Donna Druchunas's Blog

Someday I will come back to Granada. I loved the tiny Arab bath, the archaeological museum, the unprettified streets of the Albacin area. And the Alhambra charged every neuron in my body. Over the week the geography of the place, the lonely vega and the glory of the mountains, began to imprint my senses. But while I was here, I felt restless and agitated. Lorca's ghost walks, uneasy in this city. Some things cannot be forgiven. The crime was in Granada.

These are the words of Frances Mayes, thinking about the poet Federico García Lorca who died in Granada, shot by Nationalist soldiers in the first months of the Spanish Civil War.

The thoughts and feelings mirror my own when visiting Vilnius and other parts of Lithuania. I return to Lithuania every year, drawn by the beauty of the place, the depth of the history, the mystery of the pagan and Christian folk art, the haunting tunes of the dainos, perhaps by a longing in my genes, the same longing for home that my Grandmother might have felt.

But nothing is simple. Being in Lithuania also brings up feelings of fear and grief, anger and frustration, a deep sadness that sinks into my bones. Lithuania is a country of beauty and death, and sometimes the two are inseparable, as in Ponary where the natural beauty of the Lithuanian forest is marred by the mass graves holding the bones of 100,000 victims of WWII, mostly Jews from Vilna.

Žagarė, a small town near the Latvian border, home of an annual cherry festival, is surrounded by beautiful countryside and farmland. Shortly before the Nazi's invaded, many of Zagare's Jews were expelled to Siberia by the Soviets. The remaining Jewish population was gathered in the town square on the day after Yom Kippur in 1941. Some were shot on the spot, while others were brought outside of the town to be slaughtered. Sitting near the town writing at the side of the river, and walking through the town square, I could not reconcile the beauty and the terror.

Some times it is impossible to forgive, inadvisable to forget. But the sins of the fathers should not be visited upon the sons. I neither forgive nor refuse to forgive. The tragedies that underly Lithuanian history are beyond the scope of my imagination. All I can do is hope to be a small voice for peace and understanding and to help, in any way I can, to make sure that the future is a thing of beauty, not of death.

Remember when I said Cumbria is boring and I wouldn't want to live there? Well, guess where I'll be spending big chunks of my time starting next summer? You guessed it: Cumbria!

So what's up with that? Am I becoming a compulsive liar? Did I change my mind? Am I mad?

Not sure, actually. All of the above. None of the above. I desperately want to live in Europe for half of each year. Maybe someday I'll want to move permanently, but I'm not ready to make that kind of leap yet. My first choices for relocation would be Vilnius and Geneva. But it turns out that I have a wonderful place to stay in Cumbria, with a good friend, in the countryside. And it's much easier to visit other parts of Europe once you're already on that side of the pond.

For our entire lives Dom and I have lived in the suburbs and for the past 15 or 20 years, we've been dreaming of living in the country. I wanted sheep. He wanted peace and quiet. We just wanted to get away from it all. Recently, we've both been more interested in small cities, say 400,000 to 1 million people, and have been thinking that the countryside is out of reach for us. So once we let go of that dream, here it comes, dropped on our laps, and we get invited to come and stay in the English countryside - and there are sheep! How could we say no? (Maybe we'll move to a small city in another 10 or 15 years, when we make our next transition!)

So, next year, we will be spending 3 or 4 months in Europe, based in Cumbria and I plan to have the most wonderful time of my life. I will be working - both at my day job, which travels on my laptop, and teaching in a few places - and Dom will be on a mini sabbatical. He needs to figure out what he wants to do next, some kind of portable work so we can continent-hop every year, and he is well deserving of a big break after working at a dairy for over 10 years, with no holidays off or paid sick days (because the cows never get a day off from giving milk). If it all works out, we'll be spending more and more time away from America in future years.

So for those who wanted to know a bit more, that's what's coming next summer. Between now and then: a personal vacation for our 20th anniversary, teaching in Wisconsin, an Alaska Cruise, a book launch, the Arctic Lace audio book release, and more!

I don't have knitting pictures yet AND I'm going through a stage where I am listening to music while I write. This happened to me once before and it was very strange because it's so unusual for me. Whatever, something is going on in my brain and I'm not sure exactly what it is. I'm more in tune with my emotions these days, and less interested in thinking things through logically, and I'm completely enjoying the feeling. I'm diving into this by reading fiction and listening to music. For the past 10 or 15 years, I've mostly been reading nonfiction and suddenly I find that novels are calling to me again. I guess Euro Donna is more right-brained than Ameri-Donna. There's so much that I want to write about all of this! But I'm trying to write a book now, and I need to write some software tutorials for my day job before I get fired. Which leaves little time for blogging.

Things I would write about if I had time:

How language changes the way you think and see the world, and how that interacts with visiting new places and interacting with other cultures. Sources for my thoughts: Dreaming in Hindi by Kathering Russell Rich and A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (a novel) by Xiaolu Guo.

Moving to Europe! If you don't follow me on Twitter then you've missed the news that Dom and I are going to start spending half of each year in Europe beginning next summer (because we need some time to plan, unload stuff, and get organized enough to live in two places or be vagabonds).

Speed. Or the lack thereof. I used to do everything fast. Now I seem to have two speeds: slow and slower! It's wonderful but also frustrating, especially when I have a lot of work to get done and deadlines. I think I need to let Ameri Donna out a little bit to manage this. On the other hand, I'm not feeling very stressed about the slowness, but I don't want to let it build to where anxiety starts keeping me up at night.

OK, more soon, I promise. About knitting: projects I've finished, online classes, cruises, tours, and so much more!

My current music: Jason Mraz, We Sing, We Dance, We Steal Things. I can't get enough of this fun, sexy album. I have been listening over and over and over the way I used to listen to vinyl albums when I was a teenager.

"One day in Vilnius is more interesting than a year in Toronto", Darius said.

I looked around Dovid’s apartment. This party was certainly more interesting than anything I’d experienced in the past year at home. Surrounded by writers, professors, students, and journalists from around the world, and by a collection of books in four or five different languages overflowing the shelves in every room, I felt at ease in a strange way. And I wasn't even drinking vodka.

"What made you decide to move to Vilnius from Canada?" I'd asked.

"Boredom."

Such a simple yet complex answer.

"One day in Vilnius is more interesting than a year in Toronto."

There is nothing more toxic to me than boredom. A day in Vilnius is definitely more interesting than a year in my current hometown, Longmont, Colorado. Is it just the voluntary dislocation, moving myself into an unfamiliar place to jar the senses? I don't think so. Some places seem to be inherently more interesting than others. It's not necessarily the terrain, the weather, or the architecture, although these things certainly play a part. It's the people, the culture, and the intellectual milieu. Cumbria, England, for example, is beautiful, foreign, and boring.

Officially, I'm not an intellectual. I dropped out of high school, worked in blue collar jobs, and never got a degree (although I did get a high school diploma and started college several times). Unofficially, however, I find myself feeling at home in an environment where people are more comfortable discussing literature and world politics than football and celebrity news. I am, perhaps, a misfit, not belonging fully in either world.

Being a misfit, a creature hovering between two worlds, suits me. The description fits in many ways: I am a high school dropout who loves academia and intellectualism. I am an ex-Christian atheist who feels a strong attachment to my Jewish roots. I am an American who longs to live in Europe. The inability to belong to any one group is, perhaps, genetic. I am half Lithuanian and half Russian/Jewish, something that does not seem very odd to my American friends, but a combination that makes many Lithuanians take a step back in shock. The alienation can be frustrating at times, but I find that it is offset by a unique ability to forge bridges between two disparate groups. I can, in general, understand complex issues from multiple viewpoints, and often I can successfully translate between people who cannot seem to understand each other, even if they speak the same language.

A day in Jerusalem, I think, would also be more interesting than a year in Toronto. In that city, according to poet Peter Cole, you are "surrounded by people with whom you disagree, but whom you like very much." How refreshing.

That's how Lithuania has seemed to me, as an outsider anyway. I think America used to be that way, but in the past decade the public dialog has disintegrated into a giant food fight, with the prospect of real violence seeming less ridiculous than the prospect of real conversation. I wonder, though, how close to the surface the violence is in these other places where it has, perhaps obviously, erupted more often than it has in the US.

The saying "may you live in interesting times," is meant to be a curse. And perhaps it is. But it seems that some of us are not fit to live in a perpetual state of blessedness.

---

I was saving this for an essay, but after I read this short interview on Publisher's Weekly, I decided I'd go ahead and post my own thoughts. Katherine Russell Rich, author of Dreaming in Hindi, understands this. When asked why she returned to India even though her first experiences there were somewhat negative, and sometimes even violent, she answered:

I love the country. I feel I became this other person that now has no other expression. That part of me can't be made to exist here [in the U.S.] because there's nobody who understands the way I was altered by everything there. There is a Chinese curse: may you have an interesting life. And there in India I certainly did.

Sounds like Euro Donna, dreaming in Lithuanian, to me.

Update: I am enjoying Dreaming in Hindi immensely. I spent the last few summers in Lithuania studying the language, amongst other things, and I find that this book pulls me back into the feeling of being in that place where everything is strange and you can't quite understand what's going on. Katherine Russell Rich has captured the essence of the language-learning experience perfectly. I also love the way she has interspersed the science and linguistics information with the parts of her story. It all flows beautifully and makes the book much richer than it would have been as a simple memoir or a simple non-fiction book. I look forward to going back and studying more in the future with the ideas in this book to enrich my own experiences.

I have to finish an article today. I would say that it's about three-quarters complete. It needs some bits of info filled in, one sidebar needs major revision, and the rest just needs a once-over polish. I'm not quite ready to work on it yet, so I thought I'd blog about my weekend to warm up.

As you know, I've been working on giving Euro Donna free reign in my life. This weekend, she was completely in charge! I had to work on my article and do a bit of work for my day job, but I didn't want to get bogged down in anxiety, so instead of forcing myself to stay home and work, Dom and I went away for the weekend! We stayed with a friend who lives in the mountains and went to the Estes Park Film Festival.

We drove up Friday night and saw two films. Between the films, we went out for a wonderful Nepalese dinner and a quick stop at my favorite bookstore, MacDonald Book Shop. Although this is a small store, it's the kind of shop that nurtures readers, and I never fail to find something interesting on the shelves, usually something surprising. I was not disappointed this time.

Poking through the travel narratives, as is my habit these days, I saw a book with an intriguing cover. It had pomegranates on it, and a statuette of a woman standing in between the fruits. I love books with pomegranates on the cover (Fruitflesh is a favorite). The title of this new book is Traveling with Pomegranates, printed in luscious and lustrous red ink. I knew I had to have it. (I later noticed that the author is Sue Monk Kidd, author of The Secret Life of Bees, but since I haven't read that, or seen the film, it wasn't a factor in my purchase decision.)

I flipped the book open to the middle and read a couple of pages while waiting for the 8:30 film to start. I was immediately hooked. I was reading about a woman turning 50, a writer trying to find her true self. I couldn't but help think about Euro Donna. As I started reading the book in earnest the next day, I realized that there was a second author, Ann Kidd Taylor, Sue's daughter. This book is the story of the two women. The subtitle says it is a mother-daughter story. That is part of it. But for me, it was the story of two writers finding their way through travel: the older woman at a major turning point in her career, dreaming of becoming a novelist; the younger at the start of her career, just beginning to realize that she wants to be a writer. But the book is about so much more. It is about spirituality without the structure of organized religion and patriarchal traditions, and it is about allowing ourselves to find inspiration and spiritual direction wherever it comes from, no matter how strange the source may seem.

The book isn't perfect. For me the relationship between the mother and daughter seemed forced. I could relate more to the older author's voice than to the younger. I wasn't surprised by that. It reminded me of reading biographies when I was a child and how I always got bored after the subject grew up. The metaphors in the book get a little heavy handed and both authors have a tendency to over-explain, which tarnishes the magic just a bit. But before I went to bed on Saturday, I found that I'd finished the whole book. I'd also gone hiking, attended a screenwriting Q&A session, gone out for lunch with Dom, and visited a local craft fair.

I wasn't working on my article but I wasn't feeling rushed or anxious either. On Sunday morning I woke up, and wrote for several hours. The article was almost finished. I was relaxed and refreshed, ready to face a new week of work. And it was all thanks to Euro Donna's calm approach to life and work and creativity.

Now I will have to re-read Traveling with Pomegranates slowly, a chapter or two each night, to savour what I missed on my first reading.