Author: nmblansett@gmail.com

Luck Came to Lacey one Night

Reflections, The Ron and Lacey Story

  

2/12/16

Just when we thought we were out of luck, Lacey came into our lives. But her appearance didn’t portend possibility. Instead her skin was mottled, her fur blotched, her tiny sharp puppy teeth too eager to draw blood from the hands that offered to feed and contain her.

“She needs some manners,” the veterinarian instructed. She needs more than that, I sighed to myself. We were on the Emoth nest path, our children seeking their own fortunes, however unsuccessfully it seemed at the time. Our formerly twice rescued dog, Sunday, put to sleep as they say. We has carved out a post-millennial pathway for ourselves. Now interrupted by complications , circumstances–and canines.

Through the Years

She Wants Her Estate Gift to Inspire Others to Do the Same

“I want to invest in Emory because Emory invested in me,” begins Rosemary Magee 82PhD, whose 40-plus years at Emory included teaching courses in English, interdisciplinary studies, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies; serving as senior associate dean for resources and planning of Emory College of Arts and Sciences, as well as university vice president and secretary; and directing the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library.

“Emory provided me with the greatest gift on earth,” she says, “a lifetime of opportunities to learn, to grow, to stumble, and to flourish.”

As a doctoral candidate in Emory’s ILA program, Rosemary was first inspired by the university’s mission to apply knowledge in service of humanity. “This is the very definition of a liberal arts education,” she says, “and still the foundational principle of the university.”

As an alumna who went on to join Emory’s faculty and staff, Rosemary made employee contributions from the very start of her career at Emory—first in small amounts to meet fundraising challenges, and then later, through MyEmory payroll deductions. “My personal and professional advances coincided with the growth of Emory,” she recalls. “So I was extremely fortunate to be able to express my gratitude by giving back.”

When she and her husband started preparing for retirement, there was little doubt whether they would include Emory in their plans. “Thanks to the guidance of our financial adviser, we were able to work toward a planned gift,” she says.

The wrinkle is in the decision to let Emory know about her plans.

At a university event, she spotted one of her colleagues wearing an attractive lapel pin and she jokingly asked him where he got it. “I’d like one of those pins, too” she said, “and he told me that he received his pin when he made a planned gift to Emory. Well, I had already made my plan. I just hadn’t told Emory about it yet!”

It was then that she realized the importance of making a planned gift, and of reporting it to the Office of Gift Planning.

“The real reason for making a planned gift of course isn’t the pin. It’s the importance of telling others about it. To serve as a guide. To inspire others who are similarly moved by the mission of Emory to follow suit,” she says.

As she reflects on her career, she could just as easily be talking about her vision for her estate gift: “So many great unexpected things have happened here, but it is not about the place alone. It’s about being true to what we say we do and having a space and a place for that to happen.” She wants her gift to provide future students with opportunities to fulfill Emory’s core mission in new and unforeseen ways.

“I want Emory to continue to enlighten future generations. Someone I’ve never even heard of or met will benefit from my planned gift,” she says. “And the reason I’m telling you about it is to motivate others to do the same.”

Recombination: Stories at the Interstices

Stories

Some years ago, I began writing short stories that emerged from within me in the shape of a being to be encountered. Many of those stories were published in literary journals and otherwise received notice in a variety of ways (readings, blogs, podcasts, discussion topics). While I intended to turn them into a collection, the process of doing so and other complexities of work and life diverted my attention. More recently, I began to wonder about what had happened to the various characters populating those stories, now some years hence. Thus, began this reimagined project, tentatively titled Recombination. I currently am working on a set of matched stories that cross over time and place. They offer insight into the intentions and actions of the earlier characters but move them forward into a present—and perhaps a future. Taken together, they are an intermittent fictional series.

This project stitches the pairs of sequenced stories together with what might be called metaphysical meanderings, reflections on time and space, on then and now. The project as a whole crosses over into new terrain of both poetry and nonfiction prose; it bends and blends genres. The stories often turn on scientific metaphors that describe and inform a state of being or emotional incandescence. In addition to those already included in this project, I have stories named “Free Radicals,” “The Uncertainty Principle,” “Cosmic Strings,” and “Naked Singularity,” an astronomical term.

My short stories are not expressly about these concepts, but I do like such rich, evocative terminology. In their proper context, the scientific words are intended to describe objective phenomena. For me they can also probe the interior—by exploring the nature of relationships and the condition of intimacy.  This I consider the essential raw material for fiction. 

One story, for example, originally had another title, “Disquiet.”  During the revising process, however, I was drawn first to the term “Double Helix” after reading a news release and then “The Human Genome Project.”  It is now paired with a story, drawing from the same characters, called “Frisson,” which seems to relate to scientific words like “fusion” or “fission” but actually refers to a sudden passing phase of excitement.  For me these titles invoke the twists and turns of the imagination, suggesting something about the tiniest, most private mysteries of what it means to be human.

Circumambulation

Short Docs

Everything runs in a circular motion, according to the musician Donovon.

This series of epigrammatic, meditative accounts focuses on the concept of “circumambulation,” both as a spiritual practice and as a regular dimension of daily life. Circumambulation, which involves walking around a sacred object, is an essential aspect of Buddhist rituals (and other Eastern and Western religious traditions). It can also contain broader, more ordinary meanings. The first in the series (combining writing and documentary film), Moon Peak, was already completed some time ago; for the second, Hellbender, the writing and filming are finished, with editing to be accomplished over the summer; the third, Transmigration, both writing and filming are well underway. The scaffolding for the fourth and final in this series of short documentaries, Isle of Hope, is now in design.

For all sections of the Circumambulation Series, I seek to discover a context for experiencing the extraordinary within the ordinary, or what Virginia Woolf refers to as “moments of being” resulting from instances
of shock, discovery, or revelation.