I'm thrilled to announce that I've won a grant from the American Art Therapy Association for the Mud & Fire Community Project, a one-day art workshop that is scheduled to take place in Carpinteria on June 23, 2018. Here's the flier I just designed for the project.

The project will feature a one-day art workshop led by artists (including myself) and trained post-trauma art therapists from the American Art Therapy Association (AATA). Thanks so much to Madoka and AATA for helping make this happen.

Now that we have some funding lined up, we're looking for families (including kids 5 and up) who would like to participate. The whole day includes art materials and food and is totally free.

Please e-mail me if you have questions or want to know how to either get involved, volunteer, donate food or participate. E-mail me at redhencannery @ gmail.com.

From fire and ash to creativity. Let's do it. Also, click here for more concrete details.

     Of course every writer dreams of a book tour. You know, adoring fans greeting you at dozens of strange, new, fabulous American cities. A ship in every port, a feather in every cap. In reality, we are living in the 21st Century at the end of a drawn-out recession and financial crisis when books are mostly digital pixels and a flash mob for a closing athletic shoe store garners more interest than any author peddling her novella. 
      Still, we can all do something to push our latest book project and sometimes creativity can go a long ways.  Take the ingenuity of my publisher's marketing guru, Lori Hettler. She invited me to participate in a "virtual" book tour. I really had no idea what she was talking about, but I agreed. Turns out, she meant doing things an author might do if they were touring the country and appearing in various book stores, but without actually leaving my home. As a new business owner and mother of small kiddos, that worked for me.
           So, today, I introduce my virtual self, the digitally retouched perfected version of the author and artist Maureen Foley.  Untethered by actual reality, I can be any height, age, weight! I am astute! I am erudite! I never laugh nervously or say "like," in that embarrassing SoCal way. I am glamorous! Put together! Modest! Fabulous! I quote famous authors and read only Proust and Dickens and Austen and Marquez. I can quote George Eliot and all the postcolonialists, post feminists, structuralists and more! I can theorize your teleology and analyze your Marxist theory. I am represented by six different literary agents. I always remember your name, look you in the eye, shake your hand and make just the right compliment. I'm like an inert gas: perfectly self-contained and aloof. 
        Sadly, my virtual self only exists in the severe confines of this blog. Oh, and I'm letting her roam free for the next two weeks, from January 13-28, 2014, at various guest blog posts at the following sites: Booked In Chico, Love at First Book, Words, Notes, Fiction, Chick Lit Central, The Relentless Reader, Little Fiction, Curbside Press, Lesbrary, Lovely Bookshelf, WordPlaySound, Gapers Block, and the Guiltless Reader. To check out the posts as they go live, see the Women Float section of my website here. She's great. Go meet her. Tell her I sent you. 

       I present to you "Salvage," from an experimental bizarre-o series of boxes that I made and filled with beeswax, plastic baby dolls and then painted on top. I made this piece and others, working out various biological clock, baby-yet-unborn emotions, and promptly forgot about the paintings. Then, recently my friend Riven reminded me that I'd made them over a poolside glass of wine. "Oh, yeah. I liked those," I said at the time. 
      Remembering that series reminded me of the time that brought that image forth: looping through the end of my 20s, landlocked on a dead-end relationship, working part-time as a freelance writer and part-time for a beekeeper in Santa Barbara. Hence, the chunk of beeswax melted into the little boxes, dropped-in plastic babies, drawn in charcoal, and then painted with oils. The blue paint in this image of "Salvage" is a tracing of the baby doll's body frozen in wax, like Han Solo. 
       Like many of my art works, it was never shown, and none of that series sold. In fact, I don't even know where the original is anymore. Did I give it away during the last 10 years of extreme transience? Who has it now? Or is it gathering dust in a thrift store somewhere? Or rotting beneath piles of wreckage in a compost heap? Buried in the sand? Lost at sea? Like that time in my life, I'll never get this piece back, but I did find this photo out of the blue. My little lost "Salvage." And now an actual child in my life, instead of one buried in wax, half-imagined. And now stuck in a moment of not-painting and yearning for time to make art. And now about to read (again) from the book that I'd written and abandoned when I made this strange painting. 
       Cyclical; small towns and artistic lives force you to keep returning to the source of what is known. This painting reminds me of how we are just following the same thread over and over, as it loops its way back and around. I visited a book club in my hometown where my ancestors first moved in the 1860s last month for Women Float, and one of the members told me a story about my grandmother who passed away 21 years ago. Like a gift from a past life, these souvenirs from our former selves act as signposts and postcards, omens and receipts. 
       On Saturday, I'll read again in this place where I've staked a past and future claim: Carpinteria. (It's a reading and book signing at Porch on Santa Claus Lane, at 3-5pm.) What ghosts from my past will greet me? What new insights will arrive, too? Like this strange recent arrival of "Salvage," I look forward to what can be learned from something discarded, something I left behind and forgot. 

    Now I have a true confession to make: I'm not the only novelist in my house on the avocado ranch by the sea. Strange but true, there are two of us here: me and my husband, the fabulous Irish writer James Claffey. 
     Living with another writer is both amazing and difficult. On the upside, we both understand the need for alone time (When else can the words appear on the page?). We get the idea that our collective time and resources need to be channeled towards a potentially financially fruitless artistic pursuit. Need an in-house editor? Done. Want a living, breathing thesaurus at 10pm? He's here, in the kitchen, probably brewing a final cup of Barry's Irish tea (with milk, of course).
        Less wonderful, however, are the inevitable comparisons between careers, petty jealousies, parallel deadlines and quibbles over who gets ownership of a particular amazing detail (like a person with pale, translucent skin being named the "glass fish"). At its lowest moment, I compare our relationship to the crumbling couple in that great indie film, The Squid and the Whale.
      Unlike that couple, however, we're still happily together. We have managed to work these scribe-related annoyances out over post-dinner beers, when the baby is asleep and important topics can be poked and prodded and ironed and smoothed out. I guess I was totally naive when I imagined our writer's life together, pre-marriage, pre-kids, pre-dueling MFAs. I had no idea how difficult it would be for us to navigate both creative careers at once.
     Back then, James dreamed of writing a novel, while I had three manuscripts under my belt (and also unpublished in boxes under my bed). I encouraged him to apply for writing programs and then, behold, he got in and, behold again, he got a great scholarship! He wrote and wrote, and I wrote a little, and soon enough he'd graduated and was still writing like he was in grad school (I have no idea how he found the time) and soon enough we both found ourselves buffing our manuscripts (his bright new Blood a Cold Blue and mine, Women Float, like an ancient vampire from the crypt) out to their final shine and preparing to send them out. 
      At this point, I got really nervous. It felt like a no-win moment. Of course I wanted us both to get books published. However, I felt anxious about the order of things. If I got a book deal first, I worried that I'd feel horrible at somehow overshadowing my writer-love. But if he got the acceptance first, that meant that I'd have yet another debilitating bout of "trailing wife" syndrome, that creepy feeling that you're living in your partner's writing shadow. You see where this is going. 
       "Wouldn't it be amazing if we both got book deals at the same time?" I asked my husband one day last year.
       He gave me the "poor dear" look, that wordless Irish sneer of his that speaks volumes. I was probably pregnant at the time, which never helped me win any logic-bound arguments. 
       "What?" I asked. "It's possible."
       But we both knew that idea was ridiculous. Childish. Magical thinking. An outlandish thought, like many of my so-called brilliant schemes, like owning a used car lot and selling all the cars for a penny. Not going to happen. 
      And then it did. But of course, James had to out-do me by getting two books into the world (more on the second one later this year.) It turns out both of our book deals were less "Oprah" moments, and more carefully negotiated conversations that resulted in publishing deals with small presses. I think this simultaneous show of success is the universe's way of reinforcing our bond, telling us, "Hey, you two, stick together and I'll make big things happen for you both." 
     I do believe that creative people, when paired up, have a logarithmic affect on each other, like the Richter scale to measure earthquakes. Two creatives don't double each other's possibilities. Instead, their energies are increased exponentially, in ways they can't always see. Get a group of creatives together and watch out. I've seen this happen more than once with my own circles, but somehow I didn't anticipate it in my marriage. 
    Or for my own creative work. Individually, I've labeled this in-tune-with-the-universe moment, "en fuego." You've seen this happen. When a friend gets drink bought for them, wins the lottery, gets honors bestowed without trying, this is all an "en fuego" moment. Now I need a new term, for two people in the flow. Or more. Do you feel like James and I are influencing your creative luck? Are you part of this pod of creative souls who are flinging yourselves into our orbits? Or are we all just becoming aware of the same creative moon as it rises on our collective horizon at the same time, like people living on the same lattitude and longitude of the same slow-spinning planet that is just now seeing the rising of its lone moon for the first time in our lives?
      James and I are not always on the same planet, nor in the same place at the same time, creatively speaking. Sometimes we're not even in the same solar system. But when we are: watch out. We are like supernovas of writing brilliance. Or at least my Irish writer is a pretty stunning cosmic array. To find out what I'm talking about, pre-order his book Blood a Cold Blue HERE. 

     How do you say thank you when your heart is exploding with gratitude? It calls for a truckload of admiration and love. And so, to everyone who has helped me throughout this Women Float book launch and throughout my creative and artistic career, this truck's for you. Specifically, I give you this truck of zinnias that I helped pick from the fields at Fairview Gardens to show my deepest appreciation for your comments, kind reviews and help. 

   Does anyone remember the Richard Scarry children's books about various animals engaged in everyday misadventures, like a cat flying a kite that gets caught in a tree or a fox as a carpenter banging his foot? With characters like Lowly the Worm and Huckle Cat? (See the above YouTube video for an animated version of his stories.) Well, I've been thinking of these bizarre remnants from my childhood all week for two reasons. 
       First of all, the characters in these brilliant books all drive cars that echo either their personality, job or both. For example, Lowly the Worm drives an apple-helicopter and the monkey drives a giant banana-shaped car. I loved this as a kid. It made so much sense to me and these whimsical automobiles were so much inspiring than the typical vehicles I rode around in. 
    So, after more than 30 years of dreaming of my own car that mirrors my true persona, I now have my own mermaid-car. Well, sort of. I don't drive a long, voluptuous, half-naked fish woman with flowing locks (yet), but I made my first step in that direction by sticking on a car magnet with the cover of my new novella, Women Float, on the side of my very pedestrian ride.  Now, stuck in traffic, I imagine people looking at me and wondering about the book and how to get their hands on one and how cool I must look with a book car magnet on my door. 
      The second reason I keep thinking of Richard Scarry is because of my daughter. She loves the image on the side of my car and she toddles over to it and points at it repeatedly, a high compliment for her. I also had an 8-year-old girl from the afterschool group I lead at the farm admire it. Mermaids are making me big with the pre-pre-pre teen crowd. Are there any marketing stats on this group? I'd call them neener-tweeners and let me tell you: mermaids are huge. 
     Is it the mythic fish-lady or Richard Scarry that is appealing to my daughter? See, just she started reading her first Richard Scarry book. A friend got it for us at a Carpinteria Friends of the Library Used Book Sale. I understood why the board book was on sale as soon as we got home. Each of the 10 pages included a jigsaw puzzle embedded in the page, all of which fell out and were lost as soon as we got home. No problem. My daughter doesn't worry about something trivial like losing puzzle pieces. She's still got pictures of Huckle Cat riding Lowly around on his bike and then watching him buzz off on his applecopter. And she now gets to admire Sargeant Murphy pulling over the monkey, Bananas, in his banana car. 
      I can't confirm this, yet, because she's not really talking but I think my daughter has re-named me with my own Richard Scarry-esque persona name, now that my car has a makeover. I think I'm now Wawamama. (That's Watermother to you.) I'll let you know for sure in a few months when I can discuss all this, and more, with my little reader. 
     In the mean time, thanks to everyone for their cheers of support for Women Float. Jason, my publisher at CCLaP, told me to tell everyone who pre-ordered that books should start arriving this week. The book is now officially for sale here and I look forward to the book launch, this Friday, in Carpinteria.  Come see me so I can sign your book and we can discuss why so many of the Richard Scarry characters wear lederhosen.  

     Today, my debut novella Women Float launched. I'm at a loss. My book and I existed so well underwater, underground, entombed in that kind of perfect solitary wind tunnel that any artist understands. Input and output, all occurred in secret, a great compost heap of digested memory, experience, fantastic imagining, poof, into the brain and out through the great Play-Doh spaghetti factory of imagination. Never to be seen by anyone looking in from the outside.
        Until today. You'd think I'd be prepared. Ready. It's not like I've never seen my writing in print. For better or worse, I've slaved or scammed a thousand fast and easy stories for weeklies, monthlies, newspapers, websites, anything. When people have asked me what I write, I've sometimes answered, "Anything that pays."
      Is that like literary prostitution? If so, then I'm guilty of being a woman of the write. But writing on assignment, regardless of how minor the water board meeting or major the red carpet, was never like this. Because Women Float feels personal. The book feels like me. 
      I know, I know. I can hear you writing workshop graduates. I am not these words or the ones in my book. But I've cared for my characters, nurtured them, fed their existence and conjured them from air. I want everyone to love them, without judgement, like me. Besides my dear characters being exposed, there's also me, their writer. I'm their creator. I always wanted to publish a book and when I hadn't for so long, I became familiar with that, too. That void, like the unborn child or lost beloved or cancelled vacation. I got used to this feeling of something both precious and unattainable, and then I built stories around it to make myself feel better and then I inhabited those stories and wrapped them around myself like a warm Alpaca shawl, homely but comfortable. 
          Today, I removed that ugly sweater of failed writer-dom. Today I also ate the season's first ollalieberries from the forgotten bushes leftover from my family's abandoned u-pick berry farm. I shared them with my daughter, her first taste of that dark and surprising blackberry. Then, my daughter picked her first ripe apricot and showed it to me. I broke it in half and she pushed the half-moon  into my mouth again and again, smiling as I admired the tartness, flavor. She smeared the leaking orange orb across my face, until the clear juice stiffened like white glue, drying in the sun as a reminder that the world is too much sweetness. 
       This important day of delightful publication is both unprecedented and uncomfortable. Fear of failure sandwiched neatly by fear of success. Today, I bite my first fruit of true writing success and it is all sweet, with no bitterness at all. I force myself to rest here, for one, two, three, four breaths. I will engage just one reader at a time. That is all. That is enough. 

     I was recently invited to participate in an amazing project with my former grad school friends from Naropa. One of them, Chris Mazura, rounded up a group of us to participate in what he's calling the Naropa Postcard Project.  Here's the basic idea: a group of writers all received about 30 blank postcards which we were then tasked with transforming in any way we felt using writing, text, art, drawing or whatever. The writers were then required to mail the postcards out to other writers on the list. So, all 30 writers should receive 30 postcards. The idea was inspired by Ken Mikilowski's Alternative Press Postcard Project that the lit mag Bombay Gin covered when I helped edit the magazine. Cool idea, right? 
      So, about a month ago, I got a slick manila envelope filled with 8-sheets of printer friendly paper perforated into postcards. I couldn't believe Chris pulled off the logistical genius to get all the addresses and everything together. Then, my artist brain kicked into high gear and I decided to use the eight blank pages as mini art pieces, incorporating text and image and variety of mediums: graphite, colored pencils, water colors, oil pastels and permanent marker. The timing was perfect. I've been so overwhelmed with raising my daughter, working my day job at the organic farm, working on edits for Women Float and trying to cultivate a healthy marriage (not to mention the garden at home), that art has gone completely out the window. But the Postcard Project gave me the two key things every distracted creative person needs: peer pressure and deadlines.
       Each time I received a beautiful, inventive postcard in the mail, I'd pause and think, "Right. When are those due? What am I doing?" I broke the project down into chunks: time for creating the images, time for addressing the backs, time for writing the short messages, time to go to the Post Office to buy stamps. And yesterday I finally did it: I mailed out all 32 postcards! Did I really mean 32? Yes. 30 for the participating writers and two  extras for whatever. So, I sent one to Hoot a postcard-related lit mag and one to President Obama, just for safe keeping. I'll post that one below, called "Ode to Eileen Myles," just so you can see my great leap into the art-political circus.
     The takeaway? First, we all need friends to inspire us and get us out of the dark creativity doldrums sometimes. Second, deadlines are amazing. Third, I'm so excited to have connected with my former creative co-conspirators. It's never too late to revive past artistic connections. 
        For more on the project or if you want to participate in the next round, check out Chris' blog here.  Oh, and if you need anything to read, Women Float is now available for pre-orders here. 

             As I explained in my last post, my long-lost novella manuscript, Women Float, s being published by the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography early this summer. They have a distinctive business model of issuing the small press books both as pay-what-you-can digital e-books and simultaneously as beautiful hard back hard copies that are handmade and gorgeous art objects. As if the whole strangeness of having this book rediscovered isn't odd enough, it also appeared in its first life as a handmade book. 
               Granted, back then it was in an edition of 12 copies only and I published in March 1998 under the imprint Avocado Press while completing my undergrad studies at Kenyon College. I'd just learned how to make books from the artist and professor Claudia Esslinger. I'd taken  a screenprinting course from her and was totally thrilled by the Japanese style binding she showed us. I'd written the book as an Honors English project and wanted a sense of completion by producing it as a book, so I used the techniques she showed me to produce the small run. (I've gone on to produce dozens of handmade books with the skills she taught me.) One of those funky first versions of Women Float still lives at the school's library. 
             Fast forward 15 years of carrying that strange purple-blue handmade book around to Colorado, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, San Francisco and finally back to Carpinteria to January of this year when I first found out from Jason Pettus at CCLaP that the book was getting a second life. After recovering from the joyful shock of getting to see the book published (via e-mail while waiting for my order in a Santa Barbara In 'N Out burger joint) I dug out the original version and thumbed through it. Then, for fun, I photographed them. I've placed them side by side above this post. 
                Seeing all four images together, I was struck both by their similarities and differences. In terms of colors, both books feature blues and greens. Mine, of course, was produced at the very embryonic moment of the Internet and digital age, so while I laid it out on a word processing program and printed it out with my own printer, the pages are photocopied onto a nice cream paper. On the other hand, the CCLaP version is a complete stepchild of the Internet: the web is how I found CCLaP and the photographer who did the cover image, how I'm editing the book and how I'm talking to you about it now. 
              Again, seeing them all, I'm struck by the sheer moxie, persistence, stubborn drive it takes to give a book life sometimes. Fifteen years of stupid insistence that Women Float see the light of day. But it wasn't me. It was the mermaids. I credit the fantastic creatures with guiding this book into its final form. I think they worked while I slept, like the shoemaker's elves, to swim this book to the world. In their honor, I painted a mermaid onto a bus bench yesterday at my hometown's annual volunteer bus bench painting day (see the photograph of her below). Now, she'll look over the city and its visitors everyday with that coy, siren's smile, beckoning all to imagine the things that exist beyond the real. Creativity, folks. Like taking the bus, it's both totally ordinary and a daily essential. Long live the mermaids and long live your own personal artistic ambitions!

Before my daughter was born, back in my 20s, I had this idea that I would have my first novel published before I had kids. Ambitious, fresh out of grad school and focused on a writing career, I knew what I wanted.  Then, over the years that idea developed and grew its own branches and leaves: a book before a baby, so I'd be an established author before my life got pulled into the inevitable morass of bottles, diapers and sleepless nights. I had this notion, pre-kids, that having a child created a fissure, an ending, a void. My life would be over and nothing interesting would happen after that, so it was critical to have my book done and finished first.
    Then an everyday miracle happened in real life: a baby appeared in my body without that mythic novel ever arriving on the shelf. Delighted by her arrival (and totally exhausted from the sheer physicality of waking, rocking, holding, picking up, burping, pumping and more), I still felt the vicious bite of the inner critic: you didn't get the book out and now it's too late.
    It's too late. That's how I felt in the early days of my baby's life last spring. I'd never get the time, mental focus or pyschological space back to continue painting and writing, much less the energy to send out my manuscripts and endure rejection. Like a creativity biological clock, I felt my days ticking away without that stupid self-invented marker of success: my book. Friends tried to encourage me by reminding me that life would settle down, time would come back and that my daughter was the most profound creation I'd ever made. I agreed, but I'd always wrapped my identity around my artistic life and that life seemed over. Gone. Vanished.
    But then this second miraculous thing happened after I gave birth: I became both miserable and fearless. I'd seen the void, that fragile silk thread holding death to life, in the process of giving birth and I'd felt the physical toll after growing and expelling another human. This raw state produced a new side to my creative life and I found a warrior. My life was over, but a new one appeared. I found courage in wanting to be the best artist possible, not for myself anymore, but for my daughter. And so, with my husband's constant encouragement, I dared to send out a long-dusty manuscript to a small press that was profiled in Poets and Writers, despite countless rejections.
    The third miracle then shot forth from the clouds: a book! The Chicago Center for Literature and Photography asked for edits and then accepted the manuscript, nearly exactly a year after my daughter's birth in February 2012. So, here I am, with a book in process and a growing child. I'll send the book's birth announcement as soon as it arrives, hopefully in May. As for the meaning of these two auspicious events and their reverse order in real life, I'll leave that to the Fates to decipher. After all, there are so many things in a creative life that remain a mystery.