Blog Posts - Mary T. Wagner

My Growing Bolder connection!

1/3/2015

Way back when "Running with Stilettos" was just a wee new blog and I had JUST collected a bunch of essays from the blog into a book of the same name, I was surfing the internet one night looking for something else. It was close to seven years ago, somewhere in the summer of 2008.

And while I didn't find the link that I was looking for, I came across an ad for something called "Growing Bolder," a website based in Florida that devoted itself to the message (at least as I understood it!) that instead of bemoaning the fact that we are all inevitably growing "older," we should celebrate that we can and often do grow "bolder" in our choices.

Given that I was shopping for my first motorcycle jacket at the age of fifty and had only started wearing spike heels not very long before that, you could say that I was "all in" from the start! For years I posted paragraphs and essays at the Growing Bolder site, sharing news, challenges, photos, and encouragement on a "member page" personal blog. There were ups and downs, joys and sorrows, challenges and satisfactions...and demons wrestled to the ground.

In my literary world, I wrote three more books, and learned to enjoy speaking in front of groups of people instead of wanting to run from the room. Growing Bolder turned into a media juggernaut, expanding to radio, TV, magazine, and now a documentary. The GB website has undergone a sleek new redesign recently, and I am so very happy to note that while the "member pages" part of the site is gone, I've been folded into the official "GB blogging team." Woo hoo!!!!!

And so I expect that just as hearts expand to hold more love, my writing output will expand a bit too. I'll still be posting at Running With Stilettos...and I'll still be adding to my "author website" here as well. But come on over to check out Growing Boldertoo! Not just for what I'll be writing, but for everything the website has to offer in terms of inspiration, and encouragement, and pushing one's limits, and trying new things. Because we can ALL use more of that to keep us "growing bolder" instead of "just growing older."

The One-Legged Bird

12/31/2014

We all, once in a while, just need a little help to get by.

I thought of that tonight as I stepped out to fill the bird feeders in darkness on New Years Eve. The temps were zero when I woke up this morning. They're currently hovering in the teens right now as the moon shines above, but the stiff wind will just about peel the skin off your face.

And it all makes me think of a tiny visitor that came to the clear plastic feeder that sticks to my kitchen window many years ago. He still stands out in my memory as a testament to resilience, and survival, and hope, and the fact that every so often, we really all could use a safe place to land.

One chickadee pretty much looks like every other chickadee--crisp, tiny, with brilliant white collars that look just a wee bit "fluffy." They dart, and flit, and visit the feeders on my porch with impunity, jostling for pecking order among the cardinals and nuthatches and goldfinches and various woodpeckers. There's a large feeder that sits on the porch rail and holds more seed and supports several visitors at a time. And then there's the tiny plastic feeder stuck to the window with a suction cup, positioned just at eye level when I'm washing the dishes. It holds less than a cup of seed at once, and has room for just one small bird to feed at a time. I fill both feeders on the porch with the expensive sunflower seeds that already have the shells taken off. More birds like them that way--it takes work to break the seeds out of their shells first--and I like having more kinds of birds around.

On this particular day, a very sorry-looking chickadee showed up at the tiny window feeder. I think it was raining. He was bedraggled, and missing some feathers around his head. One of his legs was broken and it trailed behind his body. He balanced unsteadily on the other, but managed to feed himself without jostling or interference at the window before flying off. I didn't think he was going to make it very long in the natural world where "only the strong survive." I didn't expect to see him at the window again.

I was wrong. He came back day after day, balancing on his one good leg. Eventually the broken leg fell off, and he started to look healthier and stronger...albeit as "normal" as a one-legged chickadee could look. His feathers grew back in, and his white collar gleamed against his black cap and beak. I nicknamed him "Stumpy" for obvious reasons.

I don't know how long chickadees normally live, but Stumpy made it through at least another couple of winters, balancing solidly on his single leg at the tiny window feeder to reach the premium bird seed that kept him going.

Eventually there came a time when he no longer showed up and I knew that the laws of nature had finally caught up with him. But I also knew that he'd gotten a second chance, and his second wind, when he found a steady food supply and a sheltered place to eat it when life must have looked most precarious. And it reminds me that every so often, when life buffets us with surprises and dangers, we can all use some shelter from the storm, a good meal, and a safe place to land.

Bonfire Therapy

12/29/2014

I first posted this essay on my Growing Bolder blog...but like this "new beginnings" story so much I had to share it here too!

The “burn pile” in the backyard stood nearly five feet tall, a spiky assemblage of branches, sticks, vines, and firewood. It completely overran the neat and tidy edges of the fire pit created for occasional use two decades before. It was a mute testament to many things, among them the fact that I own a small chainsaw and I’m not afraid to use it, and that nature abhors a vacuum so yard work is a necessary fact of life.

Particularly when the yard is part of a fourteen acre wooded parcel. Mother nature never stops trying to reclaim the civilized part of it, the “lawn” part that gets cut with a mower and trimmed along the edges and even sports several flower beds. For that matter, there are a lot more “woods” to the parcel than there were thirty-odd years ago when we first built a home there and raised a family. The forest continues to migrate toward the house. For the record, the “we” part has changed as well in those years, as the phrase “separate ways” came to apply to a marriage of 25 years.

But the empty nest I got in the divorce years ago was temporarily re-occupied by two of my four adult children over the holidays, and my son, visiting from the far side of the country, eyed the burn pile with longing. “Hey, he asked, “can we light this thing up before I leave?”

“Sure,” I said amiably, although I had my doubts. It had been rainy and damp for a good deal of the late fall leading up to winter, and the early snow that had capped the pile had melted all the way through it. In fact the pile included some half-burned wood that marked the last time I tried to set fire to it, with little success.

Still, I took comfort in remembering some of the lessons and advice I had taken from the man with the longbow and the pipe and the black leather pants who had been in my life for the past several years, although he was absent now too, the sharp pang of parting still nearly fresh. During the time we were together I’d learned how to take apart and reassemble my chain saw; learned the difference between primer and regular paint; and learned that “you can burn just about anything with enough lighter fluid.”

This last had been underscored the night he took it upon himself to carve up a tree branch roughly the size of a small school bus that had cracked and broken away from the rest of a tree by the house in a recent storm. I couldn’t fathom that wood that green and newly cut would catch fire. I was wrong—a lot of lighter fluid was involved—and the evening turned out to be quite magical, if exhausting.

Back in the present, I kept an eye on the weather and the burn pile during the week of Christmas. It rained, of course, but Christmas Day finally came without fog and damp and mist, and the sticks and vines dried out a little. And so on the evening of the day after Christmas, less than twelve hours before my son and I would leave at four in the morning to get him to the airport for his return flight, my daughter and son and I gathered around the fire pit with some matches and a quart and a half of lighter fluid, and a hose in the grass nearby just in case of emergency.

Earlier in the day, I had walked the trail around my place with the critters, and hauled back roughly five pounds of fallen pine cones sporting gobs of sticky sap which I then salted the pile of brush and branches with.

And then against all odds and reason—and with several reapplications of lighter fluid—the pile finally “caught” and we stood around it, talking, sharing, and gazing into both the past and the future.

The past, in a very real and tangible way. There had been many bonfires in this fire pit over the many years we had lived here together. They had involved s’mores, and beers, and music, and laughter, and reflection, and connection, and celebration. Graduations, birthdays, friendships, all had been honored at the outskirts of a blazing fire in the back yard with a big sky above us. It was not lost on the three of us that with the empty nest up for sale, this could very well be the last bonfire we would share in the backyard of the home they had known since they were born. We all know and accept that the idea of me moving from this large and wonderful place “makes sense” on so many practical levels. But we will all still mourn the magic of having the wild just outside our back door, and the comfort of “home” to return to. This literally has been the only stable home I’ve ever known in my life, and I will miss it dreadfully some day when I finally drive away for the last time.

And I personally viewed this particular huge pile of yard waste through the lens of wrestling Mother Nature to a draw a couple of months earlier, tackling a stand of trash trees and serpentine wild vines that had encircled a couple of young maple trees at the edge of the yard, hobbling their lower branches and overshadowing a wildflower bed I had planted nearby. I had hacked, and cut, and dragged and stacked until I was too exhausted to do more, but by the time I finished, the maples stood on the cusp of their autumn brilliance, ready to blaze in splendor without interference.

We all looked into the weight of the year gone past us too. All three of us had seen some mighty and significant professional accomplishments…and had known disappointments, both personal and creative, along the way as well. The flames licked and curled around the chunks of wood in the pile, turning them red and orange and gold and white hot, reducing them as they broke and settled to glowing, fractured hints of their former solidity. We celebrated the good stuff…and felt the weight and the pain of our past disappointments burn off and scatter as tiny, glowing embers lifted high above us on a channel of hot air rising from the middle of the fire. The night was warm and windless, and clouds covered the dark sky above. It felt and looked as though we created our own stars in the heavens that night.

And so the sparks carried away the past, and reduced some of it to ashes, and carried our hopes for the future aloft into the night, into the cosmos, into the air around us, into the Great Unknown of the future. And for a simple bonfire in the back yard on the night after Christmas, you couldn’t possibly want for more than that.

RESTING PLACES

11/16/2014

Now that the art exhibit has come and gone and all the photos and paintings are down from the walls of Inspiration Studios in West Allis, Wisconsin, click here to take a VIRTUAL TOUR of the "Resting Places" art exhibit by downloading the Kindle edition of the exhibit catalog.

The full-color Kindle edition of the catalog is only $1.99, and you can still access it and view the exhibit FREE through KindleUnlimited and the Kindle Owners Lending Library.

Enjoy! It was such a great and vibrant show to be part of. Moody, atmospheric photos of old tombstones interspersed with lively, colorful and often quite moving abstract paintings...what's not to love?

About those old graveyards...

10/12/2014

In case you've been wondering about all those graveyard photos that I've been taking lately, some of which have now found their way into the art exhibit "Resting Places"...

MOST OF THE BEST THINGS in my life have happened by chance or by accident, and hanging around rural and small town graveyards taking photos was certainly one of them.

About a year ago, I was working on a scene set in a small, neglected rural cemetery for a book I was writing. I decided that a visit to just such a place with my camera would allow me to both get a visceral sense of the place…and capture all the visual details I’d surely forget by the time I got back in the car.

I was utterly unprepared for how the place captured my imagination that foggy autumn day, or how I would find myself drawn again and again to these poignant places. As I drive down two and four-lane roads in the countryside these days, my eyes scan the hilltops for a glimpse of tall obelisks rising above the surrounding grass, inevitably leading to a stop...or a return trip.

Sometimes it was the visuals and their symbolism that pulled me in, and sometimes it was the stories that rose from the words on the marble and granite tombstones. Oh, the stories written there, of lives and loves and losses. The monument to a married couple, and the string of small markers beside it for five of their children who didn't reach their first birthdays. Some lived only a day or two. The man born in Limerick, Ireland, who died in his thirties and is laid to rest in southeastern Wisconsin. The ship's engineer laid to rest at a small cemetery at a land-locked crossroads in Dodge County, a steamboat carved in bas-relief into his tall monument. The tall monuments to German immigrants, who died here but whose loving tributes were written in German, their dates of birth and death marked by "Geb" and "Gest." The old man who had fought in the Revolutionary War, and died decades later in Wisconsin when it was still little more than a wilderness.

Whether ornate and well-maintained, off the beaten path on two-lane country roads, or beside steepled churches in small towns, the graveyards and their stone markers stand as testaments to the fact that we want to be remembered, and that we mattered, and that we were, above all, loved. I have come across some cemeteries that are so small that they are not even on the map. Often the only sounds that I hear are crickets chirping and birds warbling, a dog’s far-off bark, the whinny of a horse in a pasture nearby, the wind in nearby branches.

And in the places that are more forgotten and less visited than others, there is a strange peace and beauty—the arching branches of oaks overhead, the fragrant crush of wild mint underfoot or the smell of lilacs nearby, the blaze of white trilliums and purple violets among the stones, a swirl of dead oak leaves from the winter before, resting against worn marble, brown and curled like scraps of leather. And as my fingers trace the worn letters, I know that here was love.

5 BFFs who'd like WTSF for Christmas!

10/6/2014

There's a chill in the air, the frost is on the pumpkin, and the holidays (and holiday shopping) are drawing near. EEK! Where did summer go?

To help with knocking out the stocking stuffers, here's a list of your five BFFs who would LOVE a copy of WHEN THE SHOE FITS... for Christmas!

The one with a sense of humor. ("Back Away From the Bunny")

The one going through a divorce who thinks there will never be light or laughter at the end of the tunnel. ("Turbo Dating-A Year in Review")

The one thinking about a mid-life career change. ("May It Please The Court")

The one who wants to go back to school but thinks she's "too old." ("Ripple Effect")

And the one who still remembers the boyfriend with the motorcycle. ("Riding Pillion")

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!!

Live Lit in Chicago!!

9/16/2014

I recently had the opportunity to commit some "live lit" in Chicago at the "That's All She Wrote" reading series staged at the Great Lakes Tattoo Parlor on Grand Avenue. I wrote about it at my Running with Stilettos blog, since it lets me put in more photos throughout the essay that this one does for some reason!

Sooo..... COME ON OVER AND READ IT ON MY OTHER WEBSITE!!!! Here's the link to words and pictures about LIVE LIT IN CHICAGO!!

"Tagged" in a BLOG TOUR!!

9/8/2014

At this age—let’s just say “over thirty”—you don’t get too many invitations to play a game of “tag.” You remember those! Running across summer lawns and darting around trees and bushes, trying to outrun your buddies to get to the “free” zone before someone caught you and then you were IT.

But being invited to join a virtual “blog tour” has been just as much fun for this grown-up author…and didn't even require breaking a sweat!

That’s what happened recently, just in time to promote my new book, When the Shoe Fits…Essays of Love, Life and Second Chances. This would be my “best of” collection of essays from my first three books, and includes riffs on turbo-dating, power tools, shoes, motherhood, and the view from the back of a Harley.

I got “tagged” for the tour by author Catherine Fitzpatrick, author of Going on Nine, a YA novel that’s a “coming of age” story set in St. Louis in 1956. While Catherine and I haven’t met YET, the wonderful thing about the world wide web is how you can get to know folks anyway. I’d describe Catherine as a “dame,” in the sense that Lauren Bacall was a “dame”—accomplished, incredibly smart, talented and FUNNY! As a kick-ass journalist, Catherine was in Manhattan to cover New York Fashion Week for Wisconsin’s largest newspaper on September 11, 2001. At first word of the terrorist attacks, she rushed to Ground Zero and filed award-winning eyewitness reports. A front page of the newspaper edition containing one of her 9/11 dispatches is among those memorialized in Washington D.C.’s Newseum. Now she writes fiction, and she and her husband will be exiting the Midwest soon for a new life in Florida.

THANK YOU CATHERINE for inviting me into this tour!

NOW THE BLOG TOUR AUTHOR QUESTIONS...

“What am I working on”—several things at once! But at this exact moment, I’m under the gun in the next two weeks to create an exhibit catalog for “Resting Places,” a joint art show between moi and artist Erico Ortiz that opens October 4, 2014 at Inspiration Studios in West Allis, Wisconsin. I’ve developed a minor obsession with taking photographs in small rural cemeteries, and the show will feature twenty-one of my graveyard photos matched up with Erico’s abstract and impressionistic paintings inspired by nature.

After that, I’ll pick up where I left off in writing (1) a YA novel that contains NO vampires, werewolves, mermaids or dystopian societies, (2) a first-in-a-series suspense novel featuring a female prosecuting attorney (go figure!), and (3) a children’s book revolving around a kitten and…oh, I need to keep some things secret!

“How does my work differ from others in its genre?” Well, the genre for all my books up to now would be considered a mashup of slice-of-life essays and memoir. Some are about the happy stuff, others about the heartaches, and all are about what we take away from those things. I can’t remember who he was quoting when I interviewed him many years ago, but Bill Moyers told me that we all look at the world through the lens of our own experience. So while I often say that I write about things that are common experiences—joy, love, motherhood, divorce, reinvention, death, chocolate and shoes—it’s MY cracked lens you’re seeing them through! I've been compared to Erma Bombeck, Ernest Hemingway, and Carrie Bradshaw from "Sex and the City." Go figure! I'm still trying to figure out the Hemingway thing...

But one thing…there are many extremely gifted writers who peel everything back to the bone when they’re writing their memoirs, and lay bare a lot of ugly and painfull stuff. I tend to focus more on the positives, or at least to draw a forgiving screen across some of the worst. I don't want my readers to wince. Though once in a while they may want to grab a hankie...

“Why do I write what I do?” That’s an interesting question! I have often joked that with these essay collections, I was an “accidental author.” My life as a professional writer started when I was about 21 and began writing for the Milwaukee Sentinel daily newspaper as a stringer. Then I worked for the larger Milwaukee Journal on staff for a while, and turned to freelance magazine when I started a family. Then, years later, the horseback riding accident that broke my back and put me in a body cast for a while turned me toward law school and I thought writing was behind me.

Then the writing itch came back a few years later, and I started working on that novel about the female prosecutor. I got about eight chapters written, but then kept getting interrupted by serial family emergencies, some of which were taking me out of town on a regular basis. The novel got set aside, naturally. But some friends dragged/pushed/pulled me into starting my “Running with Stilettos” blog. I found I could sit and write short stuff, and it kept the top of my head from flying off. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the emergencies are behind me and I can once again pick up a project that requires a long-running train of thought!

“How does my writing process work?” Ha ha ha ha…catch as catch can!! When the kids (who are now all grown up and out of the nest) were small, I would write when they were napping. Or, if I was really cramming for a deadline, I’d get up at four in the morning to finish a project. Waiting for inspiration to strike while an editor somewhere was tapping her foot on the floor was never a luxury I could afford. Now, years later, I still feel like I’m fitting it in around the edges of everything else—work, commute, pets, yard work, connecting with my children. BUT…if something has to come out, sometimes I’ll just drop everything and write notes on anything that’s within reach. Like the back of a manila envelope in the car. Or the “notes” section of my iPhone. And I get a lot of inspiration from nature, which I get a slow-motion tour of every day while I’m walking Lucky and The Meatball in the woods.

And NOW, to pass the torch to three other accomplished writers who I am privileged to know and recommend! First at bat…

Angela Lam Turpin, a self-described “California girl” who spends her days working in real estate and finance and the hours before dawn writing literary short stories, paranormal romance, crime thrillers, and effervescent women's fiction better known as chick-lit. Her short stories explore the depths of human emotion from hope to despair, and the heroines in her novels fight the challenges of their lives with pluck and courage. (The literary apples don’t fall far from the tree, since Angela is one of the most resilient people I know!) She is best known for her wry humor, realistic plots, and engaging characters. Her latest book is The Human Act and Other Stories, a collection of short stories that explore sexual identity, poverty, romantic love, parenthood, eating disorders, infidelity, and family relationships, effortlessly carrying the reader from the inner city to suburbia.

Next up, David W. Berner, a Chicago-area college professor and broadcaster who I first encountered when we were both reading essays to a crowd at The Beauty Bar on Chicago’s near North side on a Sunday night. David’s first book, "Accidental Lessons," is a memoir drawn from his mid-life decision to spend a challenging year as a public school teacher with kids would could politely be called “at risk” and the profound lessons he drew from it. His most recent book, Any Road Will Take You There: A Journey of Fathers and Sons, is drawn from his 5,000 mile road trip with his teenaged sons as they retrace Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” adventures. I’ve always been a big fan of time spent in a car with my own children, and the emotional tributaries that reveal themselves when the rubber meets the road.

And finally, here’s Holly Sullivan McClure, who I first met in the enchanted environs of St. Simons Island, Georgia several years ago when I attended my first Scribblers Retreat Writers' Conference as a guest speaker. Holly could be the dictionary definition of “eclectic,” inasmuch as she is an author, a story-teller, a literary agent and writing coach, and an ordained priest in the Celtic Christian Church! Raised by storytellers, preachers, and bluegrass musicians, a child of the Smoky Mountains with a Cherokee mom and a father whose people came from the Scottish Highlands, Holly draws on her heritage for inspiration. In her latest book, The Vessel of Scion, warrior priests protect an ancient blood line from an enemy determined to eradicate it from the world. Faith and reality collide as final prophecies come to pass, and two children hold the key to whether good or evil will win out.

Now Angela, David and Holly, officially you’re “IT”!

End of the Road

8/29/2014

Serendipity is a wonderful thing. Between the book launch and the "house for sale" thing, I've been stressed to the max lately. So today, when I had a day off work, I headed into Milwaukee to look for that instant stress reducer, a new pair of high heels.

I decided to take a scenic route to get there, even further off the beaten path than the rural road I usually drive. And as I drove, hoping that I'd find something quirky to stop and photograph, my banker called to schedule a meeting. And while we were chatting I spied a small country graveyard I'd never seen before. I passed it in the blink of an eye, so I made a right turn at the first opportunity, at what looked like a street so that I could go back and check it out. Well, it LOOKED like a street! I was well into the turn before I noticed the "dead end" sign on the right.

I cut the call short and searched for a driveway to maneuver around in, but the bumpy two-lane went on for at least a quarter mile, maybe even a half, until it ended at an abandoned farm. It was desolate. It was quiet. It was the definition of the "middle of nowhere." It was just a wee bit spooky. It was just GREAT!!

And so before I could possibly go back to check out the cemetery (another of my pet obsessions), I locked up the car and started taking pictures. You could say I wasn't exactly dressed for a photography adventure--a sundress and bare ankles aren't particularly conducive to picking your way through thistles and long grass and raspberry canes. I REALLY wanted to make it all the way around the house and up to the front porch, but after a certain point I gave up when I realized that if I crashed through the cover of an abandoned well, it would be a long time before anyone found the body. But it was worth the stop...and for all the wild overgrowth and uncertain footing, the raspberries were absolutely delicious!

"When the Shoe Fits..." is LIVE!

8/2/2014

Here's the official shout-out that my new book, "When the Shoe Fits...Essays of Love, Life and Second Chances" is LIVE on Amazon, with some great reviews and a book club "Discussion Guide" in the back of the book. Come over to check it out and read the preview! It's available both as a Kindle edition (and remember that Amazon has a zillion apps for you to read it on other devicees) and in paperback. Here's the link to the book on AMAZON!

And I am humbled and grateful for the opportunity and and publicity and coverage I've gotten from some other and bigger websites for the opening weekend. Check out my "Reinvention from the Trenches" guest post on MORE Magazine's website, MORE.com. And my dispatches from my home planet, otherwise known as the "Imperfect Women" website, in the form of a guest post about the adventures of "The DIY Cover Shoot". And a very nice shout-out for the book from And Vannie Ryannes wrote a terrific (and humbling) review of the book for the "Voice of Women" BellaOnline website.

Yes, grateful, humbled, happy and thankful! What a long, strange and FUNNY trip it's been!!