Content Tagged ‘Cheri Lucas Rowlands’

My grandfathering essay

May 3, 2017 | 9 Comments

Driving back and forth between Ohio and Virginia late last winter and into spring, as I taught a short course in memoir at Virginia Tech, I thought of how I might write an essay about my granddaughter. Or rather, about the twelve-plus hours in February when I had cared for her alone.

Let me repeat and recast that: a guy in his sixties, with a bad back and a grumpy demeanor, was tasked with watching a toddler, then in the throes of the Terrible Twos, alone for over twelve hours. Oh, she’s adorable—the cutest, sweetest, smartest kid on Earth—but she does something different every 30 seconds. A force of nature, she totally sets your agenda. And did I mention that she doesn’t nap when at home, only at daycare? That she’s in the Terrible Twos? For the uninformed, the latter means “no” is a fraught word. So I’d rolled with the punches, all 12.5 hours of them.

At the end, punch drunk, I had only two clear memories of that Saturday. A vivid one at the start and another indelible moment at the end. Two memories to work with. Which seemed great, in a way: open with the first and close with the second. A memoir sandwich. I steadily warmed to this, seeing how beautifully those two moments captured my and Little Kathy’s rollercoaster of emotions and activities. It was so intense, I have only two memories! She wiped my slate clean and almost killed me! Perfect. The problem, of course, emerged as I tried to write the essay. I have only two clear memories of that day.

Much spilled out for the middle, don’t get me wrong. As I said in my email to my memoir class for retirees that starts tonight, “After this class, should you choose, you’ll be well on your way to inflicting your own grandchild, dog . . . partner, self, or family on the unsuspecting world!”

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My editor speaks

July 13, 2016 | 21 Comments

In a slightly earlier era, Cheri Lucas Rowlands might have written for newspapers or magazines. She’s got a similar but more fluid job, one not nearly so place-bound. She works remotely: when she’s not at home in Sonoma County, California, she travels the world, writing, editing, and taking photographs for herself and for the internet publishers who employ her.

Rowlands is a “story wrangler” and editor for Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com and Longreads.com (among other products). WordPress is the world’s most popular web and blogging software, and currently powers over 60 million sites on the internet. This very website runs on WordPress software, though when I launched it—eight years ago this month—I started on the hosted version, WordPress.com.

I met Rowlands when we were classmates in Goucher College’s MFA program in creative nonfiction, 2005-2007; in fact, she may have been one of the twenty-somethings I asked back then about which blogging platform to use and was told “go with WordPress without a doubt,” which turned out to be solid gold advice. Knowing Rowlands gave me confidence recently to pitch her my essay “Why I Hate My Dog,” which she liked and passed along to the editor-in-chief of Longreads, who gave it the green light and returned it to Rowlands for editing.

As I explained in my last post, after working with me on my essay, she agreed to answer some questions about editing writers, online publishing, blogging, Longreads, Automattic, and her career in the digital world of writing and publishing.

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My dog tale published

July 6, 2016 | 26 Comments

At last I’ve documented our family dog’s epic weirdness—and, well, mine. My essay “Why I Hate My Dog” explains on Longreads. Bottom line and fair warning to the rescue-minded: every adult pound dog I’ve known or heard about has suffered from scorching separation anxiety. Belle’s is far from the worst—at least she doesn’t tear apart the house—but plenty bad. Her suffering, plus some truly odd behavior, affects her humans.

Briefly this essay has made me more tolerant of others’ bad dogs. This morning, Kathy and I passed a man on our walk being dragged along by a snarling dog. We sometimes see him, and I dread it. Though I hold that dog against him, Kathy greeted him. His response was slow and a tad sullen—we’d disturbed his peace, too, even though his dog was the one wanting to kill Belle and maybe us. Then we ran into him again on our loop. He was friendlier, saying by way of possibly ironic apology for his dog, “He loves everybody.”

“I guess he’s trying to be funny,” I said when he was out of earshot.

“I don’t think so.”

“Maybe that dog was his kid’s, who died,” I offered.

“Maybe it’s a rescue he got to keep himself company in his old age,” Kathy said.

By definition, almost everyone is doing his best, right? Sometimes that’s pretty pathetic. But it goes for me and my dog, too.

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