February 11 Class

 

What's Love Got to Do With It?

My free creative writing class, Your Portland, is happening on Saturday, February 11, 10:15 a.m. at Taborspace!

In this encouraging group, we'll look at a variety of writings and then use prompts to begin telling our own Portland stories through poetry or creative prose. Feel free to message me for details.

In the meantime, here's one of my Portland stories -- a creative essay that was originally published by Mount Hope.

What’s Love Got to Do with It?

Imagine you’ve fallen in love – not with a person, but a thing; not with an object, but an activity. A seed must have been planted some time ago. Maybe it lay in the wisp of a memory from your childhood friend’s recital, in the froth of the white tutu that skimmed her legs. Or maybe it was inside the jewelry box with the pink figurine that began twirling as soon as you opened the lid. Whatever the reason, the desire to dance suddenly blooms inside you now like a riotous plant, and at the age of thirty-seven, you take your first ballet class. In that hour, your muscles burn, your t-shirt and gym shorts are soaked with sweat, and you don’t know a tendu from a grand jeté, but you’re hooked anyway.

After that, you go to ballet class every week. You go when you’re tired, when you’re coming down with a cold, and when you should be at home working. You’re even reluctant to attend your grandmother’s 95th birthday party because it means you’ll miss ballet. Secretly, you think such devotion will make you an exceptional dancer—the kind that lifts the audience with her as she leaps into the air—but that doesn’t happen. It could be your age since most dancers start training when they’re four or five. But to be honest, you were never all that coordinated, not to mention that you have the flexibility of a fence post, and there must be something wrong with your sense of rhythm, because whenever agroup of people start clapping to a song, you’re always a little off. In fact, you can’t think of a single quality that makes you suited for dancing, other than the passion that fuels your persistence.

Besides these physical challenges, ballet is, for you, the ultimate brain teaser. Even after one year of classes becomes three, then five, then eight, there are new combinations to learn every week. Each sequence of steps feels like a high school calculus problem you can’t solve without serious help. As much as you want to believe you’re graceful and accomplished and quick, that you’re smiling as you sweep across the floor, that your body as light as tulle, all it takes is one glance in the mirror to see that your mouth is a tight knot of tension and that you’re lurching forward on the wrong foot. In this sense, your frustration with ballet has brought out your least-attractive qualities. You’ve left more than one class with your face burning with embarrassment, and with your head a snarl of snarky thoughts, jealous of other students who have more aptitude.

Still, you love ballet. You love the soft pink slippers that get all worn and dirty around the toes, the long arms and graceful hands, the intensity of a room filled with dancers determined to master a new step. You love the metal barres with their peeling white paint and the vocabulary of rhyming French words—tombé, pas de bourrée—and the music that beckons each dancer to rise to its challenge, to leap beyond the familiar sphere of home, family and work into a world where sweat and strain and stubbornness can mingle with light and air and grace.

And then there’s performing.

As much as you love class, the spring recital is magic. On stage, in the lights. Costumes, clapping, and the camaraderie of waiting in the wings with the other dancers, who all encourage and compliment one another. Every year your studio presents a collection of pieces performed by different classes. Along with the younger students, who with their smooth faces and slender limbs look like real dancers, the adults also get their time in the spotlight.

As a beginning ballerina, your roles are all character parts, which involve a lot of posing and mugging between relatively simple steps. The first year you’re Raggedy Andy, complete with baggy-blue overalls, striped tights and a red-yarn wig. Another time you’re a harem girl, sporting voluminous hot-pink pants reminiscent of I Dream of Jeannie. In these get-ups, the audience isn’t likely to notice if your legs aren’t completely stretched, or your toes aren’t perfectly pointed, and as you take your bows, you feel the buzz that comes from making people laugh.

The year you turn forty-five is different though. Your class is doing a serious piece set to Mendelssohn’s beautiful “Venetian Gondola.” The dance doesn’t call for posing or exaggerated gestures. It’s just you and the other dancers in leotards, tights and short, sheer dresses performing pretty steps. Fast, difficult, pretty steps that require some expertise. If you make a wrong move, there’ll be no cartoonish costume to cover it.

To compensate for your lack of talent, you’re determined to do everything in your power to make sure you’re ready for the show. You begin by leaving little notes listing the sequence of steps all over your house—upstairs by the telephone, the table by your bed, the bulletin board above your desk. You even make sketches, reminding yourself of the position of your feet, the angle of your head, and which arm to extend. Mostly, though, you practice. Pirouettes (turns performed while balancing on one leg) have always been your downfall, and sure enough, you have to do one at the beginning of this dance. Luckily, you work at home, so you can jump up from your desk at any time and pirouette in your narrow kitchen, again and again.

One evening, you’re practicing at home before a rehearsal, and it isn’t going well. You tell yourself to give it a rest, but you can’t—you’ve decided you have to get in one good turn before you leave for the studio. Of course the more you try, the more tired and sloppy you get, until your arms and legs begin to resemble the appendages of a drunken puppet. After the twentieth desperate try, you finally make yourself stop, realizing that this frantic approach isn’t improving your technique. Any dancer will tell you that in order to execute a difficult move, you have to believe that you have the skill to nail it, and your repeated failures this evening are doing some damage to your psyche. Completely frazzled, you’re driving to the studio an hour later when, unbidden, a picture of one of your fellow dancers pops into your head. Nicola is pregnant with her first baby, and suddenly you can imagine her holding her son. With this image comes a wave of happiness and, strangely enough, love. You’ve made many friends through ballet, but you don’t know her as well. Tall and thin and athletic, she has long, thick, dark hair, and a dignified, almost regal, bearing. While she seems like a nice person, the two of you never talk much beyond the occasional comment on the rain or the difficulty of the dance.

Still, here you are, feeling this strong, unmistakable affection for her as if she is a dear friend.

And just like that, you know how to prepare for the performance. From that point on, you need to stop trying so hard, to stop focusing on yourself so much and just enjoy the music and the movement and the other people in the dance. Ballet teachers are always telling their students to remember to breathe, and that’s what you have to do—to breathe and look around the room, to see who you’re dancing with, and to appreciate them. To take pleasure in Meghan’s graceful lines, Clare’s smile, Birgit’s strength and Rehl’s courtliness. To stop concentrating on your inadequacies and just enjoy chatting with the other dancers as you all walk to your cars after a late rehearsal. Ballet, after all, is as much about love as muscle—the love of reaching for what looks like an impossible goal and the incomparable pleasure of moving in sync with other people.

Now you’re forty-nine. No matter how hard you try, you may never be flexible enough to do the splits, or skilled enough to execute a perfect pirouette. But love is something that comes naturally, the thing that can take us all to the place where Mendelssohn went when he wrote his music, the thing that leaves us all awestruck, like a new mother holding her infant. When you watch the video of the “Venetian Gondola” piece now, you see that love on your face. You didn’t turn into Anna Pavlova the night of the performance, but you weren’t just stumbling through a series of steps, either – you were dancing.

Your Portland -- Telling the Story of Your City

I'm so looking forward to teaching this class!

Your Portland

Creative Writing Class

  

                                             

Portland is more than a news story. It’s the story of your personal experiences. Of the people you know, the jobs you’ve had, the heady moments and the heartbreaks.

 

In this class, we’ll look at a variety of writings, then begin to tell our own Portland stories through poetry or creative prose.

 

Saturday, February 11, 2023

10:15 a.m. – 11:45 a.m.

Taborspace, 5441 SE Belmont

Free

 

All experience levels are welcome to join this encouraging class.

 

 

Led by award-winning writer Linda Ferguson. Her most recent collection, Not Me: Poems About Other Women, was published by Finishing Line Press. As a writing teacher, she has a passion for helping students find their voice and explore new territory.

A Walk in the Woods

 

Thank you d. ellis phelps and formidable woman sanctuary for including three of my poems in woodlands, a collection of art and poetry by 49 writers and artists. You can see the journal by clicking here.

They're Here!

A knock on my door, and then I found a box of these on my porch. What joy!

My third chapbook, Not Me: Poems About Other Women, is now in print. 

(Side note: The cover was inspired by a photo of Bette Davis.)

Here's what poet Diane Averill says about the book:

"Through a prism of voices, both real and imaginary, we gain new understanding of women's lives in a world that is not always made for them. At once subversive and strong, Ferguson's imaginative language both heightens and deepens our awareness of ourselves and others." –Diane Averill, author of Beautiful Obstacles.

If you'd like a copy, you can purchase one from me or order one from Finishing Line Press by clicking here.

Six...Oh!

Me on Christmas morning, 1987

Sixty is sexy.

Maybe?

Anyway, as my birthday approaches, I've been reading Ross Gay's The Book of Delights.

Here are a few of my own:

Cruising

When my husband gave me my Raleigh beach cruiser for Christmas in 1987, I didn't ride it that much.

Now, in 2022, it's my main form of transportation.....especially since our car has been in the shop since August. 

Oh yes! I bike to buy food and to fetch dog supplies and to pick up books at the library. To Taborspace to teach my classes and to visit my son on the other side of town. 

I started cycling about four years ago. Then last year we got a pup who barked a whole heck of a lot, and I rode even more just to get out of the house and away from that awful sound. What bliss to pedal over the Tilikum Bridge and have a moment of peace as I looked down at the Willamette River and saw it slowly moving to its own music.

Like a set of matryoshka dolls, there are multiple delights within this one delight. For instance, what possessed my husband to buy a bike for un-athletic me in the first place? 

But the fact that he did was a gift, indeed.

Shall We Dance?

Backstage in 2010

I gave up dancing -- one of the great loves of my life -- 10 years ago and thought, Well, that's that. Now, thanks to two ladies in London, England, my dance journey is beginning again. 

A few years ago, Susan started teaching her mum, Elizabeth (whose body was experiencing the less-delightful aspects of aging), ballet exercises. The two of them were having such a blast they decided to share the fun and benefits of dance by forming Ballet Based Movement, which offers lively, good-humored classes on Zoom for beginning and over-50 dancers from all over the world.

Thanks to Susan's energetic encouragement and inspired choreography, in this class we transcend the real and imagined limits of age and enter a world of music and muscle where we become Giselle challenging the spell of ghostly spirits; or Sylvia, the goddess of the forest with our bows and arrows; or a crowd of cheeky-cheeksters cocking our hips to Scott Joplin's "Elite Syncopations."

We're not just dancing: We're laughing and straightening our spines and getting stronger (dancing these past two years has made me a better bike rider and vice versa!), and falling head-over-pointed-toes in love with movement.

Psst, if you'd like to join us, check out the Ballet Based Movement website. 

Woof

You know those silly people who knew nothing about dogs and went out and got one anyway at the peak of the pandemic? 

Hello, I'm one of them.

Craving long, meditative walks with a warm companion, I started my search for The Perfect Puppy, which led my husband and me to Jenny. 

Jenny, as fluffy as a stuffed animal asleep on your pillow, but also fiercely reactive with an unnerving bark that feels a lot like broken glass grinding into your ear canal. 

Instead of achieving my Zen state through our dog in 2021, I was roiling in the bottomless depths of my own personal hell, which, I was all too aware, I'd made for myself. 

Jenny.

Jenny bug.

Jenny beans.

Jenny bear.

Jenny Sinclair Redpath. 

We named her after one of my husband's relatives in Scotland. My father-in-law was orphaned as a teen, and his aunt took him in. Just like that he went from being an only child to having a houseful of rollicking cousins/siblings, including Jenny Sinclair, his favorite.

After 18 months of training, our Jenny has calmed down a bit. She licks our ankles with her long tongue, and sometimes, when there's no one else out (no neighbors or squirrels or dogs or crows or kids) we enjoy a nice long walk.

*

What makes Ross Gay's book on delight so appealing is that it's not all sunshine and flowers. Gay sees the world's less endearing qualities and still finds delight everywhere, whether it's a bright bloom of happiness, a slender stem of pleasure or a seed of irony.

On a birthday or any day, what more could you wish for?

 

The Golden Shovel

What's a golden shovel?

It's a type of poem. You take a line from someone else's poem and use each word from that line to end a line in your new poem. 

Thank you to the Oregon Poetry Association and judge James Benton for including my golden shovel poem "Our Eyebrows Raised Like Cathedral Arches" among the winners for this fall's contest. Marvin Lurie and Trina Gaynon, the other winners, wrote absolutely stunning pieces. You can read them all by clicking here.