Midsummer moodiness

Somehow, the summer is slipping by. Without warning it is more than half over really, and I'm feeling moody about it. The sky has been a mosaic of torn clouds this week. Strong winds and rain have been thrashing about wildly like a greenbroke horse. The night sky burnished with sheet lightening, thunder always rolling low in the distance. It's that time in the summer when I start to think about it ending, and I feel a certain abject sorrow thinking of it. Like driving again after living through a car crash, the prospect of going back to work and living through another winter makes me white-knuckled and anxious, albeit in a hazy popsicle and sun-stupored way. Last year's autumn and winter left scar tissue running the length of our relationship: mine and DH's. We survived, but sometimes the ache of it painted entire weeks with indigo and gunmetal gray. We came out of it, one bowl at a time at the pottery studio, centering, finding each other among strangers, with slip on our hands and glaze splattering our shirts. But it took until after my birthday to feel like we'd make it to the next.

Now roses are blooming hot red and hooker pink, their petals promiscuously soft, but the slugs are eating holes in the leaves. We still haven't put in a garden fence, and the ground where the beds have not been turned has begun to reclaim its meadow-ness, grasses and tiny fingered ferns and sturdy-rooted dandelions sprouting up through the rubble of tilled soil. I wake up and spend my days sprawled out reading novels which is something I almost never do, and cannot quite get accustomed to. Hours in a book, interrupted every fifteen minutes by Bean who lopes about the yard with his bubble mower or a watering can.

We got him a set of trains and a an oval loop of track and they keep him occupied for nice long stretches of time, during which I get hauled into whatever place is inked out on the pages I'm turning. I get pulled in so easily, my whole day takes on the hue of the story, as though my life were a cotton cloth saturated in the dye of each story's language and emotion; little ripples and circles left clean, like tie-dye, where necessity forces me to resurface.

Small things bring me back to the moment. Making alphabet soup. Lying in bed with DH, my head pressed into the soft place where his arm and shoulder meet and his heartbeat thrums so loudly in my head, all at once I start to think it is my own. Or sitting on the planks of the small dock at the neighbor's pond with Bean, our toes in the water, listening for frogs and splashing, while above us swallows swoop and dive. But in between these things, words are running a haphazard narrative inside my head. Stories are bunkering up against each other.

Last week I finished Pam Houston's novel Sight Hound, which I wasn't entirely drawn into at first (many narrators, one of whom is a dog) but found myself sobbing by the end, grateful for it's right-there in plain sight way of talking about risk and faith and grief. Today I finished As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. DH's ninth grade copy with his ball point pen notes in the margins.

I read it in two days, though I didn't expect it to. There was a certain terrifying tension to it. Faulkner's language is so heady and convoluted and looping that the act of reading it becomes part of the story. You become torn, and belligerent and hateful and grieving because the language makes you feel these things. Like a rip tide, it tows you under. One sentence looping back on itself again and again until you can no longer read it and have it mean anything at all, or another so abrupt, so sharp with colloquial timbre that you have to catch your breath. I want to go back and read the whole thing again, because I felt myself pushed to the very edges of comprehension, as though it were my gut and not my mind to towards which the story was aimed.

I’m also reading Homeland, a collection of short stories by Barbara Kingsolver. My everywhere read. The one I snatch at in all those in-between moments. Each story yanks me into the very center of it’s truth. I read them hungrily, picking over the skeleton of the story, trying to understand how it is made. The gathering of small details, the weight of lines, or the way the author’s voice rides up high over the words of the narrator like radio stations overlapping.

Yet with all the book reading and the lolling about, I haven't been able to stay focused on writing. There is something in my aquarian nature that is both sanguine and ambivalent. This, combined with Bean's intermitent pestering, and it seems it is nearly impossible for me to effectively structure my days. I get disoriented in summer, with all the basking and book reading and love making and such, the heat rising up early and abating only after the thunder and rain have rinsed the grass and sky.

Anyone else feel like this, midsummer? What are you reading? Doing?

Reasons to celebrate

I’m home, drenched with gratitude. The outcome of my week away was more bountiful than I could have ever imagined--she asked me to continue working with her in a private, advanced writing group that meets a few times a year, and exchanges manuscripts routinely. I’m beyond thrilled, beyond words even. Without a doubt now, I will be focusing on writing with my whole heart now.

I have to say, I feel like I owe you—Internets—one heaping helping of gratitude. You have, again and again made me take my writing seriously. Thank you for all of your comments…(Do you know how much I love them? A TON! ~ On that note, sorry about the funky commenting problems. Just hit “submit comment” ONE TIME, and it goes through, even if it tells you it doesn’t. Still don’t know why—though I’m trying to figure it out.) Thank you for all your emails, your encouragement and companionship from the very depths of my heart.

I started this blog two years ago this month, and I’ve benefited from the community I’ve found through it immeasurably. I laughed aloud when I went to look back at my first posts. See this one? Some things have come full circle, non? ( I never went that summer. Something about having a six month old prevented me. I think I’d delusionally signed up to CAMP with him and DH for the five days, in a two person backpacking tent, in a campground full of middle-age, new-age types who were seeking an ‘experience’ while there. We didn’t make it past night one.)

Anyhow, if I were a dog I’d be thwacking my tail into something rather hard. Since I’m not, I can’t stop grinning. Spent the day picking wild strawberries with Bean, wandering newly mown paths through our meadows, and yesterday, happily reunited, the three of us took a four hour nap in the sun. Life is good, good, good.

Writing assignment # 3: An alphabetical story

(The first letter of each sentence is in alphabetical order. X or Z may be left out, but not both. One line must be one word; one must be 100)

Evening

Zig zagging above us, the bats move through the fading light like acrobats. Yellow light stains the mountains, but in the valleys evening makes the shadows long. We’re in the lower meadow, picking sweet corn from the garden when we see them. Very slowly, we turn in unison, though neither of us has said a word.

There in the shadows, a doe and two fawns step from between the maples and the birches, heads low, grazing on wild strawberries and newly waist high grass. She lifts her head from time to time, sniffing, but we’re downwind. Reaching for me in the semi dark, I feel his hands fold around my shoulders, and I sink back into the warmth of his chest. Quiet.

Purple spreads across the darkening sky. One by one the stars come out, and fireflies start to twinkle at the edges of the lawn. Night folds her quilt of dark around us. Meadowlarks and the last of the swallows dart towards the pines along the drive.

Leaning back into his chest, he smells like grass and salt and honey, and I can hear his heart beating like a distant drum, until gradually an entire chorus of night sounds begins to build around the rhythm of his pulse, steady and persistent; bullfrogs calling from the pond below our meadow punctuating the higher more urgent trilling of the peepers and the tree frogs, with a bass that reverberates slightly in my sternum, and above them the insidious sonic treble of mosquitoes who are, as of yet, simply circling, while the bats swoop low, just missing our upturned faces.

Kissing him is suddenly worth more than spotted fawns, and I turn. Just then the coyotes that we’ve heard nightly begin to call. I pull back. He tilts his head like a dog, listening as their wild yapping reaches fever pitch. Goosebumps spread on my arms. Fleeting like shadows, we see them at the edge of the woods, crossing the upper meadow. Even as we’re watching, they disappear, melting into the night, their song ending suddenly as it began. Disentangling, we turn towards the house where light spills onto the lawn in golden squares.

“Come on,” I say.

But he pulls me back, his hands running up my shirt. Another moment in the dark, and we’re falling into the knee high grass.

June Self Portrait Challenge: environment # 2

This place is big with words, with ideas, with art. The walls remember e.e. cummings and Stanley Kunitz; Grace Paley's voice and Mary Oliver's eye for noticing the profound in minute details. A fish weathervane tilts out my window. A long catwalk connects the studios; roses tumble wildly below. I stand in the mirror taking pictures to remember this, so that when everything else pushes in, I'll have snapshots with light flooding through big windows and the fan whirring. I'll have Pam Houston's voice and the laughter of other students sharing work. I'll have the images of Robert Yarboroughs paintings dancing like sunspots on the inside of my eyelids, and Wired Puppy coffee, and houses painted lavender and lemon and ocean blue. I'll have the memory of hours writing, quiet pooling up like water around me; and I'll have the seal's slick wet heads bobbing up out of the water to eye me sitting, sand flecking my calves, alone on the shore.

Bliss

Have I mentioned that I’m having a divine time? I sat for three hours and wrote this afternoon after receiving brilliant criticism on the piece I am working on. I went to the beach yesterday, with a picnic: spicy fried chicken, pot stickers, salad, grapefruit soda, and a coconut & chocolate chip cookie. Then I watched the sun set over the water. I heard Maxine Kumin read from her work, and oh, how my breath was lost somewhere as she read, like the flight of birds.

And I went to dinner with Pam and the class tonight. She is charismatic and analytical and forthright. She’s been in the Bronco’s locker room and interviewed Toni Morrison, and she can make a room of people laugh belly laughs repeatedly.

Here are a few things she's said so far this week that I really want to remember:

On why she writes: “Writing is the way I honor the physical world. I think of it as a kind of prayer.”

On craft: “Sink the story into the metaphor. The challenge is how to sidle up next to the big things without becoming lecturers and making total fools out of ourselves.”

“There is nothing worse than trying to say something. You’ll always fuck it up. Keep it concrete.”

“You don’t have to tell everything. Let the concrete specifics stand in for the general.”

You cannot communicate depth using emotion word. ”Just read your seventh grade journal to see that!”

On Revising: by the fourth draft, “take out the things you needed to say to know, but now they can be removed.”

On fiction versus nonfiction: “Everything I write comes out of my experience. I hardly imagine anything.”

Do you know how freeing that was for me to hear? Do you understand how those few sentences made lots of things possible for me with writing, that I hadn’t imagined possible?

On audience; “You must believe your reader is as smart as you are.”

Writing assignment # 2: an airplane story

The big rigs were matchboxes and the cars marbles and then it was over. On the way down, the salt flats were pale green and iridescent blue, and the mountains heaved up like bread rising in the oven. I chewed gum on the descent, for the first time I’d ever been allowed, and felt my seven-year-old body slam into the back of my seat as the wheels hit the tarmac and the wind flaps roared with engagement. I tried hard not to swallow my gum. The second time, two years taller, on a ranch outside Gunnison I was in the back seat next to my sister. She was always talking about being a pilot when she grew up. I decided I wanted to be one too, but the way she talked made me keep my dream to myself.

My dad sat in the front seat with a thermos of coffee and bread and butter sandwiches wrapped in cellophane next to Art Gilmond, who was sixty, and smelled of engine oil and sweat. He was balled and sunburned and he kept a ranch with mustang horses and fruit trees. We were staying the week.

I’d surprised him heading for the bathroom the night before, coming up the stairs just as he was passing in the hall.

“Boo!” I yelled.

His fist stopping just inches before my startled face.

“Damn it. Never do that again,” he said his face suddenly ashy. “Never surprise a Vet.”

I kept my distance.

The yellow and white propeller of the little four-seater wound up like a drunken bumble bee. This time the plane bucked down the runway and then lifted off, air slipping under and over its fat white wings like someone had tossed it aloft. We circled the canyons low enough to startle horses. The engine vibrated in every cell of my body. The sky seemed to be a brighter blue than on the ground, and everything looked miniature like in a painting or like a toy store village. We at bread and butter as we circled; flying to the edge of a canyon and then flying on, the land suddenly falling away below us. My ears popped, and I gulped air.

The third time I was seventeen, and alone in the front seat with the instructor. The long cable that connected the glider to the belly of the plane up ahead of us would pull us aloft, he told me. I was ready. By the fence my dad stood with his foot on the bottom rail, a thermos of coffee in his hand. I’d been reading. I knew about aerodynamics and the Wright Brothers. I also knew about Icarus.

I was ready for anything except for the way when the instructor retracted the metal cable after we’d climbed up, and up, circling with the tow plane until we were at gliding altitude, it was suddenly silent. No motor, just rushing wind. I could see gulls circling just below us, and the tiny speck of my dad.

I'm somewhere else

I left at half past nine, and followed the sunshine south. Listened to Radio Lab. Did you know dolphins and ducks sleep with one half of their brain at a time? I was fascinated. Listened to a fiesty Niko Case play for a live audiance, and watched as the landscape flattened and the trees became stubby and gnarled. Now I'm here, feeling light headed and wonderous. Ready to take a walk to the beach, and maybe to scope out the local coffee shop before orientation starts in an hour.

I have work to share, but I'm terrified, still. DH read it dutifully and gave the best of advice: you have to start somewhere, and anywhere is good. Especially if you love words as much as I do. And besides, they're not going to eat me alive just because I signed up for advanced fiction when I've only written a handful of fiction pieces in my life. Right? We'll see. I'll be posting a lot this week (no two year old!) I'm interested to keep a record of my emotions as I jump into this. Something I'm drawn to and totally scared of in the same breath. Must be a little how moths feel, fluttering by the porch light.

Always last minute me

I woke up this morning with a sore throat. I always seem to do this: get sick right after I've made it through to the end of something stressful. I also always manage to leave everything for last minute: laundry, the rest of my fiction piece, packing. I hate leaving in a rush of packing and hapazardness, but I always seem to manage to find myself there.

An inefficient overachiever, and a sick one at that.

I'll leave in the morning tomorrow, and drive for six hours. Signing along with the radio, trying to get the directions right, and feeling like my stomach might fall out my mouth, but I'll try not to focus on that. (Have I mentioned how anxious I get right at the beginning of things--at that cusp of unknown? I have. I know. But I really hate it.) But with all my heart I'm excited to be going, and I have questions that I'm determined to ask of the lady whose prose makes me grin, or catch my breath. But I also want to know answers from you. If you write, or read, or dream of writing, I'd love to hear your thoughs.

* Where are the lines between life and fiction. How can pieces of life, stories, characters, annecdotes become the tapestry of fiction?

* How much is enough? I'm forever writing the long piece. The piece with backstory on the backstory. I want to learn to craft a shorter narritive. Something with just enough to let the reader do the rest. How do you know when to leave off, without saying everything?

* And audiance. I don't feel like I have a sophisticated enough sense of audiance yet. Kurt Vonnegut says "Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia." If you write, who is your one person? Who is yoru audiance. Maybe that's my problem, I can never think of just one person.

What sets you on fire?

How do you write? How do you sit down and break open the cracked clay that paints your heart like a mask? How do you say the things you need to say, or want to, all the while believing in a few unsure things (the threads of a story stringing out like a spider’s fragile gossamer?)

It has dawned on me that I have no idea how to write really. Some days I feel like words are pelting me. Other days everything comes out so boring and uninspired. Most of the time I have no idea what to expect when I sit down at the keyboard. My mind plays chicken with me. The two of us wobble about mostly, looking stupid.

I think my problem is that I can imagine big. I can imagine BIGGER than big. I get glimpses of the whole damn story, from every perspective, the way it all should be. Then I have to write it, and that totally sucks. You know what I mean? Then the sentences tangle. Do any of you write?

What do you believe in? Especially with fiction? What makes you believe you have something to say? Is it story, for story’s sake, or something else? I really need to know.

Part of the reason all of this has me off kilter tonight is that I’m going for a week long workshop with Pam Houston on the coast in ten days. I’m already feeling dry-mouthed and foolish. More than anything else I hate meeting people for the first time. After we’ve met, I’m okay, but I hate those first few moments of unknown: skating out on ice the color of a robin’s egg, wondering if it will hold. I hate parties for this reason; and talking on the phone. And of course, being a writing workshop and all, I’ll have to meet lots of people; and then read them my timorous attempts at fiction. Gasp. Why do I do this to myself?

I feel like I’m lingering in the doorway of an open jet plane: air rushing past it’s metal belly and below a wide topography of green and blue and a geometric jumble of urban shapes, and the outcome’s totally uncertain. You never really know.

The shape of anxiety

There comes a point when habit pulls me here, to this place where I tell myself stories about the things I cannot do. Invariably after a week of rising early, making coffee, and touching my fingers to the keys, following words about where they will travel at dawn, my mind becomes like a child terrified of the monster under her bed.

This week, more than anything else, I have been watching my thoughts as I wake up and stumble like Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase into the moment of the present, with my mind and body disjointed in a hundred little ways. I’ve realized that without any intention I put a great deal of effort into constructing thoughts that cut me off at the knees. I tell myself: you don’t know anything about fiction writing. And, you don’t have time to really produce anything worth publishing. And, I suck at this, what am I possibly thinking? And six or ten thoughts later I’m in a tailspin writing incoherent mutterings.

But this week I’ve been trying stubbornly to not listen. Trying, being the operative word, of course. Have you ever noticed how damn hard it is not to listen to your negative thoughts, and instead tune to the positive ones? I feel like I’m almost hardwired to tune in to these thoughts, like a freaking hand-made transistor radio that can only pick up a one station. I buy my own bullshit ninety-eight percent of the time, hook, line and sinker. And then I sit down to write, and it’s a wonder I still remember all twenty-six letters, let alone how to construct a few sentences that reflect any small piece of how my heart moves.

But that is the reason I write. The reason you write. The reason we both read. Because writing is an act of turning our inner ear towards the divine breath of creativity that moves across the harp strings of our hearts, and turning that other-worldly song into words; opens our hearts, so that when someone else reads strings of their own heart resonate in recognition. Writing then, becomes something huge. Words have the immense capacity to reach across the divide between individuals, and to inhabit the private spaces in our hearts and minds from whence new ideas spring. The stories we choose to tell shape us.

Maybe this is all very obvious, but the trolly part of me that crouches in the corner of my mind and repeats idiotically a mantra of fear really needs to hear this today. So as I sit down to write this morning, my windowsill cluttered with jars of brushes, I grab a the most recent Sun and find this, by John O’Donohue:

Fear is the greatest source of falsification in life. It makes the real seem unreal, and the unreal to appear real. In The Courage To Be the theologian Paul Tillich draws a distinction between fear and anxiety. Anxiety for him, is this diffuse worry that has no object or point of reference. This is the atmosphere in the U.S., the land of the free and the home of the brave. There is a huge anxiety just down under the surface.

Fear, as distinct from anxiety, has an object and a point of reference. Tillich says that in order to handle anxiety, you have to translate it into a fear that has a definite object. Then you can engage with it. Part of the intention of growth is to overcome one’s fears.

It makes so much sense I almost laugh out loud, my hearstrings thrumming. What if I pushed farther? What if I tried to narrow the huge anxiety I have about writing, especially about writing fiction, into a fear that I can grow past? What if? I’m not there yet, but it’s a good point to launch from.

Do you have wide anxieties or pointed fears? Is there a false story you tell yourself again and again unthinkingly? What is stopping you from accomplishing the things you dream of?

Intention

Time to return to the things that matter. To wake up bumble-headed and still trialing the wild ponies of dreams, pour tea, and write. To show up, because this is what I want to do with my life. Even when showing up means having a staring contest with the page, while the birds sing jubulently outside; and dawn spreads across the gravel and the new buds and the eaves. I'm determined, because I have to be, because this is what I've chosen. Some days I come away with nothing. Other days, a few sentences, like a pocket full of sea glass shards. Or poems, that tumble from nowhere before I'm even awake.

Two versions of Worship:

I kneel down at the arbor of another day kissing the small pebbles of wonder that press into my knees, the palms of my hands, the soles of my feet I gather the petals that have drifted earthwards from the quivering globes of roses, and press them to my heart

April 24

**

my heart is like a music box; many pronged tin cylinder, twirling making steady, frail music rise joining the windstorm of my soul where the notes are torn and the song becomes wild and tumultuous and I feel very small.

April 25

Life is happening right now

He told me he loved me, for the first time, yesterday. Driving home on our washboard bumpy dirt road, spread thick with mud like peanut butter on an open faced sandwich, he said, “I yuv you mommy.”

I said, “What?” Not really listening, caught up in the replay of a Teri Gross interview with the late Kurt Vonnegut on NPR.

“I yuv you,” he said with a rosy, jelly-smudged grin.

It felt, then, like summer sunlight. Like lightening bugs flitting about the lawn on a late August evening; like standing at the top of a very tall mountain, above the clouds and suddenly breathless; like finding ten perfect unbroken sand dollars in a row at the beach;

“I love you too,” I said. “So much.”

In my chest, I suddenly felt the fluttering of a thousand mariposas.

It’s bizarre sometimes, how things you were sure you were set on, when they don’t come to fruition, make room for other things to come into focus, unfurl, blossom. Every so often I feel like I get the chance to pan out and see the full three-ring-circus that is my life. The rest of the time, I’m there in the midst of it, too close to the action for perspective, twirling with the raspberry stain of my love smudged across my sleeve, and a thousand fragile things gathered up in my arms: my child, my work, my many foibles and distractions.

Finding the small envelope in my mailbox gave me this unexpected opportunity for perspective. It made me step back and really admit for the first time, how utterly overwhelming the past year of my life has been. I’m a chin-up kind of girl, and I’ve been trying to tell myself a hundred happy-ending stories, but painted over the stress of raising a toddler and renovating our own home, has been the pale hue of trauma after the shooting that took place at the school where I work in the beginning of the year. Terror pressed into the supple limbic portion of my brain that cannot speak and only feels, with sudden abrupt urgency, and altered the certain fundamental aspects of the way I live and trust and respond in the world.

I’ve been navigating my way out of that maze of reactions the entire year, and somewhere in the process, when I applied to grad schools, I entirely forgot about the school I’d researched last year that really belonged at the top of my list. Forgot, entirely.I was so shocked to realize this, it made me no longer sad about the small envelope bearing the word regret. Instead I finally gave myself permission to slow down a bit. Permission to have the summer here, with my family and a box of mail-order chicks, and watermelon seed spitting contests and writing workshops, and to take out West to run a half marathon with my sister.

Permission to not compete with the peers in my life who are at different places in their lives, because in the end, our lives are tangled up with entirely different sets of stars. Can’t you picture that? All of us, like marionettes with fragile golden strings stretching up into the dark indigo bowl of heaven. Have you ever looked up and tried to count all those stars?

Like dislocated limb, I’ve been dangling on the peripheries of my life all year. I’ve spent many months trying to find that groove where the cartilage of necessity and the bone of loving and dreaming meet. It has been painful. My senses of safety and inner equilibrium have been precariously balanced amidst a heap of responsibility and guilt and worry. My days are scribbled with the irrational ink of worry. I’ve burst into sudden shocked tears when a glass breaks. I’ve had entire fights, painful and raw and startling, that midway through, I can no longer recall the initial provocation.

Somehow, receiving that letter didn’t shake my belief in my writing at all—the way I imagined it would, before it came. Now, from this vantage point I don’t think my writing was the reason I was rejected at all. I think instead it was because my readiness to be there wasn’t self-evident in my application, or in my hurried recommendations from professors I hadn’t worked with in years.

I don’t know if I would have been ready, honestly. It would be a little like jumping off a bus moving at full speed, and because I’m that chin-up kid with a big ego, I’m sure I’d make it work somehow, despite the inevitable scraped knees and broken arm. But this way I’ll have some time to really find my footing, rather than plunging blindly into a new stream with flooding banks, which graduate work in writing invariably is.

So I’m looking forward to summer now, more than I was. (Also because eight inches of sleety frozen crap is in the forecast for tomorrow night. Somewhere, some very drunk weather gods are having a hell of a good time at our expense.) Some part of me feels like hugging this other part of me that has reached out and offered permission to just be here right now; at the beginning, instead of rushing pell-mell ahead. I know how that sounds, but I can’t think of any other way of describing how my drive to accomplish things can a perilous and ruthless taskmaster, who crowds my days with post-it notes and plans, and forgets life is happening right now, and how relieved I am to have to slow down.

Life is happening right now.

He said “I yuv you mommy,” and he was beaming.

That’s enough.

Mail.

The small envelope arrived. With it a thousand other possibilities, and certain (if not temporary) heartache.

Waiting

Feeling the tight stomached ache of waiting, now. For spring, for the fat envelope, for several nights of sleep stacked up against each other like a solid cord of wood.

I finished The Year Of Magical Thinking yesterday, and all day today I keep going back to it in my mind. So many of her sentences are like the unusual pebbles we scoop up at the beach and then finger softly in the white cotton interiors of our pockets all afternoon.

This one, particularly:

"Marriage is memory, marriage is time."

I randomly opened an old issue of Vanity Fair today, looking for inspiration, and landed on a page with her bird like portrait: frail after so much loss, but fierce. I clipped it to the wire running along the low wall near my desk, with other glossy pages ripped from other sources, each image causing amazement to quicken in my soul.

Waiting always feels like this. I heard from one school, yes. But the other, the one I dearly want, most, utmost, not yet. There are more birds now: doves, grackles, starlings, chickadees and a whole bevy of chatty bluejays at the feeder; but not yet robins from the tree tops, and not yet buds swelling large enough to force in jars along the windowsills. Though surely soon.

At the doorway

So I finished, and I’m happy with the manuscript I put together. I wrote well, I think. My body aches from poor posture, and hour after hour in front of the computer.

Getting these applications finished is a milestone for me. I’m standing at the doorway to something I’ve wanted for such a long time, and finally I’ve given myself the all-out green light to go ahead and be a writer.

It still sounds a little scary to say that, to admit that’s what I’m doing by sending this fat envelope off. Like releasing a flock carrier pigeons, hope takes flight on a hundred wings tonight.

A week of mornings..

Monday:I’m stumbling to break into a new routine of writing in the morning before my thoughts are shattered with day. Now I wake up with dreams still trailing through my mind like the tails of wild horses, and there is nothing I can hold onto for sure. But it is a quieter time, now, with the restless cat circling my knees, as the before-dawn light spreads out above the blue of land and fog like a pale smudge of jam. I’m ready to at least sit and follow the words across the page.

*

Tuesday: It’s early and I’ve wrapped my wet hair in a fleece blanket to stay warm. The house creaks as the heat comes on. Outside the mercury hovers near zero. Already daylight is smudging the clouds with pale gray and rose. I do not want to be awake today, tiredness clings to me, making my vision blurry.

*

Wednesday: This morning the white-bread toast is gummy and the tea too sweat. I brought a handful of pecan halves upstairs, but I’m not interested now, in the dark before dawn when the temperature dips and the house is still. * Thursday: The morning is frail and dark. My body aches from a lack of sleep, and my dreams tumbled around my mind like rocks in the dryer. Now day, and I’m anxious. No clean laundry, not enough time to accomplish the things I need to get done. *

Friday: Morning, just six hours after crawling under the heap of down comforters and closing heavy lids. Morning and the sky is so beautiful, I wish I could capture it just once the way it really appears, for those fleeting moments of dawn before day. Moments when everything still rests, and branches are quiet angled lines against the delicate expanse of sky.

This morning toast with raspberry jam, and hardly anything to write or say, except to keep the momentum of early morning waking. So I sip coffee from a tall mug and hear my baby’s voice rise up, waking his daddy, and greeting day, and though I’m tired, I’m grateful.

officially freaking out

I've mentioned before how scheduling isn't particularly a strength, and though I do own a calendar, I don't seem to know how to use it. I've been going through this week happily thinking I had the ENTIRE WEEK of winter vacation (next week) off to work on my grad school application (20 page manuscript, shudder, cough) but um, it's due on MARCH 1st which is actually in the middle of next week. Crap. Um. So. I need you all to cross your fingers for me and tell me nice things and forgive my absence a possibly give me critical feedback if I get up the guts to post any of the work I'm submitting (some of the original ideas came from here actually.)

Can you do that? Because right now I feel like I totally suck and I have to teach two more days and I feel like I'm coming down with the stomach flu and by tonight I'm supposed to do wildly impossible things like email one of my profs from college a 'statement of purpose' so that he can write a recommendation that's up to date. Yipes. The stomach ache doesn't help things. And seriously, why the fuck wasn't I able to actually LOOK AT THE CALENDAR, before assuming I had 10 days to get this done, when really I have, oh, FOUR. Oh, and I have to be observed teaching tomorrow and I haven't written up the plans for that (part of our yearly eval process.) Crap. crap. crap.

A reader's life...

Before reading I listened. I was the eleven-year-old with scratches on her knees, perched on the armrest of my dad’s tan Lazy Boy, listening to Huckleberry Finn and The Yearling. I was a late reader; a kid in the ‘special’ reading group. But those early years when reading wasn’t really mine, gave me stories in a different way, and for this I am grateful. Listening to a book is different than reading one. There is nuance and rhythm to a text read aloud. I think every author secretly wishes his or her book will be read this way: aloud, into the quiet of a room with crickets calling through the open screen, each word received by eager ears. I was such a captive audience then, unable to skip ahead when I was bored or didn’t understand. I learned to stay with texts. I learned to love words, and book after book, my appetite for words grew. Eventually, when I did learn to read, I remember feeling a little bit in awe that I could just pick up a book, open it, and the entire story could be mine. Now I watch the first graders I teach start the year barely able to identify all the letters in the alphabet, leave in June sixty-pages deep in an adventure story, and I’m still a little bit in awe. I teach kids how to break words apart and reassemble them so that sentences become whole. I teach them how to keep a story map in the back pocket of their imagination, how to watch each character for signs of change, and how to delve deeply into the world of images they know to construct a new world specific to the book, but I do not really teach them how to read. The stories teach them, just as they taught me: how to read, and also how to write so that the words I type take on the shape of what matters in my life.

The first book that had this affect on me was Isabelle Illende’s memoir, Paula. I was eighteen when I read it, and living in Germany for a year before college. By then I had read and loved many books, but never had even remotely imagined writing them. Paula was my first encounter with creative nonfiction and reading it changed my understanding of what was possible, or even allowable in writing. It was the first time I had considered that my life—right there on the train with tears streaming down my cheeks as I finished the book, surrounded by tall men in shearling hats speaking a dialect of German thick with consonants—was story. A year later, I enrolled in my first creative writing class.

Many of the authors I discovered throughout college who still matter to me, are writers who are present with their sleeves rolled up, in the middle of their stories. Tracy Kidder, John McPhee, Annie Dillard, Terri Tempest Willaims, Susan Orlean, Barbara Kingsolver and Joan Diddion, are several authors whose work I have read, and re-read, marking the pages and underlining text, in the process of cultivating my own voice as a writer. Each brings a distinct perspective to their writing of life as it is happening to them in the moment. In Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Diddion took risks that made the hair on my neck stand up. She dared me over and over again to be more honest in my writing, and I copied sections of that book line by line, to better understand how such writing was constructed. Doing this made each comma, each period, each word, newly significant. Reading like this, through writing, allowed me to feel the meter and meaning of her prose in my hands, in my wrists, in my heartbeat.

Because listening came first, a part of me is always listening when I read. What draws me to a text might be its topic or title, but what keeps me is its tenor; the way vowels play together among words, the way meaning is made from each small parcel of lines gathered together with just the right punctuation. As a result, though I have been an avid reader of memoir and essays, nature writing, travel stories, and ethnographies, since college, my nightstand is always an eclectic a jumble of novels and poetry.

Sometimes when I walk in the woods behind my house, I realize after it is already too late that I have walked through a spider’s web spanning the seven or eight feet of path; tiny gossamer threads invisible to me until I feel them. Long after I’ve continued on, I’m still brushing away the sticky threads that linger, clinging to my cheek or hair. Reading is like this for me. A line, a character, a scene, small fragments of the prose I’ve read remain in my mind long after I’ve put the book aside. Annie Dilliard’s essay “Total Eclipse” is like this. Though the first time I read it was nearly ten years ago, I still get caught in its imagery: I cannot imagine an eclipse without imagining hers. Countless other texts have had this affect as well. Certainly Flannery O’ Conner, William Faulkner, Sue Monk Kid, Robert Bly, Mary Oliver, and William Stafford are a few writers whose names can be found along the spines of many volumes on my bookshelves; the words and characters they have created dance up before my memory like sunspots, keeping me company, giving solace, or taking me for a wild ride.

I always have at least two books with me, (right now it’s Gilead and The Year of Magical Thinking; before that, What We Ache For and The Memory Keeper’s Daughter) so that I’m ready for when a few moments land back to back, as my toddler sleeps in the car, or while waiting at the dentist’s office. Also because I’m a mother, and a teacher, and my time is flecked with interruptions, I read copiously Online. Being able to peruse Anne Lamott’s essays at Salon.com, or David Sedaris’s most recent humor at The New Yorker Online, makes me giddy. Like the orange sections offered to runners at each marathon mile mark, the essays and reviews, political commentary and prose I read Online, are moments of sheer sweetness wedged between the must-do things of daily life: email and lesson plans for the week.

Now when I try to remember what the actual process of learning to read was like I cannot put my finger on anything specific. No ah-ha moment, no instance when words clicked into place, and suddenly became story. All I can remember is that before, the words of Frog And Toad flipped about on the page like fishes, and my parents were the keepers of the wonderment contained within each book. After, the stories were mine to devour whole, and hungrily, I did. Reading is still like this for me, vital and sustaining. It has become something almost reflexive, like breathing.

Self portrait challenge: black & white # 2

Unexpected gratitude at 5:15 a.m., snow already piled high, and more steadily falling. A morning to myself, writing, with coffee. My studio a haven for a few hours, while I flail about like a spawning salmon, trying to get the words right. Working my way paragraph by paragraph towards the fresh water of what it is I'm really trying to say. Snowplows scrape the roads below our house, and out the window, a blur of white on white. Like love, like staying married, writing requires this: hard scrabble perserverance. So again and again, I show up at the page. And last night, on my way home, I stopped to buy a dozen roses wrapped in brown paper, for the man I love.

Morning writing

(Maple syrup on snow.)

Golden light fills my studio, the first of the morning. The sun, just up, climbs the rungs of the trees. Its smooth white disc of light is etched with a crosshatching of twigs, snow dusted and dark. Last night I made plans to wake up and write for an hour while the newness of day still holds some secrets in. So I am here, wearing my husband’s burly wool sweater and socks pulled up to my calves. My hair is still rumpled from sleep. I haven’t brushed my teeth. But something feels alive in me that allows me to fling a few unguarded sentences at the page.

After forty minutes of revising, the light spreading across my room has turned pale and bright with day. The sun has climbed sky’s ladder now, its face well above the trees, and the mountains look like cardboard cut-outs along the horizon, painted dusty blue. I go down to the kitchen where DH is mopping spilled coffee from the soapstone counter, and Bean, wearing his blue striped train conductor hat, is twirling about the room. They’ve made a fire, but it’s still cold. I pour coffee and maple syrup and milk into a pan and reheat it until the steam rises, and then pour it into a white enamel mug. With a stack of buttered toast, I head back upstairs, back to this desk piled high with books and papers where I wait for words to fit the empty spaces on the page.

After revising the entire essay, reworking sections again and again until the words fit together into a mosaic that I can understand, and that, at least in part, take on the shape of what I’m trying to know, they bust into my studio grinning. It’s 10am now and my coffee is cold. DH is ready for a shower, but before he goes he pulls me close, his hands traveling up under my sweater touching my hot skin. Bean circles my studio, a wreck after preparing for my showing. Empty frames litter the floor. Scraps of paper, one shearling clog, a case of rubber alphabet stamps. He sings, tunelessly, sweetly, as he collects and reorganizes the loot this space provides: tabs of watercolor paint, the wingnuts on the easel, a drawer full of cards, a futon frame without the mattress. He lies on it, his legs and arms spread out to account for the gaps. Perfect balance.

I finish reading This Autumn Morning, by Gretel Ehrlich. It’s an essay in the 1991 collection of Best American Essays, and it speaks to me in a language I know: one of loss and natural wonder both. As I read I relearn something about this art form that I love. That words can travel around and around the heart of whatever it is you’re trying to say, like the circles spreading outward from a pebble tossed. They do not need to go straight like arrows.