Loquacious: "Feral" by Kimberley McGill

Loquacious: full of excessive talk : wordy (www.m-w.com)

Loquacious is a "wordy" series that revels in language. Read more essays in the series here.

I've had the pleasure of knowing Kimberley McGill for several years now. Though we've never met in person, I feel confident that we could sit down to tea together and chat for hours about books, travel, spirituality, and cats. I think I first made Kimberley's acquaintances when she was a student in one of my Alchemy writing classes, and I got to know her better when she became one of my writing coaching clients. It's been a joy to see her transition from being rather tentative about her writing ability to owning it. Her perspective is always interesting and often a bit unusual -- which is just the kind of perspective I like to encounter in people and on the page.

Feral

By Kimberley McGill

Growing up, I memorized the rules of civilized behavior – how to look, dress, walk, think, and feel. I learned to bend to the mandates of schools, media, and my abusive parents. Politely and quietly, I surrendered while simultaneously applying my lipstick and mascara. Domesticated.

As an adult, I tried to hide the fact that I wrote poetry and wanted to speak the truth. I longed to satisfy my curiosity about the world and judge right and wrong for myself. Even though I could barely remember a time before I'd internalized all those rules, I wanted to ditch the suffocating masks. I dreamed of living as myself – going feral.

I respect feral animals. Humans try to domesticate them, yet they somehow find a way to escape and return to their natural state instead of remaining a disguised creature. They embody authenticity and resourcefulness.

It took a while, but I eventually slipped out of my disguise. The shift disoriented me, but I hung on and found, buried under layers of lies, a feral compass that pointed me toward emotional and physical health. Not everyone in my life celebrated with me. They could tolerate my bohemian look, they could even overlook my divorce, but all my crazy truth talk had to stop. When I kept talking some people disowned me, others chalked everything up to insanity, and still others gave me long, animated lectures on how selfish I had become and admonished me to stop making everyone's lives so stressful.

I felt like what I imagine the Giant African Snails would feel if they actually had brains. As it is, they creep along oblivious to the fact that people are upset with them. Somehow, humans transplanted them from their home in Africa and dumped them in Australia. A shipping accident might have brought them over, or maybe someone thought the snails would look cool at the bottom of those huge fish tanks that aquariums use. In any case, they got loose and now go about their business eating everything in their path, including houses. Seriously, they can chomp away at houses. So now Aussies call them an "invasive species," as if the snails had a big meet-up to plan an invasion of Australia. As I mentioned before, they don't actually have brains. But if they did, would they feel as angry and hurt as I did when people twisted my story to use as a weapon against me?

These days I don't have anyone in my life that treats me this way, but a few of the people who love me don't always understand me. When my daughter, Melissa, discovered that I titled my blog "Feral Compass," she texted me: "Mom, people will think you don't bathe or use eating utensils. Do you have to be strange? :)" She included the smiley face, not because she didn't mean what she wrote, but to let me know she loved me anyway.

When Melissa came from Mississippi to visit us here in Southern California, I had to warn her about the feral parrots that live in our area. They're not dangerous, but at sunrise they come out of the trees squawking and screeching long before any sensible person's alarm clock goes off. Having our double-paned windows closed doesn't protect us from the piercing noise. Melissa brought earplugs and lovingly rolled her eyes when I told her that I love the birds.

Every morning I smile, even while I'm cussing them out, because I feel a kinship with these Amazonian Parrots. Our stories mirror each other – they were smuggled in with the intention of domesticating them into pets, but before that could happen they escaped to make a life for themselves as free birds. I'm in awe of the fact that their flocks aren't homogeneous – they include different species of Amazonian Parrots that wouldn't usually hang out together. I don't know how much of a brain they have, but they have figured out that they can thrive together. Of course, it helps in their relationship with humans that the little green screechers don't eat houses. They just make the windows rattle.

I've also found a diverse community, outside of family, to thrive in. A "tribe" made up of women from all over the map whose children also call them strange. Sometimes when we get together, we can make windows rattle, too.

I'll always think of myself as a feral human. I deconstructed the roadmap I'd lived with for more than half a lifetime and remade it to move closer to my values and my heart. The map has built-in flexibility for all the unexpected, and sometimes unwelcome, circumstances that show up. My feral choices heal and delight me and can also leave me feeling raw and vulnerable. They're the only choices I'm willing to make.

Oh, and in case my daughter's text message raised any concerns about my personal hygiene and table manners: I adore bubble baths and even know how to use chopsticks.

** ** **

With roots in the American South and Argentina, Kimberley's feral compass  has led her through South America, Europe, and a good assortment of back alleys. Currently she lives in Southern California with her sweet man and two mostly feral but spoiled cats. She's working on developing her blog (Feral Compass), revising her poetry, and wriitng a few true stories for a crazy and almost impossible project she dreamed up while riding the train from California to New Orleans last year. She won't allow anyone to trick her into revealing the details.

Image credits:
Snail: http://www.flickr.com/photos/usdagov/6947960770/
Parrots: United States Department of Agriculture, http://tiny.cc/l4fcuw

Loquacious: "Bird" by Karen Dietrich

Loquacious: full of excessive talk : wordy (www.m-w.com)

Loquacious is a "wordy" series that revels in language. Read more essays in the series here.

Today's guest essay was written by Karen Dietrich, a real, live writer who lives right here in my town! Until recently I've had very little local creative community, but that is slowly changing thanks to another local writer (who you'll meet in a future Loquacious column) who introduced me to Karen. In addition to being a poet, writer, and professor, Karen is also one-half of the music group Essential Machine. And in a werid twist of local connection, we discovered that she worked with my husband at Blockbuster Video about 15 years ago. I'm glad that our paths have crossed again, and I'm pleased to bring you this engaging and vivid essay about her run-in with "bird."

** ** **

Bird

By Karen Dietrich

I still remember the tape recorder – it was silver and black, and from the Sears Catalog my sister Linda and I prized. Sprawled on the shag carpet, we routinely circled our desires on those four-color glossy pages. The tape recorder had been a gift for Linda on her eighth birthday. I was five years old, a smaller shadow following longer shadows around the neighborhood.

One afternoon, while Linda was in school, I stole the tape recorder from its hiding place under her bed and ran to the basement, where everything was amber with paneled walls and mounted deer heads. Into the pinprick holes of the recorder's microphone, I played Olivia Newton-John's Greatest Hits from the turntable, announced each song like a DJ, the plastic buttons smooth on my fingertips as I hit record, stop, rewind.

The problem was the playback, the sound of another girl in the room. Surely it wasn't me. I ran upstairs to my mother, played the evidence for her, certain the machine was defective – a loose component, a malfunctioning red and black wire deep inside. My mother laughed, then gave me a pat on the head, my dark hair parted taut down the middle, two identical braids dangling below each shoulder.

"That's not me!" I told her. "That's not my voice."

"But it is you, of course," she said. "You just can’t say words with er sounds."

"Yes, I can. Test me," I said. I was a diligent student, a lover of assignments and tests. Memorization thrilled me, and I had a knack for it. Mind like a steel trap, my father said.

"Say bird into the tape recorder and play it back. You'll see what I mean," my mother said, and went back to her housecleaning, her hands forever hidden in buckets of soapy wash water.

I locked myself in my pink bedroom and recited the blackbird verse I remembered from a book of nursery rhymes:

Sing a song of sixpence a pocket full of rye,

Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.

When the pie was opened the birds began to sing,

Wasn't that a dainty dish to set before the king?

When I played it back, I realized my mother was right. I couldn't say bird. My version sounded more like board. I said bird over and over into the silver and black tape recorder, hoping that eventually the playback would match what I thought I was saying.

I began avoiding the words I couldn't say correctly, and for the most part it was a success. Bird was the only difficult one. Although I now hated the word, I loved the creatures intensely. I loved watching robins gather in our yard. I loved watching sparrows assemble nests in the porch roof gutters, their small tufts of grass and twig peeking from the eaves. The previous spring, a bird had made a low nest in our dogwood tree. Three speckled eggs had hatched into small alien-like babies, necks stretching to reach the fresh worms their mother dangled above them. I promised myself to never speak of birds until I fixed my speech problem.

And with that promise, birds were suddenly everywhere. There were Cardinals in coloring books, and black crows on Saturday morning cartoons. There were blue jays on the hidden picture page of Highlights Magazine, sweet birds sleeping in the hem of a boy's pant leg.

One year of speech therapy eventually cured me. My therapist's name was Karen, too. She gave me stickers for progress – metallic, puffy, or scratch-and-sniff. I pressed them inside the front cover of my workbook, a softbound edition of speech exercises. Karen had discovered the source of the problem. It was my tongue – it didn't know to anchor itself to my top molars while making the er sound. In the evenings, I practiced speaking into my pink Holly Hobby hand mirror, watching my lips and tongue, saying bird over and over into the air, letting my sound take flight.

Bird reminds me of hate and love and the desire to make something beautiful. Bird reminds me of language and emotion and how they swirl into memory, a seemingly endless spiral. Today, when I say the word, it's always like singing, like birdsong.

** ** **

Karen Dietrich is the author of a memoir, The Girl Factory, forthcoming in October 2013. Her poems and essays have appeared in Pittsburgh City Paper, The Bellingham Review, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and elsewhere. She lives in Greensburg, PA. Find Karen online at KarenDietrich.net.

Loquacious: "The Magic of Names" and "Gorgeous"

Loquacious:  full of excessive talk : wordy (www.m-w.com)

Loquacious is a "wordy" series that revels in language. Read more essays in the series here.

This installment of "Loquacious" is a double delight, which is appropriate, since the following essays were written by the delightful Helen Agarwal of Dixon Hill. I met Helen at Squam Art Workshops a few years ago, and I've enjoyed the way we've kept in touch in a sort of dipping-in-and-out, swooping-by sort of way. I swing by to see what she's up to, and she does the same with me. (All of this swooping has been virtual, sadly, because Helen lives in England and I'm here on the other side of the pond.) A connection to place, a sense of beauty, and a love of words suffuse Helen's work with light. I recently wrote a guest post for the "Changing Places" series on her blog, and I'm delighted to return the favor by hosting her here in The Word Cellar with two essays about some wonderful wordy things. Why two? Because sometimes you just can't stop yourself at one when there's so much loveliness and power to explore with language. I'm happy to bring both of them to you.

Gorgeous

By Helen Agarwal

Gorgeous. It's always been gorgeous. Since the very beginning. Since gorgeous first entered my consciousness.

Gorgeous sounds….well, gorgeous. Full and ripe. A word to gorge on. A moreish, succulent, soft yet satiating sound. I have to pout my lips to say it. Which makes me feel pretty damn gorgeous.

Gorgeous is a word to linger on. That first syllable. Teasing. Tantalising. It can be drawn out forever. Emphasised. Leaned into so easily.

The second syllable. It's coquettish. Sinuous in a neat kind of way. Most of all, it's juicy. Gor–geous. Gorge juice. And maybe that's the nub of it.

Favourite word? Gorgeous.

Favourite food? Fruit.

Always, always, always. No consideration, no decision. No questioning my taste buds or bothering my brain cells. Fruit and gorgeous are part of my genetic make-up. They're who I am. Slice me in two and the rings inside would be fruity and gorgeous and fruity and gorgeous and fruity and gorgeous like pineapple rings right back to the moment of conception.

But this is hindsight, this deconstruction of the word. A little erudite, a touch poetic. Until my rambling thoughts wandered down this page, none of this had ever occurred to me. Far from being brazen, gorgeous has always seemed an innocent word to me. Seductive but wholesome. The connotations, after all, are naturally good. Gorgeous is only ever attached to delightful things. Or to rich and resplendent things. Nothing horrible is ever gorgeous.

There's another association. More particular. The dreamt-up hero of my childhood fantasies called me Gorgeous. Not a compliment, you understand, but his fond name for me. Instead of Love or Honey or Pet Lamb (that's another story). To him, I was Gorgeous. And it's stuck. These days, I'm even Gorgeous to myself. As in, "Come on, Gorgeous, you can do it!" when I really don't think I can and I need to cajole and wheedle and urge every last scared or reluctant ring of my being to do the necessary thing.

When it comes down to it, gorgeous is a word I don't need to unpack. For me, it's an evident truth. Of all the scrumptious words in the world (and there are many), gorgeous is simply the most gorgeous.

* * *

The Magic of Names

By Helen Agarwal

If words are powerful, then names have superpowers. They're the magicians of the word world and they make magicians of us, too....rolling off our tongues and dancing through our minds as spells to conjure with.

Our names are generally the first things given us on arrival in this world. Heck, half the time we've been given them before we ever get here. We construct elaborate ceremonies around the giving of those names; and they turn into containers for all we do and become for the rest of our lives. Hurl a name into the ether and it carries with it a mass of associations. Invoke a name and you can inspire an army, terrify a populace, calm a crowd, reassure a baby.

It's not just our own names that endlessly fascinate us. We have a compulsion to name everything around us. A scientist discovers a star, he names it. A child is given a doll, she names it. When you think about it, perhaps the only thing, other than existence itself, that everything in the universe – animate and inanimate – has in common is that, sooner or later, it all winds up with a name.

When I was small, names were my playthings. I wove stories around them, played games with them, compiled long lists of boys' and girls' names in an old blue notebook. Every so often, I'd pore over the lists and choose the names of my future children. The number of my proposed offspring always correlated directly with the number of names I couldn't bear to live without.

I was eighteen when I discovered the power of my own name. With several years of depression behind me, as well as the usual teenage inadequacy, I rolled up to my first day of university and stood in front of the notice boards in the English department. Scanning the lists of seminar groups, my own name leapt out at me. And the shock was physical. I'd felt like a shadow for so long, barely visible even to myself. Yet someone behind one of the doors in that corridor had acknowledged my existence; had accorded an entire place on this course to me. Suddenly my name gave me substance that was tangible and real. A lifeline back into the world.

Years later, names rescued me again. Living far from home, lonely and homesick, I found a small botanical garden close by. I'm big on nature and dappled sunshine, but those weren't the things that drew me there, week after week. It was the labels attached to the plants. And, oh, the names! Wandering the wooded paths, I kept company with the Green Dragon and the Trout Lily, the Sensitive Fern and the Fringe Tree, with Jack-In-The-Pulpit and Rose Vervain, with the Swamp Milkweed and the Small Yellow Lady's Slipper. I "collected" the magical words in the back of another notebook and fantasised about the character of each fairy tale plant around me. The garden became a living storybook. Enchanted.

These days, it's the Pennine hills I roam. No plant labels here. Instead, I send names spinning from the wand of my imagination and create my own reality from the moors about me, giving name to favourite features, telling them they count. And so I walk along The Mossy Path; I visit The Pool of Reflection; I pass The Spindly Tree. Weaving a personal landscape from the physical one around me. Still conjuring a world from words. A world from names.

** ** **

Helen Agarwal lives in a gorgeous house in a gorgeous place in the Pennine hills of northern England – where the names of Cathy and Heathcliff echo round the moors. She writes about her life (gorgeous and otherwise) at Dixon Hill and posts what she hopes are gorgeous photos of her magical world on Instagram. Her e-course, Falling Into Place, is a gorgeous exploration of place and self and the power of names. Helen tries very hard not to overuse the word gorgeous.

Loquacious: "Rubble" by Annie Penfield

Loquacious:  full of excessive talk : wordy (www.m-w.com)

Loquacious is a "wordy" series that revels in language.

In this essay, written after Hurricane Irene devastated portions of Vermont in 2010, writer Annie Penfield meditates on the word, the idea, and the reality of "rubble." I love Annie's writing because she uses language to pull readers into her world ― inside and out. When I read her work, I feel like I'm seeing the world through her eyes and riding (slipping, sliding, swirling) around in her thoughts. She combines her depth of spirit and introspection with a deep connection to the land, moving seamlessly from the internal to the external and back again, until there is no distance between the two. She is one of my closest friends from grad school, and I recently had the joy of spending time with her (and recent Loquacious contributor Laurie Easter) in a St. Benedictine monastery. There was plenty of laughter, great conversation, and, of course, some reading and writing. There also may have been lemon wedges, a small container of salt, and an unspecified amount of tequila. I hope you enjoy this essay as much as we enjoyed that tequila I do.

Rubble

By Annie Penfield

Rubble: sounds like bubble but also a rhyme with trouble. It means wreckage and fragments of a broken building. There is no hint of creation from rubble; hope can perhaps be derived from the sound of the word―rubble that bounces on the tongue upbeat like a child sounding b-b-b pushing a small matchbox car along a small dirt road through debris, through a village that has sprung from imagination.

The flood scrambled Vermont valley towns: claiming houses and herds, bridges and roads. The roads are all different after the flood. The river ate them. What is left is narrow and bumpy and crumbled at the edges. Now we have a single lane and a stoplight when before we were accustomed to just soaring down the hill.

With the stoplight, we must wend one at a time through the blind curves. Debris and uprooted culverts line the roads now stripped of pavement. What had churned alive in roiling waters now sits abandoned along the single-lane road.

I am waiting for the light―the one that tells me to go. Move. Move through the sorrow. I thought I was sad for the flood damage but I think I am sad about the unlived life. About possibilities I see for myself that seem scattered along a roadside, potential not yet pursued.

I saw the river course and claim a new path, then return to its banks. Like I see a dream but let it slip under everyday routine. My passion for other possibilities slips into the darkness of deep waters, like the coffins pulled from the graveyard, drawn in by the currents of the Irene-fueled river that ripped on land and houses and livestock. The landscape is different now. That graveyard is empty. I sit at a light and wait for change.

Along the road, long grasses flattened, an imprint of the flood. The water leapt its banks, flowing wild like fantasies across fields, and spreading like a prayer over open lands. Turning a corner, the river threw up its rocks and sticks. Piles of asphalt but not salvaged for the road. New fill will arrive to make the roads fresh and easy, but now I travel the rough, crude and functional.

The caskets traveled the undertow. They found traction to move and to be cast about. Twenty bodies have been found down stream and the struggle to reassemble them and the re-internment begins. To sit and wait for change, to watch the rivers run, to ignore the possibilities, will I dull to my current life, like that graveyard that has lost its souls.
 
I no longer believe in salvage. I want to lay a new path in the rubble and stumble my way into a future less certain. I let the waters rest within the familiar banks.

I am sitting at the light, waiting for change. Waiting to be released down the single road of rubble that follows the curves in the river.

** ** **

Annie Penfield lets her words ― and her children and horses ― run away with her.  She lives in Vermont with her husband, three children, two dogs, five horses, and one little donkey named Dazzle. She owns Strafford Saddlery and has her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is working on a memoir about her time on an Australian sheep station. Recently, her essay "The Half-Life" won the 8th Annual Fourth Genre Steinberg Essay Prize. It will be published in the February 2013 issue of Fourth Genre.

Loquacious: A serendipitous word choice from Laurie Easter

Loquacious:  full of excessive talk : wordy (www.m-w.com)

Loquacious is a "wordy" series that revels in language.

This week, the lively Laurie Easter, writer and fellow VCFA graduate, searches for her favorite word and comes to a serendipitous conclusion. I asked Laurie to write this essay before I named this series. She sent it to me around the time that the first "Loquacious" post went live, but I was on vacation and missed her email. A few weeks later she emailed again to ask about her submission, and asked if her post had inspired the name of the series. I had no idea what she was talking about until I found her original email and read the essay below. Call it serendipity, synchronicity, coincidence, or kismet (all good words), or just two writers' minds dipping into the same word pool. Whatever you call it, it sounds good. Keep reading and you'll see what I mean. 

Loquacious

By Laurie Easter

In considering writing this guest post on my favorite word, I found myself a bit stymied choosing a word, or even several, that deserved such accolades. What do I consider a favorite word? I wondered. (Now, as I write this, stymied comes to mind as a word I rather enjoy.) But on the morning of my deadline, I woke amidst a half-dream of words floating through my consciousness. One of which was SLEEP, a word I love, but whether it is for the sound of the word itself or the act, I cannot say. My snoozing brain whispered, Sleeeeeeeep, as if the extended long vowel sound could sequester me in my lulling subconscious.

Another word floating through my brain was RELIEF because yesterday I experienced an immense amount of it when my twenty-two-year-old daughter called from the wrecking yard after retrieving her personal belongings from her totaled Toyota Camry, which she had crashed two nights prior on a dark and windy rural highway. She said that in the daylight the car looked to be in a lot worse shape than it did in the near full moonlight after the air bag erupted against her face and chest, effectively smacking her into shock. Yes, RELIEF. That is a very good word ― and a very good feeling. Much better than any word that would describe me if there hadn't been airbags in her car. My dream-brain went on to wonder about this word RELIEF. Is it anything like RE-LEAF? In experiencing relief does one metamorphose like the trees that lose their leaves in fall, withstand the stark cold of winter, and then cheerily burst forth new growth in spring?

In search of that one special word, other words floated from my left hemisphere: FAMILY, PEACE, SERENITY, HOPE. But are they words that I love because of the way they roll around my brain or sound in a sentence, or do they merely carry weight due to their representational nature? Are they words that are fun to say or listen to? Peeeaaaace, my dream-brain said. It's got a nice sound, with that long E like sleep. Serenityyyy soothes. But hope and family? These words carry their weight in symbolism more than syntax. My dream-brain reached: What is a word that stands singularly special?

And then it came. LOQUACIOUS. It sounds like an exotic fruit, like if you opened it up to taste it, your mouth would salivate in spurts of anticipation the way it does from the smell of an overripe lemon. Say it: Lo-quay-ciousssss. Do you feel it, the tanginess of plump seeds and juicy pulp tantalizing your tongue and filling your cheeks? LOQUACIOUS.

** ** **

Laurie Easter holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She lives in Oregon with her husband and two daughters. But that will change in a few short weeks when her youngest daughter leaves for college three thousand miles away and everyone else has to move out of the house they've lived in for the last eight years. Laurie is the recipient of an Artist Grant from the Vermont Studio Center and will spend the beginning of her empty-nest life writing along the Gihon River in autumn.