SCARY WORDS ON MY FRIDGE

When my daughter turned 14 about a year and a half ago, we were surprised that she didn't want to take her learner's permit test, but we didn't push it. You see, I think the worst drivers in the entire world live where we live. I literally cannot drive the four or five blocks to the post office without seeing someone do something ... ahem ... incorrectly ... while driving.

There is a two-way stop sign close to my house that people think is a four-way stop. If I'm coming up to it and see cars waiting, I automatically rest my foot lightly on my brake, ready to pounce, because there's probably a 50% chance they will think I'm going to stop and pull out in front of me. My city is also famous for people cutting their left turns way too short. Instead of waiting until they are close to the middle of the intersection before starting their left turns, they start them at the beginning, causing them to partially drive in the wrong lane. How they keep from tearing off bumpers is beyond me.

So - suffice it to say - it is scary to drive in my city even with a few or 20-some years of driving experience. I was not in a hurry to have my daughter out there as well. By the time she turned 15 about 1/2 a year ago, she had started studying for her test but still didn't ask us to take it. We told her we would take her whenever she was ready but we were not about to encourage her. Finally, about a month ago after hearing they were thinking of changing the requirements to having your learner permit for a year instead of 6 months before you can get your license, she decided to take the test.

I took her to the driver's license station after trying to find it where they recently hid it, having to stop at the workforce development office to ask for directions. She passed, only missing two questions. Her dad is now in charge of teaching her to drive and it's gone well the three times they've been out so far. However, after my daughter's creeping turns and chugging about 40 down the highway, we decided some method of advising other drivers on the road - not the most skilled or patient lot of folks - that we had a newbie in their midst was needed. So I turned to the Internet and now, these three signs proclaiming "STUDENT DRIVER" in bold black letters with bright orange backgrounds are on my fridge, waiting for the next driving lesson.

Safe driving. Please, stop texting and put your phone down. The message and conversation can wait.

-The Wordsy Woman

MY UPCOMING NEW PUBLISHED WORDS

I'm so excited that advanced marketing has started for my upcoming poetry collection, The Other Side of Crazy to be released by 918studio this September.The collection explores the craziness of modern life. Reviews are already coming in:

“The trick in The Other Side of Crazy seems to be that it’s a place we cannot access, or perhaps does not exist. These poems are filled with startling images, both strange and commonplace: blood-soaked quilts, burning watches, calendars, thunderstorms, dead skin, pharmaceutical commercials, a bike ride across the emotional terrain of modern life. These poems are littered with interruptions—both internal & external—that are always biting at the heels at this contemporary normalcy & domesticity, and in the end, rather than being resisted or fretted upon or allowed to hold modern life hostage, they are embraced & incorporated into the living and crazy love these poems so deftly reflect.” ~ Ryan Collins      

“In The Other Side of Crazy, Jodie Toohey explores the frailty of relationships and modern life from her own unique perspective. She guides the reader ‘Through the valley/Of vulnerability/…Of agony over/Straits/Of jackets and jars.’ Her poems beat with palpable emotion, fearless and honest, evoking a rich, multi-layered world.” ~ Nancy Ann Schaefer, InSearch of Lode

"In her book, The Other Side of Crazy, poet Jodie Toohey proves to us that still waters do indeed run deep.  Her poetry collection proffers a brilliant disturbance of the intellectual mind that reassembles as creative genius.The poet conjures everyday moments of insanity in her work that gift us sanity, and that join all of us in a very human, very creative, coven of mad genius. These poems are like rare, black pearls, simple, beautiful, darkly iridescent, and a little sinister.  The Reader wears them in her heart and mind like a badge made of rare jewels that entitles her to a tour through The Other Side of Crazy with poet Toohey as the tour guide." ~ Ellen Tsagaris,Sappho,I should have listened

"Poet, author Jodie Toohey exhibits her diverse and creative poetic voice in The Other Side of Crazy. Her poems elicit  raw emotions and draw the reader to think about life from a different angle, from the other side of the proverbial box." ~ Trisha Georgiou, Quartered Enlightenment 

To read some samples, click here.

To craziness!

-The Wordsy Woman

IT'S GRAMMAR TIME - LEAD VS. LED

The pair of words, lead and led, has tripped me up in the past because the word lead, usually pronounced leed can be pronounced led when talking about the metal of lead, defined by Dictionary.com as "a heavy, comparatively soft, malleable, bluish-gray metal, sometimes found in its natural state but usually combined as a sulfide, especially in galena." The proper word is also lead when using the metal in a cliche as in "He has a lead foot," describing a perpetual speeder. Because lead sounds like led and my fingers sometimes fly faster than my brain, they insist on writing lead when I mean led.

The word lead (pronounced leed, not describing the metal), can be used as a present tense verb, noun, or an adjective. According to Dictionary.com, the present tense verb means to go first, show the way, guide, or influence.For example, on my desk is a Isabel Bloom heart I received at a Women's Connection conference that says, "Lead with your heart."

According to Dictionary.com, as a noun, lead (leed) means the position in first place or ahead of others, something that leads (or goes first, shows the way, guides, or influence), or a particular type of leash. As an adjective, Dictionary.com says lead describes the most important thing, that which goes first, or that which leads. As a noun, an example would be, "I got the lead in the school musical." And, as an adjective, "I got the lead role in the school musical."

Led, on the other hand, is simply the past tense and past participle version of the verb, lead, not to be confused with the capitalized version, LED, that Dictionary.com includes which describes a type of light bulb.

Fortunately, just like this lead vs. led mistake can be easy for your fingers to make as you're flying along writing on your keyboard, it's just as easy for your brain to correct it during the editing and proofreading process. Just remember the only time you use the led-pronounced version of lead is when talking about the metal. If you are using the word as the past tense of the leed-pronounced verb of lead, then use led.

May you always be in the lead position after you have led your followers to lead.

-The Wordsy Woman

WRITING'S SURPRISE PARTY

The Midwest Writing Center's
Creative Writing Primer

This post was originally published on June 28, 2013, on the Midwest Writing Center's blog to celebrate the first birthday of Midwest Writing Center's Creative Writing Primer.

In her writing-guide titles, Writing Down the Bones and Wild Mind, Natalie Goldberg encourages readers to practice timed free writing. The key to timed free writing is not that you write five minutes, or ten minutes, or twenty minutes, but it is what you do when you think you are finished. You set the timer for five or ten minutes more and keep going. The reason? You will often be surprised, even startled, by what your creative brain spits out when it thinks the free writing is over.

I have followed this practice many times during my writing life, and am always amazed at how well it works. Often, in those last few minutes, the meat or the meaning of what I was trying to say falls out onto my paper. This surprise in writing is one of the reasons why I love it so much. But free writing is not the only place where I enjoy surprise in writing.

During the poetry session of a writing workshop I led, I borrowed my daughter’s poetry magnets and gave each participant and myself a small, random handful. The group and I were almost astonished by the beautiful poems our brains produced with these random words. Everyone created pieces with meaning and insight. I’m not a brain scientist and it isn’t important how they do it, but it fascinates me how our brains can take random things and put them together to create something concrete and meaningful.

The best poems I’ve ever written are dripping with surprise. When I free write, many times I merely pay attention to the words flying through my head and I copy them down in my journal. As I’m writing, they seem random, independent, and not connected at all. Often when I’m done, I have an entire poem that I think is just comprised of haphazard words. But then I read it. Sometimes it happens immediately and sometimes it doesn’t happen until I read it maybe months of even years later, but I find meaning. A real, honest-to-goodness poem with insight and meaning my brain created when I was just paying attention to individual words. Usually, I’ll need a few words added to cement the meaning, but frequently it is all there in the original transcription.

Even what I initially fear are mistakes in my writing sometimes end up being my brain actually saying what it meant to say. For example, the title poem of my poetry collection, The Other Side of Crazy, starts off with “Peddle down the street, past salted pines.” When the initial proof came, I thought, Oh no, I made a mistake. Peddle means to sell something and pedal a bicycle is what I actually envisioned. But then I read through the rest of the poem and I remembered when I wrote it. I was in the middle of a prospect-calling campaign for my business and I realized the poems described precisely how I felt about cold calling. And peddle actually fits better. So I kept it.

Surprise in writing practice can manifest in many different ways; the writer just needs to be open to it. And believe. But there’s a catch: you have to be writing to find it.

Hope your writing is filled with pleasant surprises!

-The Wordsy Woman