Lone wolf

Sun 12.27.20

      I ran a candy concession stand with my two brothers when I was six years old, I have picked beans in the fields with friends in the summer earning spending money, been a babysitter, worked as an aide in a nursing facility, I have worked at a printery, I was a cashier in a supermarket, I worked at a chicken processing plant making up packages of organ parts, I worked in several woolen mills and a cotton mill as a spinner, late shift, I worked in shoe factories and sought training to become a hand sewer, a highly skilled, well paying craft in that business, I have worked as a waitress at a hotel, and at several restaurants, I have been a gardener, a seamstress and a gourmet cook, I have collected unemployment compensation on a few occasions and considered it a godsend, I returned to school, and in the process became a welfare recipient; I got a B.A. in psychology while working the night shift at Dunkin' Donuts, then working for the Extension Service at University of Maine/Orono as a creator and developer of urban 4-H programs, and also for the housing authority creating programs for the young and elderly, I was the director of the University Women's Forum at the University of Southern Maine/Portland in my last two years of school, I was a psychiatric social worker at a mental health center, I was a brush painter at a Bath Iron Works and was part of the crew retrofitting the U.S.S. Conyngham, I owned a home and office cleaning business named, Housewife, Inc., and to further that career, I took a Dale Carnegie course in public speaking, and became a member of the Chamber of Commerce, I went on a vision quest leaving a world and a way  of being behind me, I worked for a year on my first novel, COMICS,  taking a side job translating French documents for an anthropologist and also housekeeping his home, I worked in the emergency room of a hospital as a mental health clinician for which I received extensive training and psychiatric supervision, became a licensed social worker, I worked as director of a patient support team at a hospital, seeing to the severely ill and dying, facilitated a cancer group, and various other circles, spiritual, intellectual, women, men, I gave readings of my poems and fiction throughout New England, and was invited to be an artist in residence at the University of Maine/Orono, where my first novel COMICS was staged.  After my year I signed up for the Master's Program in English, and started my second novel, 53. 

I needed a larger world, for new adventures to fuel my writing.   Luckily a door opened when the writer, artist and famed feminist, Kate Millett (Sexual Politics) invited me to be a colonist at her Women's Art Colony, The Farm, where I worked for my keep during that summer shearing Christmas trees.  Kate became my mentor and dear friend.  It was time to leave Maine and head for the world of New York City where I applied for the Master in Fine Arts Program at Sarah Laurence College, and while there completed the novel 53; and acquired an MFA in creative writing, going on welfare my first year living on the Lower East Side in NYC, working for the Sierra environmental group scouring neighborhoods for donations, and writing a new novel Diana Bontemps, about a teenager coming into her sexuality, her strength, and also working as a telephone psychic giving readings to individuals from every part of the country.. 

I moved to the Upper East Side and started my own business Luhrenloup, counseling people in search of psychic solutions.  Good money, nice clothes, soignee, a Paris vacation, but something’s off.  I write the memoir Manhattan Seeress at this time and as the chapters unfold the world of Manhattan Seeress collapses around me.  The ceiling in my apartment crashes bringing the roof into my apartment.  I find a tonier apartment and again the kitchen ceiling collapses, then I have a nightmare in which I am in the East River slowly sinking, the water volumizing above my head.  I am working on a novel, Converting Hull 1042, which does not ring true to me; I’m lying. How can one lie in a story?  By not being true to the characters, putting them in a false world.

I move to Harlem for a reality check and enter the world of bottom line.  The world of bottom line is sordidly, heartbreakingly, desperately real.  I lose my clients because I’m no longer interested in their questions.  I am writing a narrative nonfiction book entitled The Tenant’s Tale: Bearing witness to the Great Recession of 2008.  It is a story of how one adapts when the bottom falls out, a directed beam focused on the illusions with which we furnish our rosy realm and when it collapses finding one’s way to what is truly nourishing, what supports, what invigorates. 

       There may be a job or two I've forgotten or simply eliminated from my conscious mind, but essentially this is what I have been doing to occupy myself.  Some of these gigs were taken out of sheer desperation and penury, others struck my fancy or sparked some interest. Some things I learned were best for me; I would rather be a bag lady than pay for my life doing work I despise, and in that context I have left jobs that drove me crazy, with no savings and no prospects on the horizon.  Working for others is unpleasant and unwise.  I am happier and wealthier pursuing my own path.  

      I have now arrived at the best of all possible worlds where the work I perform nourishes my writing life and I will restart LuhrenLoup in which I offer spiritual counsel to those who seek me out, and hopefully  there’s another novel cooking on the back burner.

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 The all-time favorite essay, over and above everything else I post on this site, from at least 20 to 30 countries is The Sweat Lodge Ritual the Lakota purification ceremony.