading to the publication date.

After the above mentioned TalkRadio program had aired SheWrites member Lori L. Tharps, author of the memoir Kinky Gazpacho published her "Countdown to Publication" blog post.

Perhaps she was inspired by Carleen Brice's video . Perhaps Tharps thought humor would win over people unfamiliar with her work. Tharps's Kinky Gazpacho does look like a fun read, but a comedy writer she is not. There was nothing remotely funny about the way she addressed her white Shewrites sisters. Perhaps she was the victim of a self fulfilling prophecy.
The discussion that followed in the comments section reeled participants in and out of a time warp, with white readers promising to promote her book, sight unseen and a few wondering what the hell was going on.

Why the segregation in addressing fellow writers?

The Times are Literary A Changin'

The fact is, the TalkRadio program and the discussion following the blogpost by Lori Tharps tell us that the times they are a changin', but if we don't pay close attention, all we may wind up with is a reversal.

By Judy L Katz 1st publ. 1978

After a sensitivity training in the 70s Judy L.Katz noted:
"... I felt defensive about my whiteness and guilty and hurt because I was labeled the oppressor. [The group's response:] This was a self-indulgent way to use up my energy. The real issue was not whether I was concerned about addressing racism but what I had done to challenge it. What action had I taken? By not acting I supported and perpetuated racism." From White Awareness: Handbook for Anti-Racism Training

SheWrites is a platform where writers can count on support as writers. A place to promote our own work and if we like an other writer's work, we'll promote her book, but our willingness to promote a writer is based on our liking someone's work, not on an imposed sense of discomfort.

Celebrate Contemporary Authors of Color
At this time in history the focus of African American writing is changing and all of us can have a hand in making that known to people in our community, no matter what color we have.

"Today, African American literature has become accepted as an integral part of American literature, with books such as Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley, The Color Purple by Alice Walker, and Beloved by Toni Morrison achieving both best-selling and award-winning status."

Seeing this last paragraph of the Wikipedia page on Af Am Lit makes me smile. The mentioned "Today" was the today of yesteryear and is way behind the times. Take alone the books on Hurricane Katrina and engaging novels by women authors mentioned above, look at work by Jeffery Renard Allen and while you're at it check out other "young" writers of color such as Sonya Chung or Rattawut Lapcharoensap.

Have you read a great novel by a writer of color lately? Visit Wikipedia and help contemporary writers make history.

More thoughts on this subject from my fellow HYBRID AMBASSADORS:

Sezin Koehler's Whites Only?

Rose Deniz's Voice Lessons from a Hybrid Ambassador

Catherine Yiğit's Special-ism

Anastasia Ashman's Great White People Book Club

Tara Lutman Agacayak's Circles

Catherine Bayar's Thicker Skin

Elmira Bayraslı's The Color of Writing

Jocelyn Eikenburg's The Problem with "Chinese Food"

This work by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Naranja Sanguina Creates a Sense of Apolcalypse

2010-08-02T15:06:00.000-07:00

My sweetheart is "at camp" this week. He's participating in Centrum's Acoustic Blues Fest in Port Townsend. A sucker for road trips I offered to drive him and his gear to Fort Worden where the Festival takes place, five hours on the road, just to see our dog run on the beach and my hubby in his dorm room. On our way to the utmost north-eastern point of the Olympic Peninsula we noticed the temperature was lower than it had been when we left; on my way back to Seattle I felt it went up again the moment I crossed the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Leaving the Kitsap Peninsula behind me it was as though I drove into a moderately warm oven the moment the tires of the truck hit the mainland. It was 6 p.m. and the sun, while still high in the light blue sky, seemed veiled.

When I stepped out of the car in front of our house in Seattle I noticed a wood burning smell, not unpleasant, rather like that of a good campfire (no, really) but I drew no conclusions other than that I was glad I could detect smoke again after living without a sense of smell for two years, and that our neighbors must have added some aromatic chips to their charcoal barbecue pit.

By 8:30 p.m. the sun stood like a Spanish blood orange over the horizon without any of the usual spreading of colors in the sky, a bloody red ball against Wedgwood powder blue. In the iPic I took the sun was golden, not red. The surrounding atmosphere of the globe was reddish pink. It all had an apocalypse-like feel to it. The stillness of the summer evening, the sun like a ball on fire, a photograph that didn't speak of reality, it made me want to scream. A silent scream like the one uttered by the figure in the famous Munch painting. For the longest time people thought Munch had to be crazy for "seeing" such an image, but astronomers discovered changes in the atmosphere due to a volcanic eruption can create the colors Edvard Munch painted. In the sky that is, it doesn't explain the red sun ...

This morning I awoke with the aromatic wood burning smell in my nostrils and remembered last night's red sun and that I've seen something similar in Los Angeles about 35 years ago. Forest fires, I realized, it's summer time and the woods are ablaze. Dreadful, dreadful fires. A good reason to scream.

Which artwork expresses how you feel at times?

This work by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Let the Spirit Lead

2010-07-22T10:18:00.000-07:00

Photo courtesy Sezin Koehler

~~~

Tears from heaven, butterflies the size of condors

a bathtub drain as compass, swirling whirling

stream of scented water, consciousness finding a way

to the tide, the waves. Beached whales floating

back to the pod, playing with octopuses, embraced by

countless arms, swimming with mermaids

bound for heavenly parties between silhouettes

of trees, growing upside down in Australia, or

was it all happening in your mind, high

on herbal essence, clouds of steamy goodwill

Love in the air, no need to put a word on paper

Words multiply and mate forming never ending

Stories waiting to be told

~~~

This is no labored poem, just my comment in response to Sezin Koehler's post "This is what my blog looks like on writer's block".
When you visit her blog now, you won't see the image, it's not show as illustration with her blog post. "Let the Spirit Lead" was the header of an earlier blog design.

What do YOU see when you look at art?

This work by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Lyrical A-Z of Seattle SheWrites One-Year Anniversary Bash

2010-07-02T08:34:00.000-07:00

Look at us, not your baker's dozen, thirteen women as varied as our hair styles, backgrounds and writing. And yet, or perhaps because of that, we had a lot to share. What brought us together was, you guessed it right, our SheWrites membership. Some if not all of us had already checked out "Who's Who" by visiting the others' SW pages, personal blogs and websites. But to come out of our writer's isolation to meet in real life with others as dedicated to the word, added that extra dimension, that only face to face encounters allow.
Interesting notion, many of us turned out to be both writers and artists!

In our writing, be it blog posts, essays, novels, profiles, poetry or prose, we're as diverse as all our other sisters who were celebrating this One-Year Anniversary of SheWrites. On paper or Online we may be analog, bold, perhaps cute, digital by now and dominant is possible too (always pitching that last word). And we're all elated with the right turn of a sentence, whether it's funny, girlish or hard core.

In meeting a the Elysian Brewery (where the volume was intense), we found we could be jovial, yet no-one disclosed to be a KitKat® lover, or what detergent to use. Some of us are mothers, but in our circle only notorious for their focus on words. We show we can be open minded, which makes that we won't turn away from a paradox, from quaint nor from what might be considered queer. Whether we're rowdy, sultry, sexy, or truthful and united, we're word vixens, wondering about 'xiting plots, yearning to spin a tale, always putting the dot on the i and telling it how it is or was. As I tried right here. My words about our gathering spun out from A to Z.

We were all thrilled and some eager to send in proposals for the Passion Project.
And last but not least, of course we cheered to Kamy Wicoff and Deborah Siegel and others involved in the workings of SheWrites for giving us the opportunity to connect! SheWrites always does the Write Thing.

P.S. Did you notice the SW Tee Flag? Now wouldn't you look good in that?

This work by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Azby Brown: Just Enough - from Edo to Us

2010-06-30T23:11:00.000-07:00

In 2005 The International Examiner published my review of "The Very Small Home". At a time that empty-nesters call moving from mega-mansions into 2500 sq. feet homes downsizing, to see the ingenious use of space in homes of around 1000 sq.feet remains refreshing. Now the author of that inspiring book, architect Azby Brown treats us to another gem. In "Just Enough: Lessons in Living Green from Traditional Japan"(Kodansha International) Brown points to the past to show how we can live happy, fulfilled and responsible lives today.

In my mind Azby Brown is the Rick Steves of historic time travel. Where Steves takes you to his "Europe through the back door", Brown invites us to visit Edo period Japan with him. He addresses his readers —that's us— as part of his entourage. If we're willing to go the distance, we may accompany him on a foot-trip through the 18th Century Kai province of central Japan. On our way to the village of Aoyagi (a composite of different villages in the area) we learn among other things about vegetation, foraging, the sharing of water and homesteads.

Concerned about the environment, deforestation and lack of fuel sources Brown studied what happened in Japan over two centuries ago when the archipelago suffered from similar environmental problems as our world does these days.

"Just Enough" is divided in three sections. "Part I – Field and Forest" introduces the reader to the sustainable world of 18th Century farmers in the Kai province. "Part II – The Sustainable City" addresses ways in which city dwellers in those days did their share to keep their society from going down the drain. In "Part III – A Life of Restraint" the highest accomplishment of the Samurai of Edo comes to light.

At the end of each of the three parts a section is dedicated to what may be gleaned from life in the Edo period and how we can apply those lessons in our own lives, in today's society. Brown asks us to rethink the meaning of comfort, to look for beauty in function, use water more fully and suggests to "put human waste to good use". If you're bewildered by the latter, the author mentions that the "yuck factor" was introduced by the Victorians, and that composting toilets have been in use since the 1970s and are constantly improved.
His drawings of Edo cities are idyllic, clean and green. Seeing a pen drawing of a neighborhood's "drain patrolman" really drives home the notion that waste control was very important.

Having literally illustrated his narrative with countless pen and ink drawings Brown follows the example of the 18th Century Shogun's government. "Higher-up" provided Edo period farmers with detailed manuals —visual aids that held information on anything from plant varieties, to tool design and fabrication, to climate and health. Back then it was all there was, today there's something magical about hand-drafted imagery, it draws the reader in, line by line, more effectively than a thousand words or a photograph could.

The author, a native of New Orleans, LA, is director of the KIT Future Design Institute in Tokyo. He holds degrees in architecture and sculpture from Yale and entered the Department of Architecture of the University of Tokyo in 1985 under a grant from the Japanese Ministry of Education. He became an associate professor of architectural design at the Kanazawa Institute of Technology in 1995, and currently holds a position there in the department of Media Informatics.

In lieu of presentations on 6/30 and 7/1, Azby Brown will be speaking at Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 Tenth on July 2 at 6 p.m. Admission is free.

Previously published in the International Examiner 6/16/2010
this work by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

She Writes and Shares @ SheWrites

2010-06-29T10:06:00.000-07:00

Mother of the author in original SheWrites Birthday Design Tee-shirt ©2010 SheWritesdotcom celebrating the writers' platform and meeting place one-year anniversary

"Why don't you write a book about us, you and me," my mother would say now and then.
I'm not so sure you'd really want me to do that, I'd think, share what I write about us with the world? But that was a long time ago, when writing about my parents still had a therapeutic function and I was by no means ready to share those notes with anyone, let alone my mother. My mother myself, my mother and I, so many years spent trying to understand what could not be understood.

Children try to understand where their parents are coming from, literally and figuratively. If parents keep a secret from their children out of shame or for fear their offspring might repeat their mistakes, those same well-protected children most often step in their parents' footsteps anyway.

"I used to do exactly the same things you do," my mother would say, and I'd think, yeah, right, sure mama. It wasn't until I started to sort-out all the material I inherited after her death, piecing together letters, photographs, postcards; scanning Identity papers and the like, that I realized how true her words had been.

My mother the nurse, my mother the designer, my mother the advertising woman. And yes, my mother the wordsmith, my mother the traveler (on the right in this photo), my mother the midwife. Little did I know how adventurous she'd really been, the rebellious daughter of a strict upbringing.

My mother, "Mina Bakgraag", my father's muse, my teacher, the woman who challenged a man 20 years her senior to become a professional artist —because she wouldn't give him a child if he didn't. My mother, the wife of the artist who always said he couldn't paint her for the life of him. But what about this painting?

I recognize the woman with the short bangs as the one in a photograph taken in 1955, showing Nita with her and Jaap's dogs, she pregnant with me, the dogs on guard, Jaap no doubt behind the camera. I'm panning left and right, zooming out, imagining what happened back then, how my parents lived before I was born, zooming in again to our lives together, our "folie". Yes, I've been and am writing about us, about her and him and me.

Do you ever wonder whether your memoir should be called a novel?

This work by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Head Back for this Dutch Treat - Craving a ... what?

2010-06-11T06:31:00.000-07:00

The tags in the tweet by @TabletMag for Katie Robbins's article in Tablet magazine would have been a dead give away, but it was the announcement of a Dutch Treat in Tablet's newsletter that caught my eye before I'd even logged in to my Twitter account. What could it be? Something about our proverbial thriftiness perhaps?

The moment Tablet's website had loaded and I saw the photograph with the article I knew, and so did the little guys who work at my physical memory bank. My mouth started watering. Even although pickled herring isn't my favorite, the sight of soggy pickles coupled with the white flesh and blue skin of the marinated fish did the trick. Can't help it, I'm conditioned that way. No matter that I have a sensitive stomach, been suffering from hiatus hernia since childhood and GERD will hit me with a vengeance (I'll spare you the details, if you're interested, just click on the links) if there's anything that proves my Dutch heritage it's the click, click, clicking in my memory bank when I see a ***haring***.

"Oh, wat snak ik naar een Hollandse Nieuwe."

Oh, how I crave a New Dutch Herring I thought in Dutch, yes, that's what happens, just the way I'll think of "poffertjes", "oliebollen" and "Nieuwjaarsrolletjes" in Dutch, I "Snak naar een Hollandse Nieuwe." And don't think (with all due respect to the hosts) that the haring we eat on Koninginnedag in Seattle comes even close to true Hollandse Nieuwe!

The Volkskrant reports that the first barrel worth €58,000 has arrived, but if I go by Tablet Magazine's article New Yorker's have got their own! OMG if it was just a matter of getting on the subway, I'd rush to The Grand Central Oyster Bar for the Holland Herring Festival.

Anybody going to/ coming from N.Y. one of these days?

Do you have a similar response to a food or drink of your native country? Any food memories that turn you into a lyrical fool?

This work by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

My Cubist Gertrude Stein Portrait

2010-06-03T15:54:00.000-07:00

I dug up the 1998 print of the collage "Two Muses, Two Muses" after reading Renate Stendhal's blog post at SheWrites Why do something when it can be done
After hearing the announcement on NPR (in 1998) that Rebecca Brown was organizing a 24-hour Gertrude Stein-a-thon at the Richard Hugo House in Seattle I proposed to add an exhibit of designs I created for video presentation of Three Plays. Inspired by the preparatory goings on at Hugo House, I borrowed a pile of books on Stein from the library. Matisse has always been a favorite of mine. When I came across Gertrude Stein's literary portrait of Matisse, I decided to make a portrait of Stein in Matisse's later applique-like style, using a photocopy of a photo I found in one of the books.

Thus the title "Two Muses, Two Muses", borrowing something from both the writer and the painter, each of whom has been my muse.

After making the collage, I couldn't stop. I tacked the burlap I had lying around on a 4'x8' board and made a larger than life painting of the writer while listening to her reading her portrait of Matisse. Listen to Stein recite and you may understand my obsession.

My dear friend, former dancer Lori Mitchell poses with Gert for the sake of scale.

If you're an artist, which writer/ poet triggers your artwork, if you're a writer/poet, which artist has triggered your writing?

This work by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Writing in Two Languages at the Same Time

2010-05-26T10:47:00.000-07:00

The past year and a half I've filled out more profile forms than ever before. The editor in chief of a Dutch Cultural Agency requested I'd sign up with Wiki, Twitter, Linkedin to name a few. I managed to put off FaceBook for a while, that is, I was invited by an IRL friend, but flooded by news from his virtual friends I quit after two days. Took me a year to sign up again, and this time I kept a low profile, meaning I remained invisible until I thought I had enough of a handle on keeping the flood gate under control, keeping myself from being swept away, off on a tangent. Oops, where's this going, what did I just say, where did I want to go with all this? Oh, yes, something about profiles and writing in two languages.

Stating in a profile that you're a bilingual writer suggests you write fluidly in another language beside the one that's your mother tongue. Does that make you a translator? Yes and no, or not necessarily. That is, I don't translate in one or the other language, I think in both, depending on the subject that's on my mind (I learned yoga and cooking in English), the location I find myself in, or the person I'm with.

What if I want to tackle the same subject in both languages? Writing one and then the other makes sense, but not to yours truly, at least not always. Just yesterday I came across a photograph I made in 2006 when I was working on the factual biography of Jake in my dedicated writing studio at Luna Park ActivSpace .

In order to see whether I was covering every fact with the same attention I made sure each paragraph had the same length. Those of you who are familiar with the length of Dutch words understand what a feat that was. Aside from word length there's the issue of content. Some things that may be crystal clear to a Dutch reader aren't to an American, and visa versa. I thoroughly enjoyed being forced to cut words and add meaning while staying within the parameters of space. Crazy? Possibly, but I dare say these rules I set for myself worked as well as a stern editor might.

Do you apply certain constraints when writing/ translating and how do you benefit of such parameters?

This work by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Alan Lau, Marc Wenet, Suzanne Wolfe: Poetry in Word and Image

2010-04-28T18:32:00.001-07:00

when three voices merge and mingle

"This is my language," Marc Wenet made a grand gesture at the small wooden assemblages mounted on the gallery walls at Francine Seders'. Every now and then Seders hosts an after-hours gathering in her namesake gallery, situated on the outside of the bend in the road where Phinney and Greenwood Avenue jog together to hug one of our fave burger joints, Red Mill. Over the years we've gathered at Francine's not only for artist receptions, but also for French conversation, or as was the case last Tuesday a merging-of-minds-and-voices salon.

For his latest show Wenet published a book with photos of his work, Alan Lau's poems and an essay by British born novelistSuzanne Wolfe.
The sculptor, who has worked with found or discarded materials since the beginning of his career, saw more natural elements entering his oeuvre after coming to Seattle from Chicago. All pieces in the show at Seders' are created out of weathered wood. Many of the assemblages show faded coats of paint. Combined with measured slices of color; a narrow strip of red, a repetition of creamy rings or red bars cascading like steps to somewhere, each piece invites meditation.

Lau said writing poetry to go with the artwork was a challenge. "For yourself you write what you want to write. But it's good to feel uncomfortable, good to go places where you normally won't go." He read some poems he created for Wenet's artwork, and a few more from his own book Blue and Greens: a produce worker's journal, beginning and ending the sequence with the shaking of what? A box of sunflowers seeds perhaps, so appropriate for a Greengrocer Poet.

Wolfe who said Wenet's artwork "spoke" to her, kept her contribution a surprise to be discovered in the book. Her mesmerizing voice transported us to fourth Century Carthage when the man who would become known as Saint Augustine lusted after the young daughter of a mosaic layer and lived with her for fifteen years before sending her packing. Can't wait to hear more of that work in process.

At Francine Seders Gallery, the language of art, poetry and prose is joined by it's inspiration, Wenet's poetic assemblages.

How do you see poetry, how do you read art?

Mark Wenet will give a talk about his artwork on Saturday May 1st at 2 p.m.Francine Seders Gallery 6701 Greenwood Avenue North, Seattle, WA 98103-5294 (206) 782-0355

Chocoloate Pudding, Aioli + the Art of B.S.

2010-04-24T09:28:00.000-07:00

At Odd Fellows Hall smack beside Elliott Bay Book Company's new home on Capitol Hill in Seattle. Plenty in time for PEN World Voices reading (more about that later) we opted for dinner at The Tin Cafe. The hanger steak, which I had vowed never to order again in a restau (tough chewing at Le Pichet, CafePresse, Cafe Campagne) was the very best I've had in this city. The chard with sauteed button mushrooms delicious. The spring chicken served with excellent potato mash and buttered carrots was tender but not outstanding in flavor (which works to my favor since I'm intolerant to many spices).
A can of shoe string fries was cooked just a tad too brown (one notch) and instead of the aioli mentioned on the menu we got plain mayo, that was a disappointment, I love my aioli!
The waiter claimed any sauce of this mixture would basically be called aioli. Eh, get out of here, garlic makes aioli aioli!
His remark made me think of something I read recently (but where) about the uncanny ability of men (in general ha, ha) to claim knowledge where they have none. Even my husband calls that B.S.-ing by the way. Harry G. Frankfurt wrote a book about the art of B.S., titled On Bullshit.
Still very enjoyable meal in Grand Cafe/ Belgium cafe style open space. Even the acoustics (noisy!) didn't turn us off. And the pudding was yumbo yummy! As good as my mom's and that says something.

How do you react as a cook/ chef/ gourmand when a waiter is trying to sell you B.S. Send him back to the kitchen?

Ghostwriter Escapes the Garden Shed

2010-04-16T17:33:00.000-07:00

Five years ago I created the Tuin van Mariënhof garden blog for my friends Jeannette and Meinoud Dijkema. It all started when I learned that they planned to open the gate to the garden of their monumental estate de Mariënhof to paying visitors. All they had at the time was a simple flier. That they would attract many more interested people if they had Internet presence was obvious. An avid gardener myself I derived great joy from finding relevant information to link to the posts I created from their email messages. Today, the total number of posts, including those I wrote on my own, is 270.

The goal, to create an effective Web presence has been reached. Even although hardly anyone leaves a comment, we know thanks to Feedjit (see right hand margin of blog) that people from all over the globe wind up at the virtual or real Mariënhof Garden

Whether browsers are looking for a picture of a hazelnut blossom, or architectural features inspired by the Acanthus —one of the subjects I wrote about with much pleasure— Google directs them to the blog of an estate garden in the countryside north of Amsterdam, in the Netherlands.

Meanwhile the Dijkemas have published their book about their garden and it's time for yours truly to focus on her own book length manuscript, a saga about art, nuts and love in a cold climate.

What does it take to focus on one's own material, or, when do you know enough is enough, it's time to work on just your own project?

Traffic Park on Seattle Center Grounds?

2010-03-30T14:46:00.001-07:00

Driving toward Interstate-5 through the Rainier Valley or New Holly neighborhoods of Seattle, we often see a group of African immigrants, both adults and children, waiting patiently to cross the street. More often than not they smile, perhaps they hope to charm drivers to stop, but they must wonder why no cars come to a halt. Positioned only 30 feet away from a pedestrian crossing, they seem oblivious to the meaning of the white stripes on the tarmac.

Long ago, when I came to Los Angeles on a student visa, I myself showed my ignorance concerning traffic regulations in the United States. The very first time I drove a car in this country I was halted by a motor cop.
"You drove through the stop sign," he said.
"Yes?"
"You know that you're supposed to stop," he stated pulling out his ticket pad.
"Why should I stop if there was nobody coming from any of the other directions?"
"You have to stop. You have an accent, I take it you're not from here?"
"I'm from Holland."
"And in Holland you don't have to stop for a stop sign when there's no other traffic beside you?"
"No, Sir," I said, omitting that we didn't even have stop signs in the Netherlands.
Apparently he thought that was pretty funny, and a good enough reason not to give me a ticket. Pocketing his pad he said he'd let me go with a warning. "Remember, in America you stop each time you see this sign, whether there's traffic or not," he said before riding off.

Concerning the stop sign I learned quickly. But for at least two decades, I was under the impression that the word for the white stripes on the tarmac that we refer to as "zebra" in the Netherlands, was PedXing in America, and pronounced [pedzing]!
It took me twenty years to realize that PedXing was the abbreviation of Pedestrian Crossing. And that while I come from a country where children are taught "Veilig Verkeerslessen" or Safety (in) Traffic Lessons.

As a child I worried that I wouldn't be allowed to go on the school outing to the Youth Traffic Park if I didn't learn the traffic signs and rules in class. The Youth Traffic Park, the first of its kind, was founded in Assen, a small provincial town in the Netherlands in 1957. The prospect to go there was exciting, for we'd get to peddle around the miniature roads and roundabouts in small cars. In 1988 the Youth Traffic Park was moved to the outskirts of Assen and in 1992 it was renamed Verkeerspark or Traffic Park. More and more attractions have been added to make the Traffic Park a destination for the whole family.

I'd like to see a Traffic Park in Seattle. A perfect location would be at the foot of the Space Needle, in the place of the Fun Forest. It would be a wonderful venue for parties and outings and a great opportunity for the city of Seattle to commission the work of Public Artists. A playful answer to the Sculpture Park!

The Traffic Park in Assen has partnered with ANWB the Dutch equivalent of AAA, and the ANWB offers junior memberships for children, that allows them yearlong free admittance to the Traffic Park. Hey, AAA!

Have you been baffled by foreign traffic rules or are you still by those in your own country? Wouldn't it be fun to go to a Traffic Park where you'll learn the rules by (the right) example?

Gremchelich, Matzah Balls and Easter Eggs: Recipes for a Dutch Seder

2010-03-29T07:40:00.000-07:00

During my childhood in the Netherlands, spring was heralded by my mother's birthday on the 22 of March, followed by "grote schoonmaak," the thorough spring-cleaning of our home, and the delivery of two oversized boxes of Hollandia Matzos by Van Gend & Loos, the Dutch UPS of the past.

My Jewish father taught me about the 10th plague inflicted upon Egypt, which would cause all firstborn children and livestock to be killed. By smearing the blood of the sacrificial lamb on their doorposts, the Jews saved their firstborn from death; the doors of their homes were "skipped," in Hebrew "pasach," which was why the holiday was called Pesach (Passover)

My non-Jewish mother told me that Pesach was the Jewish Easter, and Easter a heathen celebration of spring. Spring, of course, was the end of the long cold winter, and a new beginning, which was symbolized by eggs. Each year my mother presented me with a string pouch filled with egg-shaped sugar candy, and a colorful basket with fluffy yellow Easter chicks, chocolate eggs wrapped in colorful silver foil, and an Easter bunny.

Pesach started with the seder dinner, which was different from the regular Sabbath evening meal because we would have matzah instead of bread, matzah balls in our soup, and gremchelich (thick pancakes made from matzah brei with raisins, slivers of almonds, and sometimes candied ginger) for dessert. The way I remember it, the question-and- answer ritual at the seder had more of a conversational quality to it, perhaps because I was an only child, and most likely because my father was the only one who really knew the hagaddah (book that tells the story or Passover).

In preparation for the seder my father would tend to the beef and vegetable stockpot of soup, while my mother soaked matzah in hot water, and fried a chopped onion in chicken schmaltz (fat) to make matzah balls for the Pesach soup, and prepared the mixture for gremchelich. We would eat those thick pancakes for dessert at the seder and throughout the following week as a snack with our tea or coffee.

For maror (the bitter herbs, standing for the hardships suffered in Egypt) and the vegetable, my parents used radishes and parsley that we dipped in a bowl with salty water (tears shed in Egypt). For charoset (symbolizing the mortar used by Jewish slaves to build the storehouses of Egypt) my mother mashed chopped walnuts and tutti frutti (mixed dried fruit) together. A chicken bone was added to our seder plate instead of the traditional lamb shank. Three circular matzahs were slid in between the folds of napkins-- two for the blessing of the bread, half of the third set aside as afikoman (which comes last). But I can't remember ever having played hide and seek with that piece of matzah as is common in American households with children.

The Passover of my childhood was carbohydrate heaven. The morning after the seder we set our kitchen table without plates so that we could butter the large round matzah without breaking it, and although I'm sure the table was covered by a vinyl tablecloth, I also seem to recall newsprint, and the added pleasure of reading while eating matzah with shredded cheese, soft boiled or fried eggs, brown sugar or honey. From early on I knew how to trace the dots along the center line of the matzah and cut mine in half. I knew there was nothing like a sweet or savory filled matzah sandwich.

This annual bliss continued until my father died. Not that my mother stopped ordering matzah, making matzah ball soup and gremchelich after his death. No, I stopped eating matzah when the 16-year-old daughter of my parents' Jewish friends told me eating matzah was terrible for a girl's figure!

These days I tell myself cleaning house will make up for those extra calories. My husband and I continue my parents' traditions. After Purim I've got matzah on my brain and plenty of time to clean house and prepare physically and mentally for our own hybrid Pesach.

Here are the traditional recipes my parents prepared for our annual Dutch seders.

Gremchelich (makes 24 pancakes)
6 matzahs, 3 eggs, 5 oz granular sugar, 3.5 oz raisins (soaked in water), 3.5 oz slivered almonds,¼ teaspoon cinnamon, grated rind of ½ lemon, oil, hot water

Break the matzahs in a colander, pour hot water on the pieces, let cool. Beat eggs together with sugar and cinnamon. Squeeze excess liquid from matzahs, combine matzah mush and egg mixture in a large bowl, mixing well by hand (keep it lumpy). Drain water off raisins and pat them dry with kitchen towel, add to batter together with almonds and lemon rind. If the mixture seems to wet, add some matzah meal (I like to make my own, using a rolling pin or a bottle to crush pieces of matzah folded inside a (clean) napkin or kitchen towel.

Heat oil in a skillet. Using two soup spoons, create balls of mixture and gently put them in the hot fat, flatten the ball with fork or spatula while the gremchelich cook, turn them over with a spatula when golden brown. Serve dusted with powdered sugar.

Haroset
1 bag of tutti frutti (prunes, dried apples, dried pears, etc.),3.5 oz chopped walnuts, 1 tsp cinnamon

Chop the tutti frutti into small chunks (make sure there are no pits in the prunes), sprinkle with cinnamon and mix in chopped walnuts. If not sticky enough to shape into small balls add some sweet wine or honey.

Clear Beef Broth with Spring Vegetables
For the stock: 4-6 cups of water (1 cup per person),2 or 3 meaty beef shanks (cut off excess fat),2 tsp kosher salt, 2 large carrots scraped clean, cut in 1-inch chunks, 2 peeled stalks of celery, cut in 1-inch chunks,1 leek (white and green) cut in length and quartered, washed very well (dirt hides between layers), 2 sprigs of parsley,1 Tbsp fresh or 1 tsp dried thyme, 1 turnip, quartered, 2 peeled cloves of garlic, 5 mushrooms, peeled and sliced.

Vegetables for Soup (to be added after straining of stock): 2 large carrots scraped clean and sliced thinly, or 1 cup of baby carrots cut in half, 1 heart of celery, all the light colored stalks, with leaves, cut in ¼-inch slices; 2 or 3 small leeks, most of the green removed, cut in length, then in ¼-inch slices, 4 mushrooms, peeled and sliced

Rinse shanks, add to large stockpot, add salt, cover with water and bring to a boil. Skim off foam, and continue doing so until very little foam or no foam appears. Add all of the other stock ingredients, bring to a boil again, then lower flame and let simmer for 3-4 hours.

Place clean, damp cheesecloth in colander, and place colander over a large pot. Strain stock through colander. Put the meat (which by then falls off the bone) back in the broth, and add the soup vegetables. Bring to a boil, lower heat and simmer for 20 minutes. After this you may cool the soup and refrigerate, or bring back to soft boil and start adding matzah balls.

Matzah Balls for Soup (makes 12)
3 matzahs, 3 Tbsp (or more as needed) matzo meal (see gremchelich recipe),2 eggs,1 Tbsp oil, ½ tsp kosher salt,1/8 tsp (more or less) black pepper (optional), 1 medium size onion, 1 tsp ginger powder (optional)

Break matzah in colander, dampen with cold water, and shake off excess liquid. Matzah pieces should not be too wet. Fry finely chopped onion in oil until golden brown. In large bowl, beat eggs until fluffy, mix well with moistened matzahs, onion, salt and spices. Let rest for 1 hour. Heat your favorite beef, chicken or even mushroom stock. Divide matzah mixture in 12 equal amounts and shape into balls. If mixture is too damp, add matzah meal. With the help of a soup ladle lower the balls into the softly boiling liquid. Cook for 20-30 minutes until the balls are done and bounce to the surface. If you made large balls, cut one in half to check whether it's done on the inside. Consistency should be firm and dry, not dark and soggy.

Eat well, enjoy, and Chag Sameach!

Previously published by InterfaithFamily.com Gremchelich and Easter Eggs Recipes for a Dutch Seder - InterfaithFamily.com

The Art of Blogging

2010-03-10T09:06:00.000-08:00

A blog post by Mia Easton at She Writes triggered thoughts on blogging in general and my blog in particular. Five years ago I launched both my website and my first blog the one you're visiting right now. Thinking of what had occupied my mind for 12 years, I shook the name Hope Filled Jars out of my hat. Can't say I knew exactly what the blog was going to be about. But I did know I wanted the webmaster to include a link on my website before letting it go live.

At that time I'd been writing a column, book reviews and articles for a Dutch web magazine for five years. I was in on the difference in style between writing for paper and for web content. Still, I felt I had to be very careful about what I "gave away" for free on my blog. Anything I saw fit to sell, I kept to myself.

Along the way I discovered that posts about more personal issues, such as hyperacusis, loss of sense of smell, or being an artist and a mother who doesn't get to see her daughter grow up, got more hits than anythings else.

Still it's taken me the five years (my magical destiny number) I've been creating blogs for myself and others, to come to the point where I'm willing, and even aiming at, writing more open-ended posts. Quite a feat for someone who likes to write well rounded pieces (the equivalent of having the last word). It wasn't until dialogue2010 and getting involved with the women writers and entrepreneurs blogosphere that I started to realize why some blogs get a lot of attention, and why mine did not.
The art of blogging is dialogue.

What is your secret? How do you get readers to respond to your blog posts?

What an Expat Leaves Behind

2010-03-06T09:21:00.000-08:00

Tonight at 10 p.m. a week ago, that is February the 27th I enjoyed a conference call with nine women from around the globe. When I dialed in on Skype to enter the conference call the first voices I heard were of American expats artist/writer Rose Deniz, who as initiator of dialogue2010 would chair the meeting, and founder of expat+HAREM Anastasia Ashman, who hosted the conversation.

For me this conference call was a first, and a little unsettling in that you could hear people "enter" what in my imagination was the foyer of a home or studio, while I myself sat alone at my desk, staring at the document on the computer, that held my answers, correct that, my notes in response to questions Rose Deniz posted Online previous week.

Meanwhile one after the other announced her arrival at the virtual meeting place. Another American expat Tara Agacayak, and Irish Catherine Yiğit said hi from Turkey. Sezin Koehler dialed in from early morning Prague, Karen Armstrong Quartarone from Italy, Elmira Bayrash from New York, Joslyn Eikenberg from Idaho and Catherine Bayar whom I thought to be in Turkey at the time, announced that she and I were both in the same timezone, for she called in from Berkeley, California.

Rose made the introductions and made sure every one of us got a two-minute moment to say something about living in a foreign country. The first question we focused on was what we left behind in order to make the most of our hybrid lifestyle. Hearing all the comments, I pictured thoughts about the expat hybrid lifestyle forming an audible cloud, similar to the tag or label cloud you see in the sidebar of many blogs.

What I jotted down while listening, but forgot to say: The opportunity to see the children of friends and cousins grow up, being part of their developments, that's what I left behind and missed out on.

What (notion) did you have to leave behind in order to live your life abroad to the fullest?

The Silence Between Friends

2010-03-05T23:09:00.001-08:00

At times during dialogue2010 the conference call with nine other women, I was amazed to hear the silence —usually reserved for encounters between the best of friends— between remarks, when each of us pondered the effect of what the other said.

As Rose Deniz states: Dialogue is Art

In our virtual expat-HAREM mutual respect and willingness to listen carefully made up for invisibility. The hour flew by and when we stopped I had the feeling we had reached the starting point for future conversations.

After barely six hours of sleep I woke up the morning following dialogue2010 with my mind racing, ready to pick up the conversation where we had left off the previous evening. I wanted to share the notion that I felt found. My situation wasn't so different from that of the others. I, the one who supposedly had it so easy living in America, realized: I as well am a hybrid, the foreigner, the stranger in a strange land, coming in, willing to open up, to honor and respect, hoping to make a difference, honoring her own background, while taking in all that's new.

When did the notion that you were no longer a tourist and visitor in your adopted country hit home?

On the Look Out for Snail Mail

2010-03-05T22:59:00.000-08:00

It used to be that hearing the mailman deliver word from friends and relatives was the highlight in my day. Nowadays the bark of Mocha, my twenty-pound guard dog merely announces her nemesis dumping bills and magazines, plus holiday cards and calendars for the previous owners of our house in the box at the front door. Electronic mail is delivered 24/7 in one of the four virtual mailboxes I maintain. I've turned off the "you've got mail" feature, as to not be constantly reminded of new arrivals. What I do look forward to though, is the ringing of the telephone, or the jingle of Skype, telling me I may hear the voice of a friend or loved one.

What makes your day, a real letter in the mail, a phone call from a far-away friend, or a comment on your blog?

Postal Stamps and Overseas Calls

2010-03-05T22:47:00.001-08:00

Sixteen years ago, when I emmigrated from the Netherlands to the United States, one of my best friends told me that her daughter, who lives in France, preferred receiving letters over phone calls. "She likes that you can touch a letter and read it again. So I'll be writing you," she said to me. And she did, like clockwork biweekly. I looked out for the imaginative Dutch postal stamps almost as much as her writing.

Given the choice between a letter, a call or the possibility to blog and receive comments, which would you pick?

From Kitchenwaste to Black Gold

2010-03-04T10:53:00.000-08:00

If I ever saw a badly created apple peel it's the one in the photograph. The peel should be so thin, that all you see is the shiny skin, not any of the moist flesh of the fruit. Any excuse? Nah, not really, sleepiness perhaps. My daddy taught me better, I know that much! In "Painting for Life" the book I'm working on, one of the sections is dedicated to "How to Peel an Apple".

The picture shows the empty yogurt container, which so far is filled with:
*a piece of used paper towel on the bottom
*coffee grinds plus paper cone**)
*tea bag
*apple peel and core
**) Gary bemoans the demise of his gold filter but they are available for his new coffee maker, all he has to do is follow the link to wisegeek.

Later today we'll add the veins of lettuce leaves, potato peel et cetera.
Off late the City of Seattle's Utility Department allows (no urges) us to put all kitchen scraps in the yard waste. Cooked leftovers, rice with sauce and even animal protein including dairy. All of which, together with the kitchen waste of all those amazing Seattle restaurants will be made into the most luscious, dark, mysterious life force known as compost. A-ma-zing!

Chicken skin in my kitchen waste though? Don't think so. Perhaps well-wrapped in newsprint, and dumped in the yard waste bin for the good utility folks to dispose of, but most definitely not mixed in with the kitchen waste that will go into our own compost heap. I can well image the wild party we'd have in the backyard, all the meat eating critters would notify their kin and friends. No, I'd rather keep the compost crew limited to worms and toss in some thicker apple peel for them. After all worms are the garden laborers creating black gold from yard and kitchen waste.

Call it a Wrap for Kitchen Waste

2010-03-03T17:57:00.000-08:00

Composting is an art and you don't want it to stink. After years of practicing at the P-Patch community garden, I had the creation of compost down. That came in handy when former Seattle Mayor Nickels let it be known that everyone in town had to start separating kitchen waste from garbage.

That announcement coincided with our moving into a house. Soon my aim was not merely to separate and recycle, but to create as little garbage as possible. When you live in an apartment or condo you dump your trash bags down a shoot or in a container, without ever really getting an idea of how much garbage it is you produce, something you can gauge better when you have to haul the bins to the curb yourself. The two of us have always recycled with care; separating plastics, cans and glass from other trash, but once we had our own yard, we, well, I, became obsessed by separating this from that and the other.

Some Friday mornings we don't have any bins to take to the curb.

Greens, peels, teabags, coffee grinds, it can all go back into the garden. That is, after some extra care. You can bury a mixture of browns and greens or dump it all in the composting bin. Don't take the "brown and green" to literal though, the art of composting tells us coffee grinds for instance are considered "green", not brown. This has something to do with nitrogen. Don't ask me what exactly, you can read all about it in this blog post by Interbay P-Patch Master Gardeners.

If you bury your mix, cover it with a foot of dirt and leave it be. Composting materials in a bin have to be turned. You'll find excellent composting advice on the composting blog of the organic master farmers at the Seattle Interbay P-Patch. I especially like their post on "the good and the bad and the ugly" regarding your compost.

My composting routine starts early in the morning as I stand at the kitchen counter peeling and coring the apple I'll cut into my cereal with yogurt. We always have one or two rinsed yogurt containers in the sink that are lined with a small piece of paper towel, to keep things from sticking to the bottom, so I dump the peel in there. As soon as my tea has steeped I toss the teabag on top. Gary drinks coffee in the morning so his grinds land on top of the peel and tea. Later we'll add the hard vein of Romaine lettuce and the skin of a sweet potatoe. By the end of the day, it's a wrap!

I've got a memory of outdoors markets such as the Albert Cuyp in my former hometown Amsterdam, that often comes to mind as I wrap my kitchen waste. Some of the greengrocers would place a cauliflower or a pound of Brussels sprouts or whatever, in newsprint. The image of large calloused hands carefully placing crisp vegetables in the middle of a paper with old news, folding the four corners to the center, turning the package over, to repeat the procedure once more, is etched upon my mind.

Art of Composting

2010-01-16T09:51:00.000-08:00

The plant I used as a model for this painting was a gift from a gardener I met at the oldest P-Patch in Seattle, located on the grounds of the old Picardo farm. Before we moved into a house with its own yard, we tended a plot at the Upper Queen Anne P-Patch, one of the many organic community gardens in Seattle.

The —P— in P-Patch doesn't stand for a pea in the pod, but for the name of the farmer who, during economically hard times, let neighbors grow their vegetables on his property, years before the city of Seattle bought the land in 1973, and the first official community garden in town was a fact.

Since it's practically impossible to control the spread of pesticides (it's carried on the wind) from one plot to the next, the early gardeners agreed all of the gardening should be done without. That is, pests had to be controlled in a natural manner, not with chemicals that could be bad for one's health and the planet.
While they were at it, they voted to use natural fertilizer as well.

In the Pacific Northwest the story goes that the best fertilizer is a salmon, buried in the soil where you plan to have your vegetable garden. Could be true, but chances are the neighborhood cats will dig up the fish before it can do you or your plants any good. An alternative is steeping fish meal in water which is poured on the soil. Cats seem to pull their little noses up for that, but you'll see plenty of flies hovering over the areas treated with such an infusion. We prefer horse or chicken manure mixed with compost.

Recipe for Compost: Russian Kale or other vegetable stalks, apple and potato peels, chopped in 2 inch pieces, teabags and coffee grinds (from your home brew or barista), grass clippings, dried leaves, weeds (without seed heads) and water, turned weekly.

Mother/mother-* at A.I.R. Gallery

2010-01-10T16:29:00.000-08:00

Since I couldn't tear myself away from Seattle, I didn't have a chance to take pictures of the Mother/mother-* group exhibition at the A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, N.Y. That's too bad, for this is the only picture I have in which my print shows. Third piece from the right, black/white pinned to wall between two framed pieces.

If you're one of the other participants, or a visitor who made photos of this exhibition (no matter whether it was during the opening, with people present and artwork only partially visible) if you have a photo in which my print Bird Armor is in the picture, I'd love to receive a copy. I'd love to see photographs of the opening —period— if you get my point. Thanks in advance!

Birth of Butterfly

2010-01-08T12:47:00.000-08:00

In 1997 the birth of a butterfly from a broken heart shaped vessel seemed to be the ultimate transcendence of grief. My sweetheart and I suffered broken hearts after the birth and death of our little girl. Today she would have been seventeen.

Transcendence of Grief

2010-01-08T12:45:00.001-08:00

My sweetheart worked at the Seattle Repertory Theatre at the time that Philip Kan Gotonda's "The Balad of Yochiyo was being staged. The tragedy tells the romantic love story of a married potter and his apprentice. Back in my studio, after watching the show, I started doodling and soon the broken vessels took the shape of broken hearts.

Broken Heart

2010-01-08T09:55:00.000-08:00

The Ballad of Yachiyo, a tragedy by Philip Kan Gotonda, about a potter's apprentice's broken vessel and heart, performed at the Seattle Repertory Theatre in 1997 under direction of Sharon Ott, touched me so that I was inspired to create a linoleum print.

Parent and Art at A.I.R.

2009-12-08T14:31:00.001-08:00

If you were to ask me where I heard or read about Jennifer Wroblewski's call for art created immediately following a pregnancy or the birth of a child, I couldn't tell you. Perhaps it was on Twitter, possibly I clicked on a tinyurl or otherwise shortened web address that linked to a Website. You know how that goes. At any rate, I arrived at a place on the Internet where entrees could be uploaded. Easy does it. At least that's how it seemed at first. I had some material that answered to the call, I could upload that no problem. Instead of entering merely my favorite, a pen and ink collage, called "Starlight" (which was used for the cover of my book Creative Acts of Healing), I scanned pages from my Analytical Journal 1997.

In the required essay I mentioned a pen and ink series, "In the Eyes of the Gods we are Ants" drawn on the handmade paper I created, tearing up art-business correspondence that no longer mattered to me, after the delivery of our beautiful daughter Ariane Eira.

I was sure the curator would receive more entries that spoke of grief related to motherhood, but it was the first time that I encountered a call for art-work that spoke to me as a bereft mother. Perhaps that was the reason that I spaced out during the upload of the images —I didn't enter half of the work I had described.

Whether my work would make the cut or not, I was content I responded to the call, which allowed me to reconnect with the how and why et cetera.

Next thing I knew I received the message that my work had been selected for inclusion in the Mother/mother-* exhibition at the A.I.R. Gallery. To my great surprise Jennifer Wroblewski had picked not my number one choice, but one of the images from my journal.
Why? I wondered. Reading later on what the curator wrote about my drawing reinforced what I have known all along, but rarely apply to my own work, that each and every viewer adds significance to a piece. When your work remains hidden for view, when you keep your drawings in a portfolio that you never share with others, when you keep your writing as files inside folders on your computer, you not only deprive the world of your work, you deprive yourself of the responses of others. Responses that at times can bring tears to your eyes.

Jennifer Wroblewski: "Judith van Praag's 'Bird Armor' drawing, a breathtaking testament to the inherent strenght of maternity and the anguish of losing a child."

This said, written and read, I had to look up the page before the one with the Bird Armor drawing to understand where I was coming from twelve years ago. Earlier I showed the notebook at an Open Studio event, and I had taped pages together to ensure that visitors wouldn't start leaving through the book. For the first time I saw what had triggered the making of Bird Armor, it was HURT.

"When you come to the edge of all that you know, you must believe one of two things: There will be earth to stand on, or you will be given wings to fly," by Anonymous.

Mother/mother-* Curated by Jennifer Wroblewski,
On view at A.I.R. Gallery until January 3, 2010
111 Front Street #228, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Gallery hours Wednesday through Sunday 11 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Phone 212 255 6651

Real Dutch Applepie on Boerenbont

2009-12-03T19:01:00.001-08:00

Judy Shintani's Healing Family Trees Grow on History and Hope

2009-09-10T07:38:00.000-07:00

On June 27, 2009 the ArtXchange Gallery offered a free, hands-on "Remembrance Art Workshop" presented by Judy Shintani. The event was organized in conjunction with Legacies of War, which in turn is a project of the National Interest Project (PIP), a New York based 30-year-old nonprofit. The "Legacies of War National Traveling Exhibit" creates awareness about the bombing of Laos, and campaigns for removal of unexploded bombs that remained in the ground.

According to statistics ±10,000 Laotians make their home in Washington State, of those ±7,000 live in Seattle proper. The local chapter of "Legacies of War" received a Grant to collect the stories of Laotians here. In 2010 the resulting project "Our Shared Journey" shall be shown at the Wing Luke Museum.
Sakuna Thongchanh the Legacy of War organizer in Seattle said, "This will be an important moment in time, since no other museum so far has been willing to give the Legacies of War Exhibit a home."

Judy Shintani shared images and stories of her work as a "transformative" artist. Thus presenting the notion that turning painful memories into art is a healing action.
Nametags hanging from Shintani's "Family Tree" for instance are reminiscent of those worn by her relatives on their way to the internment camps. Adorned with portrait pictures however, those same tags are the leaves on the branches of the family tree, a way to honor her heritage.

During the June exhibit at the gallery, visitors were invited to write their thoughts on strips of rice paper that they could add to Shintani's "Remembrance Shrine". Those comments were the inspiration for the "Remembrance Tree" that Shintani created especially for the workshop on the 27th. This "extended family" tree will become part of the Legacies of War National Traveling Exhibit.

On that Saturday afternoon, the scrawny chicken wire body of the tree was dressed with memorial "leaves", created by those present. After a short meditation, everyone —outfitted with scissors, glue, markers and natural elements reminiscent of Laos, such as tamarind pods, banana leaves, flowers, medicinal bark and herbs— embarked on the art project. Memories surfaced and were put into words or visualized.

Darasavanh "Dara" Kommavongsa Craven wrote about her father's sugar cane orchard, raved about the perfume of papayas, then spoke of having been taken from her mother by her Freedom Fighter father when she was 6-months old. Mother herself of a Kindergartner she hopes to be re-united with her mom some day. She posed for the camera, holding up a picture of rice paddies and one with U.N. helmets and weapons.
"Perhaps someone will recognize my features and maiden name, and bring us together," she said with a brave smile that belied her emotions.

Khamsavart "KV" Saengthasy drew rice paddies and pole houses, and probed added an elk-like bison and a line with drying clothes. Just a three-year-old when he left Laos for a refugee camp with his parents and sister, he mostly recalled the smell of rain and mud. He grinned remembering cousins falling from the elevated floor into the muck

KV's father Khampaeng Saengthasy penned his account of fleeing his homeland, illustrating the memory with a drawing of a fort-like refugee camp and passport size pictures of his wife, himself and their two children.

"That's the prison I was in, as a small child," KV said pointing at the watchtower on a corner of the encampment. He shrugged, "I hadn't done anything wrong."

Meanwhile female relatives of the gents created artistic blossom holders and collages using banana leaves and photo copied family pictures; filling in the empty spaces on Shintani's Healing Art tree.

The aim of Legacies of War is: "to provide space for healing the wounds of war and to create greater hope for a future of peace." People such as artist Judy Shintani and gallery owner Cora Edmonds help the organization reach that goal.

Previously published in the International Examiner Volume 36, number 15, August 5-18 2009

Forecast Public Art Umbrella Benefit 2009

2009-08-21T13:25:00.000-07:00

Yes, I am painting an umbrella for this benefit event, see for all participating artists the list below. Visit Forecast PublicArt Umbrella Site for tickets