Saturday, August 17, 2013

Summer is zipping past


I haven't felt like much of a writer this summer. With all the traveling I've been doing, my writing energy has been focused on composing the proposal for the NEH Grant "Bridging Cultures" which we are calling "South Africa as a Metaphor for the World: Stories that Help Eliminate Apartheid of the Heart." 

I'm excited about the grant, and we are on the last legs of building it. 

However, there remains the fact that I have written almost nothing of my own fiction this summer, which is sad.

Inspired by my buddy Kirstin Cronn-Mills trek to Nebraska to gather research, and feeling as if I weren't really a writer this summer, on a whim, I went to Mitchell, South Dakota, and visited the prehistoric Mandan Indian Village dig and museum, went through the George McGovern library, and the Pipestone Monument on the way back. I sort of felt immersed in my Slider's Son story again, and can finally edit and fix, I hope. I found info about the Mandans in the first half of the 20th century that I hadn't been able to find anywhere else. Now that I know where to look, there are books I can use at MSU. But they didn't rise to the surface the way I was searching.

I do love research. And in some ways, this was a spiritual quest as much as anything. Now I'm home, and I don't want to go anywhere ever again. Just kidding, but feeling that way today.

Below is a picture of the stone "Oracle" at Pipestone. See the profile on the rockface on the right? 

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