Writing with Rox WEEKLY—Happy Birthday to me/This is how it's done!

One of the greatest gifts I've received this year (in addition to the daily gifts shared in writing with you) is this sweet, wonderfully written article my neighbor Linda Jennings wrote about me in our neighborhood newsletter (how cool is that?!), The Minikahda Vista. It's humbling and awkward to see myself in print, but she's a darn good writer and journalist and so I actually kind of like it. A lot.  

So... as a reminder, if you happen to write something about someone you know, please share it with them. It's the best kind of gift you can give and get these days. Hoodies and yoga pants I can always use more of, true; but seeing myself on the page through the heart of another, well... that's presence. 

Thanks everyone for another great year writing together at The Beach! Can you believe it's been a whole year at the new Beach, the Minikahda?  ❤️

Happy to Be Here...

You can learn and be inspired when you have coffee with a neighbor like Rox (Roxanne) Sadovsky. A Minikahda Vista resident since last summer, Rox has been successfully reaching out through NextDoor and The Vista View newsletter to connect with her new neighbors.

The Los Angeles native came to Minnesota by way of Washington, where she got her undergraduate degree (Evergreen College) and graduate degree (master’s in counseling psychology from Antioch University in 1998). Rox worked with troubled teens in the Seattle area a few years, then determined it was time for a change. Her artist mother encouraged her to pursue more education.
Rox landed in Minneapolis, at the University of Minnesota, where she enrolled in the master of fine arts program in creative nonfiction writing. Of her studies at the U, she says, “I loved every minute of it.” Writing and teaching, she discovered, were her true loves.
Even before she graduated in 2004, Rox joined the Loft Literary Center staff to teach Intuitive Writing and the Healing Memoir.

She continues to teach at the Loft and also has developed a private healing practice (Writing with Rox), Wild Women writing retreats/groups, classes in creative expression, and more. She covers a variety of writing genres — poetry, creative nonfiction, song, journaling, email, and more.

“Writing honors who you are and helps you find aliveness and joy,” Rox says. The simple act of writing allows people to slow down, she says, and connect from the heart and mind.

She points out that participants in her writing groups come together not knowing each other and with a certain amount of “Minnesota reserve.” After they start sharing their work with each other, it’s not too long before they empathize with each other and become like family. Both students and teacher gain life-changing rewards.

“Writing helps us deal with the difficult times in our lives,” Rox asserts.
THE VISTA VIEW

Expressions of gratitude for Rox’s mentorship are evident in the writing classroom in her home, from the table on which students use a marker to leave a lasting statement to a handcrafted quilt created by a student to honor Rox’s instruction and inspiration.
Students also provide feedback on Rox’s blogspot (http://writingwithrox.blogspot.com/p/what.html) using “kind and gentle,” “encouraging” and “supportive and constructive” to describe their instructor. One student suggests, “(The) class should be taken like a vitamin supplement to enhance any other writing or creative endeavor one is involved in.”
As I leave her home on a chilly day, I think this is not sunny California, but Rox is happy here — in this neighborhood...in this world. A good place to be.
-Linda Jennings
Watch for Rox’s writing in upcoming issues of The
Vista View.

Writing with Rox WEEKLY—The Logical Song

I spent half of my childhood in the car. In LA, you had little choice, given the thick lanes of traffic and the unwalked sidewalks, mostly occupied by the homeless pushing their barbed grocery carts stuffed with debris. One time a homeless woman we regularly saw cruising Little Santa Monica near to where we lived, ripped my dad's turn signal right out of his car at a stoplight. 

It wasn't all bad stuck in traffic. It all depended on Ma's mood—where she was in her cycle, or how long it has been since she'd eaten—and/or where we were headed: therapy, drum lessons, the market, a dental appointment, the beach. No matter, if the radio happened to play the right song at the right time (which we had shared custody of, Ma and I: she opted for talk radio psychologist, Dr Toni Grant, whereas I shifted back and forth between KROQ, KMET, and KLOS), all was perfect.

So that  day in early February, just past my brother's 10th birthday when he was gifted Supertramp's "Breakfast in America" record, the Logical Song came on the radio and alone with her in the car, away from my brother and his friends, I could ask the questions. What does it mean, Ma? What does "sent me away' mean? What's a vegetable? I pictured this poor guy banished, lost in a boat on a river beneath marmalade skies, along with all the lonely people: Father McKenzie, Penny Lane, Bad Bad Leroy Brown and the rest of the misfit folks I'd gotten to know through the countless records we spun at home over the years. 

"Well honey..." she'd begin, "it's about growing up."

I tried to picture it. I couldn't. "But how does that make you  a vegetable?"

"Oh for Christ Sakes, Roxanne."

But how could Ma begin to answer these questions, to translate the age of experience (logically), to the age of innocence, where I was still living "joyfully," when life was still "wonderful, a miracle"? She did the best she could and the best she could, was the best she good, because bless Ma, with her ERA bumper sticker,  fearless claiming of her space in fierce LA traffic ("up yours you creep! Those fuckers better get the hell off the road!") and her open minded heart, she kept answering those questions that kept coming day after day, week after week, year after year until I was old enough to get out of her car and drive away on my own in my own car and roll down the windows and blast the radio and wait for the day when The Logical Song came on, as I sent myself out of innocence, sent myself away to learn the answers first hand, to see for myself how to be logical.

And that's what Ma was trying to tell me that day in the car as the melodies swirled deeply,  keening callingly, addictively, between us. She didn't say it exactly, but she was trying to tell me that if ever there came a time "at night, when all the world's asleep, and questions run so deep," like they did for that simple, aching, longing, searching man in The Logical Song, it meant I was normal and that I was going to be okay. Painful as those questions would get, they would eventually lead to light, perhaps even back to innocence where life was so magical.