Transcript
00:00.00
jeffekennedy
Good morning everyone this is Jeffe Kennedy author of fantasy romance and romantic fantasy I’m here with my first cup of coffee.
00:12.73
jeffekennedy
Ah, so it’s been it’s been a thing ah I had a great weekend I kind of finished off with a bang. Oh I should say Monday today Monday bla blah blah it is monday. May second we are fully into the merry months of may which means um, sexy things for those of you who know we won’t get into it even though we are hardly Pg here at first cup of coffee. Yeah, whatever. Ah I did get this secret garden cleaned up if you’re on video you could say it’s looking much better I did not quite finish the vine behind me that needs yet to be done. Might be able to see that I have the hummingbird feeder up I’ve actually spotted hummingbirds. It was so nice to have them back again. Um, and everything is leafing out ah in cleaning up the yard yesterday. The garden I got a really. Nice surprise and I don’t know if I mentioned it here on the show last fall but I was looking back at old pictures of our garden and Laramie, Wyoming where we lived for 20 years and we had had this beautiful. Bleeding heart by the front door of the first house we bought together and it was in the shade east facing and it was gorgeous. It was like a couple feet tall and. I don’t know I might have seen 1 in someone else’s garden but it reminded me I was like oh I love that bleeding heart I wonder if I could grow out in Santa Fe was a little bit of background on this is I do love to garden you guys probably know that already. Although this was here when we bought the house. It is however changed over enough that I think I can start taking some credit for it. But um. Um, I yeah I’ve I’ve always really loved garden and in we had 2 different houses in Laramie where yeah, we really created some some knee gardening type stuff.
02:44.69
jeffekennedy
We put in ponds and waterfalls and my garden at 1 of them the first house with which had the great bleeding heart was actually on the town’s ah, garden tour one year which is not. Ah, fantastic accomplishment probably because um it was a small town but I was proud I was proud and and I put took flowers and plants to the garden show and won prizes so there you go my grandmother loved garden. And my mom says it skips a generation that’s her excuse. Although my mom loves to do potted plants and she’s amazing at design and I just splashed my coffee everywhere. That’s not good. It’s a Monday somebody has a kiss on the Mondays. So um, last fall I thought well oh I should this was the other bit of backstory is that when we moved to Santa Fe I thought oh it’s going to be so much easier to garden there because we always. Joked about gardening and laremie as being an exercise in building character because the environment is just really very harsh. It’s high altitude and it’s cold. A whole lot of the year we had a shorter growing season than Fairbanks Alaska that was great detail to share with visitors. Ah. 1 of my friends a poet had a ah a chapbook of poetry that was entitled hope in zone four because we were the zone 4 which was we were like teetering on the edge of zone 3 and maybe not. Not even that sometimes but that summed it up I thought that was a great title hope and zone for can’t remember her name right now you could probably look it up Alice oh well. So um. When we moved to Santa Fe I thought here is my chance I will be able to um garden without having to build so much character and it’s interesting because yes in some ways it’s easier. The growing seasons much longer. There’s the warmth of. Water becomes a big thing and it’s too hot for some things. But anyway last fall I thought huh I wonder if I could grow bleeding hearts here. So I got 3 bare root plants and I planted them at 3 different locations of the garden and yesterday and properly forgot about it. That’s 1 thing about gardening is.
05:32.78
jeffekennedy
Um, are there gardeners out there who like remember absolutely everything they plant. This is an interesting corollary to the fact that as a writer I consider myself to be a gardener. Um, and I totally don’t remember everything I plant until it grows it pops up. So yesterday as I was clinging things out I found a little bleeding heart and it was already starting to bloom it so I’ll put a photo off that because I know you’re dying to see and then I was like okay where did I plant the other ones and I found one other and right behind me and it’s also about to bloom and. The other one I think is hunted the crab Apple I’m gonna have to go look for it. Um, for a while I did have these markers like these copper markers that you could use a special pen to Mark things on um, it it didn’t last you know the garden doesn’t love. Having things really neatly laid out at least mine doesn’t um, one of my friends in Laramie who was also a writer and was also a gardener. We shared a great deal that way she said that she had read an interesting study on that people with. Really well ordered gardens tend to have have well-ordered gardens because they have more chaotic lives and people with really organized lives have more chaotic gardens um behold my chaotic garden. She always thought that was really funny that I was like I never know where I’ve planted things. And some things don’t come back I mean that’s the thing about Santa Fe um we things just don’t always over winter um rodents dryness sometimes it gets really cold but we had a lot of things over winter this year um so yeah. And the lilacs are starting to bloom. You probably can’t see it very well. But I’ll turn the video in case, you are on video. You could see that the lilacs are starting to pop so that’s cool. Um, so yeah I got that all finished by yesterday afternoon and. Showered off and was enjoying the grape arbor and got a call from my stepsister that my parents were in a car wreck. They’re both okay more or less okay totaled the car this kid going really really fast. Um. They were going through. They’d stopped his stop sign and we’re going through the intersection and my mom keeps calling the kid. We don’t know how old he is but he was going really fast and slammed into them spun them around stepdad had to stay the night in the hospital. Ah, he’s.
08:20.63
jeffekennedy
He’s generally okay, his blood pressure is high and my mom sent me pictures of the car and the air bags had gone off and on his so he was driving on his side. The blood is on the air bags. He got a big hemotoma on his arm and his leg and had to Lancet and. We’re having trouble stopping and bleeding and all of that so stay tuned. Um, my stepsster is funny because a couple of times that something like this has happened she calls me which she almost never calls me. We usually text she calls me and she says so if you talk to your mother. Lately yeah and the second time she’s asked me that and I know I laughed at her for it later because I and she said well I don’t know what you already know and I’m like yeah I know I understand why you’re asking it. It’s still funny because now I know if hope calls me and says have you talked to your mother that means that something has happened. So so that was our big thing. Um I talked to my mom this morning and she did get good sleep. So that’s something she’s was really shaken up and so we’ll just see how things go I asked her if she wants me to come to Tucson and she said not yet. So. Um, but if you’re listening to this mom I will a couple other things. This is just like back to our usual programming. Um I’ve started listening to poetry. This is a new thing. And it’s ah amazingly immensely gratifying and well refilling I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before so some of this came out of ah the rabbit hole of reading this biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning I think it’s funny because the transcript always makes browning lowercase I have to go in and fix it I don’t catch them all but they um obviously were poets and married to each other and it was fascinating. To read and there were some excerpts of their poetry but it mostly focused on them and talked about so like their works in context of what was going on in their lives at the time and their relationship and so forth. So after I finished the book which I think I finished on friday. Something like that I looked up a few of the poems because I wanted to see what? um you know, just get the context for it. Some of them I knew already some I did not I was of course familiar with how do I love thee, let me count the ways. Although I don’t know that I’d ever really.
11:09.61
jeffekennedy
Read the whole poem and paid attention to it. So as I was looking that up googling on my phone I got suggestions for hearing people read and so I’d I’d read the poem. Um, it’s it’s not called how do I love thee. But I can’t recall what it’s called right now but the actual title is and I listen to um, a famous actress Helen Mirren read it. And it was lovely hearing her reading it and then you know how it is when you start googling things I got the very helpful suggestion of did I want to hear my bestie Tom Hiddleston read me some poems and I thought that that one was going to be in it. But. It was um, it was not that was like a red herring on the keywords but still delightful and I listen to this 30 minute thing and I’ll I’ll try to remember to post it in the show notes because it’s well worth listening to It’s a collection of poems. Read by Tom Hiddleston who does a great job of reading. He’s got a lovely voice too and and it was some poems that I was familiar with from school and so forth and other ones that I was not and I was getting ready in and the morning you know like doing my skin care routine. And all of that. It’s a little breezy this morning you can kind of see my hairs flying around supposed to be Wendy today alas, which at least keeps the smoke off. We do have a fire up in the ymaz mountains which transcript will not get right up up near Los Alamos and Saturday are. Air was listed as unhealthy. So I just stayed in on Saturday but then fortunately wind shift to direction and it moved out so I was able to be out here on yesterday. So that was a positive. Um, what we’re saying oh the poems. So I was listening to these poems and just found it really stimulating and invigorating and I never thought of that as being a thing for refilling the well and when I was on http://poetry.org looking up some of these poems that pop ups and I reflexively close pop ups because I hate popups and I hate that we can’t stop them anymore but they did ask me if I wanted to receive a poem a day in the mail mail email and I you know like said no write as I was.
13:56.49
jeffekennedy
Reflexively closing their fucking pop up and now I kind of think maybe I do want that it would be interesting. 1 thing about poems is and you guys probably learned this in school too that they’re almost always better read aloud and I learned to read a poem. 3 times right? you read it through um just to get the poem in once and then you read it through much more carefully parsing it for sense and then a third time again faster and and one of those. And I’ll usually the last time read it out loud or is the first time even if I just get poems much better if I read them aloud so listening to other people read them is great and I one of the ones that Tom Hiddleston read was The Love Song of J Alfred Proofrock from which I recognized many many lines and I’m sure I had to have studied that at some point in school. But I’ve never paid that much attention to it and again this is something about you know what? we bring to to a work. Ah I never knew probably because I was. Ah, dense teenager when I first read that poem or studied it I think people may have done it for like poetry competition and speech and debate because I did do poetry one year I read um, an and Sexton Poem you do not do old black shoe. Now that I think I did it like way too dramatically with a blue star on my forehead anyway I’m sure people did j alfred proof of love song of but I never picked up on. All the reflections about growing older and how do you feel about love later in life. Um, and it was really enlightening and delightful and I recommend the listen my coffee got really cold. It must be chilly out here. Chilllier than I thought but we’re almost done. Um, so we watched another episode of winning time the LA lakers story last night and also another episode of Julia about Julia Child which I think I’ve also recommend enjoying both of those shows very very much in the episode last night there is this point at which they’re talking about how basketball is only a game and Jason Segel who plays Paul Westfield says you know why are we even doing this.
16:44.27
jeffekennedy
It’s only a game and the older man 1 of the team managers starts talking about when he was a young man and he says he graduated from high school on Monday married his sweetheart on Tuesday and shipped off to the navy on. Wednesday night so he has to be referring to world war two I would think and he says you know here they were a bunch of kids on this boat and the on like once a week they would stream a game baseball basketball football. Whatever and they would all. Watch this game and become totally involved in it and he said here they were in this life in death situation and it yes it was only a game but it was also this much needed distraction and and that really hit me because you know i. I’ve been disdainful of sports in the past and and a few of my friends have called me out on it and I think rightfully so because there there’s nothing wrong with being into sports any more than there’s anything wrong with being into romance. Ah it is. Not I don’t want to say it’s a distraction. It is something that allows us to look away a little bit from the very difficult things we’re dealing with and there’s. There’s just um I think there are people who want us to make want to make us feel that there’s something bad about that and there just isn’t apparently this woman and I don’t know who she was but she tweeted something a couple of weeks ago saying um, ah she. She even started saying I’m probably going to get in trouble with this for this which if you start your tweet saying that you should probably seriously rateconsider whether you really want to tweet it. But she said how can any of you be reading fiction at a time like this. We all need to be reading nonfiction so we can understand what’s going on. There are always these people in the world and apparently she later deleted the tweet after getting thoroughly shouted down but you know these people who. Think that you have to be totally focused on the brutal reality of the moment. Um, you, you don’t especially when you know we we now have the curse and blessing of being able to know all of these things that are going on around the world.
19:26.29
jeffekennedy
There isn’t an escape for from it unless you give yourself the escape and so my permission wand is inside but I shall wave it nonetheless in absentia ah, you do not have to watch the news. You do not have to read nonfiction to understand what’s going on. You can watch your sportsings games. You can read your escapist romances. You can listen to Tom Hitddleston read you poetry because all that you can control is right here right? Your your internal environment. So. You do what you need to do to create your own zone of happiness because then that gives you the the energy it refills that well and it enables you to go out there and then make changes in the world and on that note. I will talk to you all tomorrow take care bye bye.