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Reflections on the private MFA, year 1 (part 2)

(In which I continue to reflect on Year 1 of the “private MFA.”)

Have you submitted anything for publication?
Yes! And happily, it was accepted, by a kind editor with very encouraging words. I know this is not how submissions usually happen, but it helped. I will post more details when the piece comes out.

What writing projects are next?
Well, the memoir. I’m in a strange place with it right now, because it’s about grief. And while I turned to it as a way to process grief, I have found that I don’t need it in the same way at the moment. Or, perhaps there’s too much grieving to do in this moment. Or, both. There are ten pieces altogether so far, all in different stages of being.

I’m beginning to study other memoirs which are not quite so linear, such as Kim Severson’s wonderful read Spoon Fed: How Eight Cooks Saved My Life. I just finished Caroline Leavitt’s novel Pictures of You, partly about the death of a parent. I think I will need to read Meghan O’Rourke’s memoir The Long Goodbye, as difficult as it sounds, because it is close to the market that I want to reach. And I would like to read Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein, for its work on memory.

I think I want to begin to write some longer essays next, ones that I can send out to other literary magazines as excerpts. I plan to create a work timeline by the end of this week.

Aaaand, I’ve got a historical novel in mind, or a series of linked novellas. It is a teeny seedling of a novel, scarcely more than an idea, a sketched outline and a hundred words, but it is incredibly exciting to me because I have never written fiction before (unless you count the fictional territory of some of my poems). I am not even sure what I am doing yet. Because it’s a historical novel, there’s a ton of research that I’ll need to do. But I am happy to be moving into this unknown territory. That’s the ultimate challenge, where I will feel the most stretched, and perhaps I would never have arrived at this space if I was in the tracks that a traditional program would have provided (moving from nonfiction to fiction).

Writing a novel strikes me as the ultimate leap of faith for me and my sense of my writing self. I look forward to being a memoirist, don’t get me wrong. But because I read ventolin over the counter novels and they nourish me like nothing else, I want to be a novelist. Alexander Chee, a former student of Annie Dillard’s, writes beautifully about one of her pieces of writing advice: go to the bookstore, and find the place where your book would go, and place your finger on the shelf to mark the place for your own book. I’ve done this a couple of times. It’s exhilarating, and terrifying. But that’s as closest to the heart of what I want to do as I’ve ever come. Where do I go? I go to the fiction section, the literature section, of the bookstore.

What would you like to see happen with this blog?
I never quite know who’s been reading the blog, except my husband, and my mom, and maybe the one or two kind friends who have subscribed via RSS. And I don’t want to become the person who always assumes that others have read her or contacted her or tried to keep in touch via the blog (e.g., “Oh, well, then. I thought you already read this week’s post.”).

Nevertheless, some of the best blogs that I read, that take advantage of the blog format (rather than a private journal) are also spaces to create community. So I’d like to see more dialogue here. It’s a “private” MFA, but of course it is also public and in the ether. It can be a lonely space—sometimes you feel as though you are speaking to an entirely dark theater, and you have no idea what or who’s in the audience—and since I’m venturing into the unknown with my career, I’d like to hear more from and about the folks reading here. Some company, if you will.

I’d also like to ask others what their own private MFA would look like, or has looked like. (I have asked a few kind writer friends, who have already agreed to do this. I’ve received my first set of responses already, so look for that soon! I’m very excited about this feature.)

And I’d like to post more frequently, creating a more consistent space for readers, and a clearer throughline for the stories that are here.

Readers: your turn!
Who are you? What draws you back to this space? And, what would you like to see happen here? Anything else you’d like to say, constructively? Comments, as always, are open.

(Part 3 will be a partial reading and rereading list for the year.)

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Reflections on the private MFA, year 1 (part 1)

Approximately one year ago, I wrote yet another menu status update on Twitter. “You’re making me hungry!” my friend Shauna wrote back. Confession time for me: “I have always been auditioning to be a food writer.” “Well then,” she decided. “It’s about time we got you a blog.” A few clicks and keystrokes later, and my husband Josh set up this space. Thanks, Shauna and Josh.

It’s the first-year anniversary of this blog, and thus the first year of my own private MFA. Since reflection and self-assessment are part of any good writing program, I thought I’d try that out here.

Why the private MFA, again?

Well, honestly, at first it was kind of a joke. You know, my own private Idaho—although, truth be told, I’m more of a B-52’s girl. But I wanted a space to practice writing. And I’m not against traditional MFA’s, necessarily, but I’m just not in the right kind of space to do one right now. I don’t want to be away from my family (and my two little girls) right now, for a residential MFA. A non-residential MFA may be an option later. But financially, those are not an option at the moment. I do know that I want to apply to some short residencies like these, if our finances and arrangements become more stable.

Any drawbacks or rewards to the private MFA?

I would have had to specialize before I applied to an MFA program (poetry, fiction, nonfiction). Here, I’ve played with poetry, interviews, personal essay, memoir, literary mixtape, food writing, love letters to my family and my husband, graduation address. A lot of nonfiction and memoir, but I’m glad I also got to play.

Any assignments are my own. Both drawback and reward.

I wish I had more structure towards a larger project. However, that’s something that I can remedy, so I’m going to work on a plan and timeline next.

Sometimes I wish I had an advisor, a reading list, a set of classmates, a set time when I was supposed to be working on my writing. A space where writing is my primary job.

But I do have an advisor and reader in my husband Josh. He is usually my first reader, and my best reader. He’s an artist, too, but he’s a composer, so we’re able to have wonderful art-related, creative life-related conversations.

I do have a reading list—it seems rather scattered, but I have certainly read more new fiction and nonfiction this last ventolin online year than I have since graduate school. Certainly, many writing programs ask their students to read a great deal. And I have. The next post will be my reading list.

How do you think your writing has progressed?

At the beginning of the year I think wrote a lot of elliptical narrative in order to cover things up, rather than to expose them. There was a lot of throat-clearing, or waiting around to get to the point. As the year went on, I tried to reach for the guts, the heart of the post, and write towards that moment. As a result, I think my voice has gotten stronger, more confident, less apologetic. Last year, I wrote about my overuse of parentheses: they meant me ducking under my own words. I don’t think I use parentheses as often, or for the same purpose anymore, at least. I use commas a lot more now. I think that overall my writing’s moved towards the lyrical, the litany, the urgent. I use commas to connect, and I use commas to convey energy. I have noticed that the more I write and speak from the heart—not towards sentiment, necessarily, but towards the guts of the emotion or the moment—the stronger the writing becomes.

I noticed a common trajectory in my blog posts—linear chronology moving to epiphany–and tried to move away from using the same structure all the time. I think this shift marks the beginning of my experimentation with plot and linear narrative. Some of the trajectories are linear, while others are cyclical, and still others spiral towards their end.

And I’ve remembered what it is to be in “the writing zone.” I felt it when I went to speak at Evergreen, where I read the essay that’s coming out soon. (More on that in the next post.) It’s the space where I’m writing with both mind and heart absolutely committed to the work. I’m not there most of the time. I’d like to be there more often.

However, this is not to say that the rest of the time and words are wasted. I have found that I need all the other writing (good, bad, and in-between) to get me into the zone. I don’t know if being in that zone all the time is actually sustainable. It is consuming and exhausting…and still, incredibly satisfying.

Next up: reflections, part 2 (Have you submitted anything? What writing projects are next? What have you read?)

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In praise of bulbs

Since moving to the Pacific Northwest some thirteen years ago, I’ve come to appreciate bulbs. Not the light kind, the flower kind.

Though my California childhood house had a big yard in the front, I can’t say that I grew up gardening. In the front of the house we had two pine trees nestled in a huge patch of ivy next to the carport, facing a hedge of bay leaf trees. We had persimmon and orange trees. Lots of greenery, but my sister and I didn’t really garden. I remember a patch of marigolds that we tried to grow in our backyard, but they didn’t do very well.

Gardening’s something that I came to know more in the Pacific Northwest. It’s one of the most popular pastimes here. People in our neighborhood care about their yards, about terracing and native plants and lawns. This makes us sound like a region of senior citizens, I know—with all due love and respect to any seniors reading here—but it does make for some lovely city neighborhood living.

See, we have a true spring in the Northwest. After months and months of early darkness, of pewter skies turning to charcoal, we gravitate towards bright color wherever and whenever we can find it. Our grocery store sells primroses these days, to help us remember what fuchsia, violet, and daffodil look like outside. Last week, I found myself silently thanking the anonymous person (or force of nature) who planted a tiny patch of yellow crocuses along my running trail. Oh, thank goodness, spring’s coming. We can start counting down to the light.

Spring, when it comes, is a gorgeous thing here. Apple blossoms, cherry blossoms, plum blossoms yield showers of petals washing onto the streets in frothy tides. Daffodils stretching their necks, russet dahlias blooming like fireworks, pink camellias unfurling their ruffly skirts. And then, when the sun’s out: vibrant colors against blue-silver skies and silver-blue water. Spring is when I breathe in all that color, all that light. Some days I can’t believe I get to live here.

Yet it’s the bulbs that I’ve been thinking about lately, perhaps as a way to describe what’s been happening here on the blog. I’m still learning about bulbs, but I understand that they often lie dormant for seasons. Some people pack them away in their garages, in the wintertime. If you’ve ever seen bulbs, you know that some of them are rather unsightly. No symmetry, no smoothly self-contained packaging like a seed. They’re gnarled, and knotty, and even brown-papery in places where dead foliage might have order ventolin online uk been. You might even think, “Really? Something beautiful’s going to come out of here?” Bulbs are something like the Ugly Duckling of plants. In the spring you have to plant them, trusting that they will grow quickly with the sunlight, and eventually explode into color. Their blooming sneaks up on you, and almost before you know it, a cluster of red tulips have returned in your yard, the tulips that you planted from last year’s Mother’s Day present.

That’s how I’ve been feeling about writing lately: unglamourously, unpoetically, something like a bulb. After the start of a new semester, and a series of minor colds in the family house, the book project is coming off of the back burner. Clearly, the private MFA has the perks of flexibility and sick days, but its main downside is its lack of structure and accountability. I have missed writing here and tried not to scold myself for posting less regularly. I want to keep this space as a space of pleasurable focus, at least for now. So my degree in progress has been dormant for a while, but I’m planting it again with hopes of spring. The Northwest spring allows you to do that.

We’ve got an amaryllis bulb in our kitchen, since our kindergartener C had one in her classroom. Amaryllis flowers grow well indoors, and they grow quickly. The class got to measure the growth of the stem every week. When we saw amaryllis pots at Trader Joe’s, C asked us to get one. It’s the first living plant we’ve welcomed back in the house in years. The amaryllis bloomed in late December, with red flowers like a hibiscus, at least in my range of flowers familiarity. But the flowers and leaves didn’t last for very long; we were on holiday vacation for most of that blooming. The flowers wafted pollen onto C’s bookshelf in her bedroom, and eventually their long green stems shriveled to light brown. We had to explain to her that we had to remove these parts of the plants, in order to make room for the flowers to come back.

Now I see that bulb every morning next to our kitchen table. The green stems and leaves are coming back again, and they’re growing at odd angles, reaching for that elusive Northwest February sunlight. Every few days I’ll water it, and check on it, and turn it around to straighten out the growth. That’s how I want to come back to the blog. And writing. And light.

Thanks again for returning, and reading.

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The clenched fist

So I’ve been running—no, jogging—for about five weeks now. It’s still hard for me to say that I’ve been running. It’s still incredibly hard for me to call myself a runner. Too much expectation of what a runner’s supposed to look like, and that’s just not my body type.

I never thought that I’d take up running as my cardio exercise, ever. With the quirky exception of soccer, which I love to play, running has had bad connotations for me for a very long time. The timed high school run around the practice fields, the lagging behind almost everyone else. Unattractively out of breath and sweaty in an unattractive big T-shirt and shorts. Running was all about pointing out how out of shape I was, particularly compared to (as it felt) almost everyone else.

Oh yes, and running was always about the aching feet, which I thought was just a natural part of running for everyone. And then I got some real running shoes, from a store that actually analyzes your feet, the shoes’ fit, and your stride. As a lifelong low-maintenance girl, the running-shoe fit is the closest thing I’ve come to an in-store makeover, for now. (What’s next: Sephora?)

I didn’t even want to run. Walking has always been more, ahem, my speed. However, having come through a difficult year with my mind mostly intact, it was time to take better care of the body. A couple of people very close to me have had great success with this program, so I thought I would give it a try.

Now, running by myself meant that I didn’t have to worry about anyone timing me, or about competing with anyone else, or thinking about how quickly I lose my breath. So for the first two weeks or so, I walked most of the time, and listened to music, and walked a little faster for a minute or two, here and there. But I didn’t think that it counted as running. Then, ventolin inhaler nyc during the “run” portions of the program, I began to shuffle, faster than walking and almost to a fast race walk. I didn’t think that was running, either.

Maybe it wasn’t. I now realize that in running, there’s something important about the hands.

As I walked for the first few weeks, I’d kept my hands open, loose, mostly so I could move them along with the music coming from my Itouch. I played air piano for Stevie Wonder, or waved my hands around as I sang with ABBA, and even played air typewriter for the Prince lyrics. But the hands have always been loose: fingers open, keeping their options open. I’m not running, no sirree. Who’s running around here? Not me, not me. La, la, la.

But last week I began to close my hands into loose fists, thumbs inexplicably tucked under index fingers. And I realized what making a fist does to the arms: it activates the muscles in the forearms. Once the forearms commit, they activate the elbows. When the elbows swing forward, in counterpoint with your feet, they bring their own momentum. When your elbows and arms are swinging, your entire upper body commits to the run. Since your lower body’s pretty much moving already when you run, simply clenching your fists involves your entire body in the run. The grip isn’t violent. Your fists just have to be clenched, fingers closed enough for a fist-bump. Those of you reading this who are runners, you must know this already. But it’s huge news to me.

You have to clench your fists first: then the commitment will come.

I’m here, after a couple of crazy weeks. I’ve been worried about writing, worried about grading, worried about teaching, but mostly worried about showing up in the first place. I still don’t think I’m a runner. And yet, I suspect that I’ll be learning from what it is to run, for a long time.

Thanks for coming back and reading.

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So you want to be a writer

As of this writing, Google generates over 81 million suggestions just for this phrase alone. I should take this as an inspiring sign that so many people want to write, or that so many people want to know how to write. Or, if I was so inclined, I could take this as a depressing sign that so many people have written about this topic already.

But, a happy person by nature, I’m not so inclined. Here’s a collection of links that have been on my mind lately when it comes to writing and the writing life. Since I’ve gone back to teaching last month, and started one daughter in kindergarten, I need to get back into a regular routine of creative writing, somehow. To clear my mind (and my bookmarks menu), I decided to start here.

In the literature/music class I’m teaching this semester, we’ve been talking about making mixes of songs. Here’s my mix of links and quotations that are running through my head, called “So you want to be a writer.” (Liner notes included: one of my favorite genres of writing, one that my students tell me is being lost with the IPod/MP3 playlist.)

Track 1: Dear Sugar, “Write Like A Motherf*cker” (Sorry, Mom.)
Dear Sugar (an advice columnist at The Rumpus) usually manages to make me cry, or gasp, or laugh, or all three. “I know it’s hard to write, darling. But it’s harder not to.” This column is the starting gun for the album.

Track 2: Voices of Our Nation, Summer Writing Workshop for Writers of Color
Application guidelines for the VONA workshop. I’d never heard of this workshop before, but it sounds like a wonderful experience, set in one of my favorite cities in the world. It looks like something I could apply for, eventually: an abbreviated, near-private version of an MFA, in a supportive community.

Track 3: Michelle Hoover, “So You Want To Be A Writer?”
Michelle Hoover’s “so you want to be a writer” roundup of links and advice, recommended via Twitter by Poets and Writers magazine. Some useful, practical advice for writers here and now.

Track 4: Renee Shea, “The Taste of Memory: A Profile of Monique Truong”
Continuing the Poets and Writers track, Renee Shea’s recent profile is a wonderful read. One interesting piece here is not only Truong’s impressive track record of awards, but also her methodical, disciplined approach to applying for awards in the first place. “As writers we are socialized into a state of perpetual gratefulness-to receive a grant, a publishing contract, a book tour- as if we didn’t earn anything with our labor and talents. Lawyers don’t think that way. They know that they have a valuable skill and expect valuable compensation for it. I love my fellow writers, but I wish that they would think and behave –just in this instance-more like lawyers.”

Track 5: Alexander Chee, “Getting Your Name Out There”
Alexander Chee’s series on author blogging. Chee is a gracious and generous Twitterquaintance, and I actually began to read his writing there. (And I just checked out his first novel from the library.) But his blog, Koreanish, contains helpful, thoughtful posts on the writing life.

Track 6: Junot Díaz, “How I Became A Writer“
I started reading about this story from Chee’s blog, but went to read the full story from O Magazine. I am simultaneously inspired and terrified by the heartbreak behind the writing of Diaz’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. One of my favorite novels, of all time—but, like so many amazing things in this life, it did not come for free.

Track 7: Jennifer Kahn, “The Art of the Perfect Pitch”
And speaking of free (and the need for money), here is some practical freelance writing advice from UC Berkeley School of Journalism professor Jennifer Kahn about how to sell a potential story to an editor.

Track 8: Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

I don’t have a link, but a quotation instead. I’ve been mulling over the question of audience for the book I’m writing, ever since early last week.
“If something inside you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don’t worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this.”

Track 9: J.K. Rowling, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination.”
J.K. Rowling’s 2008 commencement address at Harvard, her version of the famous Yoda mantra: “Do or do not do. There is no try.” Like Lamott’s advice above, some instructions on writing and life.

“And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life. You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.”

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(Approximately) Five Questions About Writing, History, & Technology: Hans Ostrom

With the shift in new routines, I’m missing a few things that I know the non-private MFA would offer: externally-imposed structure and accountability. But! I’m a Capricorn, as I’ve said, and usually good with internally-imposed deadlines.

So with the beginning of a new school year, it’s time for a new assignment. To help with more regular posts, I’m introducing a new occasional feature here: a series of short interviews with writers, historians, and anyone else who’s interested in questions of writing, history, technology, and memory.

Today’s inaugural series post is a short interview with my good friend and colleague, Hans Ostrom. One of my favorite stories about Hans is our very first meeting. I’d done some research before we met, and saw that we’d gone to the same high school. I realized that my high school principal also had the same last name, and so I asked Hans if they were related. Hans raised his eyebrows, dropped his jaw, turned slightly paler, and actually dropped the paper he was holding. My high school principal was (is) Hans’s older brother. Hans and I have worked together now for almost seven years.

*****

KikuGirl (KG): In the “customary” Google/Wikipedia search, I couldn’t find any interviews with you! Are you that reclusive? Has anyone called you the J.D. Salinger of Tacoma, or Sierra City, where you grew up?

Hans Ostrom (HO): Ah, this one is easy. There are no interviews because no one has been interested in interviewing me.  I like the interview as a genre, and I don’t mind being interviewed.  One problem, if it’s a problem, is that I have written in a bunch of genres—poetry, fiction, scholarship, criticism, journalism, textbooks, encyclopedias, blogging, etc.  I think if I’d decided on one thing early on, I might be better known as a writer of that thing—be it poetry or mystery novels or whatever.  But I love to try different kinds of writing. I would say I’m solitary—writing-groups, for instance, have not worked for me, and I’m terrible at literary politics—rubbing elbows, going to the right conferences, etc.  So by default, not really design, I’m a lone wolf and a contrarian. But I’m not reclusive, and  always thought Salinger was simply bizarre.  Whereas I’m simply obscure.  I think bizarre pays better.

KG: Speaking of all of that writing: you write and publish more, both in hard-copy print and online, than just about anyone I know. (Maybe you’re the Joyce Carol Oates of the West Coast.) In addition to the multiple, regularly-updated blogs, there’s the edited encyclopedia of African American literature, there’s the poetry collection, the textbooks about creative writing, the scholarly studies, the detective novel, and probably a whole other set of writings I haven’t discovered yet. How do you produce so much, so consistently?

HO: I’m probably a compulsive writer.  Not an obsessive one, but a compulsive one.  I just love to write, so I write more or less all the time—in waiting rooms, in bed, sometimes while watching TV.  I do very well with deadlines, which are a kind of drug for compulsive writers.  This all may have started at community college, where I had a full-time academic schedule, worked as an R.A., and wrote sports articles for local newspapers.  This required multitasking and writing quickly.  So I just tend to plunge in and write and then see what I have later, as opposed to a lot of planning, outlining, etc.—although these are often necessary, too.  And one genre tends to carom off the other, so in the midst of an  encyclopedia entry, you might get an idea for a poem.  [KG: I love this idea.] Writing is probably also my way of processing the world, perhaps of coping.

KG: In your historical novel Honoring Juanita, there are several metaphors for history. There’s the standard history as “the dusty, distant past”; history as the recurring, haunting Juanita; history as the origin of objects (the ventolin buy online trees that the main character, Mary, uses in her woodcarvings); history as sedimented levels of trees and nature. What did writing historical fiction do for you that reading written histories might not have?

Mary is a kind of poet, and I think poets are mad to make history “real”: palpable, something you can touch and smell.  Of course, this is impossible, as history is past, is gone.  Its effects aren’t gone, but it is, so it always exists once or twice removed. Perhaps my favorite metaphor is the sediment/compost one, history as a slow building up, an accumulation, something that feeds the present, for better or worse—good compost vs. unhealthy compost. A woodcarver, Mary wants to get her hands on Juanita, but of course she can’t.

KG: Elsewhere, you’ve written about the Kindle and e-books, and you (like I) have lived from dial phones to IPhones. How do you think these forms of digital technologies will impact our reading habits, and our memories?

HO: I think they are revolutionizing reading and writing—right now.  And this will only accelerate.  There’s something called “Moore’s law,” which is that micro-chip storage capacity doubles every 12-24 months.  I think you’re seeing an erosion, even a collapse, of publishing hierarchies.  Vested interests need to try to prevent this from happening, but I don’t know if they can. We could be witnessing a vast democratization of writing and publishing, and I love it.  The old way depended upon an economy of false scarcity, which is reinforced by rigid ideas of “genius,” by making art mysterious (“it can’t be taught”), a fixed canon, only so many slots open for “great” writers, etc.  Many people are nostalgic for this setup, but I’m not.  Interestingly, you can archive books with Amazon  after you’ve read them on Kindle, so there is a chance that people will leave their Kindles to their children—a library of hundreds of books, maybe thousands, if we go by Moore’s number.  Few saw this coming.  Huge personal libraries owned by everyday folk.  At the same time, we may also be entering an era in which most people don’t have the patience to read for a long time or to read complex things.  Don’t get me wrong—I love books as books, as artifacts, but I also love these new developments.  It’s not an either/or question for me.

KG: What’s your favorite metaphor for history, or your favorite quotation about it, and why?

HO: The compost one I mentioned. I think maybe another expression would be “a necessary illusion.”  That is, history represents what is gone, but we need an illusion of its still being there, so we continually create  illusions of past—in our personal lives, in history books, in the media (“founding fathers,” “the greatest generation”).

Where history is still alive is its effects, and oddly enough, people are often reticent to accept that reality; thus the U.S. has never fully come to terms with the effects of  slavery, for example (just one example—there are many).  A kind of deep denial festers, therefore—and you see it coming out in the overreaction to Obama’s being elected.  He is as moderate as Eisenhower, but confused racist reactions drive people to make him some kind of Other—socialist, Kenyan, proto-dictator.

I can’t think of a favorite quotation, but I’m sure it would be something  ironic, something to let the pretentious steam out of history.  There’s probably one from Wilde or Twain.

*****

I’m honored—and frankly, surprised—to note that this is Hans’s first interview. And it’s my first written interview, too. Many thanks to Hans for being the first contestant, and for playing along.

Writing, history, and technology are going to be important in my book, so these interviews are also a form of research. If you know anyone who would be interested in being interviewed for this series, please send me a message at kikugirl (at) kikugirl dot net.

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An unexpected stretch

“How does it feel to be writing your own MFA?” my newly-refound childhood friend asked me, while we were chatting on Facebook this week. A concert pianist, and thus an artist herself, she wondered if I faced issues with writer’s block, or struggled with a blank page, or a blank screen. “Sometimes the longest trip is between me and the piano,” she wrote.

“Well, I’ve been away from writing for a while—for now, I still hunger to write,” I replied. “And I know that an artist’s life is not a linear one.” (“Amen, sister!” she wrote back.) “But right now, I think it’s more fulfilling.”

And it’s true, so far. While writing my dissertation had its own rewards, a life lived in bookstore cafes and libraries, this version of my writing life is, well, fun. And it’s a foreign work ethic for me, when my work ethic is usually much more Puritan.

These days I just don’t want writing to be work that I hate. I don’t mind it being hard. I don’t mind working hard. But I don’t want to hate it. I don’t want to write out of guilt for having not written. I don’t want to write in order to please a hostile or cynical audience. I want writing to always have some element of pleasure as the goal. (I’m telling you, Stephen King’s On Writing has some great stuff in it.)

So when I write these days, I am seeking pleasure. Every time I decide to write creatively, it is a gift that I am giving myself.

You might hear the faintest hint of yoga-speak creeping into that last sentence, and I don’t blame you if you are skeptical. Too granola, too Berkeley, too earth-mothery, too woo-woo. I know, I know, I know. Surprising that despite growing up in California, despite going to UC Berkeley, I didn’t take up yoga until I moved to Washington. Like many people, maybe even some of you reading right now, I rolled my eyes at yoga. But really, now that I think about it, the idea of writing as a gift to myself must have something to do with my yoga practice.

A few years ago my sister convinced me to try yoga. For a little while, I took yoga classes at the recreational sports center here. And when the karate students were thumping upstairs over our overheated yoga room, I couldn’t see any “horizon” past my Warrior II fingertips, pointing at the heap of dirty blue gymnastics mats. And then I bought some DVD’s like the ones here. And it was fine, but not great, much less life-changing.

But then I started taking classes, and found a studio that I love, about a mile from my house. The teachers often incorporate meditation techniques. (Some of my favorite techniques: focus on an image, a word, a quotation, and use these as themes for the hour and a half. It’s actually quite literary.) The teachers gently correct postures. And the studio itself tries to create community within its community, from the self-introductions at the beginning of classes to the sponsorship of farmers markets to the weekend retreats, events and workshops.

And for someone like me, who lives so deeply in the mind, yoga has been a priceless gift, because it emphasizes the mind-body connection. Academics live at computers, at desks, at tables; it can be physically and mentally damaging if there are no times to take a break. It’s absorbing, and rewarding, but it can take its toll.

While academia often involves judgment, yoga doesn’t judge me. I rarely look around to see what other students are doing, and I don’t feel the need to compete with them. (“Ooh! She’s holding her ‘tree pose’ longer than I did!”) I’m never sorry that I went to yoga, and that’s an entirely new approach to work, and even exercise, for me. Even after several years, I feel like I’m still pretty new, but I’ve gone to a few advanced yoga classes. There I’m nowhere near as flexible or practiced as other students, but it’s actually fun to shrug my shoulders (mindfully) and just give the pose a try. Or rest.

There was a series of poses that used to be very difficult for me; I had to start out in the easiest, most modified version. Then I had to modify a little less, but for months my arms would shake when I’d lower myself to the ground. But one day I realized that I could do these poses without any modification or protest, mental or physical. And I wasn’t doing it to please my teacher, or to get a good grade, or to receive validation from anyone but myself. For an academic overachiever like me, it’s a revolutionary approach to learning.

Yoga taught me that holding up your own weight can sometimes be the hardest thing to do, but holding up your own weight can also be exactly what makes you strongest.

So now, six years after I started yoga, I can list almost identical reasons for my yoga practice and my writing: I go because there I can practice, and screw up, and fall; because there I can rearrange my mental furniture, or even redecorate my mental living room. And because there I am constantly surprised that I can discover new ways to be happy.

(And yes, now the title of this post comes into play. Sorry for the pun. But honestly, I didn’t expect to end up writing about yoga. I was going to write more about the latest developments with the book. Next time, for sure.)

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To daydream, to promise, to liberate

It’s 10:24PM, and I just finished sending a cover letter and book proposal to this contest. It’s the first writing contest that I’ve entered in…now that I’m counting…hey, twelve fourteen years. I was lucky last time, so maybe some of that luck will carry over to this time.

I’m excited (it’s out there!) and relieved (it’s out there!) and terrified (it’s out there!).

This is the second book proposal I’ve written. The first one was for my academic book. I may return to my academic book eventually. But by comparison, this proposal was so much fun, and so rewarding. I hadn’t realized that I really could write something before I’d written it. I have similar problems writing academic abstracts for conference papers: how do I know what I’m going to argue before I’ve argued it? So I usually need to write the entire paper first, then write the abstract. And, given that proposal deadlines are usually months and months before the conference, the timing of these two acts never works out very well.

With the academic book, I’d already written a full version of the project. So it was easier to write the proposal, knowing the chapter outlines, knowing most of the “through line,” having an academic monograph format to follow (introduction, 3-4 body chapters, conclusion).

But with this project, I have not written the book yet. I know its focus, and I have an idea of how it will be structured. At least for now. You can ask my students: I am a huge believer in (and preacher of) process, allowing the writing process to carry you where it will. That’s where the real insights and discoveries lie.

As I wrote this proposal, however, I was surprised at the book proposal genre’s ability to daydream, to promise, and to liberate, all at the same time. It opened watershed expanses of possibility. Could I do this? ventolin inhaler 100 mcg no prescription Sure. And if I could do that, why not this? It’s a creative work! The writing process actually can carry me where it will. To write the proposal is just that: it’s writing into possibility.

And, I realized, the proposal is a proposal: it’s not a contract. Maybe there are acres (if not oceans) of latitude between the proposal and the finished product.

I have had a hard time with uncertainty, but, as my sister pointed out to me, this is one of the first times in my life that I’m uncertain about my next steps, my next stage. I knew I wanted to major in English before I set foot on the Berkeley campus. I knew I wanted to teach before I finished college. I knew I wanted to be a professor before I finished graduate school. I landed my first teaching job right out of graduate school. To top it off, I’ve had the same lovely and amazing partner for almost 20 years, over half my life. A lot of my life has been stable, and well, I’m a Capricorn: driven, ambitious and goal-setting. Most of the time, I like it that way. And I know that I’ve been extraordinarily fortunate to have so much stability, especially with love.

On my best days, in my best moments, I know that this new uncertainty—like the creative process—could actually be good for me. Yet I know myself. There’s a strong possibility that what’s good for me, as with most people, is not always going to be what’s easy. That’s all right, though. Capricorns are used to hard work, and that’s usually where and when and how we thrive.

I just want to be strong enough, and graceful enough, and grateful enough to see this uncertainty as a privilege: to see uncertainty as freedom.

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Uncollected

It’s been quite a month, and while I’ve been able to spend a lot of time with my daughters, it’s also been exhausting. I’ve had to choose sanity and take a few expectations off of my plate: mostly self-imposed expectations, often the heaviest ones. Not all laundry must be clean and put away at all times; not every snack my girls eat at home must be homemade and organic and local (you can take the girl out of the Bay Area, but…); dinner does not need to be simmering on the stove when anyone walks in the door. Or, maybe one might be feasible, but not all three in the same day.

And yes: not every blog post must be perfect, beautiful, articulate, collected. For now, the point is to keep writing, whether it’s for the joy of it (Stephen King’s On Writing) or if it’s only for 15 minutes a day (Summer Pierre’s The Artist in the Office).  It’s the writing as habit that’s been an important transition for me this summer. And because of writing, I think I newly understand the phrase “collecting your thoughts.”

So there are a few thoughts I’ve collected, picked up, from the cluttered floors in my mind:

1. I’m not entering a writing contest just to win, really. Although winning would be fabulous, it’s more about the commitment to set a larger goal and put my writing out there. A lot of my thirtysomething peers seem to be running 5Ks or triathlons (or marathons) to commit themselves in similar ways. The contest deadline‘s this week, so I’m going to be working on that application. I’ve got a cover letter mostly finished, and am going to be revising these pieces.  And after that, I’m going to try to submit things elsewhere, maybe here and here. But I just want to keep my head down: write, revise, occasionally send (or hit “publish”).

2. Ever since I wrote about libraries a few weeks ago, I’ve been thinking about ways to help public libraries, beyond donating my books and beyond using the facilities. I was shocked to see that Seattle’s Central Library will be closed for a week next month, due to budget cuts. That library seems to serve so many, in so many ways. I’ve been heartened by NPR’s prediction that libraries will be the next cupcakes. I’ve seen several articles about libraries that have continued this thread in my mind. But I want to know what else I can do, or where to begin. I’ve been committed to American ethnic studies for almost a decade now, and I wonder if there’s a place for me to combine my commitments to that field with my renewed commitment to public libraries. Both of these institutions are firmly committed to radical inclusion and social diversity and educational justice; it shouldn’t surprise me, but it does, that both of these things are also currently under attack.

3. I’m going to look a bit more into metaphors for history. Ever since I read my first piece of historiography in grad school, I’ve wanted to know more about it. I’m fascinated with Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history,” with Suzan-Lori Parks’s “great hole of history.” I’ve been thinking more about it ever since I came up with my own metaphor for history and title for the book.  Any cheap ventolin inhalers sale suggestions are more than welcome.

As a subset of that, I’m also curious about what makes something or someone historical. I’ll have to ask my historian friends and colleagues about that.  What strikes me about internment and Japanese Americans is that in some ways, internment is a big part of what makes Japanese Americans “historic”—and there’s so little about what happened to them after they left camp.  Are they no longer “historic” once the historical event has passed, in other words? What’s left once the boat and the wake have disappeared?

I’ve been mulling over the main character’s struggles in Louise Erdrich’s novel Shadow Tag:

How many times have I told you how difficult it is to resist the lure of the historical moment? The one action, the instantaneous truth that changes everything? How many times have I described my own struggles in telling stories, relating historical occurrences, searching for the sequence of events that results in a pattern we can recognize as history? There are always many moments, there is never just one. There are many points of clarity and many causes to one effect. However, after many, many of these points, these moments, have occurred, there is, I should tell you, a final moment. A final scene.” (48)

But I wonder about the desire to resist the lure of the historical moment. We find that the character’s narration is somewhat unreliable. I wonder if her desire to resist transcendence and knowledge (that is, the epiphany) is in itself revealing, and if so, how.

4. An MFA usually requires a large project. I’ve got my project. It’s already larger than I’d anticipated; at first, I thought it would be a reworking of a response to my dad’s manuscript about our family’s internment. And it is, but among other things, it’s also about:

  • technology and memory: how do different forms of documenting (from typewritten manuscripts to Facebook photos) inflect how and what we remember?
  • family and endurance: how has my family maintained its ability to laugh?
  • creativity and multimedia: the textual, the visual, meshed with the archival; the creative lives of me, my dad, and my sister

After I enter the contest, I’ll need to figure out how to plot my next steps. In the meantime, I’ve been happy to spend so much time with printed pages and much less time with online pages (not that I don’t appreciate you reading this!). More printed pages have meant that I’ve been reading books, not just replenishing the well but also stirring up the pot, and seasoning the stew, to mix a few metaphors.

Four things: that’s the collection which is in the laundry basket for now: a few wrinkled items, a few fluffy items, a few that need to be hung up and put away. I’ll add some links to this post tomorrow evening or Wednesday, and I’ll post more about my entry in the contest towards the end of the week.

(For those of who you who asked for a post about farmers markets, I did write one, but it became something else entirely: a meditation about home and a marching song. I’ll keep trying. And I’ll post that one, too, once I revise it.)

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Revision of Assignment #1 (Tell a story in lists)

On Becoming a Writer (Again): A Progress Report of Habits

Clean desk.
Hours to complete: about 4.

Renew library card. Check out library books.

First checkout from the library: 2 books. Second checkout from the library: 1 book. Latest checkout from the library: about 14 books.

Read more fiction for pleasure.

  • Read Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist, a few stories from Miranda July’s No One Belongs Here More Than You. Laughed over one, puzzled over the other (perhaps am not hip enough? a high probability).
  • Tried to read Sonya Chung’s Long for this World, but had to return it to the library. Want other people to read this book—it looks like it will be important, transnational, historically relevant. But early in the book, had this terrible feeling that a feverish child was going to die. Couldn’t go on.

Read nonfiction writing.
Just finished Julia Child’s memoir My Life in France. An inspiration.

Resurrect the quote journal for inspiration.
Taste these from My Life in France:
• “the pleasures of the table, and of life, are infinite” (302)
• “how lovely life can be if one takes time to be friendly” (66)
• “I was thirty-seven years old and still discovering who I was.” (67)

Carry several notebooks and pens around with you.

  • Saw my writer friend R’s clothbound journal a few weeks ago: the cover soft, lovely, well-worn like an heirloom quilt. Want my notebook to be like that: used, not reserved for special occasions, like fancy china behind glass cabinet doors.
  • Using one of those hardbound blank journals that had been a Christmas gift. Having that notebook is like having a camera: not only are moments and thoughts that much easier to document, but having the journal is itself a lens and a mandate.

Read books on writing.

  • Started Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. It’s been recommended reading for writers, but all can think about, at least in this early part of the memoir, is “No wonder he writes horror novels.”
  • Started worrying about some of the different neuroses associated with writers: the sullen solitary, the competitive wit, the narcissistic venom, the icicle-forming insecurity. (Note to self: do not confuse writers with anonymous YouTube or newspaper commenters.) Thought about the writer who reads other writers and always loses in self-judged beauty writing contests. Always the bikini round, not the interview, that wins the day.
  • Wondered if this worrying about worrying is a writer’s characteristic.

Write.

  • Blog posts: 19
  • Status updates on Facebook and Twitter: probably too many.
  • Typed letter to a friend: 1

Revise.

  • Posted first drafts on the blog, then second and third and fourth drafts.
  • Reflected more on earlier entries, such as the one about the act of loaning out and returning library books. Although still struggling to love abundantly, wonder if my love of owning books may be actually less about generosity and more about the idea of hoarding something. You hoard something that you love because you worry that it will be taken away from you.
  • Tried to remove as many “I”’s from this post as possible.

Grades:
1. Collaged the lists, wrote, revised the first assignment into a linear story.

2. Oldest daughter commandeered one notebook from my purse, while we were waiting at the airport. She’s started to write and illustrate her first narrative book.

3. Opened my dad’s manuscript; had been scared to reread it; haven’t read it in over 25 years.

4. Woke up with a filmic ending of a story. Had never met the boy and girl characters, though had seen that particular off-ramp to downtown Seattle many times over. Two balloon releases. Not sure why. Wanted to know how the characters got to that image. Started to dream in fiction.