On books; On writing; On living. Sometimes, poems happen too.

Letter to Editors #4: Dear Procrastination,

2012-01-27T08:38:00.000-08:00

Dear Procrastination,
Let's get real. Writing is hard.
I've never done anything harder. Or more rewarding. But it's the hard part that makes me turn to you, old pal. If there was one thing I wanted to do today, it was work on editing my novel. Here it is 9:12 PM: I've cooked two meals, shopped with my baby sis, played around with my new Zune, and baked vanilla cupcakes.
Procrastination,
The only guard against falling into your endless cycle of putting off what is challenging but ultimately necessary is persistence and optimism (in the case of writing, necessary in an existential rather than a practical sense).
The advice that we must give ourselves permission to write our worst and not sweat that one bit resounds without contention throughout arguments and musings on the art of writing. Why?
We must give ourselves permission to write our worst because the practice of writing is far more important to becoming a writer than any single sentence any writer will ever produce. Writing and editing require focus and stamina. Focus and stamina are strengthened by practice.
Writing daily. Writing through false starts, blocked narratives, and scenes that aren't fully realized. That is how a writer conquers you, you tic!
And optimism?
The only guarantee for practicing over and over day after day is that in the end you will have written something. You've got to believe that even if that's all that comes of your dedication and training, you will still be satisfied with your life's work.
So, procrastination, you caught me today. The sun has set and to stay up much longer would be borrowing from tomorrow. But, I did manage to write this letter and now that I've come to a close, I see I have time for at least a few more sentences... *opens novel draft*

Beating you sentence by sentence,

Liz

Letter to Muses #4:

2012-01-10T22:04:00.000-08:00

Dear Solitude,

You are sometimes hard to come by anymore in my beautiful, busy, love-drenched life, but without you, shadows pool in my eyes and I struggle to see or feel clear.
A young woman, I took you in excess, as I tended toward excess in things that felt good. Hours spent writing, listening to music, watching insights form on the ceiling like clouds in the sky, coming into focus, then shifting. I took you on long walks across two towns. I found a more disciplined you in yoga.
You are why I walk to runs and meetings even in the pouring rain. You are why, though I'm not a morning person, I love the quiet hours when the whole house still sleeps. You are why I run distance, trying to shed all the mind phantoms that keep me from just being you.
Though you are sometimes mistaken for loneliness, you have nothing to do with that particular sadness. You aren't sadness or joy, though you can be filled by either one.
The people I love best are good company in solitude. These people I can sit next to on a lawn chair reading a book without a word passing between us for the whole of an afternoon. I can write when they are in the room.
As for writing, without you the valve shuts, stopping the flow, creating a pressure strong enough to signal all the wrong neural networks.

Letter to Editors #3

2012-01-07T11:22:00.000-08:00

Dear Petunia,
I call you Petunia, though you are just an aspect of me. I call you this because the name reminds me of a girl from elementary school who never once talked to me without that look on her face--eyes narrowed, nose wrinkled in disgust. She was a pretty-faced girl who could be nice, but for some reason didn't like me.
Petunia, you are just like that girl. No matter what I do, you are there ready to jab your stick pin in my balloon, push me in the lunch line. You tell me that if I think that just because I want to be a writer my writing deserves to be read by anyone else at all, I am delusional, at best a fool playing an elaborate game of pretend.
You tell me to work hard and keep my nose to the ground. You wonder why I waste my time solving problems that involve placing words in order on a page. If I like stories so much, you tell me, I should just read more. There are already more worthy stories out there than I could read in two life times, at least.
You add, in that snotty way you have, that I'm not very good at it anyway. Sure, I've struck creative gold a few times, but to a certain extent writing is like sex. If you do it often enough, you're bound to create something better than yourself.
You don't like the way I dress or laugh, and you certainly don't like the way my conflicts aren't resolved and my scenes too thinly sketched. If you can get my attention, you tell me all this in a steady stream, barely pausing for breath so that my pen stops mid-sentence and I exhale an exasperated sigh, then check my email or do the dishes because who the hell am I kidding anyway?
Petunia, I know this letter won't bring an end to our relationship. You are an inextricable part of me, and in my optimism, I like to think, a strangely necessary part that keeps me working at becoming a better writer.
Petunia, there is something I want you to know. The most alive I ever feel comes always after writing something I believe is pretty good or maybe even better. That feeling comes from a desire to create far more powerful than your desire to destroy.

I've got you where I want you,

Liz

What I Want in 2012...

2011-12-31T11:23:00.000-08:00

While I'm in agreement with Rachael Jamison over at her fantastic blog Little Revolution Inside that in no way should a New Year inspire you to make a list of all the things you want to fix or change about yourself, then start carving away at the self-image of the beautiful person you already are, I do want to start this new year with some narrowing down of choices.
Particularly considering the never-ending news feeds we all have opened ourselves to via our Facebooks and our smart phones and our high-speed internet connections, I, for one, would like to pause here at the brink of the New Year and get some focus.
What are the things I want to do most of all? I will have to say NO to some things in 2012, which is great because saying NO is a practice I am currently cultivating.
When every day forces outside of me are pulling toward some news, activity, must-read, belief, new practice, new adventure, and so-on, I want to start this year with some non-negotiables, some things I want to do and read that everything else will just have to work around. I've created two lists: 20 Books I Want To Read In 2012 and In 2012, I'd like To. I also created and printed a visual map of these lists that I posted on my inspiration wall and will write all over by crossing out the things I've done and writing comments such as hearts, smiley faces, and exclamations. (See photo).

In 2012, I'd like to:

--Write everyday
--Run a marathon
--Write one letter a month
--Make more meals with Chris
--Try Portal because Emy says so and if I do, maybe I can get her to run with me
--Read the books on my list and more
--Keep writing Letters to Muses and Editors for this blog
--Do everything on the List of Things I Want To Do With Chris
--Send out stories
--Remember that even 10 minutes of yoga a day makes a practice

I will read other books--for teaching, for book clubs, because they find me, but these are the books I want to read no-matter-what in 2012...

Books I Want To Read in 2012:

1. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
2. Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
3. Great House by Nicole Krause
4. Fire on Her Tongue (Poetry)
5. Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Essays) by Joan Didion
6. The Art of the Personal Essay by Philip Lopate
7. 13 Ways of Looking at a Novel by Jane Smiley
8. The Falls by Joyce Carol Oates
9. The Fact of A Doorframe by Adrienne Rich
10. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
11. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstein
12. The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman
13. The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker
14. One For the Money (Because Carrie Says!) by Janet Evanovich
15. Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood
16. Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown
17. The Mind-Body Problem by Rebecca Goldstein
18. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos
19. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
20. Finish Ulysses... :)

Letter to Muses #3

2011-12-20T13:23:00.000-08:00

Dear Imagination Tree,
Half way into a ten mile run, half way up a doozy of a hill, you shifted my perspective the instant my brain received the sight of you. Trudging up that hill, by breath, by cadence, by will, I felt your influence before I understood its meaning.
You are like the sight of a rainbow caused by sunlight through a window prism, like stumbling upon a hopscotch board with time and inclination to spare, like the urge to turn a cartwheel just to make sure I still can. I saw you and longed to play under your branches, to let imagination trump sensibility, to pause mid-hill to play.
Imagination Tree, you remind me to:
skip rocks
splash in puddles
smile when I run
and, most of all,
to write what pleases me.

Letter to Editors #2

2011-12-01T15:45:00.000-08:00

Letter to Editors #2

Dear Stack of Ungraded Papers,

When I first became a teacher, I toted you around like a newborn baby. Proud, you testified to the good work I had been called to do in the world. I tended to you before and after dinner and during family movies.
You took longer to finish than I expected and you grew like some kind of well-fed yeast. When I finished grading you, students paid little or no attention to why you had earned the grade you had, even on assignments they would revise and turn back in to be graded again.
I need you, to insure accountability, to make sure students are producing compositions, but you and I both know that the real learning happens in the classroom day to day and in the act of the student creating the paper that is now sitting in a pile for me to grade.
You take time away from curriculum creation and refinement, face –to-face in process interactions with kids, and personal creative pursuits that expand my knowledge of and love for my subject area.
You give feedback too late. You further the myth that human potential can be quantified by a number or a letter. You distract student focus from the wonder and curiosity that leads to leaning that improves us and lasts.

I’m looking for ways to shrink you and still have students writing and creating.

Liz

Letter to Muses #2

2011-11-17T20:05:00.000-08:00

Dear Letter In The Mail,
I look for you every day, though at times you have stayed away for years. I have put bundles at a time of my own letters in the mail in hopes of your reply, a sort of message in a bottle.
I dig for stationery remnants in thrift stores and tuck them inside my iris-adorned letter box. I have some with a pink tea rose design and some with sea turtles wearing sunglasses. The best letters I have ever gotten, I save in that same box in case of emergency.
Always, it seems, I have been a sucker for a hand-written note, even when the notes were as simple as "What are you doing after school today?" written with hearts over the "i"s and passed during Mr. H's lectures on the War for Independence.
Letter in the mail, you remind me of why I write anything at all, even so called fiction.
I will never forget the day. It was March. Gray-covered. Rain fell in that weak-persistent way that salt and pepper race on a tuned-out television. Before that day, I'd never considered the term panic attack. Now, if I hear the words from across a crowded bar, they sober me.
Nothing big happened to trigger the attack. Staring out the kitchen window, a sink of dishes half done.
I had been looking forward to an evening of solitude so I could write. But my mind just went wild with imagination and I thought I would surely die.
So certain was I of my own death--probably by heart attack--that my hand shook as I wrote, "Dear Grandmother I Never Knew", then kept writing more and more words.
Nothing less than a miracle, then, that by the time I closed the letter "You Loving Granddaughter, Liz" my heart drum had returned to that steady, familiar knowing.
Letter in the mail, you remind me.

Love,
Liz

Letters to Editors #1

2011-11-13T11:24:00.000-08:00

Dear Premature Feedback,
I knew the story wasn't finished. It stank, in fact, in at least five places. The bones were there, but not the flesh. The ending dropped like an egg onto the kitchen floor when I read it aloud.
It was cruel the way I asked for you and then picked apart how my lover gave you exactly as I asked. It must be his fault, I thought, for not saying you clear enough, for padding you with "I like" on all sides.
I ask for you because I want someone else to tell me what only I can tell myself: the work you are doing is good--press on.

Ignoring you,
Liz

Letters to Muses #1

2011-11-12T06:18:00.000-08:00

Dear Stormy Autumn Morning,
The trees are on fire in the yard and the streets are shiny wet from the rain that drums on the roof. This new house has more windows to look out of and a rain chain. From where I sit, throw blanket and slippers on, reading on the love seat, I watch the water's path down the chain until a gust of wind sends gold leaves tumbling to the ground, pulling my attention, nudging my imagination. The sun illuminates the yard and I imagine if I ventured out I would find a rainbow. The wind, the light, the leaves, the rain: stirring ideas, possibilities, desires. Mornings like these, writing begins easy and I lay down word upon word, heart alive with belief in creation.

Love,
Liz

Tottering on the beam

2011-10-20T04:25:00.000-07:00

Fall (September and October more specifically)is the hardest time of year to get writing done. While the change of season invites writing and reflection, the amount of things I need to do in a day widens with the start of school. Yet, the days are literally shrinking and the ungraded papers (like the leaves on my lawn) pile higher and higher. I'm not losing hope,though, not giving up. Getting up at 3 AM two days each school week is helping. Regular writing time after school on Wednesdays with my two favorite writing buddies is also a boon. Keeping my bi-weekly appointment with my critique group also urges me on. Then there is also the network of writer support I've built on Facebook. Hallelujah for these encouragements!

Because writing with consistency through our busy, overcrowded lives is at times impossible and, at best, difficult, but rewarding work.

Reflection on maintaining a writing life post-MFA, written in second person for no particularly good reason, just to see what emerges

2011-08-13T20:02:00.000-07:00

When you published your first book, an allegory on dot matrix pages filled with colored pencil illustrations, held together with yarn and glue, you were told by the big sister-like teacher with the cinnamon hair in the Young Writer's Workshop that you were a writer. You liked the sound of that. It was the thing you had been waiting to hear, the explanation for your impulse to observe, mute, a soothing from the shame of "stare hard, retard".
Because you were young enough to believe just about anything, for a while you needed nothing more than the go-ahead of the teacher with the cinnamon hair. You wrote stories, all illustrated. You and a friend made up your own comic.
Your body too was changing when you stopped believing, no longer content with what you had been writing, afraid to write the things that sat like a heavy meal in your gut. Terrified you weren't a writer after all, afraid to have nothing to show, you took the poem about a flamingo offered by your generous, concerned friend and put your name on it so that you would have something to show.
You started to journal and your aunts, who must have sensed your need for guidance or perhaps were once there themselves, bought you books that called you writer, offered you exercises to build-a-better-body, a body that could endure the strain of story-making.
You began to write the things that mattered, though your stories then, like the teen who wrote them, mostly only pointed and balked. You wanted to keep writing then more than anything though. In fact, those stories were the only thing you trusted and you were sure without them you were nothing.
You believed this less when you became a mother,then a teacher, and it was hard to write in those years and you were so aware of that hollow, just as you were the beating of your own heart that first year of teaching. You wrote in fits, though you often felt guilty and were sure that your family must be lost without you. Selfish of you to have this page, this pen, this separate pleasure! You sometimes snuck in writing time.
It wasn't just that you loosed your grasp on what you never could control, though that helped. You persisted, sometimes you really just limped along and lied. Now you've got your MFA and you know without a doubt, like you did when you published your first book, an allegory on dot matrix pages held together with yarn and glue, that this is the thing you must do and that you must in some way do it every day. When you doubt that, you will remember the rush of relief, love, and joy you felt the first time your fifteen-year-old son spent the bulk of one day struggling to master a song on his electric blue Fender guitar.

Teacher/Writer: Struggling to Find A Writing Schedule

2011-07-13T07:36:00.000-07:00

Summer time is prime writing time for me. My best teacher friend (who also happens to be a fiction writer) and I devise an escape plan at the end of every school year to immerse ourselves in a writing life. We do this to avoid the inevitable. School ends and the routine that we have spent all year perfecting and shaping drops away, leaving us not free and inspired, but lost and looking for our keys. This year (because of a late release date) we didn’t do this. Until now. Here we are in Packwood, WA where I have no cell service and I have to sit on the roof to steal Internet from the neighbors who own the pug named Gary (who stops by every once in a while to make sure we are all settled in).
The first day here I was like a kid with ADD during a history lecture. Read for a while. Pace the floor. Write a letter. Walk down to the river, throw myself down on the sand and pray to the River Gods for aid. At least three times, I was ready to pack it up and go home, ready to say, you know what, I finished my one book, that’s all I’ve got.
Finally, I was able to sift through some short stories and decide which ones were worth the hard work of revision and set aside three that are the seeds of future novels. At that point, I couldn’t delude myself. I had a complete draft of a novel I’ve needed to write since 2005, three future novel seeds, five stories that even the thought of revising gives me a mild endorphin rush. I will write. I have to.
This whole situation is really a false dilemma that I have been handed the solution to countless times. Build a habit. Keep a schedule. Set attainable goals.
So, what’s the problem?...
I am accustomed to my teacher schedule, wherein every year the schedule begins anew and every summer, the comfort of that routine drops away. So, here’s what I decided while I was walking around the neighborhood here in Packwood trying to get even one bar on my cell phone so I could send that one last text message. It’s high time I separated my teaching life and my writing life and came up with a writing schedule that will work for me year round. If I am able to write more in the summer (because I have more time), well nothing keeps me from writing above and beyond the schedule, right? I need to create a summer schedule that will also work during the school year and hold myself accountable to that schedule.

My schedule: Thursday through Sunday
Goal: @ least 1000 words or 6-10 pages of revision
What’s your schedule?
See my success rate here.

Writing practice

2011-07-09T10:36:00.000-07:00

Working on a short story and researching markets. Read an article with my breakfast (coffee, grapefruit, brie and crackers) about yoga and activism that nailed how I feel about writing practice, yoga practice, running, and just trying to be a better human being: "...sometimes what feels like a setback is really preparation for a big leap forward...progress isn't a neat linear path." That's pretty much what my novel is about. :)

I finished my book. What now?

2011-05-29T12:11:00.000-07:00

I suppose there is at least this reality: I am never short on papers to grade, lessons to plan. And that's the danger I'm facing. While writing a book (particularly when you've never published or book or much of anything at all) involves a massive amount of faith and nerve, teaching is something I have a history of success in. It is very tempting to soothe the fears uncovered by the process of writing and rewriting my book, a book that at times unearthed acute personal pain, with retreating into what I know best.
I am resisting that temptation. I will grade those papers and plan those lessons, of course. However, I am also stepping ever further in the direction of the unknown by attempting to find an agent to represent my work. Using Jeff Herman's Guide to Book Publishers, Editors, and Literary Agents (2011) along with sites like agentquery.com and simple Google searches for criteria like "agents Pacific Northwest", I am going where this woman has not gone before. It is a time-consuming and tedious process that feels sometimes like throwing dimes into glass ashtrays, but I have sent out 50 queries so far. I will press on, exhaust all my resources, thought I want to be writing again, have a second book strong in mind.
Writing is a practice of faith. For me that sometimes means letting go of the fear that if I am not currently writing, I may forget how. I feel this same way about other practices, other passions. If I take a week off running, will I ever go back? If my life makes the regular practice of yoga near impossible (which often happens in the ebb and flow of other demands on my time) will the loss be permanent?
So now I get the center of my faith. Having faith as a writer must come from a commitment to the necessity of the moment, a letting go of worries about the past or the future.

Publishing news with flare

2011-05-28T19:52:00.000-07:00

Booksquare.com is a fun read full of insight and news related to books and publishing. You can also get it in a newsletter or get it injected right into your Facebook or Twitter feed.

Pretty cool list...

2011-05-24T09:33:00.000-07:00

50 books that will make you a better writer. :)

Test your grammar skills?

2011-05-18T21:11:00.000-07:00

Fun! ;)

Revelations About Writing While Running the Capital City Half Marathon

2011-05-15T22:13:00.000-07:00

This morning I ran the Capital City Half Marathon for the third time. I’ve run several half marathons in the past seven years, and as for overall good feeling before and after the race, this race was my best yet. Around mile 5 or 6 of the run, I put into words what it was that was making this race so good for me, so that I could stay feeling good for the rest of the run, and I kept repeating three phrases over and over to myself: stick your neck out; listen to your body; come to your own edge. It was around mile 7 that I began to see how these mantras applied to my writing life too.

Stick your neck out

This mantra has a simple, practical application to running and has to do with physical alignment. I have experienced shoulder and neck tension with frequency during runs. I’ve tried various tricks to keep my shoulders relaxed, but today something clicked for me. “Stick your neck out” reminded me to keep a long neck and to extend through the top of my head. For the first time ever, I had absolutely no tension in my neck and shoulders during the run.

I was basking in this freedom of movement and turning the corner of mile 7 or so, when I thought about how “stick your neck out” also applied to my writing life now. I just finished my first novel, have written a query and synopsis, and am attempting to find an agent. After twenty years of writing, I am finally willing to stick my neck out and try to sell my work. In the past so many things have prevented me risking rejection. I felt overwhelmed by the publishing process. I felt less-than other writers. I did not trust my own instincts. Mostly, I just didn’t believe I could do it and so I didn’t stick my neck out. I have sent out 20 queries to agents in the past two weeks and already received five rejections, and despite those rejections, I feel a freedom of movement much like I felt during the run this morning. In a different way, I am sticking my neck out.

Listen to your body

At mile 4 I was running hot and though the rain was coming down and people around me were still wearing their long sleeves, I peeled off my long-sleeve layer. I ran the rest of the run in a tank top. The relief I experienced when I peeled off that layer was ecstatic and came as a result of listening to my body. I listened to my breath. I felt the cool raindrops on my skin. I slowed and quickened my pace entirely based on my own body’s signals (breath, temperature, body sensations). I tuned out what other runner’s around me were doing with their bodies just like I would in a yoga class, a place where listening to my own body and not looking around are givens. Today I found that I could do the same in running more than I ever had before. The resulting feeling of freedom filled my heart with love. I made it a goal to say thank you to the volunteers I passed along the rest of the route and I did.

Listening to my body in my writing life has to do with accepting the natural ebb and flow of my creative energy and not judging my own writing practice by what I did the day before, what another writer does, or what I think I should do. As I mentioned, I just finished my first novel. I am eager to get back to the page. I even know what my next project is going to be. I have a roll of butcher paper that has been sitting in the corner of my bedroom for a week now in anticipation of mapping out the plot of my next project. I also have some short stories I am working on. Should I start mapping that plot while I am also researching agents and sending out queries? Should I split my daily writing time between queries and writing time? These are questions I have been struggling with. This morning, on the run, I discovered my answer. No. I will write when I am ready and when I am done sending out queries. I may take some notes here and there, but when I listen to my body and I think of having my head in a writing project and trying to sell my book, I feel my breathe catch and my muscles tense and I realize that I need to slow down my pace and do what feels right, not what I think I should do.

Come To Your Own Edge

Come to your own edge was the mantra today that reminded me to push myself the whole way. I have a tendency to be a bit easy on myself when I run and this phrase reminded me to stay in the moment and push to the best of my ability.

In my writing, coming to my own edge means to find time to write every day and to value that writing time by staying focused in the moment, setting goals and working toward them. It means being a good self-editor by being willing to delete, revise, or set aside work that isn’t my best. Coming to my own edge means that when I’m writing, I am just writing (not multitasking) and I am doing the best writing I am capable of in that moment.

Somewhere between mile 5 or 6, I had come up with the language for how I wanted this run to go: stick your neck out; listen to your body; come to your own edge. I was saying those three phrases over and over to myself and it was at about mile 7 that I began to see how each of those phrases related to my writing practice as I want it to be. I thought to myself, “The first thing I’m going to do when I finish this race is find someone with a pen I can borrow.” Fortunately, I didn’t have to look far. My pals at Guerrilla Running were the first booth I came to. As I write this, I am reading the notes I made on the back of one of their flyers.

Jane Smiley

2011-05-14T13:15:00.000-07:00

Just started Jane Smiley's Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel. Here's an interview with her at Failbetter.com from last December discussing her own writing and writing practice.

Yoga and Writing: Another Perfect Pair

2011-05-06T15:35:00.000-07:00

An article about yoga and its benefits for writers and also about the importance of solitude and stillness (which yoga provides). Included in the article is a quote from Writing Down the Bones , a book that influenced me as a very young writer and that I love and a link to a site with poses and prompts for you to try.

My personal yoga practice of more than twenty years is a part of a whole creative practice, the product of which is writing. I generate and work through ideas while I run or walk. I prepare my body and mind for the stillness and focus that writing requires through yoga. Both running and yoga have made me a better writer.

Running and Writing: Perfect Pair

2011-05-05T17:14:00.000-07:00

Love this article on the connection between running and writing. It spoke to my own feelings about the relationship between these two practices for me. Also, here is another push for me to read What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

I've never read anything John Sayles wrote, but...

2011-05-04T10:19:00.000-07:00

I've never read anything by John Sayles, but I'm inclined to give him a try after reading this article about his unconventional book tour.

If you designed your own book tour, what would it look like? Where would you go?

Now that I think about it...that could make a great project for my ninth grade students...hmmmmmm

NY Times Writers on Writing Archive...Enjoy!

2011-05-02T18:55:00.000-07:00

Wow! This should keep you busy for a while. :)

Ian McEwan Article

2011-05-02T10:05:00.000-07:00

Ian McEwan on books that have shaped his writing and also some about his writing process. I particularly liked what he had to say about welcoming silent periods where you may not be writing, but ideas are developing.

Timed-write challenge

2011-05-01T20:58:00.000-07:00

Assignment: At least four times this week, set a timer for at least one hour and sit down to write.

The rules:
1. Don't answer your phone, check your email or Facebook, or get up to make tea during that hour. Stay in your writing space.
2. Seek solitude. Go to a cafe to be alone or tell the people you live with that for that hour you are unavailable and stand your ground.
3. Make some brief notes on what you accomplished in each writing session and how you felt.
4. Post your reflections on this experience as a comment here next Sunday, May 8.

I will be writing with you!

Call for submissions: Freed by yoga

2011-02-20T14:07:00.000-08:00

I am seeking your poems, essays, or stories about how yoga has influenced your way of thinking and being for a blog I want to launch this spring.

Mail submissions to liz@eatyourwords.org. Include your name and the words BLOG SUBMISSION in the subject line.

A New Year, 2011... :)

2010-12-31T12:24:00.000-08:00

This musing goes out to Chris, because more than anything I want to spend this coming year achieving goals and enjoying life with him. So, baby, here is to a rare love, a new year. *mwah*

Books I Read in 2010:
Various essays and poems from collections pulled off the shelf such as Naked Poetry, Dancing With Joy, and Risking Everything...
To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf
Man Walks Into A Room Nicole Krauss
The Book of Other People Zadie Smith
Ron Carlson Writes A Story Ron Carlson
Five Skies Ron Carlson
A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf
Reading Like A Writer Francine Prose
Marya Joyce Carol Oates
How To Be Good Nick Hornby
Eva Trout Elizabeth Bowen
The Death of the Heart Elizabeth Bowen
Because It Is Bitter And Because It Is My Heart Joyce Carol Oates
Tinkers Paul Harding
I started Kavalier and Clay (Michael Chabon) and want to finish it in 2011
Generosity Richard Powers
March Geraldine Brooks
On the Road Jack Kerouac
Interpreter of Maladies Jumpha Lahiri

Books I Want to Read in 2011:
--At least 3 yoga books
--Several books purchased, check out from library, or pulled off my shelf on a whim
--At least 4 books all in one sitting
--Books given to me by people I love: World War Z; Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned; A Gate At The Stairs; The Map of Love
--Several books of poetry
--Finish Ulysses on schedule
--Kavalier and Clay (Chabon)
--Mrs. Dalloway
--Mansfield stories
--Poe stories
--Lolita (Nabokov)
--Catch-22 (Heller)
--Stranger In A Strange Land (Heinlein)
--Slaughterhouse-Five (Vonnegut)
--Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon)
--Under the Net (Murdoch)
At Least two of the books recommended by my Facebook friends: The Beauty Series, The Imperfectionists, The Lost Diary of Don Juan, Hunger Games, Harbor, The Help, Of Human Bondage, The Eden Express, World War Z, The Book of the New Sun, The Mulching of America, Shadow Tag, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, The Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing

I also want to read more literary journals and at least one regularly (perhaps the one I already subscribe to--that would make sense).

As far as goals or resolutions for the year, I want to keep running, writing, and taking time for love. I want to write more letters. I want to spend 10 minutes every morning in silent meditation and keep a journal of brief written recordings of those sessions. I want to live with intention, love without fear, and be the best person I can be.

NaNoWriMo!

2010-11-05T10:58:00.000-07:00

Call for submissions!

2010-05-21T11:59:00.000-07:00

Plasma Magazine is a Pacific Northwest literary journal whose founders believe in art as food for our creative selves. What should you submit to us for publication? The piece that feeds you, the piece that reminds you what the hell you are living for, creating for. We are seeking short fiction, flash fiction, poetry, letters, reviews, creative non-fiction, essays, illustration, photography, audio, found art, and perhaps something we haven't thought of yet.
Please send your work in a format we are likely to be able to open to: SUBMISSIONS@PLASMAMAG.ORG.
We offer what compensation we can at this time for your original, unpublished work. We only offer to celebrate your work among other talented artists in a venue anyone with an Internet connection can see. Artists retain all rights to their own work.

Now open for submission. First issue released the first week of October.

Jumping in: Eat your words.

2010-05-18T13:17:00.000-07:00

I went to the meeting much the way I might go into a lake on a reticent day. One toe in, testing the waters. I had been here before and, frankly, I had doubts.
Do I have time to devote to the creation of a literary magazine? Are these people serious enough to do the work it will require? Do we really have something meaningful and particular to offer readers? Are we here for some other reason than to invent an outlet for our own masterpieces?
I went to the meeting. Christie and Kenny were already at the table. Nate was in the kitchen boiling water for tea. He had made biscuits, the softest biscuits I have ever tasted. There was butter there, but who needed it? I brought chili cherry chocolate and chai tea.
"What's in the dip?" I asked.
Pimento cheese dip. Nate had made that too. We began the meeting, snacking, each sharing what we were dreaming of in a literary magazine, what we had envisioned during the weeks since the meeting had been proposed. Now, I was getting excited. Submerged in the water. Making splashes with my feet. Diving to the bottom.
In the end, we decided on the working title Eat your words, because 1) I already owned the domain and 2) we all agreed we wanted to created something that fed each of us, others too, in that way that art sustains us.
So, here I go. My friends and I are launching an online literary magazine and it seems that now I must go draft a call for submissions...

PAD Challenge/Day 23/Exhausted Poem

2010-04-30T22:46:00.000-07:00

Writing poetry after 10 PM,
Friday.
Writing poetry because it is April 30,
the last day of the poem-a-day challenge
and you want to go out strong.

Thinking, after 10 PM, of ordering
another Americano, wondering what
it is with the trance music in this place.
*nods head, blinks eyes hard*
Writing poetry after 10 PM
because you want to go out strong.

PAD Challenge/Day 11/The Last...

2010-04-30T22:07:00.000-07:00

The Last Thing You Did

The last thing you did before leaving
sits in my memory like a stone
too heavy to lift with thinking.
I can't tell other people. They laugh
because well it was ridiculous and also because
a proper reaction is not at the ready, and
people tend to laugh when a thing is distant and shocking.
The last thing you did before leaving
did in my exhausted heart. It sits
in my memory like a stone I want to toss
across the surface of my experience,
watch it skip,
then sink.

PAD Challenge/Day 9/Self-Portrait Poem

2010-04-30T21:50:00.000-07:00

Being pay day,
I could afford the animated movie
I took you to,
the popcorn that looked
larger than life in your lap. Could afford
new shoes for you and me,
a cart full of groceries and to pick
up the pictures of your tenth birthday party
that had been filed alphabetically by our last name
three weeks ago. I hadn't expected
to come across a photo of me. I
had taken them all,
but,
there it was, blurry, taken too close.
So close you can see
every blemish,
each patch of discoloration,
the chicken pox scar on my right forehead,
but,
my whole face is involved in the laugh,
my eyes squint, cheeks blush, and I've never
seen a picture in which I looked so happy.

Smiling slightly, I set the picture aside.
It would become one of those pictures.
Those pictures that are part of who you are
and also who you want to be.

PAD Challenge/Day 12/ Prompt: City

2010-04-21T16:36:00.000-07:00

Portland

When I say Portland
is a great city
(which I say at nearly every mention),
I don't just mean
the bus signs are color
and symbol coded and therefore
easier to follow, or that the fare
is cheap and the buses run often
and that anyways,
"It's a great walking city" and it's known
for entertainment: music, restaurants,
market by the river on Saturdays, ice-skating at Lloyd Center.
I don't just mean that it's a publishing Mecca,
a liberal hoe-down,
a city you can
really let it all hang out in, the city of roses
and so many books,
city of preachers of all kinds,
city of saxophones and coffee shops.

When I say Portland is a great city,
I'm really talking about
being nineteen
and terribly anxious
to get to the heart
of any matter.

PAD Challenge/Day 13/ Prompt: Love Poem

2010-04-21T12:12:00.000-07:00

Waves

It was late in the evening
after a hard days work. I reclined,
feet propped, book in hand.
Reading of waves, the sentences
being the longest, most beautiful
my eyes had ever followed across a page.

I dropped the book;
It was an accident,
an influx of desire,
a moment in which the room
filled up with water that rose
to the tops of my thighs and the waves,
like the sentences, moved with divine grace,
life and art being playmates on the shore.

I picked the book up again,
jumped into the next sentence, read it aloud,
felt its cool splash
on my legs, belly, breasts, felt
an ache in my belly,
picked up the phone
to text you:
"How are you, baby?"

Read Write Poem/Day 18/Meow

2010-04-20T13:25:00.000-07:00

Fingers splayed,
lungs full first, then
emptied with a forward lean,
a roar,
a tongue stuck out,
eyes wide and sure,
a roar from the bottom of the belly,
one that awakens
your lion heart.

I was fifteen and felt
embarrassed, but intrigued,
willing to try it again.

Read Write Poem/Day 17/Elemental

2010-04-20T12:26:00.000-07:00

Air

The questionnaire said
I was more air than earth
and sometimes fire
and that cooked, in general,
worked better than raw
on my wind-like nerves
which blow and scatter the contents
of my mind, until sometimes I just
want to walk these thoughts
right out of my brain, until my legs
are weary, my eyes tired and in my dreams
I sit on the grass at the edge of a brook,
the sun warming my shoulders, and I lay
on my belly reading Whitman.
The questionnaire said
I was more air than earth and offered some
suggestions for balance. But the thing is,
sometimes I am at my best when I am
jacked on caffeine and a storm is raging.

Read Write Poem/Day16/Smell

2010-04-20T12:10:00.000-07:00

White Dress Shirt

I remember when you took off
this very white dress shirt,
said you would like me to
put it on and nothing else, if I wanted,
whenever I felt like it. That night.
I didn't rush to slide it over my head,
wanted to keep it sexy, keep it cool.

You were you and I was me.
An hour earlier, we had been posing as strangers
who claimed our same names. We did this
for adventure and to
heighten the big city get away
that led us to this hotel room,
both of us naked and open
like poppies in the latter part of blooming.

I remember how I kept smelling you,
how you smelled like so much goodness,
like waffles and vanilla ice cream, like the grapes
you ate from the room service plate, ginger snaps
dipped in coffee, a salad garnished with pansies.
*inhales deeply*

When you weren't you and I wasn't me, I was thinking
that I had never seen such a man, that I wanted
your hands on my hips, you tongue in my mouth,
same as I would had I been only me, and you only you,
but with the added twist that we were playing.

I never got around to wearing this shirt for you
that night,
and you didn't even notice
until I pointed it out to you
that morning, stepping one leg at a time
into my jeans, thinking of coffee, crumpets, and kissing.
I noticed the shirt where you left it, laughed,
told you I was taking it for later, stuffed it in my bag.
You smiled, agreed.

Read Write Poem/Day 15/Carrying A Tune

2010-04-20T12:04:00.000-07:00

Fading light crystals,
long walk home today,
snow-tough bird squawked, winter shrill.
I startled,
jostled this free:
A laugh bone deep at some happy thought.
I chortled.

Read Write Poem/Day 13/Poem Starting With A Line from Norman Dubie

2010-04-20T11:58:00.000-07:00

Words are

Words are being told like beads,
strung,
ends crimped:
faceted, blown,
hand-carved,
bead words, language jewelry,
woven into stars and hand bags and question marks,
hanging from the ears of girls
whose cheeks blush when they giggle,
wrapped around the wrist of the meditating man.
Words adorn like beads.

Read Write Poem/Day 12/Secret Code

2010-04-20T11:46:00.000-07:00

The stack of papers
on my desk sighs
in exasperation.
They've been trying for days
to get my attention.
They grow bold, tall,
attempt to lure me by adding
a few poems to the mix.
When I stand near, they
quiver in anticipation
of the ink they long for,
the grade they need to be given.
But it is the leather-bound journal,
Celtic knot button clasp that
I've been turning to lately,
because it's April and I am.

Read Write Poem/Day 11/Didn't choose

2010-04-20T11:31:00.000-07:00

I don't want to write a poem about what I didn't choose

I don't want to write a poem about
what I didn't choose.
Too much!

I didn't choose the V-neck 'til
thirty, married, hoping
to reclaim him.
I didn't choose to say no.
So many times it hurts to think of
how I just held my breath and prayed
he--or it-- would go away,
that the someone--anyone--
would swoop down from above
to save me.

Always stars
and princes
and God. I didn't choose.

I didn't choose the table.
I didn't choose the car.
I didn't choose the movie, even.
And when I did choose...

I was right; It wasn't easy.
I had to roar, lion-hearted
and I am still bathing the wounds opened
by the words you said in revolt of my choosing,
particularly that one WMD--
I never loved you anyway.
So, thank you very much, but
I'd rather write about what I choose.

RWP/Day 10/Celebration

2010-04-20T06:10:00.000-07:00

Split Screen

The screen on which your first
birthday plays in my mind is a split one,
like the one you play on Xbox
when you have a friend over.

Your father helped with the math,
cut the wood required to build the bookshelf
I would assemble with hammer and nails
according to the design sketched
in the same spiral notebook I used
for my Victorian Literature class.
A gift to you. From us.

On each screen is a grandmother, a cake.
You had two parties that year.

On the first screen,
You are wearing bib overalls,
a purposefully undersized top hat
attached by a ribbon under your chin,
red feather in the brim.
This cake I made out of brownie mix,
layered with chocolate ice cream and strawberries,
and topped with chocolate whipped cream.
The cake took longer than I thought it would to make,
but I finished just after midnight and
in the morning after coffee and email,
I checked on it in the freezer. There were only four
hours then until your guests arrived.
You were sleeping still.

At the party,
you kept tugging at the chin string
on the hat, managing twice to take it off,
only to have one of us, over-doting
put it back on again.
You are just a shadow figure when the lights
are dimmed. We all are.
Your baby arms,
lit by one bright candle,
waving,
your eyes wide.

It is a tradition in my family
that on the first birthday, the child
demolishes the cake.
The degree and method of demolishing
are among the first myths we make.
Did you cry and beg to be held
by your mother at the sight of the cake?
Did you fling chunks of icing and spongy cake onto the walls?
Onto the floor? Did you bury your face in it, laughing?

How must we have looked to you?
A mother, A father, A father's family,
standing round you
in your high chair
waiting to see what you'd do to the cake?

Because hateful words had been passed
and both judged the other's social and moral character,
this first birthday is a split screen
on which both story lines follow you.
You had a second party, for my kin.

On the second cake, I went for something different.
Carob cake with cream cheese frosting made to look
like a child's alphabet block,
bearing the first letter of your name
in yellow and blue and red.

Again in your high chair,
your shirt removed, the floor covered
in plastic, we watched, to see
what you would do.
I'd put so much frosting on the cake,
you nearly choked on it and I swooped in
with a sippie cup and carried you, cake-covered
to the bath.
You had cake in your nose.
I thought I might smell vanilla in the folds
of your neck for days. Your balled-up fists
held more cake. Your lips were blue,
dark brown cake rimmed your mouth.

You had just learned to walk, and you would
talk, talk, babble talk,
as you talked while I bathed you,
pouring cup after cup of water
over your shoulders, using my hand to shield your eyes
when the water cascaded down,
over your round baby head.

RWP/Day 9/Word List

2010-04-20T05:55:00.000-07:00

Strum

Strum
my heart.
Love it when you say jam
whether you mean black-
berry or campfire music-making or
I gotta go. Love the way
your lips and teeth and tongue play "J".

Wings open,
I flap, lift, rise, then
swoop. Did you know there was such a breed
as happy eagle? It seems I was born
with a talon after all. I thought
Uncle Joe teased when he said, "Right here
(pointing to his ass.) That's your tail.
Your parents had it cut off when you were
born so the other kids
wouldn't make fun of you."

Strum
my heart.
My levers are oiled. I'll even
dance a marionette for you because I know
you would do the same
for me.

Strum
my heart.
Don't stow away
the things you want
to do, to say.
No matter how uncertain.
The distance between us is the coldest winter.

Strum
my heart.
Sit upon my rug, fire burning in the chimney.
If dreams are a tome,
voluminous, detailed, gilt, crisp-paged
on which words can appear or disappear,
I find, in loving you,
I am suddenly prolific.

RWP/Day 8/Language

2010-04-18T16:42:00.000-07:00

Language

I call you
love-eyes, bright mind,
the first of epithets
in our secret love-language,
where words become you and me
and we delight in this word-play,
language love, soul syntax, plus
where it seems the future
will not be abbreviated.

Descriptions fall short
of experience. I am left to
meander in metaphor.

A fortune cookie
with only one word hidden inside--yes.
The part of the wave that touches my shore
again and again. Skipping class,
but learning more.
The used book I bought as much for
the notes scribbled in the margins as for
the poetry inside,
a brand new pen that was a splurge
as far as pens go, like the one I'm using now,
thinking of how you are so much delight...
a kiwi berry
a certain slant of light
an evolution of language and , in turn,
a shift in how
my eyes interpret signals.

PAD Challenge/Day 3/ Partly...

2010-04-15T20:23:00.000-07:00

Partly, we loved

Partly, we loved.
You agreed about dreams, partly.
I wanted, partly, to stay.
We made love that last time, partly
because the weather
was right for it and it had been
a long while, and we had some partial
memories of being young and on fire
for each other, for a good six months,
at least.

It only takes six weeks to form
a habit. Breaking one?
Easier said than done.

Tongue pressed to an ice cube
on a dare. I saw this happen
once: a very cold ice cube,
a panicked tongue.
The boy with the ice cube stuck to his tongue
was so scared he just closed his eyes and
unstuck it by force, leaving
little bits of tongue on the cube.

The whole experience must have been
just like parting with you,
who I, partly, loved.

Read Write Poem/Day 2/Acronym Attic

2010-04-15T09:08:00.000-07:00

Right Wing Porn

That is just right-wing porn,
he said.
I didn't understand what he meant
by that, really, couldn't picture it, but
I admired the concern that pushed him
to muddy metaphor AND the creative risk
he took in uttering it. I noticed how
his eyes looked always on the verge of something
and I wondered if
kissing him would taste of wild strawberries.
I thought so.

Read Write Poem/Day3/What scares you

2010-04-15T09:01:00.000-07:00

Coming to a close

Put your heart into it,
my mother always said.
She also said,
"Use your head, girl."

I read a lot, but still
feel anxious when the story
begins to move toward the close.
I put my heart in, my head,
and hope each and every time
that the story I've followed
is not one of those
where the whole damn thing--
the who--the where--the what--the why--
just a dream or
ended badly.
Badly being, of course,
not the same as sadly.

PAD Challenge/Day 7/ Prompt: "Until ____"

2010-04-15T08:39:00.000-07:00

Until You

A stray cat, until you
walked into that stray-cat bar,
holding the moon in your arms,
part piper, part prophet, part Phineas.

Happy to fend and scrape,
heart pumped full of tequila and NO
until you with the moon in your arms, smiled.
Unaware as you smile-talked, that you were
holding the moon--a miracle! Until you,
I looked up and could not see
the constellations for the stars.

Until you, No.

RWP/Day 4/Inside Out

2010-04-06T13:42:00.000-07:00

Prompt: Write a poem that illustrates your idea of inside out.

Inside Out

"Your night gown is inside out," you said.
I looked. Laughed.
It wasn't that my senses were dulled, not at all.

The way you prop your barely-gray head on your elbow
like we're sixteen, new to this, wondering,
amazed at how good the trace of a finger
from neck to torso feels.
You lick your lips and I think you have
a sense of adventure
that thrills me, and I want to run through
all the verbs in the entire OED with you, plus invent
an adjective or two.
Your eyebrows flare up a bit
where they come together at the brow and there are
some stray hairs here and there. They
mirror the wildness that underlies your more obvious
control and clear thinking.
Yes, I see the scar on your lips,
and also their thinness, their mischievous shape,
their color of sea shell bellies. A close look at those lips
causes the hair on my forearms to quiver.
That dimple hangs like a spotlight
over your smile. Your eyes, lover-boy lashes,
irises like mandalas whose patterns wash me with joy.
Your jaw says I love you before your lips
have emitted a sound, the way you set it with intention.
Your forehead is where you carry your burdens
with such consideration. I admire you for that,
and think this too is wonderfully rare. I am drawn
to kiss the soft flesh above your brow, again and again.
How better to tell you?
Lay down your burdens, baby,
come into my arms, take what you will
from that sack of care and hold it up to the light,
so I might see and nod to you what I understand.

We had made love.
"So new," you moaned.
I felt, as Emily Dickinson said of poetry,
as if the top of my head had been taken off.

"Your night gown is inside out," you said.
I looked. You were right; it was.
I laughed, then went back to my studies:
your nose...
the space around your eyes...

PAD Challenge/Day 2/Water Poem

2010-04-05T11:04:00.000-07:00

Prayer

1.
She learned to swim the easy way:
A stout-hearted father who
loved her very much
tossed her into the water, calling out,
“You can do it! Swim, honey, swim.”

2.
She was reminded of this story
she had heard a hundred or more times
when she threw her first stick into the river,
for her puppy, Max. Max, the yellow lab,
bought, she was sure, to ease the ache of loss
they had all felt since the sheriff came-a-knocking,
took off his hat, dropped his chin, said, “I’m sorry” and “died”.
She remembered how her father clapped
when her instinct took over: dog-paddle, it was called
and watching Max, she understood why.

3.
One has to be very brave to swim
in a cold river.
“Don’t wade out slow,” she told the boy
who would follow her anywhere.
“Jump right in. Get your head wet. You'll warm up fast.”
She is thinking of this now as Max, who has
had a long life, but is dying of cancer
(can you believe dogs get cancer?)
swims after what could be his last stick.
She wonders what happened to that boy,
Jimmy? Was it?

4.
She wonders what it would have been like
to meet her lover, Sam, back when she was river-bold,
shoves her hands in her pockets and looks up
at the cloudless blue summer sky, remembering too
how just that morning,
she watched the shower pour water over
Sam’s oft-pondering head, noticed how,
as always, drops settled on his womanish lashes, how the water
lit him like a saint in a museum painting,
how, seeing this, her knees gave just slightly.

5.
On the river bank, hands in pockets,
heart fixed on her common saint,
she utters a prayer to the bright blue sky.
If one of us has to go first, God,
Let it be me.
Let it be me, God.

Read Write Poem/Day 1/Shuffle Poem

2010-04-02T12:31:00.000-07:00

Prompt was to take the titles of the first five songs that come up on shuffle mode in your MP3 player and use them in a poem.

The song titles that came up for me were: Dust Bowl, The One Thing, C'mere, Californication, and Lonesome Valley.

Here's the poem:

Sunset in that Lonesome Valley

C'mere, he said.
My heart is a dust bowl and you
look like a tall glass of water,
a bud about to bloom.
Californication was playing
on the radio, and we'd been driving for nine hours already
when we stopped to watch the sun set in that lonesome valley.
C'mere here, he said.
That sunset: The one thing I'd never forget.

Poetic Asides PAD Challenge: Day 1 (Loneliness)

2010-04-02T11:07:00.000-07:00

I chose the blue silk cami, exhaled
as the fabric fell like water down
my torso, the hem settling just under
protruding hip bones.
It had been one of those days.

A typo discovered too late
in a carefully edited—by me—document
started the unfortunate motion
even an hour on the tread mill and
the ego stroke of being ogled while circuit training
had not erased. I say started; there were more.
I am not so sensitive as that.
A second and third blunder. A lunch
eaten too fast, leaving me hungry still.
A colleague who never intends to criticize:
“Those are interesting pants.”
How could she have known that
the vulnerable spot baptizing and a mother’s hope
had not cured had today erupted like a sore?

Naked from hip to heel,
I sat chin to chest, pondering
the day. Counting the number of days
since your last visit.
When my phone buzzed, I knew it would be you.

I jittered like a host before her guests arrive,
waiting for you. You ascended my stairs,
palmed the straps of the cami off my wanting
shoulders as if to say,
Baby, I’m a river, here to wash you clean,
leave you smiling, soothed.
I love you, I said.
And I you, you answered, kissing my eyes closed.

Something you said reversed something you’d said before,
and I couldn’t quite put my finger on what you meant,
nor form the question with my lips, so I kissed you instead.

Our bodies lingered in that ecstatic moment when
my yes collided with your yes and our mouths
formed the same shape as a blown, dark, pupil.

I mimicked sleep when you rose to go, listened
rustle of your slacks
click of your belt
a minor squeak as you put on each shoe.

I imagined the scene.
She had left the light on.
As always.
Left a note on the table signed, as always.
Does she write out the word love or abbreviate it with a symbol?
Is there an arrow pierced clean through?

I slept montage dreams,
then woke cold, unable to recall the particulars,
so I rose to make coffee.
My legs ached (too little water, I thought) ,
my belly growled (must have been the light dinner),
unsettling me. I poured a second cup of oatmeal
into the boiling water, took the butter out of the fridge,
pulled the honey off the shelf.
Tea-kettle whistle, sounded like howling to me.
Fear, without pronouncement, rattled me,
and my panicked heart sought ritual.
Loaf of bread.
Jar of peanut butter.
Strawberry jam.

I called up the stairs,
“Son! Wake up! It’s time to shower.”
One more word and my voice would have cracked.
One side peanut butter.
One side jam.
This is how one makes a sandwich.
Cut in two, placed in the zipper seal bag, then
that bag placed in the bag with the honey-crisp apple,
the kettle-cooked chips, the whole lunch
placed in his backpack.
I wonder what my world will come to when
he is no longer around to make sandwiches for,
when he is making his own or someone else’s, in his own
house, his own tea kettle howling?
I wonder, then, what new ritual will make me feel that,
for someone, I am needed?

To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

2010-03-31T23:15:00.000-07:00

O, parentheses! I have n’er seen you so buttered across the page…
The use of parentheses (in addition to parenthetical commas) throughout Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse is a point of style that cannot be ignored. I went through the book and highlighted them all. Nearly every turn of a page bears the mark of my yellow highlighter and at least a couple of pages contain parenthetical statements that are nearly a page long (Again, this is in addition to Woolf’s use of complex sentences, laden with parenthetical clauses that are set off from the primary clause with commas).
Woolf’s parenthetical statements range from descriptions of what is physically happening in the scene while we are witnessing thought “(as she sat in the window” (27), to the clarifying “(James thought)” (4), to the fragmentation of the point of view character’s stream of consciousness “(so courteous his manner was)” (195). The narrative shifts perspective often and seeks to show the limitations of the individual perspective: how we see what we want to, what we need to, and what experience has trained us to. Use of parentheses is one aspect of how the complexity of syntax in To The Lighthouse mirrors the complexity of perspective and scene. I admire how this, coupled with the use of symbolism, figurative language, and parallel perspectives create a story about the complexity of the human brain and how that isolates us one from the other.
Despite this realistic view of human interactions, I was heartened to see a glimmer of hope in Lily’s awe after explaining the artistic choices in her painting to Mr. Bankes, a moment in which she sees a power in the world, “which she had not suspected, that one could walk away down that long gallery not alone any more but arm in arm with somebody—the strangest feeling in the world, and the most exhilarating” (50).
(The psychological depth and drama in this novel spoke to me in affirmation of some choices I’ve made recently in love, the decisions first to leave a relationship that was damaging and disparaging to him and me and then to embrace a love in which so many interactions leave me feeling as Lily did in that moment with Mr. Bankes. To be two individuals, solid in personal vision, willing to see what the other sees, to listen, and to love honestly! Reading this book affirmed for me that to love is my choice, and that loving is not about two becoming one, but about two becoming a stronger two through honest affection and attention each to each.)
O, but I digress! I’d like to close this admiration of Woolf’s complexity of syntax with an exercise, just to see how when I get to the point of sentence level editing, how my own work might change and also to try out some elements of style observed in Woolf.
Here are two paragraphs from my novel as they are:
Movement saved me. Forcing my body through space, even into new shapes. the movement of my legs over the ground. Breath and body flowing in asana. One foot. The other. Running. Walking. Forest inclines. Always one step ahead of despair.
I survived the men who maimed me. A bad tattoo. Tongue-lash. A belt. A fist. Seeming gentle, unwanted hands. Movement saved me from a body without space to breathe.
Here, I’ve played around with the syntax and punctuation:
Running, walking, forest inclines: movement saved me. Movement saved me from a body without space to breathe (a body I despised). Forcing my body through space, even into new shapes, saved me. One foot. The other. (Progress!) I was mostly able to stay ahead of (that monster) despair).
I moved passed the men who maimed me: a bad tattoo, a tongue-lash, a belt, a fist, an unwanted touch. Movement saved me from a body at odds with itself, hand that hid in pockets, between thighs, shy shoulders curled like the top of a question mark.
And now, I will set this aside and continue my trek through the second draft, coming back to it when I’m ready. To The Lighthouse is ambitious in subject and form and I do believe I will return to it again, and to Woolf, who has her sentences by the scruff of the neck, even when they are lengthy.

The Book Of Other People by Zadie Smith

2010-03-31T23:12:00.000-07:00

For the most part, the character sketches in The Book of Other People, edited by Zadie Smith, portray characters who are stuck and the writers do not offer the reader hope of their redemption. There is more emphasis on flaw than compliment or possibility. This is fine, I suppose; there is a reality in that. I like prose that is well-written, regardless of the author’s tone or the mood of the piece. It is fascinating to read characters who are corrupt and without redemption, and there is value in looking at the darker side of human nature. This anthology, a collection of character sketches, varies markedly in style, from comic book to straight prose description, and demonstrates a multiplicity of ways to create character. I’ve struggled with writing this paper, though I did come away from this book with (if not an epiphany), at least a reaction from that part of my brain that mulls over the questions regarding the why of my writing life. I’d like to look closely at a few of the sketches, before I share that with you. Three pieces that speak to the differing possibilities for creating character can be found in a closer look at David Mitchell’s “Judith Castle”, George Saunders’ “Puppy”, and Dave Eggers “Theo”.
“Judith Castle” is a first person unreliable narrative that relies on stream of consciousness and interaction with minor characters to demonstrate that unreliability. In seeing how Judith thinks throughout, the big lie we learn she’s been telling herself in the end does not surprise us. We see example after example of how she ignores the truth and constructs her own reality, how she justifies her actions, examples of her distorted perception of herself. Oh, but we are moved by how pathetic she appears in the end sitting in the lobby of a man’s office, a man who faked his own death to evade her, who she has constructed this elaborate fantasy of true love about. She is finally revealed for how pathetic and blind she is. We see her vulnerability, wonder if she is even capable of the truth, consider how the knowledge of it might destroy her and are moved to pity. The entire story is in Judith Castle’s point of view, yet we are able to see through her self-deceptions and delusions.
In George Saunders’ “Puppy”, we are able to see the lack of ability to see herself clearly that Callie possesses. We see this because we see her and her home through the eyes of the Marie, who is the second narrative voice in the sketch. We see the filth she lives in. We see the awful image of her hyperactive son tied up in the back yard. The point of view is third person limited omniscient and switches between being in Marie’s point of view and Callie’s. When Callie asks “Who loves him more than anyone else in the world loved him” (179) ,referring to her son who is chained like a dog in the back yard, we see the complexity of the situation for having seen both what Callie sees and how she lives and what Marie sees and how she lives. They are both of them pathetic in their own ways. Neither character sees herself clearly. We see both of them from the perspective of self and other.
Theo, the main character of Dave Eggers’ “Theo” is an allegorical character, a mountain that wakes along with two other mountains. He is one of two males in the trio and is heart-broken when the she-mountain, Magdalena, does not choose him for a love, but chooses the third mountain, Soren, instead. Theo has no specific dialogue and is painted without much specificity in form or nature. The reader is left to imagine him as we may, which works, since the idea is that Theo could be any man (or woman for that matter), “One day he discovered he was not satisfied. He wanted the full attention of love. ..He walked over glaciers and through unknown craters, he bathed in cold black lakes, and he caught flocks of birds from the sky and ate them with something like hunger.” The word painting is broad and there is a fairytale quality in word choice. There is no actual dialogue; any conversations that occur are summarized.
There are twenty three sketches in the anthology, all offering some variation on character creation. The very first pages of my novel were in third person. It took me several months to realize that first person was going to make for a more powerful voice. The narrator has to be reliable, of course, since the story is an honest reflection on her own transformation. I’m happy with that.
How did this book stir my musings about the how and why of writing? In a philosophical way more than from a point of craft. I do want to create characters who are real, flawed, but I’ve had enough of bleak “realities” regarding the various characteristics that make us human. I am interested in writing books that emphasize our potential without ignoring the reality that life is struggle and we are

Man Walks Into A Room by Nicole Krauss

2010-03-31T23:01:00.000-07:00

I chose to read Man Walks Into A Room by Nicole Krauss because History of Love had stirred me to writerly adoration and because the blurb I read promised a good story. A thirty-something college professor disappears and is discovered wandering the dessert. Turns out he has a tumor pressing on his brain that causes total amnesia. When the tumor is removed, he doesn’t regain his complete memory. Though he is thirty-six, he can’t remember anything past sometime during his twelfth year. I was not disappointed by the intellectual quandaries posed regarding memory and identity in this novel, and though the ending disappointed my romantic ideals, I understood it and it led to a way into discussing a relevant element of craft in this novel: the minor character and how time spent there can simultaneously develop the main character.
You see, as I’ve been writing the second draft of my novel, I’ve felt some guilt about not paying enough attention to some minor characters, particularly Eve’s mother, Eve’s friends Dani and Cindy, her Aunt Linda, and her son. It was in thinking about how in the end of Krauss’ novel the story seems to be as much about Samson’s wife Anna that I began to take notes about how to round out my own minor characters.
When Man Walks Into A Room opens, Anna is the loyal, loving wife who, though her husband can’t even remember meeting her anymore, still wants him. For much of the novel, Anna is present only as an image of desire that crosses Samson’s mind and that he doesn’t even know what to do with. Those moments, what he sees when he thinks of her and what she says when he calls her (or doesn’t say) connect the moments at the beginning and end of the story where she is present in the narrative, make up a character arc that parallels and deepens Samson’s own development.
The first time he calls Anna, after leaving her, from the research facility where he is a willing guineau pig, he calls her Annie instinctively.
“Where did I get that? Did I ever call you that?”
Silence. “No.”
“You don’t like it.”
“No, I do. It’s what my brother used to call me.” Samson couldn’t remember a brother, man who shared her eyes or mouth. That Anna had never mentioned her brother made Samson jealous, as if he were an old lover whose photograph she’d kept.” (Krauss 109)
At this point in the novel, Samson has left Anna. She is trying to move on with her life after being rejected by Samson, who doesn’t seem to want to know the people and events he forgot. It is ironic that it is Samson who, in a fear panic, reaches out to Anna. We don’t know exactly what is going through Anna’s mind in that “Silence” because the story is told from Samson’s point of view, but we empathize with her, we can imagine how difficult it must be to not be remembered by your own husband, to still have the memories in your head that he has lost.
Right before Samson gets the memory implanted, he reaches out to her yet again. In fact, every time he doubts or is afraid or alone, he thinks of Anna. This time, Anna speaks “clear and steady” (140) and after he’s told her that he missed her, asked if she missed him, then apologizes, she says, “It’s not a question of sorry. It happened and now we need to move on” (140). In this moment, he wants to remember her for the first time, wants to know if “he was the sort of person who took [her] elbow when cars passed on the street” (140), but he doesn’t ask and she says quietly that she has to go, then there is a long pause, after which she says, “Frank misses you” (140). Anna is present in the beginning of the novel and there is a three page epilogue at the end of the novel that is written in her perspective. For most of the story, though, she is an idea that Samson keeps returning to, trying to understand. This different but parallel suffering is just as important to make the theme of isolation meaningful as is the characterization of Samson, the main character.
Anna, Ray, Donald: they have intact memories and we only know the details about them Samson sees, and what do we find in? They are facing the same struggle Samson is. They are all trying to find ways to connect with others so as to ease their own isolation. Ray wants to transcend the limits of the mind and develop a way to transfer memories from one person to another in order to achieve true empathy. Ironically, Ray is a man deeply concerned with his own self-care. He maintains a diligent exercise schedule, eats the purest foods, and is vigilant about sleep. These seemingly meaningless details demonstrate his desperation. Is this multi-billion dollar science project fueled because he can’t reconcile himself to his own feelings of loneliness? It seems so, the way he lives like a robot, in a sterile, empty home.
So how can I use my acknowledgement of how the characters surrounding Samson make his struggle human, universal, more real to answer the discontent I’m feeling with how I’ve developed my own minor characters? As my book is a first person narrative, their heads are off limits (as in Krauss’ novel), so like in the case of Samson, it is through Eve’s eyes that we will see them. The answers to how to develop each minor character will vary and form was I write and revise. I have at least identified that in order to render Eve with more depth, she needs to consider a few people more closely, I (writer) need to give them a bit more space to speak, and in at least one case (Dani’s) the relationship needs to be reconciled..Minor characters will be a revision goal all its own, I think.

March by Geraldine Brooks

2010-03-31T22:46:00.000-07:00

The truth is, March was not one of the books I planned read for this mailing. It’s probably not a book I would have picked up at all on my own. My writer’s group chose it for March. To be honest, I have four papers to write for this mailing and since the last mailing I’ve read exactly four new books. March is one of them. This novel by Geraldine Brooks is written from the perspective of the father from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and attempts to some degree to characterize the famous Bronson Alcott (inventor of recess!) through the imagined character of Mr. March. Mr. March has joined the Union Forces to serve as a Chaplain to Civil War troops.
When I first realized that I would either need to write about March or read another book in a hurry (not my preferred method), a topic to write on did not come to me. As I read, I write notes in the margins of my books and in the front cover and then go back to peruse those notes when it’s time to write these critical papers. The notes in March were spare and lacking in epiphanies. What to do? Then, I remembered one topic that came up in our book group discussion and some emailing that followed about Brooks’ use of diction. The narrative and the letters March writes home are remarkably formal, proper, and restrained. One of our book group members is a librarian who during her internship years once did some transcribing of Civil War letters. After the meeting, she sent us a link to where we could read them online. Another group member replied saying how surprised he was by how the letters she transcribed really did seem to match the style of March’s letters home, his narrative: so careful and polite. This set me to thinking about how diction is to some degree part of the setting, something to be considered when writing. But, how does one consider diction? Thinking about word choice is a scholarly exercise; writing is a practice of imagination. Then I thought: A-ha! This is about voice. And this is about practice. And, A-ha! I see what works for me. And I will come back to this A-ha moment and explain, but first I’d like to look at some lines from March and some lines from my novel in order to better demonstrate what I mean.
The refined, polite diction in March is indicative of another time and the words with which March narrates and write letters home transport us to that place as much as the other descriptions Brooks’ uses to take us to a time and place unfamiliar, long past. In one letter home, Mr. March writes: “My pupils, the old and young, progress apace with their letters. They open their heads to me now, and are no longer reticent. Josiah, who still ails and has a wracking cough that breaks your heart to hear, has nevertheless become a regular chatterbox, so that I can hardly reconcile him with the sullen, silent boy who met my boat” (Brooks 145). Notice in the first sentence the two introductory clauses before the verb and antecedent. This way of taking time to get around to the point, this gentle, polite voice, fits the chaplain Mr. March, who is earnest and of strong moral intention. This meandering style also contrasts with our contemporary voice, which leans toward concision and the striking out of extraneous words. Brooks’ novel abounds with introductory clauses, parenthetical clauses, clauses that elaborate, and so on. Words like “ails”, “wracking”, “ letters”, are antiquated, set us in a time unlike our own. The wordiness of phrases like “nevertheless become a regular chatterbox”, “can hardly reconcile”, and “progress apace” have the same effect. In a later section of narration, March muses, “Are there any words in the English language more closely twinned than courage and cowardice?...Who is the brave man—he who feels no fear? If so, then bravery is but a polite term for a mind devoid of rationality and imagination” (Brooks 168). With this kind of rhetoric, it was really quite natural to find myself reading a scene in which Ralph Waldo Emerson moved among the guests. The polite precision of Brooks reads quite flawless to me. I found myself reading with surprising enjoyment, reclining, my feet propped up, a blanket in my lap, willing to follow this clear, gentle voice. Afterward, after I’d mulled over the story with my writer’s group, I found myself thinking about how she came to find that voice while she was in the imaginative practice of writing. Maybe she read some of those civil war letters. Maybe she steeped herself in Emerson and his contemporaries. Maybe she listened to some of their works on tape. However she did it, I am impressed and thinking about the process of writing from the angle of the voice that tells the story, a voice constructed of particular words.
How does this all relate to my own work? Well, I just finished a critique session with my writer’s group in which one of my peers said that my piece had “strong voice”. I like to think so. I like to think I’m creating the voice of a literate, reflective, forty-something woman who has a story to tell about uncommon struggle and how she not only survived, but transformed herself in time, through movement. Her voice ought to be confident, enthusiastic, and reflective, not necessarily all of those all of the time. The story should move between those aspects of Eve (protagonist) as she recounts the story of her life from a mature point of view. Developing this particular voice has been a focus in writing this novel, my first longer work written in first person. How have I done this? By slowing down and listening. By writing the entire current draft out by hand, then typing it in later. By speaking. Yes, when I write by hand, when I type in what I’ve written by hand, I speak the lines aloud to test the voice, to make sure that each word sounds like Eve, who is teaching me more than I imagined she would. Reading March prompted me to ponder voice in my work and how to achieve clarity of voice.

Poem written at a meeting

2010-03-08T13:04:00.000-08:00

I find that writing poems during meetings makes it easier to pay attention...

No time for reluctance.
Observe buds about to bloom,
new colors waiting to paint the world
from top to toe, eager
to join in the movement building as the song
of seasons reaches the toe-tapping moment
just before the dance,
the eruption of joy.

Five fruit trees line the walk from home
to the park where my dog has not yet learned
to return the frisbee that sat
on the highest shelf of the closet
all winter, while we leash-walked
in the fading light of fall, then
the moon's coming out: winter.
1-2-3-4-5.
All of them new-bloomed, white.
When did this happen?
How did I miss it?

Now I'm tapping my toe too and the dog
is running after the frisbee he won't bring back,
celebrating his catch, his neck straining
to hold the disc higher, higher yet
as he prances round the lawn.
The birds chatter, spurring us on.
I imagine you, love-eyes,
across the dew-wet grass.
The tapping of my foot quickens pace,
seeing you there. A vision.

There was no decision to dance, and the dog
has joined me, dropped the disc
to explore a new curiosity.
Me.

On The Road

2010-01-26T20:11:00.000-08:00

“But, no matter, the road is life” (211). In my copy of On The Road by Jack Kerouac, this line is not just underlined, but circled, no note next to it. What was I thinking at the time? Looking back now, I’m thinking of how Kerouac makes Sal Paradise’s first person narrative not just a compelling quest story because of the pure adventure of it, but a quest about the quest called life we are all on, looking for “IT” (127). Kerouac universalizes Sal’s story by making him more observer than actor, through the repetition of certain words and ideas, and through the lines that bloom out of Sal’s pen as he comes to insights that lead to the final answer for him, that IT isn’t knowing, because “nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old” (310) but that meaning [IT] comes through being present in each moment, in recognizing one’s place in nature as a small part of something larger and often incomprehensible, but beautiful:
So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies…and tonight the stars’ll be out…the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in” (310).
Sal is really more cameraman than actor in his own story, showing us where he goes, who and what he sees. Often he will declare an emotion, I was angry, for instance, or “I felt like an arrow that could shoot out all the way” (27), but he moves on quickly, shows us the next thing. He’s an inexhaustible cameraman, moving from close in conversations between people he’s with, to gritty close in descriptions of closed spaces, to wide-angle views of the beautiful nature that surrounds it all:
It was a wonderful night. Central City is two miles high; at first you get drunk on the altitude, then you get tired, then there’s a fever in your soul. We approached the lights around the opera house down the narrow dark street; then we took a sharp right and hit some old saloons with swinging doors. Most of the tourists were in the opera. We started off with a few extra-size beers. There was a player piano. Beyond the back door was a view of mountainsides in the moonlight. I let out a yahoo. The night was on” (53).
This passage because so neatly contains how he both describes the scene and then widens his lens again to see the mountains, the sky, the stars, the wide world. Sal is often looking to the mountains.
Our main character observes more than he acts, follows more than not, and is, in a sense, the unassuming, every man. We see this also in frequent references to his soul personified, “my whole soul leaped to it the nearer we got to Frisco” (59). This tale is universal in a grand human sense (soul) and also in the sense of describing the culture of a nation. Kerouac uses symbolism throughout to create a story that is also a cultural exploration, such as an American flag accidentally raised upside down by Sal, and in how at the start of Sal’s journey he travels to his first destination fed on the iconic American pie. And speaking of American\ America, I didn’t go through the entire book and count the number of times that one or the other of those words occur, but it is strikingly often, and Kerouac just as often refers specifically to the names of cities and waterways, and other landmarks more than he needs to, to emphasize the context of this story, which is without question about an American Dream of sorts.
Sal’s story is also made universal in those lines that just bloom out of nowhere with insight and that are carefully placed amidst gritty, realistic description and dialogue, such as “Prison is where you promise yourself the right to live” (132) or “Isn’t it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father’s roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life” (105). Even the use of second person here helps to asks universal questions, blur the line that distinguishes Sal from Dean or Carlo or any other American man trying to find meaning, in spite of everything, including his father.
I am not sure in particular at this moment, how I can apply this to my current work, but I see a broad connection. I am also writing a first person narrative that is also a quest for meaning and that I hope has universal appeal as On The Road does.

Franny and Zooey

2010-01-26T20:10:00.000-08:00

The “Zooey” section of Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger begins thus:

The facts at hand presumable speak for themselves, but a trifle more vulgarly, I suspect, than facts even usually do. As a counterbalance, then, we begin with that everfresh and exciting odium: the author’s formal introduction. the one I have in mind not only is wordy and earnest beyond my wildest dreams but is, to boot, rather excruciatingly personal. If, with the right kind of luck, it comes off, it should be comparable in effect to a compulsory guided tour through the engine room,with myself, as guide, leading the way in an old one-piece Jantzen bathing suit (Salinger 47).
This narrator intrusion, my analysis of it, the purpose it seems to serve, and how thinking about it served my own writing are what I’m going to discuss here. Among all my observations about these two Glass stories looking at this one small section of “Zooey” will best serve my own writing now. In writing this, I believe I will do some much needed work around some struggles I am having with my own intrusive narrator. In fact, once I had the idea for this paper, I had to go back and make some changes to my own work that I didn’t want to lose in waiting.
This intrusive narrator, Buddy (Franny and Zooey’s older, writer brother), is playful, clever, and self-conscious. Wordy, indeed. In stating how what will follow will be wordy beyond his “wildest dreams”, he is wordy about being wordy. A guide in a one-piece bathing suit? That had me laughing out loud. He further tell us that it’s not a mystical story, but a love story, and that it’s not really a story but a “sort of prose home movie” (47) After this introduction, Buddy addresses the reader directly only one more time (in a foot note), and he appears in the story indirectly by the inclusion of a letter he wrote to Zooey and a scene in which Zooey pretends to be Buddy over the phone to Franny in an attempt to lift her out of her moment of crisis.
That is what this story seems to be about, Franny’s moment of crisis, which has much to do with the spiritual text she is carrying around with her. I must have read this narrator intrusion when I first read these stories as a teenager, but it went right over my head. I finished the book wanting to pass out copies to everyone I know as if the book itself were my own spiritual tome, like Franny’s pilgrim book. But, I’m listening to Buddy now, and as I think he meant it do be, I don’t entirely trust his point of view. I see that he is the one who chooses what, as the saying goes, lands on the cutting room floor in his prose home movie. This is made clear by Buddy’s intrusion, his mention that Franny, Zooey, and his mother, “the three featured players themselves” (47) object to including certain details. I see now how Buddy urges us to focus on the love stories “pure and complicated” that are happening between members of the Glass family.
I’m not sure I think Buddy’s intrusion is fully realized. I can’t say it doesn’t work, but it doesn’t come full circle. Why does our tour guide leave us after that? I guess, he wanted to thrust us into scenes, which he does admirably. So much of these stories hinge on dialogue and such specificity in description. Some of the scenes leave me envious (the restaurant scene with Lane in “Franny”, the bathroom scene with mom In “Zooey”), actually. I see why, though, as a teen, Buddy’s little intrusion impacted me only as clever and didn’t influence my interpretation of the story or stand out as crucial to the narrative. Yet, now I’m wondering if he intended it to be and how the story might have been different had our Buddy returned to bid his readers farewell in the end. I don’t know, but it has me thinking about my own intrusive narrator, a persona I am set on but not entirely satisfied with in her (Eve’s) current state of being.
When I first created Eve, I thought that it would be effective to sustain suspense about whether she would live or die (after being hit by a car) in the end, but later realized that putting energy in that direction really wasn’t consistent with what I wanted the story to be about. It was just gimmicky and done in large part to save a scene in the place I thought it should go. But, you see, I didn’t fully listen to this epiphany. I still for some reason felt compelled to make it foggy for the reader whether she still lived as she told the story, even had this line, about how maybe she was dead.
How can I explain how my thinking about the narrator “Zooey” helped me to come to something that was really just waiting in the back of my mind to be articulated, fully realized? I sat down to write this paper and instead opened the document that contains my book and changed the second chapter so that not only was it clear that Eve was alive, but I put her in a particular place, allowed her to articulate her purpose, and it feels good. I’m happier with the story now. I want an honest, reliable narrator for this first person story of a life, reflection on a life. It makes sense for the reader to know that she lives and even where she is now telling her story from and why.

What Shine Read: 2009

2009-12-30T09:28:00.000-08:00

I borrowed the idea of publishing this list from a friend who shared her list with me. I hope that others will do the same and we'll all have lots of inspiration for what to read in 2010. Following is a list of books I read in 2009, some with comments, some not. Wishing you all a fabulous New Year! Now, what do I want to read next....hmmmmm....Any suggestions?

What I Read:
The History of Love by Nicole Krauss (LOVED it! Couldn't put it down. Left me in a language-story induced daze)
Shortcuts by Raymond Carver (Writers Book Group Choice)
Where I'm Calling From by Raymond Carver
...some short stories by Thom Jones (Writers Book Group Choice)
The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver
The River Why by David James Duncan (Thanks to Chris Human for the suggestion!)
Last Night At The Lobster by Stewart O'Nan (Writers Book Group Choice)
Black Swan Green by David Mitchell (Unbelievable!)(Writers Book Group Choice)
Journey of the Heart by John Wellwood (Thanks for the suggestion Lee Brooks!)
Postmodern American Fiction
On Beauty by Zadie Smith (Loved it! Passed it on to Erin McAdams, who also read it and loved it!)
The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer (Writers Book Group Choice)
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Blue Ridge by T.R. Pearson (Writers Book Group Choice)
Madam Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
A Writer's Guide to San Francisco (Read to prepare for a spring break trip to the city!)
Runaway by Alice Munro
The Stories of John Cheever
Even Cowgirls Get The Blues by Tom Robbins (A re-read of an old fav!)
The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (Writers Book Group Choice)
The Hours by Michael Cunningham (Writers Book Group Choice)
Moral Disorder by Margaret Atwood
Birds of America by Lorrie Moore
Amsterdam by Ian McEwan (Writers Book Group Choice)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
Bicycles: Love Poems by Nikki Giovanni
Fire to Fire by Mark Doty
Dear Ghosts by Tess Gallagher
Where The Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak (Read to me by Winston while waiting for the movie to start)
The Summer Before The Dark by Doris Lessing
Reading Like A Writer by Francine Prose (Writers Book Group Choice)
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (Writers Book Group Choice)
The Body Artist by Don Delillo (Thanks to Nate and Christina Hile for the suggestion!)
Franny and Zooey by J.D Salinger (finished yesterday, also a re-read) (Writers Book Group Choice)

The Summer Before the Dark by Doris Lessing

2009-12-30T09:22:00.000-08:00

Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook is one of my favorite books ever. And so when it came to choosing books to read for this mailing and I came across The Summer Before The Dark on my shelf, it was an easy choice. It isn’t in first person, so it didn’t fit that criteria. But, it is a very close third, stream-of-consciousness at times, so it wasn’t way off the mark. Perusing it further, I learned that it was about a woman’s “odyssey into the perils of freedom” (cover description) and well, that definitely seemed to parallel the novel I’m working on.
The Summer Before The Dark was a painful read and I suppose that was intentional. The main character is pained, to the point of making herself physically ill thinking about her life, “A woman stood on her back step, arms folded, waiting. Thinking? She would not have said so. She was trying to catch hold of something, or to lay it bare” (1). The book opens with this brooding and continues brooding through the end when Kate Brown (protagonist) “let herself unobserved out of the flat, and made her way to the bus stop and so home” (247). Kate has spent a summer alone for the first time since she married and had four children that are now all grown. Maybe for the first time ever? She takes a job, runs off with a lover, falls ill, moves in with a young (and also brooding over her own life choices) woman.
Why not just write it in first person since the book is in her head most of the time and is entirely about her inner struggle? The narrator answers that question slyly in reference to why Kate tells her young roommate Maureen about the symbolic reoccurring dream she’s having: “There was a falseness. It was because she was evading something by putting it in the third person” (209). Kate is evading the fact that all her worrying about how others perceive her is “her self-chosen prison” (127). Kate is imprisoned by her own mind, by her own thinking, by her lack of confidence in herself. Lessing conveys that by showing us Kate in the third person, but giving us access to her thoughts in the moment.
Now, here is where I come to looking at the element of style that is most relevant to my current work. Kate (and Lessing—it’s all enmeshed) consistently makes statements as questions, demonstrating Kate’s lack of confidence and the fact that she is trying to move toward answers.
This technique of putting the character’s thoughts on the page in such a interrogative style would work just as well with a first person narrator (as in my novel). It also happens that I’m creating a character who is arriving at something, struggling, moving toward self-actualization. And, one area of weakness I see in my novel in its current draft is expanding my protagonist’s thinking about and reaction to the events described in an authentic and revealing way. Maybe I’ve done some of this already. It’s likely that if I were to go back over my manuscript, I might find some examples of this. After reading Lessing, though, I’m more aware of it as an intentional narrative choice. “Perhaps she had been insensitive?” (2); “They were indifferent to each other?” (75); “He did not like Jeffrey, but did like Kate in spite of her immorality?” (115); “It seemed as if they were waiting. For Kate to finish her dream?” (221) I’m envisioning that in my own work there will be a point at which the questioning stops: the point where the protagonist is hit by a car, perhaps? I know that as I edit the first pages that I’ll be sending with this mailing and I am thinking about those sections where I want Eve’s (protagonist) inner life exposed, I will consider this technique among the possibilities for drawi

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

2009-12-30T09:07:00.000-08:00

`Before I delve into what I observed regarding craft in Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love and the applications of that novel to my own craft, I have to clear the air with some straight-up praise. I love this book! I read it eagerly, woke at three in the morning one Saturday to pick up the story where I left off when I’d fallen asleep at midnight. I underlined gratuitously, drew smiley faces in the margins and wrote things like: WOW, LOL, and Yes! But. This is a paper about craft, so let me see if I can boil down my infatuation with this book that like a new love seems to hold not a single flaw, to some element of style that holds uniqueness, importance.
I can get at this, I believe through a couple of lines from the book that seem to me to not just apply to the situation to which they refer, but to reveal something of the writer’s talent, that can be observed in her style. Zvi Litvinoff, when he comes upon his friend Leo Gursky’s (protatgonist) manuscript while nursing him to health, observes something that though he was “wrong in every way about”, resonates with me beyond just the story itself, “Where he [Gursky] saw a page of words, his friend saw the field of hesitations, black holes, the possibilities between words” (116). Within that manuscript, Gursky himself writes of the deceased writer Isaac Babel, “When he read a book he gave himself over entirely to commas and semicolons to the space after the period and before the capital letter of the next senetence” (114). It is within those spaces between word in Krauss’s novel where I found myself sighing, laughing, welling up with tears. Her language is joyful and I couldn’t help seeing the writer behind Gursky’s outburst, “The plural of elf is elves! What a language! What a world!” (76). Extremely varied sentence lengths, the way she plays with punctuation and the space on the page, and the surprise at the end of the sentence are three of the elements that make this book an outburst of its own: What a language! What a world!
But. This sentence, one word with a period used throughout the novel to characterize Leo Gursky’s “butiful” (79) world, “I kept walking. I went into the drugstore and knocked over a display of KY Jelly. But. My heart wasn’t in it” (76). This word, this one sentence characterize Leo’s life. He wrote this great novel. But. He had to flee Poland and left it with a friend who he never saw again and who published it in his own name. He fell utterly in love. But. Her parents sent her to America and by the time he found her their son was five and she’d remarried and had a second son. He never knew his son. Looking at a picture of his son in the paper, Leo “wanted him to turn his eyes just to [him] just as he had to whoever had shaken him from his thoughts. But. He couldn’t” (77). Why? Because the photo is above an article announcing his son’s death. Krauss uses fragments and short sentences throughout her novel, often to call our attention to the scene, as in “A fly landed on his shriveled penis. He mumbled some words” (158), so intentionally, so interspersed with longer sentences. This same intention is evident in how she punctuates, uses space on the page.
Colons, semicolons, dashes, lists, italics, roman numeraled lists, bulleted lists, numbered lists, letters: Krauss keeps your eyes and mind popping with her skill and her willingness to roll around in all the tools available to her. What a language! What a life! The only words on one page (Gursky is trying to think of a title, “LAUGHING AND CRYING” (27). And then the next, “I studied it for a few minutes. It wasn’t right. I added another word”, followed by only these words on the next page, “LAUGHING & CRYING & WRITING”, and on for four more pages, creating a verisimilitude to how time passed as Leo tried to come up with a title for the story of his life. The sections in Alma’s point of view are broken up into numbered, titled subchapters. There is one subchapter at the end of a section titled, “23. OUTSIDE, IT WAS STILL COMING DOWN” (152). No words follow it. And that space on the page communicate so much about Alma’s being at a loss to understand her quirky brother (whose journal she’s just read). A third technique, but not the last that Krauss uses to express her delight of language and tell a story that has the capability to move a reader, to change a reader (as it did me) is her use of the surprise at the end of the sentence.
So many of Krauss’s sentences lead you to places you did not expect to go. About a goose that was supposedly the spirit of someone’s grandma, “It stayed for two weeks straight, honking in the rain, and when it left the grass was covered with turds” (99). Expressing how she often does how beauty and harsh reality are often intermingled. “She said all I had to do was sit naked on a metal stool in the middle of the room and then, if I felt like it, which she was hoping I would, dip my body into a vat of kosher cow’s blood and roll on the large white sheets of paper provided” (75). A sentence that expresses how sometimes overwhelming and ridiculous life can be. “Crossing the street, I was hit head-on by a brutal loneliness” (129). Car is what I was thinking. And yet, loneliness broke my heart just the same, perhaps more so, since it’s much more difficult to understand in the scheme of human tragedy.
What a language! What a life! I can’t make a specific connection to my own work in looking at The History of Love, but I can say that inspired me with its intention. To be truthful, my first reaction was to just give up now, because I just couldn’t see me ever reaching this level of prose. After my ego settled down though, I too wanted to burst out in the coffee shop where I finished the book: What a language! What a life!

A Poem: Home

2009-12-16T14:53:00.000-08:00

Don't know if I'll make it to the Traditions reading tonight, but the desire inspired a poem that I wrote in stolen moments today while teaching.

Home

In snow memories
certain slants of light don't gleam;
they glow soft, subtle,
stirring. Stirring me to wonder,
wistful and wild, what is
worth wanting,
worth losing...

Want warmth, for one.
I am bone-cold.
gloves, scarf, hat:
thighs still cold as mother's pork chops,
the packages she bought on sale,
stacked in the freezer alongside
all her dinner intentions.
If she faltered elsewhere,
she would not falter in balancing meals,
filling our bellies with food.

I can't blame her now, like I did
at sixteen for having more heart
than head, being too quick to forgive.
How I wanted mother to be more
like a man! Or so I thought it was.

Breath visible, tearing eyes
drink in unexpected winter light, stare
into white silence,
the crunch of snow under foot,
cheeks burning,
numb-nose running,
throat frozen by memory and desire.

Recalling, not so long ago,
my hands warming in your pockets,
the way your eyes say yes,
your eyelids flutter,
recalling this
ignites my heater-flame heart.

Light blankets the surface of snow.
My spirit glows,
love-warmed.
I've completely lost my head,
but I'm home, I'm warm.

A poem: At the Cafe With Kenny

2009-11-14T14:40:00.000-08:00

At the Cafe With Kenny

Dog needed let out to the yard,
though I was not yet ready
to open the door to the world.
Shivering, sat on porch steps,
hugging myself warm.
Noticed the first frost of the year
on my silver 92 Corolla, the grass,
and the dog's nose when he returned to kiss me.

Memory's smile snuck in,
an arm around my shoulder, a hip
beside mine. Memory of how
I once stayed out in the cold
all night, finishing an igloo alone.
There were moments I thought to give up
the creation, but looking up to the bold stars
overhead, how they shot clean through the dark,
I kept on, nose numb, fingers cold.

A few hours have passed.
The frost is gone, though the smell of it remains,
my hair feels like a cold hand against my face.

No longer alone, I'm with my nephew Kenny.
We've just sat down at the bar in a hip cafe.
The kind of cafe where the waitresses get away with apathy.
She is cool.
This place is so cool.
And the food--not apathetic--wants to delight you.

Kenny is telling me about his "rival".
He's in fourth grade too.
They used to be best friends.

He smiles and his eyes study his buttermilk pancakes
when he tells me about Angela--not his rival.
He takes a sip of his coffee.
He's been watching me write.
He says, "I talk out loud when I write too."
I laugh. Smile.

It hasn't escaped my notice that most of the other tables
house lovers celebrating Saturday,
perhaps a little hungover from Friday night's unwinding, perhaps
still in the glow of having slept in a little longer, made love,
then decided to go to breakfast.

One couple is having an argument. Not a fight.
The woman glances around occasionally,that look
on her face that says she'd talk louder
if not for being in public, on this I am certain:
Hear me.
He is listening, even pauses to allow a space
before he makes his reply. I can't make out what it is
they are talking about. Could be anything.

I finish the last bite
of hollandaise-smothered English muffin,
and I'm full. I check my phone.
No new messages.
I smile and for a moment stare at the light-strings
hanging in the store front window across the street.
Thinking of love-eyes, the stars
that cold winter night, fear grips me.
I close my eyes, stretch my arms wide, think
fuck that stupid game: He loves me; He loves me not.
How about: He wins me; He wins me not.
What a set-up all that social practice is when
the only game worth playing is: He loves me; I love him.
Otherwise, it seems best to leave
the flowers on their stems.

Inhaling deeply, breath frees me again from dark imagination.
Kenny says, "Did you know I have two cats?"
"I heard," I reply, smiling. "Tell me about your cats."
So, he tells me about Tolstoy and Freya
while we wait for the check.

As we walk to the theater, I hold him close,
feel his shoulder knocking against my ribs.

Reading The History of Love...loving it!

2009-11-11T07:24:00.001-08:00

"I got out of bed and went to the kitchen. I keep my manuscript in a box int he oven. I took it out, set it on the kitchen table, and rolled a sheet of paper into the typewriter. For a long time I sat looking at the blank page. With two fingers I picked out a title: LAUGHING AND CRYING. I studied it for a few minutes. It wasn't right. I added another word. LAUGHING & CRYING & WRITING. Then another: LAUGHING & CRYING & WRITING & WAITING. I crumpled it into a ball and dropped it on the floor. I put the water on to boil. Outside the rain had stopped. A pigeon cooed on the windowsill. It puffed up its body, marched back and forth, and took flight. Free as a bird, so to speak. I fed another page into the machine and typed: WORDS FOR EVERYTHING." From The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

Poem I Read at the Open Mic....

2009-10-22T10:20:00.000-07:00

Last night I read a poem at the open mic at Traditions here in Olympia, WA. Not sure what possessed me. I usually go to just listen and be inspired. Anyway, the poem I read follows...

Ode to the Avocado

You contain perfect green wonder,
so easily yielding to my spoon.
A delight when you are ripe to be open.
A disappointment if my impatience tempts me
to peek too soon, or if in my buziness
I miss the signs of readiness.

I loved you before
he spoke the words, “I’m sorry,”
eyes focused on his untied canvas sneaker.
Loved you before
I fell out of love with him
and into love with him,
before he fell out of love with me.

Heart-sized.
Oh, avocado!

I’m taking this slimy brown pit,
suspending it on toothpicks
on the rim of a jar of water,
placing the jar in the sun,
checking on you everyday,
praying you’ll root and grow
so I can transplant you
and have hearts to spare someday.

The Bean Trees By Barbara Kingsolver

2009-09-28T18:02:00.000-07:00

Year 2 of MFA. Critical Paper #3

I digress. I do. And, I like to. I have long loved writers who lead me through a story without predictability, who take tangents, who comment on and make connections to phenomena and ideas beyond the scene. I like to take a good metaphor and sit with it over coffee. So, when I began to follow the string of Barbara Kingsolver’s words through her novel The Bean Trees, my stomach growled. The beans on Mattie’s trees may be purple, but there is nothing purple about the prose in this book. Taylor is a straight-talking first person narrator who spends most of her words laying out the scene for us. Her comments are spare, but powerful, her comparisons modest and real. She describes the people in each scene vividly. All of this makes perfect sense. Taylor is strong, observant, and practical.
In this second draft of the novel I am working on now, one of my primary concerns is to expand each existing scene and to include more scenes, to create more space between commentary and digression, to make the scenes themselves more sustained, textured, and resonating.
The Bean Trees reads as a succession of scenes connected by a sentence or two here and there of the narrator’s commentary. I truly felt that the writer had stepped away from the text and let Taylor tell the tale. She doesn’t dwell or explain, she just says, oh that’s sort of funny or I thought that was dumb and moves on to the next scene. The readers are left to make significance or not of Taylor’s commentaries.
Here’s a short scene that involves most of the novel’s primary characters:
“Taylor, no! You mustn’t.” Lou Ann said.
“For heaven’s sake, Lou Ann. I’ve got on decent underwear.”
“No, what I mean is, you’re not supposed to go in for an hour after you eat. You’ll drown, both of you. It’s something about the food in your stomach that makes you sink.”
“I know I can depend on you, Lou Ann,” I said. “If we sink, you’ll pull us out. “ I held my nose and jumped in.
The water was so cold I couldn’t imagine why it hadn’t just stayed frozen up there on the snow-topped mountain. The two of us caught our breath and whooped and splashed the others until Lou Ann was threatening our lives. Mattie, more inclined to the direct approach, was throwing rocks the size of potatoes…
Estevan went from whooping to singing in Spanish, hamming it up in this amazing yodely voice. He dog-paddled over to Esperanza and rested his chin on the rock by her feet, still singing, his head moving up and down with the words. What kind of words, it was easy to guess: “My sweet nightingale, my rose, your eyes like the stars.” He was unbelievably handsome, with this smile that could crack your heart right down the middle.
But she was off on her own somewhere. From time to time she would gaze over to where the kids were asleep on the blue bedspread. And who could blame her, really? It was a sweet sight. With the cottonwood shade rippling over them they looked like a drawing from one of those old-fashioned children’s books that show babies in underwater scenes, blowing glassy bubbles and holding on to fishes’ tails. Dwayne Ray had on a huge white sailor hat and had nodded forward in his car seat, but Turtle’s mouth was open to the sky. Her hair was damp and plastered down in dark cords on her temples, showing more of her forehead than usual. Even from a distance I could see her eyes dancing around under eyelids as thin as white grape skins. Turtle always had desperate, active dreams. In sleep, it seemed, she was free to do all the things that during her waking life she could only watch. (94-95)
Notice the economic use of dialogue, the attention to character description, and the focus and attention on the setting. There is so much to be seen here beyond the scene. There is contrast between Taylor who wants to drink in freedom in large gulps and Lou Ann who is frozen by fear, and we see this as the two exist side by side in scene after scene. There is conflict in this contrast. How will these two continue to live together in peace? There is contrast between Estevan and Esperanza here and each time we see them. Estevan is content with the love they share. Esperanza is wanting something more. There is the presence of Turtle, who the reader just knows is going to come out of her shell one day (all based on physical description) and we are anxious to know who will emerge when she begins to talk, what might come of those “desperate, active dreams.”
Each detail in the scene is economical, has resonance beyond the scene. As I look back over the novel now, this is consistently true. Kingsolver has a clear thematic agenda in this book and it reads as awfully “political”on the issue of gender, but her writing is pure. She stays true to the story and its themes. Though I read the first half craving more literary antics, I did finish the book with some lessons from Taylor, who sees things, sees things quite clearly.

The River Why by David James Duncan

2009-09-27T21:03:00.000-07:00

Year 2 of MFA. Critical Paper #2

Until around page forty or so, I was feeling concerned that I’d picked The River Why by David James Duncan to read for this mailing. The tone eluded me at first: dry, ironic humor and overly formal vocabulary juxtaposed with utter silliness. Once I could hear the voice, I started to laugh and after page forty, I followed the story with eagerness and delight. The philosophical outlook underlying the narrative resonated with me in the same way that Tom Robbins’ work resonates with me. So, it was no surprise that Duncan made at least five or six (according to my count) direct allusions to Robbins’ work and at least once used the work erudite, a fetish word for Robbins. Okay, so I liked the book, but what did it have to offer me as a student-writer? Truth? Not a darn thing for the project I’m currently working on. I mean, perhaps I could find something if I were desperate and if it weren’t for the fact that a close look at this book has so much to offer me in revision of my other complete novel that is currently getting cold on a back burner. I’d rather write about that, and then put this paper in that same ignored pot for the time being. I do intend to heat that story up again.
You see, my novel, Fair Days, involves some quirky characters in a small town and centers around one of those characters, a twenty-four year old man named Travis who is romantic and eccentric and happily makes his living pumping gas at his parents’ gas station. The novel is meant, like The River Why, to explore some philosophical questions, but similar to the playful, light-hearted, no-bones about the fact that this is a story way that Duncan employs. At present the novel is in a third person limited point of view and though I do at times directly address the reader, the narrator in Fair Days is not a distinct persona. After reading The River Why, I think this is something I’d like to change when I turn the knob on that burner and get to work on a new draft.
Duncan writes in first person. His main character, Gus, tells his life story. His vocabulary is over-the-top, but the character claims not to care about anything other than fishing and to have not appreciated anything they tried to teach him in school, which makes the diction seem tongue-in-cheek and playful. If you’re so down-to earth, why put on airs, right? There is a style of exaggeration in the narrative that fits well with the fishing motif. He is persistent in his ironic humor and his capturing scenes that are slightly absurd or incongruous. Gus so light-heartedly takes us through this narrative that though we are not surprised with the transformation of Gus in the end, we are delighted, we are curious to see just how Gus came to be and who and what and why.
I do not know that I want to use first person in Fair Days, but I will write a couple of pages that way and see what I think. I do know that I want to create a persona for that narrator, whether or not that voice is someone directly involved in the narrative (a main character) or someone watching them (a minor character). Like in The River Why I want the voice to be the story too. I want that voice to transmit the humor, the incongruity, the philosophical thread that drives the story, and the purpose. I always wanted this, but I see now a way to get it better. That voice has got to be a character too. I have not yet achieved that kind of voice in Fair Days.
When Gus says to us, “And anyone who things I brag in stating that I understand fish-thought is obviously ignorant of the way in which fish think. Believe me, it’s nothing to brag about” (13), we already know from his diction, his sense of humor, his keen perception of his family dynamic, that he has something to communicate, that he is no fish-brain. In spite of the fact that he tells us, “In school I often amazed cohorts and teachers by displaying a degree of ignorance seldom attained by students whose minds were unscathed by amnesia or retardation” (18), we hear a wise man and keep reading, eager to know where his story is going to lead us. And when his “ideal schedule” doesn’t work out for him, “I proceeded to fish all day, every day, first light to last. All my life I’d longed for such a marathon—and I haven’t one happy memory of it. All I recall is stream after stream, fish after fish, cast after cast, and nothing in my head but the low cunning required to hoodwink my mindless quarry” (75), we aren’t surprised and we’re laughing with him, asking the ultimate story question: then what happened?
Reading The River Why inspired me to look at my own story with fresh eyes (fish-eyes?) and see that it’s the type of story that needs a good storyteller that is revealed, not concealed, to lead the reader through the story, because it is meant to be musing, clever, and whimsical.

Last Night At The Lobster by Stewart O'Nan

2009-09-26T17:09:00.000-07:00

Year 2 of MFA. Critical Paper #1

So what lessons can I take away from Stewart O’Nan’s Last Night At The Lobster as a writer studying other writers to become a better writer? I couldn’t sympathize with the main character. In fact, I found him annoying. I didn’t feel like the no-plot plot worked. So, what is there to draw from? I’m mulling over this. In fact, it’s making me a little crazy, because I have to get this paper written, after all. And then I remember. I remember the hope and wonder I’d felt as I read the first three pages, thinking that this was going to be a really great book. So, I look at those pages. What do I see? I see a lot. How O’Nan creates mood through imagery in these opening passages and in truth, throughout the entire novel, is wow—super cool.
Mall traffic on a gray winter’s day, stalled. Midmorning and the streetlights are still on, weakly. Scattered flakes drift down like ash, but for now the roads are dry. It’s the holidays—a garbage truck stopped at the light has a big wreath wired to its grille, complete with a red velvet bow. The turning lane waits for the green arrow above to blink on, and a line of salted cars takes a left into the mall entrance, splitting as the sniff for parking spots.
One goes on alone across the far vastness of the lot, where a bulldozed mound of old snow towers like a dirty iceberg. A white shitbox of a buick, the kind a grandmother might leave behind, the driver’s door missing a strip of molding. The Regal keeps to the designated lane along the edge, stopping at the stop sign, though there’s nothing out here but empty spaces, and off in a distant corner, as if anchoring the lot, the Regal’s destination, a dark stick-framed box with its own segregated parking and unlit sign facing the highway—a Red Lobster. (1)
The dominant color of the scene is gray. Even the white is a dirty white (grayish). The one color that stands out in this is a blinking green arrow and a red velvet bow, highlight the fact that things are just not all that gay for some on this particular Christmas holiday. Words like stalled, weakly, drift, waits, stopped, empty, and distant contribute to the lifeless feel of this scene. And it is truly lifeless! There are cars, a few, moving slow, but their drivers are not mentioned. , these cars seem to move on their own, without feeling or intention. The one lifelike description of the cars that move into and around this mall parking lot is contained in the line “splitting as they sniffed for parking spots”, which is a very basic, small-brained function of life. The Red Lobster, the place where the rest of the story will take place is described as a “dark stick-framed box”. How stifled! How bleak! A garbage truck ironically adorned with a brightly colored bow, a “shitbox of a buick”, things are broken, creaping along the edges, moving in dull, lifeless patterns.
This level of description is consistent throughout. I was drawn in to the description of the restaurant. It reminded me of the many jobs I’ve had in the food service industry. O'Nan got so many details right. The coddling mother, the spoiled child, the retired teacher ( a regular there), the retiree sitting at the head of a large party of guests—all these people-- these scenes--added to the bleakness, the pointless routine, the unconscious way we can go about our lives, “From here it’s all checklist. He turns up the house lights, turns on the fake-stained glass lamps over the tables in all four sections...Window by window he gently tugs on the cords and lets in the gray light of day” (29). Within each scene, as in this one, the question seems to be, where is the hope? where is the light? So, in the end, I think I can take much from this book, though I didn’t love the story. You see, in this second draft I’m working on, I’m interested in expanding scenes. It seems to me that my first draft is rather skeletal at times. I wrote the first time through terrified that there would be no end when I got to the end, and so wrote just the bones of the story down. So, as I’m working on this second draft, I want to keep these questions in mind. What mood does this scene convey and why? How does is this scene important beyond just what happens—how does it contribute to a larger theme?

What is your book about?

2009-09-20T06:48:00.000-07:00

This excerpt from page two answers the question that always leaves me flushed and tongue-tied.

"What did it take to save my own life? I can only tell that slant and tell you that it’s true. Of course, some day, maybe that day, I will die and maybe I am telling you this now from somewhere in the clouds and I am telling you now because being dead, I am wiser. Hindsight, right?
I may die here in the emergency room, my running shoes bagged and bloody. I may die in my sleep of old age. I may die of a heart attack in a bingo hall. But, that’s not what I’m referring to here. That’s not the sort of saving I mean."

Loretta's Missed Connection Prompt

2009-08-30T14:28:00.000-07:00

A friend from Portland and I exchanged missed connections from Craig's List for writing prompts. The idea was to see what we could produce in one writing session. The missed connection Loretta passed on and what I wrote in response follow. Thanks Loretta! I had fun with this and can't wait to see what you wrote.

Missed Connetion: we met on a friends porch a few weeks ago and i was flying out the next day. you were wearing cowboy books and shared your affection for yellow bic lighters. we talked for a while then before i knew it you were gone. i thought i might see you around bus so far not yet. i carry a yellow bic for the day we run into each other.

My response (Took the liberty of straying from the prompt):

Died instantaneously. Consolation for the loss one's closest childhood friend? Not really. Didn't make the nagging guilt at the fact that of the dozen times I'd had the opportunity to see him in the last decade, all I could manage was the occasional email full of fading memories, phony news, and empty promises.
I couldn't make his wedding because my company was flying the top producers--including me--to Mexico. His son's christening? I was buried in work--so sorry. His daughter's? A mid-life crisis involving late nights at strip clubs and unclaimed womens underwear under my couch cushions.
It wasn't supposed to be like this. Jack wasn't supposed to die in a car wreck on his way home from work. I wasn't supposed to be wearing a suit and tie to work every day. We were never supposed to live 800 miles apart.
Our high school band, Murmur, was supposed to keep us out of the nine to five scene. But, shit happens. People change their minds. Fall in love. Go to jail. Enroll in college.
I sang. Jack played guitar. There were four other guys in our band. Aside from an occasional karaoke song (usually to impress some drunk and willing woman), I hadn't used my pipes since Murmur's farewell show three days before I moved to Vermont to attend my dad's Alma mater just as I said I would never do.
Technically I was successful. Money. Women. A sweet ass flat-screen TV. And now, a dead best friend. The only friend I had ever told secrets to, been real with. Now it was all about business and status. Back then it was about finding meaning, seeking truth, or at least trying to.
I hadn't even gotten an early enough flight to make it on time for the funeral. Fucking traffic. A dead stop. Summer time. Ninety seven degrees.
When I arrived at The Living Water, the doors were open, but the church was empty. I picked a program up off the floor and found directions to Jack's house on the back. Survived by his loving wife Amy and three children: Zachary, Bethany, and Gemini.
I had never met his wife. Never played with his children. If it weren't for the photos on myface.com, I would have no hope of recognizing Amy of the kids when I knocked on the door of 907 Plum Street.
I drove my blue BMW through the town I grew up in. Bored kids were still putting soap in the fountain in front of city hall for kicks. Kids were still holding hands, riding skateboards, jay-walking.
I had to park three blocks down from Jack's house. Both sides of the street were lined with cars, a funeral procession it seemed, at a stand still.
I noticed the cowboy boots first. then the blue paisley long skirt, the white camisole, the long blond hair, the face in her hands, her body shaking the way a body shakes when it cries for real. She was sitting in the porch swing. The boards creaked as I sat next to her. I put my arm around her. I didn't think about it. I just did it.
"Who are you?" She asked.
"A friend of Jack's," I replied.
"What's your name?"
"Joel."
She looked up. A phantom of a smile crossed her lips.
"Joel! So, you made it?"
"Too late, but yes." I meant at least two things by this.
"He would be glad."
I pulled out a pack of Nat Shermans and my yellow Bic lighter.
"Got a smoke?" She asked.
"What's your name?" I replied.
"Janet. I was his lover."
"I was his best friend."
"Same difference," she said.
I laughed, handed her a smoke, the lighter.
"A fucking yellow Bic!" She laughed. "I would have guessed black. Maybe green."
I had no idea what she was talking about, but she was looking at the lighter like it was a marvel of nature, a four-leaf clover, a geode. I put my hand over hers. She turned her hand to meet mine. Our fingers intertwined. I kissed her forehead, held her face in my hands.
"It was good to meet you," I said.
"You too." She smiled.
I stood up, put the lighter in my pocket like it was a thin glass egg and I meant to protect it. Then, I walked back to my car and drove to my hotel humming a Murmur tune.

A grape, a worm, a kaleidoscope

2009-08-26T15:42:00.000-07:00

I noticed the way you cover
your mouth, but I said nothing,
though I recalled that such a gesture
signals insecurity, or so I was told.
But, I knew it wasn’t enough simply to say,
“Don’t cover your mouth” or
“You have a beautiful smile. Why hide it?”
So, I said nothing, only watched, worried.

You used to always be climbing
into my lap. You used to make sound
effects wherever you went, “Pew—Pew—
Pew—He shooting you.” You taught me how
to marvel at not the universe, but the pebbles of it:
a grape, a worm, a kaleidoscope.
If I’d ever known these things, I’d long forgot.

Hand over your mouth, I fear
you are forgetting, and I want to tie this poem
around your finger.

Ladies, love!

2009-07-21T13:00:00.000-07:00

Deep greens and blues remind me of walking
hand-in-hand over railroad tracks to nowhere,
turning and walking back to where we started,
remind me of kissing you,
not like kissing a man--like kissing
every woman.

Put down that miracle cream if you wield
it out of self-loathing.
Ladies, love!
Each other.

Remember when we took turns rubbing each other's back and shoulders?
How we sketched our house plan? We were twelve.
How we believed that though we would have husbands
they would be close like us, of course,
and we'd take turns cooking each other dinner
in our had to be shared home--because,
we couldn't live without each other?
How we'd care for each other's children?

I washed your feet.
I combed your hair.
I was alive.

The air on the Pacific Ocean is cold in November,
but I was warmed by your daring and jumped the waves
near-naked because I was with you.

Forgive! If you forgive nothing else,
the falterings of your ladies.

We are all of us wanting to be understood.
We are ugly. We are beautiful.
What's the difference?
We are bloooming and dying and blooming again.

They say
you never forget your first love.
It should be true.

Mid-fiction poem

2009-07-12T18:10:00.000-07:00

Struggling through some tough bits of my novel yesterday, I wrote down this poem.

I'm not sorry anymore

For once I held I'm sorry
by the shirt collar, said
"Get back here. Now!"
Closed my lips tight. Went for a walk,
counting footsteps.

It's been a year now and my grasp
has not slipped, not even
today when I'm sorry kicked me in the shins
and screamed, "I hate you!",then relaxed
into a steady scornful gaze, muttering, "selfish bitch...",
hoping I'd leap into that ellipse, all apologies.
What's the worst thing I could be?
Not that.

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell

2009-07-11T08:33:00.000-07:00

Black Swan Green
A year in the life of Jason Taylor: thirteen, British, equally naïve and gifted with insight, and a stammerer. Love this book! Honest. Well-crafted. Full of popular culture references from the early eighties. On page 211, Holly Deblin (who later becomes Jason's first kiss), gives him some advice that sums up what the step Jason must ultimately take to grow beyond what he struggles with in this book, “You're not a maggot. Don't let dickheads decide what you are” (211).
The novel is told from Jason's point of view with lots of interior monologue that demonstrates his naivete (he's only 13!), his keen power of observation and insight into life and relationships, and his common struggle to be the person he most wants to be. The book is funny, poignant, and full of delightful comparisons that lift the words off the page, creating powerful images and associations.
There is a fitting allusion to Lord of the Flies in which Jason has to read aloud, thus exposing his stammer to all and humiliating him. The author does not shy from just how cruel children can be to each other without unrealistically demonizing the bully. The story seeks to empower the individual against society, a theme that is clearly laid out by the poem Jason finds on his English teacher's desk when going to retrieve his whistle,”Don't laugh at what you don't find funny./ Don't support and opinion you don't hold./ The independent befriend the independent./ Adolescence dies in its fourth year. You live to be eighty” (213).
I am awed by how well this book is written, how real Jason Taylor felt to me. As a parent of a bright, sometimes shy thirteen-year-old boy, my question now is: How can I get him to read this book? I want to buy copies by the dozens and pass them out in the hallway at the high school where I teach. There are lots of stories about bullies. This is the most intelligent, real, and empowering treatment of the subject I've ever come across.

A few good lines:

“It's easier to change your eyeballs than to change your nickname” (16).
“Who decides which defects are funny and which ones tragic? Nobody laughs at blind people or makes iron lung jokes” (36).
“A cow of an awkward pause mooed” (52).
“Hate smells of burnt dead fireworks” (74).
“Stewy air stroked Dawn Madden's white chocolate throat” (83).
“The earth's a door, if you press your ear against it” (91).
“The last days of freedom rattle like a nearly empty box of Tic Tacs” (191).

So many more...

Quote from Burn this Book (Toni Morrison)

2009-07-09T07:10:00.000-07:00

From Burn This Book (Edited by Toni Morrison):

"Writers—journalists, essayists, bloggers, poets, playwrights—can disturb the social oppression that functions like a coma on the population, a coma despots call peace; and they stanch the blood flow of war that hawks and profiteers thrill to."

Day 4, Journey of the Heart, and lady friends

2009-06-23T08:56:00.000-07:00

Carrie left this morning. So, now it's just me and the dog here. One more day of writing and enjoying this protected creative space. I'm preparing now to write for as long as I can this morning and this evening I'll take a drive out to Pacific Beach to have dinner with a long-time friend and her family. I finished Journey of the Heart this morning and want to share some of my thoughts on this book that truly came to me at just the right time.
There was a point in reading this book when I became so enthralled that my eyes followed one word to the next with eagerness. This was not at the beginning. I wonder in fact if the book should have started at Chapter 3. It's a short book and can be read in a day if one was so inclined.
The gist of the book is revealed in the subtitle, “The Path of Conscious Love”. Wellwood proposes an eyes—and heart—wide open kind of love.
The last text my freshmen read this year was Romeo and Juliet. And in teaching this play, I am always surprised to realize both how much and how little things have changed. We are always wanting love to happen to us, to persist without our effort. Or, like Mercutio, we are skeptical of love at all, reducing it to the physical act of sex or scorning the idea of it at all. We are, as Wellwood writes, al of us wounded and wanting in love. The core of Wellwood's idea is that love is Romeo's heaven and Mercutio's earth and that it doesn't happen, but keeps happening, and can only reach it's full potential with our open and honest participation. This resonates with me and in reading this work I both came across some new ways of looking at things as was reminded of some ideas that I have long held inside and were happy to be pulled to the surface in a new context.
I think this book may be a crucial text for our time. The state of relationships between men and women does not seem to me to be becoming more liberated as some would argue. There is a glaring imbalance that our current popular culture feeds and extends. I'm not sure how to quite put my finger on this, but I see the signs of it all around me. How many books are being published with titles resembling, “Women Who Do Too Much”? Many! And oh ladies, in our liberation and our obsession with being all we can be, what have we left for the men? At my son's eighth grade graduation I could not help but notice that all the girls wore make-up, formal dresses—many in heels. Yet, I did not see one boy dressed up, and while the girls strutted confidently around, the boys slouched. The female ego has grown bold. And how will these two halves come together in love? How will they learn to find their own unique and diverse selves amidst all that they are told they can and should be?
Here are some of my favorite quotes from Wellwood's book, which urges us to place all of our previous patterns and beliefs out on the proverbial table and to select with honesty and consciousness what aspects of ourselves will allow both individuals in a relationship to reach their full potential and experience a deeper connection to each other.
“Relating to passion in a sane and healthy way is one the first and one of the greatest challenges in a relationship” (58).
“The deeper a soul-connection goes, however, the more it brings our karmic patterns and personal neuroses to the surface” (89).
“Real intimacy, in short, brings upour unfinished business—all the rough spots in ourselves and our partner that still need to be polished, refined, and further developed” (90).
“Furthermore, we come to believe that our story accurately represents the way things really are. Yet in truth it is only a dream, a conditioned pattern of beliefs that keeps creating the kind of situation that wounded us in the first place” (109).
“No matter how close to another person we may be, part of us is radically and forever alone and, in its own way, wild and free” (116).
“That is where an awareness practice such as mindfulness or meditation pr present-centered psychotherapy can be particularly useful. These disciplines slow down the busy mind. By sharpening our awareness and discernment, they can help us separate our immediate experience from our stories” (126).
“If a couple is willing to let the patterns their relationship has settled into die, it can keep being reborn” (132).
“The love between man and woman can provide powerful glimpses of sacred vision” (139).
“The profound question love poses is, 'Can you face your life as it is; can you look at all the pain and darkness as well as the power and light in the human soul, and still say yes?'” (140).
“tyranny of the orgasm” (175).

This is a book about acting out of our conscious mind, out of intention, an idea I've some across in my study and practice of yoga time and again. But to see it here in this new context—this more specific context—in this book that celebrates the paradoxes and the possibilities between us, that offers up the notion that love is something we cultivate and participate in—this--makes me happy it was passed on to me, that is now part of the pool of my experience.
All right, getting back to the novel now... :)

A few hours later...

This evening I went out to Sara's place in Pacific Beach. I was able to see her beautiful family, home, and garden and see another old Friend (Jen). What a great way to end this trip. Love these two beautiful ladies!

Everything to gain

2009-06-21T16:33:00.000-07:00

Slept in til 6! The sun was persistent coming through the window, lighting on where I was sleeping on the couch. Ajax whined while I downed a cup of coffee, scratching at the door, gazing at me with his begging eyes.
We ran down to the water's edge. The tide was way out. I collected three intact sand dollars, a sturdy, smooth black rock and half a large clam shell along the way. Ajax chased the birds and bathed in the water and I felt the gift of the moment. To be running along the ocean, the day mine to create.
I got little writing done hooked into the wireless at Cafe Amici, gave in to the distractions of email and Facebook, then strolled back to her our “home”.
I've been writing now for a couple of hours, have rewritten everything I lost due to a technology glitch yesterday, and am now moving forward again in this story. I'm cognizant today of how difficult it is sometimes to beat back the voices that keep us from believing in our stories and feeling I have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Happy summer y'all!
Back to the writing...

Day 2: Baby Feet

2009-06-20T07:35:00.000-07:00

Strolling on the beach at 5:30 this morning with Ajax, ideas relevant to both my novel and my life came to me not by brain but by inspiration. Two walks on the beach now have left the skin on my feet more like the skin I was born in, more willing to ask the right questions without fear.
I was awfully hungry when I woke this morning, but had only a cup of coffee before heading out on the beach. It felt good to feel hungry and I was thinking then that I'd like to feel hungry more often. After an hour on the beach, I washed a bowl full of strawberries. Those may have been the sweetest strawberries I've ever eaten.
Getting down to writing now. Working on my blog first. Adding some fiction, which you should check out here.

Arriving at the Beach: Let the writing begin!

2009-06-20T07:31:00.000-07:00

Friday night:
It seemed at one point today that I might never get out of my classroom and out of town. My son, who was supposed to catch a 7:30 flight to San Francisco missed his flight by three minutes because his aunt thought there was adequate time to stop to buy him a donut. Knowing that he was on his way, that by the time I checked out for the school year, he would have safely landed at the San Francisco International Airport and be spending time with his cherished grade school friends was something that I’d expected, depended on to relax into the long drive I had ahead of me to Ocean Shores. We worked it out. He finally did get on a flight, but only after I’d already made the long drive and settled in to my temporary home. He’s probably right now eating pizza, playing Xbox and catching up with his closest friends.
Long drive you say? Ocean Shores isn’t too far from Olympia. Ah, but I have a driving phobia that I have fed and affirmed for many years. The distance from Olympia to Ocean Shores seems vast when you are singing for your life, to fend off an anxiety attack, to will the calm, cool, collected person you long to be into being. I chanted mantras. I sang old folk songs. I mused poetic with Fiona Apple. And, I made it!
This is the second annual end of the school year beach writing retreat, and I am so thrilled to be here. Upon arriving in our cozy little chalet, complete with kitchen, living room, dining room, and wood stove, I immediately put all my stuff away, tucked my things into the right corners, in the right rooms—in short, nested. And this is a cozy little place, even if it looks like someone put the entire clearance bin from a pop art and frame store all over the walls. And I do mean all over. There are framed pictures of beaches, planes, bunnies on roller skates, travel ads, Disney characters, roses in a vase—I tried finding a theme to connect them all, but came up with only cheap art. After settling in and acclimating, I rolled out for a run on the beach with the dog to think about just what my writerly goals were going to be between now and Tuesday morning.
Improving and expanding my blog is part of the plan. After Ajax and I take a run on the beach in the morning each day, I’ll stroll on over to Café Amici to hook into their wireless: do some blogging, check my email, and pop on over and check on my peeps on Facebook. I want to add some more poetry to my poetry blog and set up a fiction blog, where I’ll post several short stories I’ve written.
After this warm-up, the real work begins. My primary goal here is to work on my novel. And I will do this for the rest of the day each day until I just can’t stand it. Then, I’ll take a walk and write some more. Eventually, I’ll have to sleep and start this process all over again. In there I’ll throw in some yoga sessions and some tinkering around on my guitar (I am a baby at guitar, but really enjoying the practice, particularly since it’s something I’ve aspired to for years, though I only ever started and then stopped after little progress).

Today a poem happened.

2009-06-17T09:35:00.000-07:00

My students were taking their final and I was reading a book recommended by a friend (Journey of the Heart by John Wellwood) when a poem happened to me.

Linger Love

Whether you and I
observe,
lying in the cool grass of evening--
your leg crossing mine--
my fingers brushing your palm,
the moon will glow.

Whether we take that switchback
trail at dawn, laughing into
the open space our bodies created
around us and between us
under the moon's light-blanket,
the stream whose flowing sound inspires us now
will play its part in the earth's concert.

Oh love! Linger here
even when--especially when--
I alone observe the moon,
stroll singular beside the chattering stream.

Writing poems when I should be grading papers....

2009-06-08T09:46:00.001-07:00

In high school, I was the worst student. Couldn't bring myself to read or do anything that I didn't feel like doing. Some things never change. Spent an hour this morning writing this poem, when I really ought to have been grading papers.

Thanks Kristina, for the inspiration!

Pecan Pie

Seed pods in the mortar,
I think of the way the word
cardamom
tickles my lips.

Elbow-grinding with a marble pestle,
I pull three cinnamon sticks
from that spice jar we bought in Santa Fe,
and laugh at how we were then:
a short laugh, abruptly ended,
because you're long gone and that feeling
is worse than dead: Alive, but homeless.

Crust ephemeral, flaky,
of course pecans and
corn syrup and eggs.
i
You critiqued my pecan pie with lke a pro,
and I offered unflinching advice on your barbecue,
because when it comes to cooking--we knew--
Four hands are better than two.

It's 2 A.M.
I'm baking a fucking pie!
An oft used diversion from prurience.

Sitting on the sun-porch
in the warm midsummer air,
pie in the oven,
I'm thinking that the way we cooked
is also the way to build homes and make love:
Four hands, one heart.

Last paper--Postmodern American Fiction

2009-06-02T18:38:00.000-07:00

While fall turned to an unprecedented winter here in Washington, and then a wet, violent spring, and only now the promise of summer is in the air, I read and considered many books from the angle of the writer: How does this work contribute to the great body of literature that fuels and defines the art of writing?
I’ve tried to remain objective, non-judgmental, a scholar-observer because I know that I have been blessed with a unique opportunity to grow and learn through the support and demands of this MFA program. The book I chose to read for my final—and 24th!—critical reading assignment was Norton’s Postmodern American Fiction. Though it is long and the selections are so varied that at times I felt jostled, I do believe that the reading of this collection brought some ideas together that will carry me into this second year of MFA work and strengthened my identity as a writer.
As I read the bold and varied selection in this anthology, I found myself being more judgmental. Brautigan (who I loved at sixteen!) is clever and I like reading him, but Vonnegut has more moral sense, which is ultimately more admirable. The Paley story “Pale Pink Roast” was literary dessert, full of immaculate language and powerful subtext, but Silko’s selection from Ceremony felt more human, less intentionally artful. The editor’s in the introduction to the excerpt from Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, quoted him as saying, “I’m not interested in imitating a style or structure I’ve used before. I’ll never write another book like Trout Fishing in America. I dismantled that old machine when I finished with it and left the pieces lying around in the backyard to rust in the rain” (38).
This insistence on innovation seems to be the way of things in the “high art” of writing in the post-modern era! To be always breaking old frames for fiction. To take risks. To scramble the narrative. To incorporate other art forms: digital, visual, performance—anything goes! While this is liberating, I think it is easy for a writer to lose heart and perspective, to innovate for the sake of innovation, not because it will make the work more meaningful. Mark Leyner’s “Tooth Imprints On A Corn Dog” details the activity of a writer trying to write a poem he’s been commissioned to write in twenty four hours, “1,000 lines of free verse in the poete maudit tradition of Arthur Rimbaud, but infused with the ebullience and joie de vivre that made ABBA so popular in the 1970’s” (242). This is so clearly absurd. The writer (in the story) so vain and self-indulgent that I wanted to shake him and ask: But what is the god damn point? And what is the point?
Why have I aspired to write more and better since I was eight years old? Why am I (when I’m poor to begin with) racking up more student loan debt in order to earn my MFA in fiction writing? And this program requires a lot of work! More than I realized it would. I’m accustomed to hard work, but this year has tested the limits of what I am capable of taking on—for sure! In reading the works in this anthology, an answer to these questions rose to the surface: to communicate and to make meaning for myself—to contribute a verse.
I’m curious, but not romanced by literary dogma. And though I’d like to see my work in print—I won’t lie—that’s not a driving force for me at all. In fact, I find the whole business of it tedious and frustrating. I do; however, feel privileged to live during a time in which such a rich and varied tradition of literature exists.
What I’ve gained from all I read this year is an appreciation for the individual work itself. A desire and an intention. A desire to cultivate patience in my writing, to slow down the sentence building, because this is an area where I can improve. An intention to allow form to shape from the piece itself, which includes a willingness to experiment with and change ideas I have going into a piece of writing about how the story will be told for the sake of the story itself. To always return back to the breath of the story—the life force—the central idea.

On Beauty by Zadie Smith

2009-05-30T18:42:00.000-07:00

Food is the center of our lives. It’s necessary for survival, and a source of personal pleasure and communion. Of course our relationship to food is complex. In my own life, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with food. Every family gathering I’ve ever attended has had food at its center. Usually, lots of food. Food laid out on countertops and banquet tables for people to come and go and serve themselves. And come and go we always do. Yet, amidst all this eating what is often very good food, there is the inevitable buzz of food talk. What’s the newest diet fad? Who’s tried it and failed? Who succeeded? And while no one has dared to comment when in the course of my tumultuous life I have added pounds to my frame, the shedding of pounds never fails to gain attention and approval. Obesity is my family’s disease and they are obsessed with food. It has taken much of my life—and still sometimes I need reminding—to reconcile my own relationship to food. I’ve binged and purged. Eaten next to nothing for days. Used exercise as punishment. This may be why though Zadie Smith’s On Beauty captured my attention on many levels, I was most intrigued by how she uses food as a metaphor for life.

In Smith’s novel, Rembrandt scholar Howard Belsey discovers late in his life (he is nearly sixty) that it is not the examined life after all that is most worthwhile, but the shared life. Food is one way she traces this theme to the last pages of the book.

We all must eat sometime. And in On Beauty much is revealed about each character through their relationship to food.

Kiki Belsey, who is the Black Madonna of this novel—the heroine—the character who best knows how to commune in life, says to Howard Belsey (her husband) early on, “Your life is just an orgy of deprivation” (13). She’s right, too. And it’s no wonder we never see him eat. In fact, we see him literally (but, with humor) shun the idea of cooking, a pre-requisite to eating, an act that celebrates the idea of eating for more than just survival, but also for comfort, community, and pleasure. It’s Howard’s notable sense of humor that makes his transformation at the end more believable. Laughter is communal too. What’s the satisfaction of a joke without someone to tell it to? As the Belsey’s are preparing for their anniversary party he “was dressed in his traditional ‘cooking’ costume. This outfit—a kind of protest against the very concept of cooking—Howard constructed by donning all the discarded cook-wear clothes Kiki had purchased over the years and never used” (84). Howard’s pleasures are self-centered. His smoking. His book that doesn’t seem to get written but isolates him from his family. His rigid academic theories, which also isolate him and even lead to a kind of tyranny wherein Kiki isn’t allowed to hang the kind of paintings she likes in her house. Portraits offend his—oh, so developed and informed artistic sensibilities (another symbol of the lack of communion in his life—no faces). His affairs.

The intellectual Howard fails to see what he has to learn from his not so academic wife Kiki. Kiki is not an intellectual, but she knows how to share her life. And that? That is beauty. She is a nurse, a devoted mother and wife, and a woman who builds community around her. The way she befriends Carlene Kipps, in spite of their obvious differences of opinion and their husbands’ rivalry, demonstrates Kiki’s ability to find beauty in life, in others—making her, as the physically beautiful troublemaker Victoria notes—stunningly beautiful. The second time she goes to visit Carlene Kipps she brings a pie, something she is accustomed to doing, known for, “I need a homey, warm, chunky, fruit-based, wintery kind of a pie…I need a down home pie” (161-162). Kiki is the least self-centered character in the book, trying to create home wherever she goes.

Jerome, who praises the fact that the Kippses eat together and tells his siblings he can’t understand how they can live at home with Howard because it is such a “denial of joy” (236), gets it. Levi, most like his mother, gets it too. We see this in a slightly humorous way when he brings a handful of instant Asian food to offer his new friend Choo when he drops by his place unannounced. He’s learned from Kiki that when you pay people a visit, you bring something to commune with them over. Jerome and Levi have learned from Kiki that communion is what living is about. But Zora—Oh Zora! —does not dare to eat a peach and instead “prepare[s] a face to meet the faces that she me[e]ts”(209). She eats guiltily and has not yet come to see her own beautiful self or the beauty in sharing herself. She’s more like Howard.

Communion is what we are here for, how we really survive as a species, and food symbolizes communion. Smith shows the beauty of successful communion and the suffering caused by our inability to connect. In the scene where the Belsey children meet up with each other in a moment of happy coincidence, we see how, despite their differences, there is love between them to be shared. The moment is lovely: “Just before Thanksgiving a lovely thing happened” (233). Later in the scene Smith addressed directly the power of communion, “People talk about the happy quiet that exists between two lovers, but this was too great, sitting between his sister and his brother, saying nothing, eating” (235). Another scene that shows the connection that can happen between people over a meal is introduced early on, “And not the two of them [Howard and Levi] began to choreograph a breakfast in speechless harmony: passing the box of cereal from one to the other, exchanging implements, filling their bowls and sharing their milk from a pink china jug with a sun-yellow rim” (8). This communion is a beautiful dance, a connection without need for speech or explanations.

Then there is Howard’s failed communion with his estranged father, his fruitless search for biscuits, the weak tea, and the ensuing search for instant coffee. Also, the failed communion between Kiki and Howard and one of the few times they are able to breach that gap over dessert liquor. This inability to commune in life, to learn to like the tomato is Howard’s conflict. Victoria Kipps tells Howard, “Your class is all about never ever saying I like the tomato…Your tomatoes have got nothing to do with love or truth” (312). She says this as a compliment, but we recognize it as the elucidation of his greatest flaw.

Howard needs to learn to like the tomato. And happily, in the end, we sense that he does, in how honorably he shoulders his separation and Kiki’s independence, in how he pauses just to look at the last painting of his slide show in the lecture he gives at the end of the book, in how it renders him speechless in Kiki’s presence, and in how he discovers cooking. Not just any cooking, either. He undertakes the task of using the apples from the tree in their backyard that in the past (and beginning of the book) had just fallen to the ground to rot, “Outside smelled of tree sap ad swollen brown apples, of which maybe a hundred were scattered over the lawn. It had been like this every August for ten years, but only this year did Howard realize something might be done to improve the situation. Apple cobbler, apple crumble, candied apples, chocolate apples, fruit salad…Howard had surprised himself” (435). I was also delighted and surprised! Delighted and surprised to find that in spite of Smith’s honest presentation of the lines that divide us—there are many—there is beauty in this world. There are reasons to come together and celebrate each other.

What does this matter to my writing? Even my current project? Smith weaves this theme of food throughout the story without coming off as heavy-handed or even addressing it directly at all. The communion just happens or doesn’t. I have this short story I’ve been working on that is about what I wrote about in the first paragraph of this essay: food, family, and self. Looking at what Smith has done here has given me some ideas about how to do this without directly addressing food as subject, which at this point, is how the story begins. Also, looking at what she’s done reminds me of how everything counts, every detail of a story should have a function in the greater goal of the narrative—to impart meaning—which is something I’ve been working on a lot lately. I’m getting better at cutting out lines that although perhaps well phrased, don’t serve the story.

The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer

2009-05-12T14:36:00.000-07:00

“He sulks, or is it lonely sadness in that profile? She is distanced and distressed. Love engraves a profile definitely as the mint does on a coin. She is ashamed of her parents; he thinks she is ashamed of him. Neither know either, about the other” (38). Language, race, gender, class, and the essence of Ibrahim and Julie’s separate identities are the factors that engrave the profile on their love in Nadine Gordimer's The Pickup. A love that Julie, in the end, --thank God—does not choose over her own understanding of truth, over her own fulfillment.
Gordimer’s style heightens the reality that however their bodies might have found a common geography, this upper class, liberal white woman and this poor immigrant Muslim man who meet in South Africa (her home) cannot understand each other, contain differences that may have nothing to do with the countries or families they come from. Hazy dialogue, blending of feeling, action, and dialogue and her often terse descriptions are three elements of style that help to bring this message to the surface. She does not use quotation marks or speech tags and though she sometimes sets off speech with dashes, she often doesn’t separate the spoken parts from the rest of the narrative, as in this passage where Julie floats the possibility that they consider having the children his mother wants from them, “Are you crazy? And the moment spoken, he feels its cruelty stab back at him. He throws the razor onto the towel, holds his breath and plunges his face into the steaming water. When he lifts his head, she has taken up the razor and offers the towel. As he dries his face, it’s as if the whole exchange has evaporated” (169). Exchange? There is nothing to set off the words spoken, no acknowledgement of her reaction, of how she might be impacted. He doesn’t even experience the potential cruelty of his tone and words as something done to her—it “stabs back at him”. He spends the entire exchange looking in the mirror or with his face submerged in water, doesn’t even acknowledge her minor act of tenderness in offering him the towel and razor. While Julie is willing literally and figuratively to go to another country for their love, they just cannot see each other clearly, a fact that is recognizable in how their interactions are so often reported in sketch detail.
Apart during those days, at weekends they often drove into ‘the veld’, as they became accustomed to hear her calling the countryside, whether it was grasslands or mountains. There they walked, lay watching the clouds, the swoop of birds, were amused, as lovers are, by the difference in their exchanged perceptions of what each took for granted. (33-34)
Grasslands or mountains? Indiscriminate birds. “As lovers are”. Abrahim and Julie are sketched rather than fleshed out which not only demonstrates the unbridgeable space between them, but also the universal quality of their struggle as man and woman carrying their unique identities in a world of boundaries, where we want love. Julie’s struggle to find her own identity as a woman is the crux of this story. She is a woman who “dream[s] in green” (213), who finds delight in the simple act of walking through the desert in the morning to bring back fritters for all. I was so afraid that Gordimer was going to destroy Julie, that this was going to be another story about a woman who loves too much to survive this life with her identity intact.
In the last pages of the novel, Ibrahim still thinks love is that “weakness that is not for him” (266) and as a luxury only the privileged can afford. When Julie brings the two plane tickets that will take them to his home to him, he sees her as a naïve child. He always sees her as a child, naïve. From the beginning, he underestimates her because of her privilege, accuses her of not taking things seriously enough, of seeing her life as a camping trip, an adventure. He judges her for not taking advantage of her family connections more. He uses those same connections to obtain visas he seeks to get them to yet another new country—America.
She moves to the desert for him. She loves him without condition or reserve. She hands him the razor and the towel. She interacts on a more human level with the women in his household than he is capable of. Embraces the children. Learns to cook their food. And all the while, he still doesn’t see her, doesn’t even seem to like her, submits to her love only because he sees her body like another country and he is always looking for another country than his own. Thinking of how his Uncle and mother set to keep him there, he sleeps with Julie, “the trap that was set to snap on him by the family, his mother the beloved—his body swelled with the blood of accusation and rage, a distress that gave him an erection, and that with a confusion of shame and desire, using her, could only be assuaged in wild love-making which she took for something else, so little did she know” (200-201). It was way before this point that I was hoping that somehow they would be separated, that the separation would be her choice.
Though Julie loves Abrahim, in the end she decides not to go to America and to his shock and rage, decides to stay in his home, in his country, in the desert, where she is content, where “all drifts together and there is no onlooker” (172).
It is ironic that in the end it is Julie who seems wisest, strongest. It is also ironic that in spite of his pushing her to connect with her family for selfish reasons, she finds a home within his through teaching and sacrifice. The title is ironic too because ultimately this book is not so much about “the pickup” as it is about Julie. Julie, who, as I put this book back on the shelf, will stay in my mind as an example of someone who knows the line between sacrifice and submission in love. I was afraid this wouldn’t happen. She spent too much of the novel sacrificing, against the backdrop of what we knew, having access to Abrahim’s thoughts. That he thought himself superior to her in wisdom and wasn’t capable of seeing her, as he didn’t see her the first day, “I don’t think I really looked at her. That day” (94). In the end she chooses to stay in his home, where she has found friendship, family, and the fulfillment that comes from teaching children.
I was amazed by how Gordimer blended thought, action and dialogue, sometimes even in one sentence, how she blended the vague and the specific, the analytical and the descriptive, the precise and the vague. Amazed by how all of this ultimately increased the impact of how the gulf between Julie and Abrahim had to do with so much more than the circumstances of their births.

Daydreaming of summer--need input!

2009-05-06T11:06:00.000-07:00

The things we don't get credit for, can't measure or plan, the things that bubble up from our own heart's desire, our own gratitude, our presence in the moment. Herein we find richness! Opulent. Affluent. Content. It's not my habit to put these things off to a more convenient or less busy time, and what this means is that sometimes I get very little sleep.
And this year! Finally divorced. The only involved parent to a thirteen-year-old boy. Teaching yoga and high school. Reading and writing every day since September for the work I am doing to earn my MFA in fiction writing. Amazing! Exhausting! I've learned so much. More than I realize, I'm sure.
And now...summer! I can count the school days...there are 31. I look forward to sleeping in, to day-tripping, to reading whatever I want for whatever reason, for a pause to celebrate the steps I've taken this year toward honesty and intention. So, I'm sharing two unfinished lists here and I'd like to hear what you would put on your list, so that I might be inspired by your summer daydreams. I'll do some of this and read some of this, but I will also stay open to suggestion, to change, to the unexpected.

Summer Dos:

-eat black licorice ice cream
-have picnics
-play kick-the-can
-day hikes!
-take Winston to see three movies in a row at the theater
-bike rides
-watch some movies that have been recommended to me lately
-barbecue corn and tofu steaks
-get Carrie drunk in New Mexico
-learn that flow sequence!
-see live music
-beach days
-river adventures
-camping
-Savasanah

Summer Reads:

-Lamb / Christopher Moore
-The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cover / Christopher Moore
-Fool / Christopher Moore

Recommended Books (I want to read mostly recommended books!):

-Are You There Vodka? It's me Chelsea./ Chelsea Handler
-The River Why / David James Duncan
-The Glass Castle / Jeanette Walls
-American Home Life / David Barringer
-Twisted Fun /David Barringer

PAD Challenge: Days 29 and 30

2009-04-30T22:07:00.001-07:00

Day 29.

Prompt: Never ______

Never fills itself,
deflates you.
Never-Never-Never.
Friends for-ever.
Always,

Oh stop! I want to wake,
find possibility under my pillow.
Place it in gingerly in my pocket,
after checking for holes,
and strut into this marvelous new day.

Day 30.
Prompt: Farewell

Goodbye April!
Poet mistress,
starry-eyed damsel.
Your visit, as always,
lifted me.

PAD Challenge: Day 28

2009-04-30T14:26:00.000-07:00

Day 28.

Prompt: Write a sestina.

Okay, this was freakin' hard! I've only been spending 5 to 15 minutes per poem this year, because that's just all I have to spare. But, this. This took more. And it is what it is. Here's my attempt at sestina:

Blue skies

Rolling clouds of sky and blue.
Bright sun. New vision.
Living this day only in parts.
Moment to moment. How fair
to let go of the riddling riddle.
To say farewell to Meursault's sun.

Hot sun!
The dandelions came up blue,
another damned riddle,
like the surreality of reality television
and how he could have made the waters part.

How we grow apart!
Even an only son
pays his own fare,
swallows his own blue,
follow his own vision,
chooses his own riddles.

And choice is the riddle
that determines the part.
Thank god for revision!
And hours spent lolling in the sun
exhaling blue,
inhaling feelings fine, felicitous, fair.

This breakfast faire
contains a prize in the bag. A riddle!
What is blue and blue and blue?
The part spent working in the sun
at something you can't envision.

This human vision,
to be fair
about sun
and riddles
and parts...

is a vision in red and blue
where parts don't always seem fair
and riddles too often matter more than sons.

PAD Challenge: Day 27

2009-04-29T14:44:00.000-07:00

Day 27.
Prompt: Write a poem of longing.

Hurt, hurt heart!
Love.
Long for greener groves and
music like marrow and
the one who got away, who
you couldn't catch and who
never loved you back.

Hurt, hurt heart!
Love.
Broken? Muscles used grow sore,inflamed
but heal stronger,
more solid from use.
So, hurt, hurt heart!
Then, heal.

PAD Challenge: Days 24, 25, and 26

2009-04-29T13:47:00.000-07:00

Day 24.
Prompt: Write a travel related poem.

Five hundred miles,
three hundred more:
songs about distance
unsettle my soul,
remind me of butterscotch discs
and rocky shores.

Cummings wrote:
"somewhere i've never traveled, gladly beyond".
Reading those lines, I heard
foreign tongues wagging,
new but universal sounds
I longed to hear.
Weary of being closed and unclosed,
kissed and unkissed.

I'd never traveled far
except in books and dreams
and at nineteen, I dreamt
I was in love and said yes
to the child offered not so much by chance
as by the destiny of nurture.

But I do not despair poverty or circumstance,
for there are choices within choices
and the time is near.
When this empty suitcase will be filled
with longing and distant sunsets
and all the miles I've tucked in books
and put back on the shelf.
Somewhere, I will travel.
Gladly beyond!

Day 25.
Prompt: Pick and event and make that event the title of your poem.

Lost at the Puyallup Fair 1979

Perfectly content
in my spray painted cowgirl hat
eating a granny smith wrapped
in chewy, stringy caramel.
Perfectly content
to watch the 4-H girl strut with
her livestock and bow.
Perfectly content
to count the number of soft yellow chicks
in the wire cage,
to wander, weaving
through the crowd of people
holding hands
bumping shoulders
nodding hello to smiling faces
until I'd tossed all the dimes I had,
won an ashtray. Perfectly content
until a strange woman with fear-filled, far-away eyes
grabbed my arm and crouched down to see me eye-to-eye
and asked, "Are you lost little girl?"

Only then did I burst
into tears and nod yes.

She took me to the lost and found booth
where I sat alone for what seemed like for-
ever waiting to be found.

Day 26.

Prompt: Poem involving miscommunication.

Liquor.
Assumptions.
Mars. Venus.
Disparity in desire.
Blame is easy to find.
And I've run through some possibilities:
cold feet,
singular soul,
fucking liar,
bock-bock-bock. Chicken!

From telepathic connection
to pathological love?
I don't want to miscommunicate with you
anymore. Why would you hear me
now? You were never very good at listening.

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

2009-04-29T08:25:00.000-07:00

I have affection for masterful use of repetition. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that I grew up in a musical and religious household, that I learned early on the power of a chorus to move you on a deeper level of consciousness. Even as I shed the religion of my childhood, I clung to music, trading in devotional tunes for the secular, The King James Bible for Leaves of Grass. I was thinking about this very thing the other day as I sat in Washington Square in San Francisco. I had just visited the Beat Museum and purchased a think paperback copy of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”. I was reading the poem again for the first time in years, noticing more than ever the influence of repetitious Whitman. And now I’m thinking of this moment again as I narrow down my list of topics to analyze regarding Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. Her use of repetition as a means to deliver her visual and thematic message is lyrical, worth examination.
In an interview titled, “The Art of Fiction”, Morrison described her work in Song of Solomon as “painterly”. In the first chapter, we can certainly see how the repeated use of color engages us visually in the bizarre suicide that opens the novel and introduces the issue of race. Every page of the first ten pages contains numerous literal (as in “yellow house” (3) ) and figurative (as in “sunshine cake” (10) ) references to the colors red, yellow, and blue. The impact is that it indeed feels like a painting. In her description of the only two patients of the only black doctor in town every admitted to Mercy Hospital, “both white” (5), Morrison begins a repetition of color that will continue throughout the entire novel. The repeated labeling of black and white makes race an issue that the reader can’t ignore.
In her narrative and in the songs included in her narrative, Morrison repeats the ideas and images that are at the heart of her narrative. “O Sugarman done fly away” (6), the rose-petal lady sings as Robert Smith leaps to his death wearing big blue wings. When Milkman experiences transformation in the end of the novel it’s the song of his ancestors that helps him, “Solomon done fly / Solomon done gone / Solomon cut across the sky / Solomon gone home”. Flight and wings are repeated throughout the novel in the songs and in the narrative. Even on a sentence level, Morrison uses parallel structure to “sing” her story, “The women’s hands were empty. No pocketbook, no change purse, no wallet, no keys, no small paper bag, no comb, no handkerchief. They carried nothing” (260). Black, white, gold, mercy, justice, deserve: in passage after passage, Morrison repeats words as a kind of chant below the narrative, deepening the overall impact of the story.
Nowhere is this chanting more evident than in Milkman’s transformation from Macon Dead Jr. to a man overflowing with gratitude for life, as in this scene when he comes home to his lover, Sweet:
“He couldn’t get back to Shalimar fast enough, and when he did
get there, dusty and dirty from the run, he leaped into the car and
drove to Sweet’s house. He almost broke her door down from the
incredible high that had begun as soon as he slammed the Byrd
woman’s door…’I want to swim!’ he shouted. ‘Come on, let’s go
swimming. I’m dirty and I want waaaaaater!’
Sweet smiled and said she’d give him a bath.
‘Bath! You think I’d put myself in that tight little porcelain box? I
need the sea! The whole goddam sea!’ Laughing, hollering, he ran
over to her and picked her up at the knees and ran around the room
with her over his shoulder. ‘The sea! I have to swim in the sea. Don’t
give me no itty bitty teeny tiny tub, girl. In need the whole entire
complete deep blue sea!’” (327).

Alliteration, internal rhyme, and the repetition of swim and sea make this passage like a sermon, moving you with sound and rhythm as much as meaning.
Often I attempt such rhythmic communication in my writing. It’s not easily to pull off consistently. It doesn’t always get the reception you’d want, particularly in a culture of readers who’ve been taught that the repeated occurrence of words in what they write is redundant and who are saturated in punchy, straight-forward prose. Oh, but I love it when a writer lapses into a musical mix of words that elaborate on the moment, that sound good and repeat. Morrison’s Song of Solomon is both painterly and song-like and as we know, painting and song are powerful ways to deliver meaning, to move, if movement is what you’re after.

Blue Ridge by T.R. Pearson

2009-04-29T08:20:00.000-07:00

Paul, the main character in Blue Ridge by T.R. Pearson is not a likeable guy. He is ambivalent from the get go and does not seem to have a shred of moral sensibility. Considering this, one might think that the novel would either trace his transformation or his fall. It does neither of these things. Paul goes on an adventure that is full of possibility for growth or change or corruption, but he comes through unmoved, cold as he ever was. So, why did I fly through the book, unable to put it down? Why did I laugh so often? Why is it worth reading Paul’s story at all? At least in part, it’s because of the humor and the sophistication of the writing
Blue Ridge is a self-conscious, laid-back mystery. Though the novel embraces the clichés of the genre, the ironic imagery Pearson uses throughout communicates a self-awareness that adds a touch of satire to the story. When the detective first arrives at Paul Tatum’s office to inform him of his estranged son’s death and asks him to identify the body he is described in a manner that reveals the author’s awareness of the stereotypical police officer, “He was of the standard police build and type. Strapping, I’ll call it, and square-headed, with high-school football in his background and probably a little juvenile thuggery” (7). The phrase “I’ll call it” draws attention to the clichéd description and mocks the scene with its self-awareness. Then when Paul arrives at his dead son’s apartment, his description of the scene cranks up the idea of “gritty” to a ridiculous volume, “I could see a man across the way through his apartment window. He was standing before his television in his under shorts, was massaging his scrotum as he swilled translucent skim milk from a gallon jug” (63). Descriptions such as this one are prevalent, turning grit to absurdity, adding an element of ridicule and dark humor. Another example of such overplaying occurs when the ironically named Kit Carson and Paul’s’ cousin Ray take the bones they’ve uncovered in the wilderness and are investigating to be analyzed by a doctor. The doctor’s office and appearance are described in a way that play with the idea of stereotype, turn it on it’s head by making the scene ridiculous and unconventional, “the pictures on the wall. A cartoon goose with an ice pack on its head, a cartoon house cat with its paw in a sling, a rosy pink cartoon pig with a thermometer shoved up its bunghole” (81). Bunghole! Cartoon animals! And then, the doctor walks in with red sneakers, smoking a cigarette. The way the narrative shifts in this way between the consciously mundane to the absurd add irony and self-consciousness to the narrative, elevating the work beyond cliché by embracing the cliché.
Another way that Pearson tips his cap to the intellectual sensibilities of the reader is his elevated diction. As Ray looks around the town he is to work in he doesn’t just say there is a charm to it, he “declare[s] aloud that it was freighted plainly with promise” (15). The narrator describes an advice columnist he went to for help as a “ceaseless scold with a gossamer New Age turn of phrase, a Californian, that is to say, by psychiatric disposition” (25). Turn of phrase indeed! This is a very complicated and sophisticated description. And Pearson employs this kind of wordsmithing throughout the book. In fact, this is the case whether we are in the point-of view of Ray or Paul. Phrases like “a noxious and intolerable blend of chemistry and decay” (44), “fairly comprehensive faint” (45), and “working at the moment through tenacious psychological misgivings about guns” (198), create an understatement in overstatement. The language is overstated and refined, even about events that should topple refinement because they are so unrefined. The “fairly comprehensive faint”, for instance, occurred when the detectives revealed a body to Paul that was supposed to be his son. A decaying, headless body. Fairly comprehensive does not quite seem to cut it, you know? His jaw drops and he hits the tile, knocking himself out. Pearson’s elevated diction adds irony to the story and engages the reader in the sentences as well as the story. Fairly comprehensive! I’ll say.
Paul describes his son’s girlfriend Lizzie critically, indicates that everything she does seems to be a role she is playing. She is an actress, so it fits. He specifically describes her advances toward him as “her brand of dramaturgical love” (88). As it happens, “dramaturgical” is just the word I would use for the style of Blue Ridge and its inclusion in the story seems to be yet another nod to Pearson’s conscious tweaking and crafting of this not to so typical, typical detective story. He doesn’t shy away from making his story entertaining. The writing is excessive and showy, revealing the writer behind the tale. It seems to me that Pearson took great risk in writing Blue Ridge, and that, I respect. It’s a cleverly crafted book, with an uncomplicated and predictable plot, and without a character you can really get behind. It depends on being crafty, rather than profound. Showy, rather than real.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

2009-04-29T08:16:00.000-07:00

When I came across the description of Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert as a “seminal work of realism”, I was a little surprised. It’s true I hadn’t finished cooking my thoughts on the book, but I wasn’t thinking anything along those lines. On closer examination, I could see that yes, much of the narrative is startlingly realistic. What I had been thinking a lot about though was point of view and how purely Flaubert draws his scenes through the eyes of the point of view character, usually Emma Bovary. While the author sets the dialogue and events down without judgment, his descriptions of the natural world reflect the character’s inner lives. And initially I was thinking of how unrealistic this was—that the trees, the birds, and the winds all respond to the fluctuations of the character’s feelings. But on closer examination, I couldn’t ignore that the rest of the story is put down in a detailed and realistic style.
Up to the near end of the book—Emma Bovary’s death—the story is told without narrator comment, unflinchingly, “Emma’s head was turned toward her right shoulder. The corner of her mouth, which remained open, was like a black hole at the bottom of her face; both thumbs were bent inwards toward the palms;”. The incredible detail Flaubert uses in this story, demonstrates that without a doubt there is something worth thinking about in this story of love, infidelity, and unfulfilled desire. He is showing us his characters so clearly, indicating that they are indeed worth a close examination. At the very start of the story, we are given this description of Charles Bovary’s hat:
It was headgear of composite nature, combining elements
of the busby, the lancer cap, the round hat, the otter skin cap
and the cotton night cap—one of those wretched whose mute
ugliness had great depths of expression, like an idiot’s face.
Egg-shaped and stiffened by whalebone, it began with three
rounded bands, followed by alternating diamond-shaped
patches of velvet and rabbit fur separated by a red stripe, and
finally there was a kind of bad terminating in a cardboard-lined
polygon by a long, extremely thin cord, forming a kind of tassel.
The cap was new; its visor was shiny. (2)
We know from this very first scene that Charles Bovary is a character we should pay attention to, and though he is in fact rather simple and boring, it’s clear that he’s a character crucial to the story, that we need to pay attention to.
The narrator does not take time to divulge to us what he thinks of Charles Bovary’s simplicity or Madame Bovary’s extravagances, excesses, and infidelity. But, the time he spends describing them urges—look, look, there’s something worth seeing here.
There seems sometimes a kind of dishonesty in the “honesty” of realism, because the truth is that we know the judgment is there even when the writer chooses not to share, which raises questions about whether “realism” is even possible when it comes to imaginative art.
And imaginative art indeed! Flaubert’s way of becoming his character’s in his descriptions of the natural world add depth to an otherwise realistic style. A nod and a wink perhaps to the reader in these moments of excess that reveal the writer behind the words, as in, “…her heart leapt. The flames in the fireplace cast a joyful, flickering light on the ceiling;” (89), or “She was now suffering through her love, and she felt her soul slipping away at the memory of it, just as a wounded man, as he lies dying, feels his life flowing out through the bleeding gash. Night was falling and the crows were flying overhead” (271).
This pairing of the realistic and imaginative is appropriate for a story about a young woman consumed by her own passionate nature. This makes me think of Hemingway’s purely realistic story “A Soldier’s Home” and something I recently read in an interview with Toni Morrison about how when she’s writing she doesn’t think about genre classifications, she lets the writing decide its form. And this is one great benefit of being a writer today. Over time, and with experimentation and entire literary movements: there are so many models to pull inspiration from, so many distinctions of form and style. I think this can be crippling too if one tries to either be too pure of form or too purposefully experimental. The work really should decide the form. And so it seems it was with Madame Bovary. Flaubert’s friends urged him to write something in the style of realism, and he did. It is no accident that he chose a story about a woman whose romantic nature is her undoing and who he is noted as saying was a fictional representation of himself. His was a romance with words and attention to them, a belief in stories driven by the artistry of the language, not the unfolding of events. As Madame Bovary did, he wanted the best of things that could be read in books. Perhaps if Madame Bovary had turned to writing instead of real people (men with whom she married and had affairs), she could have found the contentment she so passionately sought.

PAD Challenge: Days 22 and 23

2009-04-25T08:33:00.001-07:00

Day 22:
Write a poem about work.

What would Sisyphus do if one day
the rock just didn't roll back down?
What would you did if the alarm clock
didn't need to be set?
Everybody up and decided to serve only themselves
and their friends,
vowed no one would be friendless?

But that experiment failed with the hippies
who discovered inextricable human nature,
milk and honey and smack and booze and smoke.

Want stars in your eyes and to be your
only only. Want delight in disorder and freedom
from pain. Want the truth, no matter who you have to hurt
to get it. Want to create something
that will last and last and last. Want
these hands to be of use.

A haze of false dilemmas and wants
that want to be wanted most of all.
Seeing clear is our struggle.
These hands are mine.

Day 23:
Write a poem of regret.

Regret is a shadow that descends
in spite of intention
to live and learn by doing.
And even the darkest regrets, the ones
that contain tears and valentines sent or never sent,
or even those hinging on a death,
have no matter to them,
are only artifacts of light and perspective.

But as long as there is light and form,
there will be shadow and regret.
"I don't regret anything," he said.
And a shadow moved across his face
as the bodies and light in the bustling tavern
shifted and swayed to the jukebox
playing that Eagles song. And I shivered,
suddenly cold. Put my jacket on. Took a drink.

PAD Challenge: Days 18,19, 20, and 21

2009-04-24T11:52:00.000-07:00

Day 18:
Write a poem with an interaction of some sort.

Parenting Teenagers

How to avoid the following:
You: How was your day?
Teen: Fine
You: What did you learn?
Teen: Nothing.
You: Did anything interesting happen?
Teen: Not really.

I like to demand that he spin around, arms out
twenty times fast
while saying the alphabet backward
or make him go for a drive
or tell him STUPID jokes. And snort-laugh at them.
I embellish all the time and call them stories.

Your teenager may not initiate interaction and truth is
they don't owe you a damn thing, you ballooning ego,
but you owe them everything you've got
as exhausting as that sometimes is and you especially
owe them expectations. Damn right I expect you
to talk to me and sweep the floor and tell me what you think of hunger and
help me solve this problem. You're no accessory
here! Not just along for the ride!
Take the wheel for a while.
Yes-you!
And don't give me any lip about it.

Day 19:
Write an angry poem.

Her deference, added to the way
his blood-shot eyes burned and
words and objects flew, and anything handy worked
as a belt. These things nudged me,
as I sought identity, toward sukhasana,
toward brooding men
who needed women with practice in calm.

But I've started a whole new life
in which love is my one regret.

So many songs about love!
Money desire peddles love,
the heart's heroin, but I'm sick
of being sick, and I want good
old-fashioned anger:
skillet to your skull
sugar in your gas tank
sand in your underwear
a pox!
preferably venereal.
You fucked-up fucking mother fucker!
I'm so glad
you're gone.

Day 20:
Write a poem of rebirth.

Hangover

My head feels it's set
in a vice, and the hours of the day
are turning the lever,
squeezing out wine drunk memories
of judgment susupended, rebellious:
a big fuck you to every hesitation, every time
I cared or cowered or called
just to hear his voice.

I'm slipping past this day,
ducking notice,
hiding fear behind my shades,
knowing that at the end
I will climb perfectly alone
into sleep, curled and dreaming
the dreams I'm accustomed to dreaming.

I'm too tired to pay attention to the worry-chatter
gurgling in my stomach, wanting to remember
every freakin' little detail.
I'd rather forget.

Day 21:
Write a haiku.

In the green of spring
yellow dust confettis the world:
celebration of risk

Poem-A-Day--Day 17

2009-04-17T11:52:00.000-07:00

Prompt: All I Want Is _________.

All I want is
devouring me
lie by lie as I squint
into the chaos of desire
unchecked.

Just as a rolling stone,
I've gathered no symbiosis
in pursuit of happiness.

All I want is
to take three slow steps
backward and ask myself:
What is it you really want?

My soul's certain reply:
Truth, of course. For better
or for worse.

Poem-A-Day--Day 16--A color...

2009-04-17T10:49:00.000-07:00

Burgundy

Sculpted burgundy castor oil
rubbed on virgin lips
stayed for ten whole seconds.
Ten seconds spent trying to recognize
the reflection of an unfamiliar face.
Burgundy on the wadded tissue
she tossed in the bathroom garbage.

Burgundy, the color of her heart
fluttering in her chest,
the stripe of color on the little black marsh-bird
who, though silent, catches the eye.
Her heart flutters with a rhythm that says--
y-e-s.

Burgundy, the color of the spaghetti-strapped
above-the-knee dress
worn at her first formal dance.
The color she saw, eyes closed
as he lifted the hem of the dress
that all night had prepared her,
in that way satin conforms to the undulating
terrain of a willing body.
The stain on the bed.

Burgundy, the color of the rose in her groom's lapel.
The color of the lipstick, a shade darker than her own,
she spied at the base of his neck
while rubbing his shoulders
as she often did since agreeing to I do.

Burgundy, the color of the blood spilled
onto the bamboo cutting board
while slicing tomatoes with the dull knife.

Burgundy, three glasses a day
keeps the conscience away, she says,
holds her best girlfriend's cold, shaking hand,
leans in to kiss her cheek,
laughs, hands her the napkin dipped
in ice water:
"Right there, honey. Got a little lipstick on your cheek."
Laughs.

Poem-A-Day--Day 15!

2009-04-15T11:23:00.000-07:00

Prompt 15: Take the title of a poem you especially like by another poet and change it. With this new title, write a poem.

Here are the titles I considered:
One Art
as freedom is a breakfast food
here's to opening and upward
i like my body when it is with your body
pity this busy monster, manunkind
since feeling is first
In the Waiting Room
the force that through the green fuse drives the flower
The More Loving One
O Me! O Life!
Supermarket in California

What I went with:

Co-Op in Olympia, WA

What thoughts I have of you, e.e. cummings,
for as I walked the few residential blocks
to the westside co-op, the sun kneaded my knotted shoulders
and I thought of the fresh-baked loaf of rosemary bread and sharp cheese
that I would choose for my solitary picnic.

Hippies in the clearance bin!
Hippies in the kale!
Hippies pulling out the jars and bags they brought from home
to gather the bulk food items their hearts desire!

I saw you, e.e. cummings, love addict, juggling
eggs, a smile on your face,
and the crowd that had gathered around you
singing love songs.

College students in the alfalfa sprouts!
Families in the peanut butter bucket!

And, Edward Estlin, I heard the questions you fired at the crowd--
one for each egg you tossed into the air.
What else is heart for?
What better time than now?
For shame? Fuck shame!

Contemplating this, I turned my cart into the next aisle
where I spied Elizabeth Bishop taking photographs of people,
then pretending, when they turned to question her, to count apples,
a brooding expression on her brow.

And Mr. Ginsberg, I stood behind you in line
listened to you howl for the volunteer cashier,
who snorted and laughed, asked you to sign
his environmental science textbook.

When I exited the store,
reusable bags too full
because I have no knack for finite space,
you were reading the community bulletin board,
jotting phrases down in your pocket-sized notebook.

I walked home alone, thinking
O Me! O Love!
Until in the bird's songs,
the sound of my sandals tapping the pavement,
the feather breeze on my bare legs,
I heard you whisper:
"That you are here--that life exists, and identity;
who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you."

PAD Challenge: Days 4-14!!!

2009-04-14T22:27:00.000-07:00

Five minutes a poem. All written tonight to catch up!!

Day 4: Animal poem.

Dog

Down dog,
you remind me of
what I'm doing here.
You sigh with such disappointment
when I'm too busy pushing words around on the page
to scratch your chin
behind your ears.
You wait patiently warming my feet
until the next time I'll look into your eyes and coo,
run you about town at a pace
you only can just deal with.
When I wake, you're there, smiling, reminding me
that, in spite of everything,
today is another beautiful day,
full of things to sniff, chase after, and be grateful for.

Day 5: A monument

Anjo's Quickstop (Hoquiam, WA)

Penny candy by the bag
nickel hats
Swedish fish
red, red chewy raspberries.

On richer days,
fat, seasoned potato wedges, two tablespoon-sized tubs of sour cream
Pac-man for two quarters a game

Sunday afternoon with my older cousin De-bor-ah,
who helped me forge the notes for
two packs of Copenhagen
one for her
one for me
and then again when her mother was "too sick to make it to the store"
a soft pack of Marlboro reds
that we smoked under the bridge
in front of the skating rink
talking about how much fun she would
in the fall
in middle school.
I was so jealous.

Day 6: Something Missing

Listening this evening to the Cowboy Junkies song
Tuesday morning, I don't feel so much like
something is missing.
Yesterday, I thought this extra two feet in my bed
was something I ought to fill as soon as I could,
but this morning, I'm thinking that the real thing
that was missing all those years was something else entirely
and this space makes me smile,
knowing what I want to fill it with.
I'll wait for Haley's Comet to come again if I have to.
Until the next eclipse.
Until the moon drops through my sun roof
in an attempt to hitch a ride and comments
on the song playing on the radio, saying,
"I love this fucking song!"

Day 7: A dirty poem OR a clean poem

I should have known
when you commented on the state of my kitchen
after calling yourself a neatfreak
that you were prone to blurred vision.

My kitchen is almost always clean, but
I don't think you quite fathom our different
circumstances.
How for you being alone gives you more time
to get your ducks in a row
and how for me being alone is a chosen condition
that has created quite a stir in my domestic predictability.

Cleanliness is next to godliness,
but godliness is only possible maybe twice a week.

Day 8: Routine

Oh comfort!
When the stars in my eyes
find they aren't shining in your beautiful dark skies,
buzz of my alarm,
feet on the floor,
water on my face,
the walk with the dog in the cold silence of near dawn,
when I can chant Om Ganapati Om
as loud as I feel like,
loud enough to drown out the longing
for a sky to shine in.
Then, I am grateful for this lesson plan,
this bell schedule,
this afternoon run,
this sun salutation.

Day 9: A memory

Of all the times I should have known better,
should have tucked tail and run.
After a day of chasing
the brightest giggling eyes around the carpet all day,
tickling feet,
wiping drool,
watching those same eyes spoon mounds of avocado
into his mouth in fat fists,
mostly missing his mouth.
After snatching a study break in during naptime.

When the door flew open with a thud
and I could smell the two of you smiling at your manliness.
When out of guilt you paid me sixty dollars you wouldn't remember
to clean the puke that missed the bowl.
Of all the times, I never felt more like a whore.

Day 10: Friday

For Liz McLaren

How will I know, Liz?
A Friday night at the dance club.
My first solitary Christmas.
And, I met you
who was willing to put taste aside
for some booty-shaking,
singing at the, yes, top of our lungs,
an obvious line of questioning.

Liz, babe, let me tell you,
you will know.
And if you don't, just ask me.
Cause I know
about these
things.

Day 11: An object

You contain perfect green wonder,
so easily yielding to my spoon.
A delight when you are ripe to be open.
A disappointment if in my impatience tempts me
to peek too soon, or if in my business
I miss the signs of your readiness.

I loved you before
he spoke the words, "I'm sorry," eyes focused
on his untied canvas sneaker.

Heart-sized.
Oh, avocado!
I'm taking this slimy brown pit,
suspending it on toothpicks
on the rim of a jar of water,
placing it in the sun and
checking on you everyday,
praying that you'll root and grow so
I can transplant you
and have hearts to spare
someday.

Day12: So we decided to ____________.

So we decided to get married.
But it wasn't like when you're at the grocery store
pulling things off the shelves,
filling your squeaky-wheeled cart
and can pause to say, hey I don't need this
box of cookies
jar of gourmet capers
six dollar loaf of break.

But, we treated it like that,
skipping rebellious and ringless into the next and then
the next day. How many
times I wanted to put you
back on the shelf!
But, it wasn't like at the grocery store.

Day 13: A hobby

Since you left I've thought of taking up needlepoint
but I don't have a thimble.
Or scrapbooking, but I'm afraid of papercuts.
Or knitting, but I can't make the time.

But, moon-gazing!
That's turned out to be just the hobby for me.

Day 14: Anti-love poem

The biggest but in the universe
escaped your lips just when
I was about to say,
there's no reason we can't do anything
if we promise to be the interlaced fingers offering a leg-up
for--whatever! For each other.
I want to see you get that star.
But you were...
But you did...
But you thought...
But, but, but nothing!
There's only now.
And if nothing else, I thought
you got that.