Real-world Fairy Godmothers & Wizards are those extraordinary folks I believe have made life better, happier and – yes – more magical for all of us. Today’s extraordinary person: Sister Jacques-Marie!

Magic powers: Charm, will of iron, right-hand woman, life enhancer, muse.

Matisse is one of my favorite painters. His work is full of light, joy and charm. He was a man who fully enjoyed the five senses and had a refined appreciation for beauty. But he found – at age 72 – that his buoyant attitude to life would be severely tested. That was when he underwent surgery for cancer that left him colostimized and unable to stand for any great length of time.

Enter a woman named Monique Bourgeois. Twenty-five years old, she had been raised by somewhat joyless parents who told her repeatedly that she was ugly and useless. When Monique responded to an ad placed by Matisse for a night nurse, she entered into a platonic friendship with a great artist – and it was a friendship that restored Matisse’s zest for life and gave Monique strength and confidence.

Seeing with the eyes of an artist, Matisse found Monique, the girl whose parents thought her ugly*, beautiful and asked her to model for him. She posed for four portraits – none of which, by the way, she liked very much. Asked her opinion, she told Matisse she liked the colors but not the lines. He appreciated her honesty just as he appreciated other aspects of her character; she was wholesome, straightforward, and, well, good.

Long story short, Monique – in a decision that horrified the non-religious Matisse – decided to become a nun, and to join the Dominican order. He tried to dissuade her, but she was sure about this decision. Her new name was Sister Jacques-Marie. When the nuns in her community in Vence, France, needed a new chapel, Matisse was inspired, in collaboration with Sister Jacques-Marie, to design the chapel in its entirety – from the architecture to the bell tower, from the stained glass windows, to the altar, from the wall paintings to the priestly vestments. The end result was a joyous piece of art.

This road to this achievement was not all a great pleasure for Sister Jacques-Marie. The press published stories suggesting that her relationship with Matisse was more than platonic. Her immediate superior did not like the idea of the worldly Matisse designing a chapel for the Dominicans, and some of Sister Jacques-Marie’s fellow nuns also disapproved. Because of the possible bad publicity, when Matisse died, Sister Jacques-Marie was not allowed to attend the funeral, a decision that caused her great sadness.

Sister Jacques-Marie, who had – before she met Matisse – been timid and easily cowed – would later describe herself as being “tough as nails” in meeting the criticism and opposition directed at her. But, if you watch the documentary about the construction of the chapel in Vence, A Model for Matisse (1995), you will also note that – even in her seventies, when the documentary was filmed – despite her newfound toughness, Sister Jacques-Marie never lost any of her sweetness, her charm, or her wit.

Sister Jacques-Marie is an inspiration for anyone brought up with clueless parents who fail to see their child’s potential. She also is an inspiration for those trapped in a bureaucratic environment/job who stay with it for the greater good. In her case, it was her dedication to her calling. For others it is their need to make a living or to support their families. Sister Jacques-Marie also is a reminder that you can, to paraphrase Shakespeare, “soar above the elements you live in ” – sometimes in surprising ways!

Did her friendship with Matisse help give her that “tough as nails” strength? Undoubtedly. Did Matisse’s friendship with Sister Jacques-Marie help inspire him to continue in his mission to create beauty despite the terrible challenges of old age and illness? Absolutely.

It was a match made in heaven.

A sweet footnote to the life of Sister Jacques-Marie: When she passed away in 2005, her funeral service was held in the chapel in Vence; although she was survived only by one sister, members of Matisse’s family were present to honor her.

* Sister Jacques-Marie recalls her feisty and witty response to her parents’ calling her ugly: “If I am ugly, it’s your fault. I am the way you made me.” (Not difficult, is it, to see why Matisse so enjoyed her company?)

Real-world Fairy Godmothers & Wizards are those extraordinary folks I believe have made life better, happier and – yes – more magical for all of us. Today’s extraordinary person: J.K. Rowling!

Name: J.K. Rowling
Magical Power(s): to exhibit courage and perseverance in the face of great odds; to write books that transport readers to a magical world of humor, mystery and suspense.

J.K. Rowling Quotes:

• “I just write what I wanted to write. I write what amuses me. It’s totally for myself.”
• “Anything’s possible if you’ve got enough nerve.”
• “Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire.”
• “Never be ashamed! There’s some who’ll hold it against you, but they’re not worth bothering with.”

J.K. Rowling is one of the bestselling authors of all time. She is credited with instilling a love of reading in many children who might otherwise have been lost to the boob tube. The ongoing surge in fantasy Middle Grade and Young Adult fiction is a direct result of the success of Rowling’s Harry Potter books.

But I admire J.K. as much for her quirks and her character as for these accomplishments.

Quirks first. J.K. only barely managed to get the first Harry Potter published. One brave British publisher decided to take a chance – with a paltry print run of only 500 books! Within a year, of course, Scholastic in the U.S. bought the American rights to Harry Potter and J.K. was on her way.

Her quirk? Do you know anyone else who achieved such a significant success while still in her 30s, and yet continued to look so harried and woebegone? (Google some of her early photos.) I believe her dogged determination to tell Harry’s story over the next decade accounts for that strained look. She could easily have let the wonderful reception to Book One go to her head and let the momentum sputter and fade. But she didn’t, and the rest is history.

As for her character, this is one gutsy lady. She was a single mom who easily could have been pressured into taking a day job of some sort, handing her child over to day care and scraping by. Society would have lauded this conventional choice for her life. But she had a vision for the Harry Potter books and she chose to pursue it. It wasn’t easy. She underwent a serious bout with near suicidal depression, times when she was two pence short of enough money to buy diapers or a can of baked beans for supper, as well as the usual tough slog of writing and revising a book of 70,000 words while caring for a small child. That is pure and unadulterated bravery.

A few days ago, J.K. – who is now said to be as wealthy as the Queen of England and who could play the “go along and get along” game, instead spoke from her heart in a Times editorial, “The Single Mother’s Manifesto.” She isn’t “playing it safe” – she’s speaking out on issues about which she is passionate. (No wonder Harry was such a gutsy hero!)

J.K. is one of my “writer heroes” – an ongoing inspiration to stay true to yourself and true to your dreams no matter what. We won’t all end up with her level of success, of course; but I truly don’t think J.K. was “in it for the money.” She was in it because she loved writing and hoped to make a decent living by it – an admirable aspiration that her luck and skill amply rewarded.

I’m launching a new theme for my blog with today’s post. The theme is Real-world Fairy Godmothers & Wizards – those extraordinary folks I believe have made life better, happier and – yes – more magical for all of us. Today’s extraordinary person: Julia Child!

Name: Julia Child
Magical Power(s): to transform “faults” into assets; to make life fun for everyone around her; to make non-cooks able to turn out perfect souffles; to inspire countless women to live life courageously – in the kitchen and everywhere else.
Motto she kept in her kitchen: “I wasn’t there. It didn’t happen. It was the little people.”

I’ve always known about Julia Child, of course. She is so much a part of our culture, you can’t escape references to her, or catching glimpses of her on TV reruns of one of her cooking shows. But I was never “into cooking” and so I never paid very much attention. Mistake.

I finally caught Nora Ephron’s new movie, Julie & Julia and now I feel I’ve truly “met” Julia Child for the first time. And I’m very grateful I have!

Julie & Julia is about Julie Powell, an aspiring writer from Queens, who finds happiness by launching the Julie/Julia Project, a year of cooking each and every recipe inMastering the Art of French Cooking – Julia Child’s landmark cook book.

Nora’s movie introduced me to a larger than life (literally and metaphorically) character – a woman with a great appetite for life, an exuberance about being alive, a generosity of spirit, and extraordinary courage. I was hooked. Since seeing the movie, I’ve learned more about Julia online and I have her autobiography My Life in France on my “to read” list. And, oh yes, I bought Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Julia was born with certain advantages – her family was affluent and she attended excellent schools. But she also had disadvantages. She was 6’2 – at a time when the average woman was 5’4. She had an unusual breathy voice. She was not considered a beauty. Her husband, before he fell in love with her, described her in a letter to his brother as an “old maid.”

What is amazing and wonderful and adorable about Julia is that she went forward with her life “as if” everything was wonderful – even when everything clearly was not – and in doing so – she made it wonderful. She chose not to pay attention to her “faults” – and so she ensured others wouldn’t pay attention to them either. I watched a PBS video of The French Chef (Julia’s first cooking show) – the Le Tarte Tatin episode – in which Julia prepares an apple tart that turns out disastrously. Instead of dissolving in whimpers, she simply “fixes it up,” reassures us it’s fine, and proceeds to enjoy a slice. The show becomes not only a cooking lesson – but a lesson about life.

Because she carried herself with confidence and courage alloyed inextricably to exuberance and good will, her appearance and her voice – oddities in the eyes of the average observer – served simply to make her more memorable. And her personality clinched the deal. America fell in love with her from the moment it first set eyes on her in 1962 when a Boston educational station aired her first cooking demonstration. Julia has been amassing admirers ever since.

Julie Powell said this upon hearing of Julia’s death: “There’s so much I would not have done. Because it would not have been there for me to do. Without you here, I would be a different person – a smaller, a sadder, a more frightened person.”

I think this is what so many of us who discover Julia feel – she elevates us, shows us new possibilities, makes each of our little worlds a better place. As for me – yes, I am now into cooking!

Thank you, Julia!

Susan Cooper’s Greenwitch , published in 1974, is the third book in her five-book The Dark Is Rising series.

Cooper is exceptionally good at creating settings. Greenwitch is set on the coast of Cornwall, England, and as you read the author’s evocative prose, you can almost feel the mist from the sea flick at your face.

This mastery of settings carries over to her description of supernatural environments, including the protagonist’s trip to the ocean’s depths to meet with a primordial nature spirit of the deep, and another character’s unsettling encounter with a Dark One in a gypsy caravan. Her description of the underwater environs of the Greenwitch, a sort of wicker woman who’s come to life, largely works to make this supernatural being believable. Cooper’s gift for making the dreamlike tangible was, for me, the most inviting quality of Greenwitch.

She also has an ability to interweave several story threads into a well thought out narrative. And she is very successful at alternately setting a menacing tense mood, invoking nightmarish sensations, and then dispelling these the next moment as the forces of Light, and of friendship and camraderie stalwartly tackle their earnest mission – in this case, to recapture a stolen Celtic grail from the Dark Ones in order to prevent them from unleashing a reign of terror on humankind.

Sid Fleischman’s The Whipping Boy, 1987 Newbery winner, manages to accomplish a lot in its less than 90 pages. Despite its title, which hints at a grim theme, Fleischman makes this a fast-paced and funny tale.

Quick-witted but impoverished Jemmy finds himself playing the role of whipping boy in a royal household. Jemmy serves Prince Horace, a spoiled brat who doesn’t care very much about anyone’s feelings – except his own. So Jemmy is beaten several times a day. (It is historically accurate that a prince in the 16th and 17th centuries could not be spanked, and so had a whipping boy who felt the consequences when the prince misbehaved.)

One day, the prince – not yet the brightest jewel in the crown – decides to run away, and orders Jemmy to accompany him. The two promptly fall into the hands of two highwaymen who plan to ransom the prince to his father.

There is an attempted escape, a chase, a bear, a sewer – and a plot that plays itself out to a satisfying conclusion. Fleischman nicely sketches the friendship that develops between the two boys, Jemmy’s resourcefulness, and the character growth of the prince.

I meme it!

Meme rhymes with “dream.” Memes, like dreams, cover a lot of territory. The word meme was invented by a British scientist, Richard Dawkins, in the late 1970s. He created it to explain how commonly held ideas, slang, innovations, prejudices, beliefs, etc. take hold, spread and evolve.

A meme, he says, is an idea or belief common to a culture; it becomes common because it’s shared among people by way of the written or spoken word, and/or other forms of communication (body language, gesture, etc.) “Examples of memes,” according to Dawkins, include “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. . . . memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via . . . imitation.”

Outside of literature, the term meme has become attached to Internet phenomena – Twitter trends and YouTube videos that “go viral,” for example. In this sense, a meme defines itself as a form of communication that captures significant attention from an audience. Here’s Mashable’s list of the Top Internet Memes of 2009, for example.

Abandon all trope, ye who enter here – or maybe not

A trope (rhymes with “hope”) is a recurring theme (also called a pattern or a motif) in literature. Tropes are drawn from characters, settings, or plot. Example: Common tropes in fantasy fiction include the archvillain (character), an enchanted land (setting), and a quest (plot). TVtropes.org has a fun list of many recurring tv tropes.

For writers, tropes are a reminder that there is rarely anything new under the literary sun – but that execution is what matters. One writer’s magical land trope is the countertop with a toaster who talks, the other’s is Hogwarts.

(And, just to confuse matters a little, trope also means “a figure of speech” – similes, metaphors, and such. However, in coffee house land, “trope” is generally reserved for literary themes.)

Caffe Reggio (above) is the oldest coffee shop in New York’s Greenwich Village. Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan, and Elvis Presley have all sipped java here. Photo of Caffe Reggio by wallyg.

Five images that sum up all the writing advice you’ll ever need.

En pointe image: Lambtron. Other images via Flickr: Clocks, H is for Home; Shipbuilder, Scott Nolan; Elephant, looking4poetry; Network, alisdair; Queue, Silver Starre; Luck, paral lax.

Master the craft.

Write a set number of hours each week.

Perservere. (Image: Shipbuilder)

Be original.

Network.

Find your audience

And last, but not least - keep lots of coffee and/or a lucky charm nearby.

What stories come to mind when you look at these images? Let your imagination free.

Images via Flickr. Image credits, top to bottom: Margo Love, Kirk Lau, zoomar, syrialooks, net efekt

What is #museinks?

1. #museinks is a Twitter hashtag for writers working on projects such as novels and screenplays that require a significant time commitment. This wiki explains Twitter hashtags, how they work, and why they are useful (and fun).
2. #museinks is a “slow chat” hashtag (a coffee break type of exchange that you can tune into whenever you please or feel the need).
3. The focus of #museinks is: 1) what keeps you pumped about your writing? and, 2) your surefire methods for overcoming writer’s block and/or procrastination .
4. Here are some of the things you are invited to share via #museinks:  What inspires you to write today, at this moment? Blog posts? Online bios? The accomplishments of fellow writers? Also: quotations or thoughts that keeps you focused on writing . . . tips on writing, overcoming procrastination, setting and meeting goals, staying pumped. And, last but not least, humor related to writing, and sticking to your writing goals.
5. The tag is drawn from a play on the words “muse,” “musing,” and “ink” – which somehow seem to belong together!
6. It’s a way to take a break from your work, step back from it and refresh your commitment to it.
7. It’s a way to connect with other writers.

So consider yourself invited to join in. Post several times a day, week, month or year – it’s up to you. Here’s wishing you happy #musinks!

Photo by Lost in Scotland.

Is it okay for a writer to seek “advances” gathered from a variety of contributors in order to write her book? Writer Deanna Zandt did just that recently, and it seems to have sparked a controversy, judging by Michelle Pauli’s post yesterday on The Guardian’s Book Blog.

Some support Zandt’s move. Others blast her for, “vanity,” “shameless self promotion,” and what they perceive as the lack of a strong enough work ethic.

Seems to me that some of these irate folk are forgetting something basic – namely that writing is a business. And writers – magical as we may be in the practise of our Craft – also need that cup of java and loaf of bread in order to churn out our work in the wilderness.

Consider this: J.K. Rowling, who contributed fabulously to children’s literature (as well as the global gross national product) was, before she was discovered, a welfare mom; she wrote her first book “on the dole.” There was nothing wrong with her work ethic. She just wasn’t Superwoman (able to raise a small child, write a superb book, and hold down a day job at the same time). When her first novel was going to press, Barry Cunningham, the publisher who agreed to the small print run – of only 500 books (and no, that is not a typo) – of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, advised her to get a day job. He didn’t believe she would make a living from her work. Fortunately, in 1997, the Scottish Arts Council awarded Rowling an £8000 grant. The rest is history.

Bottom line: Magic can benefit from a few Galleons, Sickles and Knuts thrown its way. (After all, wands don’t come free.) Crowdfunding is not something I personally would pursue, but if a fellow writer finds a resourceful way to fund her work, I say more power to her.

Photo by Curious Expeditions.