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It’s all about the reach

When I moved to Seattle in 1998, it wasn’t the rain that bothered me. It was the light, or the lack of light, especially in midwinter. (It was a particularly bad winter, the natives told me: an El Niño winter with hard rains. But the winters after that never felt very different, to be honest.) See, all those years in California, I used to time my dinner prep by the setting sun. Then I found myself finishing my Seattle dinners in November by 4:30PM. And oh, I missed the sunlight. There’s a reason Josh calls me a kitty—when the sun’s out I will close my eyes, stretch, turn my face towards the warm light, and all but start grooming myself, it makes me so happy.

It’s taken years for me to adjust to the Northwest light, but I think I got closer to fine this year. We bought full-spectrum light bulbs, and I started using them to help me wake up at my bedside table in the mornings. We painted our living areas sky blue and cheery yellow.

More importantly, the grayer the skies became, the harder I looked for color in my everyday life. Looking back at my photos from this year’s autumn,  I can see the patterns that a windstorm will create in the fallen leaves on the ground. I can see how luminous the dahlias are in September, how the pumpkins in October just glow in my daughters’ arms, how the filtered sunlight enlivens the red and yellow maples, just so.

This year’s photos showed me color, light, life. You couldn’t really see how gray and dark the skies had become.

Or, since color is relative, the colors were that much brighter because the skies were so gray and dark.

This year I finally learned the lesson of the solstice: it’s not about raging against the dying of the light. It’s about reaching for as much light as you can, every single day. When mid-December arrives, It’s about welcoming the return of the light, each minute by sunlit minute.

I’ll be back next year. I hope you will too.

(P.S. My essay about my family’s sukiyaki recipe was chosen “a very close second” in Discover Nikkei’s Itadakimasu series. You can read the essay and the generous comments from the Editorial Committee here. Happy New Year, everyone!)

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What do I want out of writing?

It’s like the proverbial lonely tree falling in the forest: if you write an essay and it’s not published anywhere, does it count? (For what?) What does publication mean in a digital age where publication can be as easy as hitting a button?

*****

A few weeks ago, I wrote something, and showed it to Josh. He knew that I was still doing my song-and-dance around the scary stuff, around the difficult and true place where I have to go for the book. I knew that I’d have to go farther. He was right. So I did. I went farther down the path where I was supposed to go: towards the gut-clenching, the cold hands, all of that. I did it, and I think I wrote a good piece. It feels true.

Here’s another way I know it’s true: I had to detox afterwards, perform a sort of exorcism by doing things that make me happy: singing really loud to show tunes and 80s pop songs, baking some brownies, cleaning my kitchen. (I think cleaning my kitchen now actually does make me happy: it’s cleaning another workspace.)

While writing the essay, I kept thinking, “Nobody will want to read this.” “No one will want to publish this. It’s a niche-market piece.” There are things that I’ve written in the essay that I believe somewhere beyond what I consciously want to believe. There are things in the essay that scare me, and I think it’s because those things are true, but I don’t want to believe them yet.

And after that, I got stuck in the book process again. I wasn’t sure what I need to write next.

*****

Writing the essay, but not publishing it, or even sending it anywhere to be published, made me think hard about what I want out of this writing process, really: do I write just for the publication, so someone else can hear what I’m saying? Of course I don’t. And somehow…I’m in this funny place. I’ve written something, and I think it’s good, and it scares me, and I don’t know what people will say about it. In this age of near-instantaneous publication and reaction/comment, I wanted someone to read the essay. And yet I’m terrified at putting it up in a public forum. I did have some very specific people in mind can you buy ventolin without script while I wrote it. It is part advice column, part meta-narrative, part confessional, part literary game, part thank you-letter. I sent it to a few good friends, who liked it. But I felt stuck.

Then last week, Josh took a look at the list of what I’d written (or planned to write) so far, and we agreed. About a quarter of what I’ve written so far is going into another book. I may publish that material when I’m in a place that feels more emotionally healthy, where that particular grief is not as raw. It will take a few years, probably.

Yet I know the decision was right. I felt so relieved, ready to go back to the book about my dad and his book manuscript. I made yet another outline of the book, draft #5. Now that I’ve decided that my voice will be the primary one in the book, that it will be in the skull and the vertebrae and the legs of the project skeleton, I know where I’m headed.

(At least for now. It’s writing, after all. I’m learning that these pronouncements are, themselves, up for revision.)

Then something new happened: I stitched together a couple of pieces that I’d been working on for a while. I transcribed some of my dad’s book into the project for the very first time. I’d been transcribing his diary, but I never really thought that transcription could be so intimate. Typing his words on my laptop, thinking about him typing the same words on his typewriter: a daughter and her father, across time periods and technologies, meeting back on the page as writers. I dove back into the book.

I wrote the longest piece that I’ve written for the book, to date. I’m going to call it my first full chapter. Onward.

****

Maybe it’s not trees I need to think about, but birds.

One morning I woke up and heard a small thump, saw the shadow of a bird silhouetted against our bathroom window. I don’t think the bird flew into the window, because it was still able to fly.  I remember hearing the raspy flutter of the bird’s wings, the urgency I felt when I saw it.  And I remember how beautiful it was in that moment: wings outstretched, scared and stunned and shaken, but flying away.

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There is a season

Fall has always been the season of transitions to me, more than any other season.

(Sorry, spring: I love your flowers, but I have terrible allergies.)

Maybe it’s because when I was teaching, I always felt the pull of the old and the new each autumn: brand-new school supplies and clothes shopping; older, deeper colors of the leaves on the trees; colder and cloudier weather; new faces to learn and new students to teach. Fall was always the place to take on something new and gracefully let go of something old.

This fall, though, Josh has a new job. It’s a big transition for all of us. He’s been at UW for over 10 years, including the years of his doctorate. He’s now working in downtown Seattle. We’re all excited. But we’re also waking up about half an hour earlier. The girls like to take him to the bus stop in downtown Tacoma. So we’re all out the door in various stages of readiness by 7:05AM. The girls are sometimes yawning, and they’ll bring their bedtime snuggles or lap blankets in the car. Josh also comes back later in the evenings. We miss him, but it’s a huge relief to have him working happily at a place where he has (among other wonderful things) a window with lots of natural light. I can’t wait to visit him and go out for lunch. It’s close to PIke Place Market.

As for me, I’ve been trying out new household routines: ways to keep things a bit cleaner so we can welcome more people more frequently to our house. I’ve added one task a day to my everyday housecleaning, which is mostly kitchen-cleaning (doing the dishes, emptying the dishwasher). I’ve been trying a new way to plan meals, where each of us gets to pick a meal that all of us will eat (or at least try) each week. I’ve gone off the foodie deep end: for breakfast, I’ve been making homemade granola bars for Josh to grab in the mornings. I’ve been trying to incorporate more exercise into my week again: more frequent yoga classes, longer walks/runs.

Of course, not all of these new routines and resolutions are working smoothly all of the time. What’s most important, though, is that I am slowly learning to be very nice to myself in the middle of all this change. The girls eat mac and cheese twice in one week? That’s okay. I didn’t get to my daily cleaning chore? Oh, well. Tack it onto the weekend. I’m learning to shrug and keep trying the next day. Or the next week. I’ve wasted far too much energy beating myself up for not meeting my own ridiculously high expectations. Really. Who needs it?

And the book—I am beginning to understand why authors are cagey when they’re asked, “How’s the book going?” Because my answer is that I don’t know, exactly. It makes me sound lazy, or decadent, or indecisive, the quintessential directionless artist. Before I started writing this book, I wanted to think that it was such a linear project: “Well, I’ve gotten half of the book done, and I have an outline, and I just need to write two more chapters and I’ll be done.” It would be so nice to have a clear, concrete status report. I can say that I’m writing pieces, and thinking about where they might fit in the book. I’ve been getting to some important pieces, and in the last couple of weeks I’ve written some things that will scare the crap out of me if they ever get published. They feel scary, and therapeutic, and necessary. I’ve thought too much about how these pieces will be published, and where. I’ve worried that the book is too much about me, and less about my dad. And I’ve thought about how much I like being published in an age of near-instantaneous publishing, and how it can be a heady sensation to want those “likes” and retweets and page views in response to something I’ve written. I don’t want to be addicted to that form of publishing, right? There has to be another reason why I write.

Right now the book feels like an archaeological dig: there’s something! I think it’s important! There are bones! I don’t know what it is yet. I need to find the right tools to brush away the dust and debris. It’s taking shape. And I’ve been thinking very hard about something author Cheryl Strayed said a few weeks ago, as quoted by my friend Christine—“to lean hard into the work and not anxiety.” So I’m going to keep leaning, keep writing.

Fall in the Northwest has taught me that when the days turn gray, we just look harder for spots of bright color.

Fancy Autumn Meal for Josh: Polenta fries, Balsamic-glazed mushrooms, Garlicky Swiss chard
It’s been a while since I did a recipe post, and this one’s going to be short on pictures, unfortunately. But I posted this meal as my Facebook status update, and a few people asked for the recipes.
We had a superb time with the polenta and the mushrooms, and chard on the side. But you could mix them all together. You could add some goat cheese on top of the polenta. You could grate some Asiago or fresh Parmesan on top. You could add fresh cracked black pepper. But these 3 things together were just fine, all by themselves.

I had some versions of this meal wandering around in my head, as I was shopping at the farmers market. Mushrooms? Yes. (I’m a late convert, and I still don’t like them raw or on pizzas, but sauteed or stuffed, yes.) Chard? Always. And polenta…definitely. Since the weather had turned ventolin inhaler no prescription chilly, I’d been hungry for polenta. I made the polenta the night before, and fried the polenta the next night, Monday. It was a super-busy day, with school, C at ballet and then M with swimming right afterwards. Last Monday, because of bus schedules and swim lessons, we couldn’t pick Josh up downtown. I grabbed a few bites of the polenta and mushrooms before we headed out the door. But when he came home, he found different pieces of the meal simmering on the stove, with a lovely bouquet of smells to greet him when he walked in the door. We ate more together when I got home with the girls. That made me happy. I think we’re all going to like it here.

Part 1: Polenta Fries/Grit Cakes, adapted slightly from Matthew Amster-Burton’s Hungry Monkey
I used to be intimidated about cooking polenta, but not any more. Many recipes call for frequent stirring, stirring occasionally, and so on….for 45 minutes! But I found this recipe in Matthew Amster-Burton’s great book Hungry Monkey. If you have a kid (and even if you don’t), Matthew’s book is a fun read, but it’s also got some yummy recipes that I’ve tried and liked. I’ve been (and probably still am) a picky eater and I have liked so many recipes and ideas from this book.
The hardest part about this recipe is remembering to make the polenta and chill it overnight first before frying it the next day. Really. It’s pretty easy.
1 1/2 cup grits or polenta, preferably stone-ground (I use Bob’s Red Mill polenta)
1 1/2 cups whole milk (our family’s lactose-sensitive, so I used soy milk—see more details below)*
4 1/2 cups water*
2 teaspoons kosher salt
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, divided
*Because soy milk is thinner than whole milk, I used less water and more soy milk. I reversed the proportions of water and soy milk, so 4 1/2 cups soy milk, 1 1/2 cups water. Cooking the polenta in more milk rather than just water helps to make it, well, creamy. And more flavorful.

  1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
  2. Combine the polenta, milk, water, salt, and 1 tablespoon butter in a large saucepan. I used our cast-iron skillet, which works well, but then I have to clean it out in order to fry the polenta the next day.
  3. Place in the oven and bake 1 hour. Stir after the hour.
  4. Place the pan back in the oven and bake another 15 minutes until the polenta is thick and creamy. Add the additional 1 teaspoon butter and stir well.
  5. After the cooked polenta cools down, place it into a loaf pan (or even an 8”x8” pan) and refrigerate it overnight.
  6. When you are ready to cook the polenta fries, cut the polenta loaf into half-inch slices, or batons for fries.
  7. Using a nonstick or cast-iron skillet, fry the slices in butter (or butter plus olive oil) over medium-high heat until well-browned and crispy on both sides. You don’t need very much butter—just enough for a small coating of the bottom of the pan. Don’t touch the slices for the first 5 minutes, but each side can take up to 10 minutes to brown.

Part 2: Balsamic-glazed mushrooms
You might be tempted to add oil or butter before you do this, but don’t. Trust me. You want the mushrooms to release their liquid first and let that evaporate, then add the other flavors so that the mushrooms will absorb those instead of repelling them with water. I think I adapted this recipe from the Cha Cha Cha cookbook (Cook, Eat, Cha Cha Cha).
1 lb. mushrooms (oyster or cremini or portobello would be good), lightly rinsed and sliced about 1/3” thick
2-3 cloves fresh garlic, minced
1-2 tbsp butter
Balsamic vinegar, about 1/8 cup or a generous glug
About 1 tsp brown sugar, to taste
Fresh cracked black pepper or red pepper flakes, or both, to taste

  1. Place a cast-iron or large regular skillet over medium-high heat. Once the pan is hot enough for a few drops of water to dance across the surface, add the mushrooms.
  2. Cook the mushrooms, stirring occasionally when they start to brown. Wait for them to release their water, and cook away the water that emerges. Once the pan is mostly dry again, and the mushroom liquid has evaporated, add the butter and the minced garlic. Make sure the garlic doesn’t burn.
  3. Then, turn down the heat to medium and add the balsamic vinegar. (It will splatter if you don’t turn the heat down.) I don’t own very fancy balsamic, so I cook the vinegar, reduce it a bit and then add a touch of brown sugar.
  4. Add fresh cracked black pepper, if you want it, or some red pepper flakes.

Part 3: Garlicky Swiss chard, another recipe adapted from Matthew Amster-Burton’s Hungry Monkey
I just got used to liking spinach, fresh and in things. Started using kale in soups. I know kale’s the darling green of foodie and health folks these days. Started using chard in lasagnas, soups, other places where I used to use spinach. But chard and I are now BFFs. I buy a bunch at least once or twice a week and cook it this way. I Love Chard. Who knew? Thanks, Matthew.
1-2 bunches Swiss chard leaves (red, white, rainbow, whatever works for you) (reserve stems for another use)
1-2 tbsp olive oil
1-2 tbsp unsalted butter
Salt to taste, about 1/2 tsp to start
2 cloves garlic, minced
Pepper, if you want it
A splash of lemon juice

Heat the olive oil and butter in a skillet over medium-high heat. Add the salt and the chard leaves and stir until wilted. Add the minced garlic and stir. Cover, reduce heat to medium, and cook for about another minute. Add pepper, if you want it, and lemon juice.

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I’ve been writing

Almost a month ago, I went to a gathering where I saw so many friends from my former life.

It was mostly lovely, a joyful occasion in honor of a friend’s daughter. A few friends had stayed in touch with me, so they didn’t need the full recap of my year. Sometimes it surprises me that it’s been more than a year. Hard to believe that I don’t measure my professional life in school years now, although my daughters still mark that calendar for me. I say the afternoon was “mostly” lovely because it was also a little hard to see these friends from that part of my life–it is now a former life.

There were the few friends I hadn’t seen in almost a year, the ones who didn’t know what had happened to me since I left. For a while, it felt like I didn’t know how to answer the question, “What have you been doing?” For months I kept saying, “I don’t know yet. I’m figuring it out.”

That was hard, since for most of my life I have known what I’m going to do, and planned my life in Capricornian ways: when I was going to get engaged (after my fiancé finished college), when I was going to get married (sometime early in grad school), when I was going to get my degree (which became multiple degrees). I still consider the timing of the births of my daughters as luck, but somehow both times I was pregnant over an academic year, home with them as babies during their first summers. I still love calendar books, to-do lists, milestones, and concrete steps. (Really, I can still be fun at parties. I bring kick-ass snacks.) So it was hard, somehow ridiculously shameful, that I had to respond to “What have you been doing?” with the answer, “I don’t know.”

I felt the same way when I was starting to write this blog, too: it wasn’t really a food blog (not enough of my own pictures and recipes), it wasn’t really a teaching blog (I was leaving that life), and it wasn’t really a reader’s blog (not enough book reviews). I kept wanting to introduce myself to new people by prefacing it with a description of what I used to be.

And yet at this gathering last month, there were the friends who asked the question again. This time, however, I was able to answer, “I’ve been writing.”

 

Now, the frequency of my blog posts doesn’t reflect the frequency of my writing—you’d have to check out the “Other Places” page here to see more of the writing I’ve been doing over the year. I’ve been writing all kinds of writing: volunteer recruiting letters, nonprofit grant writing, web pages, social media community-building, author interviews, storytelling discoveries, personal essays, book reviews.

But! I haven’t really been writing my book at this point, which probably means that I am dancing too much around something that will take me somewhere deep, and painful, but true.

 

Instead, I’ve been not-writing a lot. This disappoints me. But I’m trying to take this picture’s advice and just finish something, not beating myself up. There’s enough old-school ex-Catholic guilt there, passive-aggressive as the awesome Twitter account “Your Chinese Mom” whose tag line is “Why Don’t You Call More.” Not-writing looks like this:

  • Link-collecting, especially relevant links that I want to use for the book proposal (See, people really are interested in this topic! But I still worry about marketability—is the book just going to be too sad?)
  • Epigraph-collecting, finding quotations that I think are useful. I’m thinking about not just an opening epigraph but several, and several different ones that will open the sections of the book.
  • Cutting and pasting of other people’s words in order to make it look like I’ve been doing something. Something like hiding the childhood vegetables I didn’t eat under my napkin.
  • Reading articles that explain my procrastination
  • Reading other memoirs and comparing them to the persona and structure of my yet-to-be-born book
  • Reading writing books (lately I recommend Tell It Slant, The Business of Memory, and The Art of Subtext for nonfiction and fiction, respectively)
  • Meeting with a therapist friend to talk about the impact of storytelling in trauma therapy

Oh, of course I know these are writing, too. The part of me that calls this process “not-writing” is the part of me that’s relentlessly linear, that part that loves calendars and lists. And yet the creative process, at least as I’ve come to see it, is anything but linear. There are days when I think I’ve solved the structure problem of my book, and all I have to do is just give myself short assignments until I’m done. There are days when I think I’ve healed enough to write the story of my losses without being brought to my knees (emotionally, at least). And then there are days when I know I could not walk into a room with certain people, when I know I could not walk to certain places on this earth and not feel devastated. Still. Who wants to feel devastated? Writers, that’s who. (And artists, poets, composers, dancers: anyone whose work takes us to places we don’t want to visit, but absolutely must.)

What my twin personal griefs have taught me is that so much of life is not linear. And yet I keep wanting to force grief and healing—and thus my narrative about these things—into being linear. That’s the structural problem I’ve been wrestling with for so long. Today’s a day when so many people in the U.S. are grieving, but I still struggle with this national(ist?) form of public, and sometimes too-transient grief. At the high point of my idealism, I think that one of today’s lessons is that I may need to be share my grief and even mark certain days for it. I don’t know if the idealism will win out.

For right now, all I know is that the month that I have not-written has felt worse than a month of writing. I’ve gone to yoga and gone running at least once a week for several years now. A huge victory for someone who was never that athletic, who was always intensely cerebral. I now get ridiculously cranky and tense and tight when I haven’t done any of those things. And now my mind feels that way about writing. When I haven’t written in a long time, my mind gets cranky and tense and tight. Writing is what loosens up my mind, although I have had to train it to feel that way for over a year. Writing is now that mental conditioning: not so hard to maintain, much harder to regain once you’ve been away for too long.

This post is partly for a former student, a brilliant one from my former life, who recently said, to my surprise and delight, “I’ve been reading your blog about writing!” It’s for those who read here but might not comment, but still want to know how I’ve been, and what I’ve been doing. I can say now that this is a writer’s blog. And I’ve been writing.

How do you not-write? And what helps your creative processes out of a not-creating rut? 

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On Ichiro, baseball, Japanese American (Nikkei) identity

J Peligen

Yesterday, Ichiro Suzuki left the Seattle Mariners and was traded to the New York Yankees. I wrote this short personal essay for The Seattle Star, “Why Ichiro’s Departure Makes This Nikkei Girl Sad.” It wasn’t an essay about his baseball career (the 2001 team, the All-Star appearances, etc.), but what he represented for me as a Japanese American who had also just moved into Seattle, and as a student of the region’s ventolin inhaler online shop history and literature.

The news happened very quickly, and I didn’t take very long to write the piece. However, I’m starting to see how I might approach a longer personal essay, and I’m starting to think about what essays that are not lyric, and more “traditional” essays, might look like.

8/2/12: Update: the piece has been reprinted on Discover Nikkei, web project of the Japanese American National Museum. I’m thrilled and honored.

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Poem: A Place For What We Lose

A Place For What We Lose

1.
“I’ve forgotten the words to the national anthem,”
my father announced one Saturday morning.
Over pancakes, I sang it, and sang it for him.
I’m sure my voice cracked when the rockets, red, glared,
but I wanted to give him “our flag was still there.”

After dinner parties, he had slide shows.
I held onto numbers.
Which slides were upside down,
which ones were turned backwards?
“Sixteen! Twenty-three!”
I was my father’s child with a good memory.

I thought that I had his clear sense of direction.

2.
All kids know: counting’s different during summer.
And how summer that year blurred after he died.
My sister and I swam for June and July hours,
too far from home, in a neighbor’s green pool.

First the water was clear as love’s certainty.
Weeks later we picked out some dried olive leaves.
By summer’s end the water was murky, particulate.

By August I’d learned how to swim underwater,
to hold my breath, to lie upside buy cheap ventolin down.
I’d start facing wall, kick off hard from the wall,
then glide facing sky, watching world blur above.

3.
We find a place for what we lose,
Papa Freud told a friend who had lost his young son.
If that’s true—I’m pissed.

The place is visceral, not literal or explicable.
The place is physical, not geographic.
The place is a fucking paradox: impossible.

Or rather, to revise:
we make a place, Freud added,
shaped just like the loss.

4.
First the grief of remembering fought the relief of forgetting.
(Forgetting won, no contest. It knew how to erase. )
Then the grief at forgetting was the relief of remembering.
(Remembering crept into and nourished each space.)

5.
Did my father ask me to sing him that song?
What helped him forget? What made him remember?
I had the words. I gave them all back.

What makes me forget? What helps me remember?
I still have the words. I keep singing them back.

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Seattle Star series, “The Show Must Go On”: Preparing for Drunken Telegraph

I mentioned this series last month, but I’ve compiled these posts from The Seattle Star. I’m writing a series called “The Show Must Go On” about taking my work from page to stage. It’s a series for writers who may be interested in participating in storytelling shows. It’s about writing, performing, yoga, the creative process, and—of course, the thread that connects them all—fear. The show is called Drunken Telegraph: From Pine Plank to Living Tree. Tickets are now available!

Here are the posts, along with some brief excerpts from each one. (The posts are part of the reason why I haven’t been here as often.) Thanks for reading!

Post #1, “The Show Must Go On”

“In about eight weeks, I’ll be in a storytelling show, down here in Tacoma. And having signed up for this show, I am now cursed (or blessed) with abundant irony. I am terrified that I don’t know how to tell a story.”

Post #2,”The Story We Tell Ourselves”

“I’ve signed up to do a storytelling show, though I’m not a natural storyteller. I pitched my story because being in a show sounds like fun. Because oral storytelling is a skill that I want to learn as a writer. Because I used to be a theater kid. And because as much as being in front of an audience terrifies me, I still love to perform. Then, predictably, stage fright sets in.”

Post #3,”The Structure and the Stakes”

“One piece of my self-assigned homework last week was to look at more storytelling guidelines, so I did. This set of storytelling tips on The Moth hit me hard, especially this part: the stakes of the story need to be clear to you, and to the audience. Good news, then. Just by writing last week’s post, I figured out another piece of of why this story’s been tricky. I hadn’t identified the stakes of the story yet. Bad news: I didn’t know what the stakes were yet.”

Post #4,”Off The Page”

“My plan was to write a draft of the story, and then cut and adapt the scenes. But all things work together for good, at least in this case. Before I spiral much further into angst or research or other forms of writerly avoidance and overthink-age, my producer asked if we could meet to run through the story and workshop it.”

Post #5, “Behind The Scenes (An Interview With My Co-Producers)”

“I’ve been preparing to perform in Drunken Telegraph: From Living Plank to Pine Tree, a storytelling show in Tacoma. It’s been a great adventure to think about taking my work from page to stage. For this week’s post, I’ve got an intermission post of sorts, or—to mix my theater metaphors—a behind-the-scenes interview with the show’s co-producers, Megan Sukys and Tad Monroe.”

Post #6, “The Albatross”

“After working through issues of structure, I’ve got my first headstand story pared down to several bullet events, made into bullet points, and then the takeaway, or the insight and conclusion. I’ve got my first line, and I like it: ‘Last year, I discovered how NOT to take yoga classes: like a straight-A student.”

Post #7: “A Deep and Generous Listening”

“You can take a girl out of academia, but you can’t quite take the academia out of the girl. (That’s another way, incidentally, to describe my job loss.) So, I’ve been reflecting on what I’ve learned from this storytelling show process, so far; and I know there will be more after the show itself.”

Post #8: “On With The Show”

“My voice is high and taut, thin and shaky: a tightrope of sound. I’m laughing nervously, too much for anyone’s comfort. Am I trying to make everyone laugh along with me? Does it work? I can’t tell. When will I stop laughing? Why can’t I stop laughing?”

 

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In print

It’s been rather busy around here. I’ve got 3 very different writing projects going on, and they are stretching me in really interesting and unexpected ways. Something like yoga. But I had to share this picture, because this piece began here.

The same piece which began here, from this blog, has been reprinted in two different anthologies. A week ago, I got a copy of the anthology from the good folks at Heyday Press.  It was something to see publication happen online, but it was also unexpectedly wonderful to get a copy of the anthology, to see myself in the table of contents, and to see the piece ventolin over the counter usa laid out and professionally typeset. On paper.

I am very grateful to the folks at Kartika Review for publishing the piece first, in their Spring 2011 issue. Without their selection, I would not have been eligible for their Kartika Review 2011 anthology, or the Heyday Press reprinting.

I’m grateful to folks who read and comment here, especially to my dear friend Tara who insisted that I submit this piece somewhere.

I’m grateful to my family and friends, whose love and support make so much of my writing possible.

I’ll be back with more of the book in progress this week.

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This much of my father’s voice (The diary, part 2)

And the first questions that may be on your mind: his diary? Isn’t that private? And you’re writing it out?

Well, yes, it is a diary. However, from what I can tell—and I’ve skimmed quite a few pages—it’s not so terribly private. There really just isn’t enough space on each page or each day for many private details, really. It is mostly a record of what happened each day. Very little space for reflection, or analysis, or introspection. So I don’t feel like I am invading his privacy, or at least in any way that he would worry about. But I do try to remember that it’s an artifact meant mostly for himself.

It’s a beautiful diary, though, and it’s amazing how well it’s held up over time. I give it a gentle pat each time I take it out of my computer bag.

I can’t believe how old it is. I started transcribing it almost exactly sixty years after he wrote it. There’s the thrill of the archive, the pleasure of research, that comes with transcription. It begins on his first day of boot camp. He was in the army for several years. As far as I can tell, it talks about his years in the military, including a brief stint overseas in Europe, and then about his return to the States and his first year or two of community college.

It says so much, and I have so much to say about it.

But for today I want to talk a bit about time travel. What I thought would be a linear journey through a five-year narrative has become something like an exercise in time travel, and it may be as close to tessering as I can come. My dad wrote this diary in the early 1950s, from early 1952-1956.  The funny thing is that I also know how the story ends—I know where he ends up going to school, where his career winds up, and eventually when and how he meets my mother. Part of what I’m after in writing this book, though, is the story of the middles: what happened after he left camp, before he met my mother. So I’ll be reading, transcribing, and then some reference will come along (“so and so said that July 5th would be all right”)—and I can flip to that particular day, and find out what happened. And I’m also older than he was when he was writing the diary. It’s his early twenties, for the voice in the diary. It makes me feel oddly protective of the young man that he was.

And at the same time, I am reading sooo slowly, much more slowly than I usually read. I read quickly (and then reread) often. So many of my books are books that I reread. But to read by writing each diary entry means that I am only reading as fast as I can type and then turn the pages. To read by writing makes me look, and look again. I’m not impatient with the work, somehow. I’m just luxuriating in this much time, and this much text: this much of my father’s voice.