watch hill

Just returned from the most vigorously inspiring journey! My friend Rachel is part owner of a mansion on the coast of RI. Kirk, Carson, Maggie and I were invited to partake in a Gatsby-esque summer home experience complete with salt sea air, the essence of unmitigated wealth and the company of charming heirs. Verklempt doesn't even touch it.

My new project is a fictionalized account of the family who has owned this place for more than half its life. Here's a tiny snippet:

Mr. and Mrs. Dick are dead. Your old-fashioned murder-suicide: bullet to the brain, bullet to the chest. The children were about, but the carnage was timed, as is often the case with well-thought-out homicides, to coincide with the imminent arrival of the housekeeper. The police followed shortly thereafter, having been tipped off by Mr. Sheldon Dick himself, who’d placed the call, speaking in the present tense of an act that had yet to occur.

I'm bombing along with a zeal I haven't had in months. I'm going to write this novel. It's too good, this backstory, to pass up!

time management woes

One of the biggest hurdles for me is where to draw the line on unpaid efforts. I’m a pleaser, and as such, my tendency is to fulfill. That’s how I’m wired. The challenge comes in when I have to prioritize fulfillment, especially now, when most of my opportunities are writing/editing related.
My boyfriend Kirk suggested that I look at what I’m giving away. How do I value that, if I were to apply something as gauche as money to it? What’s my intellectual property worth, in other words? Kirk says, “Well, if you were punching a time clock, you wouldn’t be able to do what you do.”

My time clock is virtual. And therein lies the rub.

I was born to be a support girl. A Gal Friday who shows up with half-combed hair and a soft pencil. Preparation has never been a strong suit. For me, the excitement is in the unexpected, so my preparation is more about deciding which of my senses I’m going to foreground for maximum capture. My strategy is that I have no strategy. Ergo, I go into overdraft every damn month.

I have the feeling that if I really convinced myself that making money was important, I’d have more. Only problem is, money only figures in when I’m completely out. How passive is that?

I’ve decided to stop writing community news. To stop doing any journalism that doesn’t translate to $25 or more an hour. Better to spend that time on business development for BridgePointNW (which, if you’ve linked on, you realize is the web equivalent of the shoemaker’s child ). So, those 20 or so hours a month I was basically giving away for the byline are going to be rerouted to show-me-the-$ land.

For now, I feel I need to continue to say yes to requests for brain-storming and helping various friends with writing/editing needs. These tend to pay off quite well, in the long run, as everyone I’m helping is part of a network of writers who now and again throw bones my way, and as an Independent Contractor, nearly all of my income-producing opportunities have been word-of-mouth type serendipities.

Okay, so when do I work on my creative stuff? Where’s that 20 hours a week going to come from? Stay tuned for phase two of my Time Management journey…

husbands: a correlative

I just read my friend, David Millstone's blog entry where he aligned his allegiance to two personally significant mediums of expression (writing and acting) with his two marriages. Because David was my first writing mentor, I’ll always side with his metaphoric first wife (though I never met his real first wife).

David will always be a writer in my mind. This designation bears out in that in his blog entry he started with his second love and wife, as opposed to his first. Emotional chronology does not necessarily correspond to its temporal equivalent—and because David has an ear for emotional composition that I find mind-blowing.

Funnily enough, David’s current acting role is that of a writer/writing teacher. His two loves fused into what must be, for him, the sort of challenge that leaves you edge-walking a precipice filled with glorious doom. God, I envy that!

Not to be outdone by my mentor and friend, I’m going to slap up a short marital correlative of my own.

My first husband was barely a grown up when we met, but at the time, my sense of who we were together was a couple who’d been married for 25 years. The portent with which I entered that union, the big Catholic bolus of righteousness, was similar to my first swipes at fiction. Too many words, fueled by concept and wholesale epiphany. Something I picked off of a nose-high shelf, wrapped in shiny paper and called my own. Oh, to feel normal, for once. My stories were chock full of sophomoric, ironic jabs. My marriage had jerky transitions I tried to sand over with compulsive attention to minutiae. I pursued a false God who lingered in the obvious details. Fear. Fear. Control. Fear. That husband died, all of the sudden. My early stories are yellowed dot-matrix testament to that unripeness.

Enter husband two: a volatile boy-child who I followed down a dark gravel rut.

Fourteen years of stream of consciousness vomit punctuated here and there with clarity. The muse of instability yanking me around: happy hour followed by hangover followed by hell. I loved this second husband who gave me an electron microscope with which to examine the cells of my navel. I courted intimacy in my writing, though avoided it in my marriage to this stunted man. The dark side can keep you from that just as effectively as the myth of wedded bliss. A little danger. Less control. My writing matured, deepened. Still, I couldn’t quite commit. Didn’t commit. To either the marriage or the writing projects—which lie in various hard drives and between the plastic covers of chunky binders. I emerged from that work-in-progress battered and jaded, ripe with failure of spirit, and tentative about whatever comes next.

And what of that, the next big thing? I feel the need for interface. A sage-sticking, perhaps? My current love has suggested a fire. Burn the evidence. Concretize the psychic space for tabula rasa. My intuition tells me that he’s correct. I need some sort of bold leap. Enjambment to the unexpectedly next right thing.

it's been too long since...

I wrote a story.
I read a novel.
I spent uninterrupted time suspending disbelief.
I wandered alone in the woods in a daydream.
I sat in a room filled with writers.
a sentence I heard gave me a chill.
characters from my pages have invaded my dreams.
I drove around with a notebook beside me, writing ideas down and missing my exit.
my rhythms of speech affected those of made up people.
I last languished in an entire day of reading, writing and pondering.

girls weekend

I’m at the coast this weekend with a gaggle of chicks I don’t know real well and one gal who’s a best friend type of gal, and it’s her 40th birthday we’re celebrating. We’re drinking a lot. We’re dancing and saying things like: “My husband wouldn’t mind it if I fucked Beck.”

Okay, I’m not saying that. One, because I don’t have a husband, and Two, because I’ve gotten over my star-fucking era. Really, I have.

So, as usual, I’m holed up in the space under the staircase working and reading, and only occasionally partaking in the rollicking discussions of our periods and what crap we use to keep pubic hair from spreading out of control.

Okay, it’s not that bad. But it almost is.

No, really, repeat after me: I can be normal. I can be normal.

I can dance to Beck and Madonna and whoever else is spilling out the ipod. But, man, I hate champagne. I’m not much of a crab dip girl, either. But I love this friend of mine who is about to join me in this exciting and rewarding decade. She’s one of those gals who reinvents her enthusiasm daily. She doesn’t spend five minutes enduring crap or people or situations she abhors. I cut the cord of her youngest child. We’re tight. But we’re different.

I’ve had plenty of friends who live in the land of normal. They seize pop culture and absorb it and swerve it with their own brand of my-husband-wouldn’t-mind-if-I-fucked-Beck. I never quite know how to be around it all. One gal talked about a spray-tanning place where a person sprays the tan on you as opposed to a machine spaying a tan on you. It’s sad to be so out of touch. There are places that spray tans on you?

I need to finish my pr piece on creative use of crunchy toppings. I’m developing a must-have pantry list. I wrote the word “craisins” in my list. I’m dragging myself into the 21st century. Reluctantly.

on self love

I remember the day my parent’s marriage finally broke up. I was twenty, and a junior at Syracuse University. I had dinner guests over at the off-campus house I shared with three women. Putting on a dinner in those days was a huge deal, and there we were, about to sit down amid the plates of doctored Top Ramen and bottles of Gennie Cream Ale.

The phone rang. It was my mother announcing memo style that she’d just left my father. I don’t think there was an invitation to Q and A. I placed the phone back on its cradle. I said, to the little group of college kids assembled around the plywood table, “My parents just split up. Let’s have some noodles.”

Calm, calm, calm as could be. But the following year was one of the more tumultuous in my memory. Here is a partial list

1. Worked in a hospital over the summer and decided to forget my dreams of becoming a writer-slash-anthropologist and learned instead how to counsel heart patients on eating less eggs and bacon
2. Took up with a coke addict
3. Got diagnosed with a mitral valve prolapse and went on beta blockers
4. Learned the coke addict (who was 28) was married. Didn’t care.
5. Went off beta blockers and began smoking a lot of weed
6. Broke up with the coke addict, went back to school, and worked full time at a bar
7. Began dating the bouncer (secretly) who was a black ex-con
8. Took acid and flipped out
9. Got really good grades in food science
10. Got really bad grades in sewing (I had to take a whole slew of home economics classes for some strange reason)
11. Began dating (not secretly) a graduate student who had lots of rattlesnakes in glass cages a few feet from his bed
12. Stopped doing drugs altogether, stopped dating questionable men, and began dating the Italian Catholic boy who’d been pursuing me for several months

I graduated college with a degree in Dietetics Management and moved to Phoenix, Arizona because it was the opposite of Syracuse, New York and because I’d read an article about it in Cosmo during a blizzard. I dragged the Italian Catholic boy with me, much to the dismay of his Buffalo, New York Italian Catholic clan family, and set out to live a conventional, church-going life.

I began to pop out the babies as prescribed, and we moved back to New York State. Four days before my second child’s birth, the Italian Catholic boy’s head was crushed in a fatal car accident.

I was calm, calm, calm as could be. I gave birth. I moved back out West. The cycle began anew, and I repeated all the former mistakes and followed them up with band aids back to sanity.

Skip ahead, several lifetimes from my parent’s divorce and the ensuing pachinko, and I think I’ve figured out a thing or two.

Here’s the residue:

1. Life doesn’t play by the rules
2. Don’t trust anything that suggests there is order in the Universe
3. Love fully
4. If you don’t acknowledge the dark side, it’s gonna find you and it won’t be pretty
5. To be human is to make mistakes. Make them, say you’re sorry, and do better the next time… It’s the only way to find any grace
6. Keep fighting for who you are

anatomy of a train wreck

Along with the mania of spring, the other shoe must fall. Things hum along at breakneck; until they don’t. Aside from duct tape and cases of bottled water, how do you prepare for disaster? I’m talking about all the types of disasters: physical, financial, heartbreak…

The sudden failures-of-spirit, disappointments and fallout from living a passionate, whole-hearted and not particularly safe life. A reckless life? Sometimes I want to say to myself: repeat after me, Suzy: I don’t believe in faeries, I don’t, I don’t! Imagination is a powerful drug—way more potent than hash, weed, opium, any of it. The muse giveth, and the muse taketh away.

It’s April, the earth has tipped just so, and all around me entropy reigns. Which has always been beneficial to me on the page, but a disaster in my personal life. I’m worried that this sweet little house of cards I’ve constructed so carefully and lovingly might just cave in. It’s awful to feel that way, simply awful.

aloysius

I’ve decided to err on the side of precocity in developing my little boy character. This is new and fun, this nod to suspension of disbelief. I’m characterizing him as a sad genius—one of my favorite types of kids, and one often exploited both for comedy relief and pathos.

The other thing this buys me is poignant and complex interaction with the adult characters, both in developing tension between the child and various adults, and the child and the larger story.

This kid, who I’ve named Aloysius, is eight-years-old, and his parents have recently divorced (sound familiar?). But unlike my own precocious 8-yr-old (for whom I’ll be attending an IEP mtg this afternoon in order to ferret out his reluctance to read), Al is plagued with additional anxieties and compensatory strategies.

I am eager to follow this rabbit down the hole to see where it leads!

the arsenal

There are three boys playing vigorously in the next room. It’s nearly noon on a Sunday, and I’m still in my jammies. I’m working. Been writing all morning—a new project for which I feel the old mojo. Feels so. Damn. Good.

The theme of this new project includes aspects of the questions I’ve been chewing on for years, namely, how close to edge is too close? Especially when you’ve got kids you’re raising by yourself, and a livelihood dependent upon balance and sanity.

In a life-meets-art moment this morning a neighbor mom came shuffling through my mudroom door just as I was writing dialogue from a kid confronting his mom about her inappropriate choices. So here I am in the Sunday morning writing chaos, unkempt hair, pjs, dirty breakfast dishes and couch cushions in “fort” piles all about. The mudroom mom was hand-wringing and nervous. Seems she’d been meaning to ask me about something for months. Last time her son (a wan vegetarian boy she’s raising on her own) came over, he saw a gun. A real gun. He reported this real gun to his mom, and his mom was caught in that weird social anxiety place where you wrestle with confronting another mom with something that may or may not be true.

Well, it’s mostly true. Carson does have a gun. A blue rifle bb gun. But he doesn’t have bb’s for it. Here in town, anyways. I had to try and explain my (our) somewhat un-pc philosophy on guns. (I didn’t begin thus: Well, when your son’s father is a redneck… so, two points for me!) Carson has, indeed, discharged an actual firearm out at the hotsprings. But today, here in town, I offered mitigated consolation to the mudroom mom. “There are no working weapons on the premises.”

Except, of course, for Carson’s collection of knives.

In this new project, the centerpiece boy character is a kid like this mudroom mom’s boy: a sunken, raccoon-eyed waif to whom you just want to serve up a side of beef. He’s my foil. The element around which the plot hangs. I’ve just introduced another character to fan the flames, complicate the dynamics. I’m in the zone, baby. Watch out!

i'm too fucking busy

…and vice versa. (Thank you Dorothy Parker.) Well, today sorta sucked. One of those days where the devil to whom I’ve sold my soul looms menacingly close.
Here’s what happened: a small business owner who was seeking infomercial-like sales copy for her web site became frustrated and disappointed with my lack of capacity for slick marketing gimmickry. After analyzing this, I realize that I failed on two counts:

1. I believe (and generated a lack of engagement due to this belief) that her product is snake oil
2. Her aesthetic offends my sensibilities

I turned my nose up at the request for “…but wait! There’s more!” type spew, even though it appears that it’s the fastest way for this gal to make a buck selling her detoxification foot patches.

Coincidentally, on the eve of my disgrace, I attended Jonathan Lethem's lecture at the Schnitz, and got a nice dose of literary elitism that I drank up and savored. Here’s what Lethem has to say about the conundrum of sucking up to the normative world: Beware “insteadness" (his made-up term for the place we all go after we’ve outgrown the doobie and need a new escape hatch). Insteadness is why we’ll belly up to the Anna Nicole Smith paternity network, why we live lives seemingly absent of desperation, and why we keep stuffing our gullets full of salty, fatty, pacifying inertia-inducing mush.

And since I’ve signed up to grease the wheels of greed, I’m not allowed to side-step this. Even if it means writing shit like: change your hair—change your life. Even if it means adopting the syntactically challenged alliterative string of one word sentences that promote the gerund to imperative.

The other part of Lethem’s harangue was in support of psychological neoteny (which is the tendency to retain childlike traits into adulthood). Artists are wired for the playfulness, curiosity, humor, creativity, sensitivity and wonder associated with childhood, and it is this phenomenon—this acceptance—of neoteny that has kept us from disappearing (both figuratively—into the gaping black hole of insteadness, and literally—from extinction due to Limbaughesque black-and-white inflexibility where the button is all too accessible).

There in lies the rub for me. I embrace my own tendency toward neoteny until I get an earful from a pissed off client who wants me to craft a formula for success at the expense of my creative dignity, and then I become somber with the grief of a cynical adult. But hey, at least I’m writing.

child's play

So instead of writing workshop tonight I played Legos with my son. Remember Legos? If you were a boy, you probably designed and conjured battle scenes in which good triumphed over evil and the sound of war cries and buzzing artillery could be heard ricocheting off of the walls. If you were a girl, well, I don’t know…probably you weren’t the weirdo sort of girl I was.

My sister and I used to build mirror-image Lego families and then act out dysfunctional sagas. Legos in those days came only in red or black; I can’t recall who was who, but, as in checkers, we each had our own color. The two-button Legos were fashioned into babies, the three-pegged bricks of plastic into “kids,” and the largest Legos were the parents. We made them into bunnies. Think: Beatrix Potter meets the Sopranos.

The dad bunny Legos would have temper tantrums and slap the babies and the kids around if they didn’t behave. The mom Legos were sort of an after-thought. Often they weren’t even in the stories. My sister and I interacted the most with the kid Legos. We really had to stretch to convincingly anthropomorphize these critters—which is completely different than my son’s experience. My son, who was born seven months shy of the new millennium, where imagination takes a back seat to innovation. Today’s Legos have faces and modular plastic hair and grooved hands into which Lego spears may be clamped.

Carson’s room is littered with Lego war ships, planes and combat landing strips. Myriad shapes and menacing structures clot the floor necessitating tip-toe machinations to get to the dresser, closet or bed. Carson’s invitation to “play Legos” was really all about me watching him play with Legos while I built the structures he ordered me to build. (I’m old fashioned, I guess, I like dictator tendencies in my male offspring.) But, I found myself creating psychologically complex story lines as the evening wore on. The task-after-task-after got boring, so I fused together an evil ruler “W” and some henchmen. There was also Hippie Boy and Frudelsnapper—wrongfully imprisoned lads who were thought to be terrorists but were really slacker surfers. Not that I ventured too far into plot—heaven’s no! But maybe, in my passive-aggressive Mom for President way, I was stacking the deck in favor of circuitous drama over linear lock and load.

Anyway, I plan on attending writing workshop next week.

more on the disappearing muse

Walking around each day in a life I’ve created from wholesale weavings of air and promise, I should feel luckier than I do. I have to ask myself why gratitude sometimes gives way to feelings of guilt, unworthiness, narcissism and pain. And yet these feelings, which historically have led to productive creative work, are not moving me thus at this point in time.

I eek out a living playing “office” and engaging in moderate wordsmithing. What could be more fun than that? I have three wonderful, albeit challenging, children. I have a great little bungalow with a large sunny yard in a part of town where I feel very much a part of the community. The aesthetics are perfect. My neighbors are perfect. My boyfriend is perfect. And therein lies the rub? Not enough drama? Not enough misery?

For more than a dozen years I mined a dysfunctional primary relationship to fuel my passion for the page. I built several manuscripts around the impossibility of loving a man who courted disaster and chaos with a limited capacity for reality. It was a brand of love that I equated with feeling—with embracing what for me has always been elusive: the spectrum of emotion. All of the emotion, the ROYGBIV of emotion. And I got used to turning inward, examining it via discordant, self-indulgent, satisfying prose and poetry.

I come from a tradition of writing that promises transformation via staring down the demons. Resurrection by plunging through the murky, dangerous and dark water with unflinching faith. And those moments of clarity that come from that? The cracks where the light comes through? They are heavenly. If glimpses of one’s own humanity (and by extension, the human condition) are the grand prize, then the practice of writing in this vein is worth the price of admission. But. Just because you peeked at God, doesn’t mean you get to stay there.

I’m spending lots of time with a sane man these days. Someone from the right side of the tracks, as it were. And I’m happy. But, damn it, I don’t know how to write as a happy person. Where is my edge? Do I have to look in new places for it? Am I destined to become a landscape fiction writer—the type often paired with scribblings from the Pacific Northwest? Am I going to have to learn to write heavily descriptive prose about eagles, rivers, rocky coastlines and shit?

I feel as though I’ve consigned my muse to some sort of personality subversion. Brain surgery or serotonin reuptake inhibitors. My muse is on anti-depressants! She’s choosing to shed her goth clothes, her multiple piercings, her penchant for dark rooms and clove cigarettes. Suzy Vitello is being kicked out of the church basement of folding chairs and into a functional world of normative, sensible, rational grown-ups, where chaos is the exception.

It’s a lovely day out there today. Just lovely. There are no cracks—only light, and the slight ennui that's buffering my thorough enjoyment is a faint, faint shadow.

muse, muse, where did you go?

Last night I went to hear one of my favorite performing authors, Anne Lamott. She’s touring the third in her spiritual path trilogy. This one is called Grace (Eventually). She was good. Low-energy due to a cold and probably the whole exhausting tour thing, but she showed up, did what was expected, and pleased her SRO crowd with predictable Bush-Bashing.

Still, I’m finding that my usual enthusiasm for readings is waning of late. As is my passion for the page generally, be it reading, writing or musing. I’m thinking that this little passion hiatus is reflective of a reverse sort of midlife sub-crisis. Instead of wildly pursuing an art form and acting out generally, I’m engaging in calm, warm, sensible activities replete with sanity.

After a tumultuous year which included divorce, philosophical overhaul and a bit more acting out than necessary, I find myself seeking the road more traveled. Normalcy, I guess. And because my brand of muse has typically come packed with angst, co-dependency and obsession, I’m not exactly sure how, these days, to approach my work. Here I have a garage full of works-in-progress, and I stand over them, hands on hips, head nodding before turning out the light and slipping inside for a cup of tea. Let’s not call this Writer’s Block, ‘k?

I prefer to think of this as a plateau in my creative pursuits. I’m not exactly subverting the paradigm, more like tipping it on its side, see what’s crawling underneath.

I think I do have to write more though. And I think I’ll revisit this muse thing shortly. Cheers.

future tense

I’m writing a short story in future tense. Here are some built-in problems with the tense choice: wrinkled chronology (i.e. inserting back-story and not losing the reader is tricky); authority (is it all a dream, or did this really happen?); intimacy (distance in tense = distance between reader and writer).

At workshop last night I got some great ideas on how to minimize the above issues. For instance, attend subjunctive mood with clarity of purpose, and treat back-story with overt syntactic decisions e.g. make it clear if the character is speculating by using words like “perhaps” or “maybe,” and be careful how I use “will” vs “would.”

Here’s the current opening sentence: Mid-morning, Pedersen will fish the Razr out of toilet with the full scoop of his hand.

The camera hovers, but at an ironic distance. Playing with tense, pov and the shifting camera, just to inform the level of intimacy I’m attempting, I could write:

Yesterday, Pedersen fished the Razr out of the toilet with the full scoop of his hand. Boring and flat.

How about: I fished the Razr out of the toilet with the full scoop of my hand. Problematic. Immediately by choosing first person, I realize I have to make the sentence less self-conscious and foreground the object. Maybe: The Razr’s slimy silver case felt like a bar of nearly-spent soap in my hand as I pulled it from the toilet.

Intimacy attained! And there’s enough of a hook for the reader to lightly wonder about the phone in the toilet. But, still, pretty typical.

So, what does future tense buy me? Suspense? And more than that, perhaps the invitation to suspend disbelief? In order for that to pay off, I have to figure out a way to close the gap between Pedersen and the reader. Here’s where Chuck had a great suggestion. Why didn’t I up the ante? Show Pedersen in some sort of moral dilemma using the phone, and what’s on the phone, as a costly conundrum that might cause the reader to ask: What would I do in this situation?

I know this means nothing, since I haven’t revealed the plot…. Perhaps I will at a later post.

me and lucinda in the dugout

Back at the dugout. Back to corporate com. Back to croutons and non-dairy creamers and online professional management tools, oh my!

I’ve got the new lucinda williams cd blaring out my laptop speakers trying to ream out a low-grade headache. I’m wandering around my to-do list, resisting 100% attention to anything in particular. In short, I’m fucking off.

More and more I find my capacity for long-stretch deep-thinking waning. Perhaps I have a blooming work ethic crisis? Perhaps I should delete this right now because I’ll forget I’m posting it and should I ever be Googled by a potential client, there I’ll be in all my slackerness.

I know what it is. It’s how I used to get after a summer of partying and fun and late nights. How I’d find myself back at a desk in a room listening to a teacher hammer abstract concepts into the wall of my brain case when I’d rather be fishing. (Except I gave up fishing at 14. It’s a metaphor.)

Lucinda is singing about not wanting to talk to anyone. So apropos.

So, I’m having a stoopid day. A day of half-assed non-attempts to engage. Should I just indulge it? Too bad the sun’s no longer shining. Spring drizzle doesn’t quite beckon the same way a blue sky does.

I should be in 19th century Vienna with Sisi and Ida. Or I should be working on my short story in progress, “To Open: Break Tamper Evident Seal Here.” Or I should be revisiting Unkiss Me.

Lucinda just sang: “You can’t light my fire so fuck off.” Hm.

These days of creative vacillation. These late mornings of driftiness. Writers can be so passive aggressive with themselves.

AWP update

There were over 300 seminars, lectures, readings and receptions to choose from at AWP this year. I attended ten, and they were pretty much the same ten. In a candy store the size of Disneyworld, I reached for my favorite confection again and again and again. And I say this without remorse or regret. No shrugged shoulders. Not one smack of palm to forehead.

It’s been confirmed (once more) that the possibilities, the vagaries, the enormously generous plain of consciousness—as opposed to the words and ideas themselves—is why I do this thing. This writing thing.

I therefore cannot report on the AWP at large, for I wasn’t present at the cross-section of poets, prose writers, teachers and lit critics. Not one homage did I attend. Not one Writing Program hullabaloo. Oh sure, I had them circled in my program, but when it came time to sit in a banquet chair in front of a panel of experts, I found myself crawling back for more genre-bending, literary nonfiction-loving, lyric essay-lauding Geek Speak.

The electric passion of a writer who explores his subject and material without allegiance to normative literary boundaries is a drug to me. David Shields, Nick Flynn, Steven Church, Michael Martone, Brenda Miller, Judith Kitchen—these are my heroes. Their common refrain approaches the anti-brand in its commitment to artistic integrity.

Shields went as far as to define the function of art as an attempt to bridge the gap between separate consciousnesses. He expressed that literary nonfiction is a framing device to foreground thought, producing clear thinking about mixed feelings. Lucid deconstruction which results in nurturing active reading.

As a writer who often has a hard time locating my own writing on the genre wheel, I appreciated the emphasis on loyalty to serious and unflinching exploration of material above pedantic allegiance to facts and formalized story-telling.

Borrowing from poetry, the idea of enjambment—of juxtaposing one thing with another in a way that’s unique to a particular consciousness—as an invitation to the reader’s deeper thought patterns and sensibilities encourages, in my humble opinion, a fundamentally intimate connection with the audience.

So with a 6:35 flight tomorrow, I’m tucking myself in early—all done with AWP Atlanta, and happily sated with my version of bliss. I’m counting on some vivid electric dreams tonight.

atlanta

In the interest of balance I played hooky from AWP for three hours and walked uptown to Piedmont and the Atlanta Botanical Garden. Blue skies, 70 degree temps and all that Southern architecture between the hotel and the garden.

When I asked the concierge if it was possible to walk there, she sort of squished up her face in surprise. “I mean, are there sidewalks all the way?” I said.

“um, yes. But it’s a little, um, far.”

“Two-and-a-half miles?”

“Yes ma’am.”

Cake. It completely escaped me to ask if the walk was safe—for a woman alone in broad daylight, how could it not be? It never occurs to me, actually, to consider the discomfort, danger or lack of wisdom—beyond being nailed by a vehicle—in walking anywhere. Living in Portland, where I have always felt 100% safe on foot, walking anywhere in the city is a usually only accompanied by the question: to bring an umbrella, or to not bring an umbrella?

Walking the first mile or so from the hotel gave me pause though. Not because it was any more or less dangerous than Portland, but because, in my geo-centric arrogance, I forgot that when Dorothy’s not in Kansas, things look different. She doesn’t necessarily blend into the culture and the story and the archetype. Dorothy, in her yoga pants and tailored jacket and pale, freckled skin was the oddball-on-the-street.

And—the initial dozen or so blocks I encountered zero women walking alone. There were several pairs of women, and a few groups of women, but no solo female venturers. I started to feel really self-conscious. I started to notice my whiteness, too. There were no white people on foot. Not one. That shouldn’t matter, right? Is it racist to be so self-conscious about one’s whiteness? Especially as I walked toward a boisterous group of African American men. I averted my eyes in nervousness. In racist nervousness. Then I thought, “No, I’m not going to keep looking at the ground, because I’m being rude and projecting all this discomfort and, y’know, fuck it. I’m just going to smile, like I would smile at anyone I passed in Portland. I’m going to give that group of African American males my biggest Portland smile.” Which I did. And they smiled back. There were six of them, and five of those guys smiled benignly. Just one of them did a lude thing with his tongue, but maybe (I told myself) he had something in his mouth he was trying to get rid of.

It seems sort of shameful to be this uptight and reflective about walking in a city where my color and probably my standard of living is anomalous. Especially on the heels of having attended a seminar where one of the panelists talked about the profound grace of connecting to the consciousness of another human. I don’t always want that connection, after all. Sure, when I’m reading a book and someone’s spilling it, yeah, that’s nice. But not when I’m walking down the street. Walking down the street I tend to fear confronting the consciousness of my fellow man. Particularly when I’m sucked up into my own flawed consciousness.

Okay, so I had to confront my flagrant racist, narcissistic self, and, once in the Garden, yet another flaw unfolded—my Philistine-like indifference to one of nature’s most cherished flowers. The Atlanta Botanical Garden boasts a world-renowned orchid collection and the current exhibit in the exalted greenhouse has combined this with an internationally acclaimed artist’s delicate, detailed glass orchid sculptures. The script calls for oohs and aahs when you enter the greenhouse—the perfect white blooms, the magenta ones, all set against tropical plants and mist and humidity and all that’s missing is a Phillip Glass score.

Instead, I found myself drawn to the gnarled tree trunks and hanging willowy tendrils of foliage. The humming tropical insects and chirping birds and overwhelming fecundity—so sensual and Southern and succulent. The collections of glass and real orchids set out like my Grandmother’s crystal under display cases or peeking from behind signs that, in faux whimsy, begged the viewer not to touch by deliberately crossing out those verbs of tactile invitation, well, I trotted right by ‘em. Too much perfection for this gal. Makes me nervous.

So—where does that leave me? If I’m too nervous to sidle up next to Southern humanity, and too unappreciative to be awed by exotic spectacle, am I a lost cause? Am I a faker in an authentic land? Am I just an old gal immune to new tricks?

That said, I completely get that Georgia is a ripe peach. There’s so much life, so much history, so many stories. I hate to think I’m getting in the way of channeling the stories. That’s why I came, after all. For the stories.

we interrupt the AWP conference

..for shameless self-promotion. My golfing article is on-line (and in the print version of) The Northwest Women's Journal.

Yup, I golfed. And I plan to again. I think. But not today. Today I’m going to absorb more AWP and, if I stick to plan, go explore Atlanta a bit, ‘cause it’s a sunny day—the tornadoes and thunderstorms of yesterday are long gone, and I could use a good walk.

AWP day one part two

I am with my people. Yay! The stew of language lovers, wordsmiths, intellectuals and freaks. AWP has ‘em all.

So. Attended an interesting seminar this afternoon with the catchy title: Losing the Linebreaks. It was a forum of poets dealing with their guilt at having written (and been paid for writing) nonfiction. Scandalous!

I’ve attended the inverse of this seminar many times. It’s called “How to steal from poets and approach the lyric register” or “How to put soul into your prosaic prose.” Nonfiction writers huddled above the magic lamp, looking for their turn to rub it and witness the Genie of Verse. O, the enjambment! The cadence! The obtuse-yet-profound!

Genre-bending from the poet’s perspective is a lot more sober. (As one would expect.) The seminar took on a bit of a support group tone with panelists wringing their hands in Faustian angst: “How to we deal with the guilt of it all—writing accessibly?”

The through-line was, of course, Baby needs a new pair of shoes. Similar sentiment bespake in my earlier post, yes? And then, heavens, what if you actually enjoy it? Writing for the mediocre reader? What then?

I found the seminar amusing, and, in turn, delightful. One panelist in particular, Jennifer Hecht, summed up the quantitative nature of writing time thus: “You’d make more money if you gave that afternoon of poetry-writing to prose.”

Ay.

(And, as a side note, she also, as a devout atheist, had the most interesting pro-religion statement ever: “Its value is in being the repository for behaviors that allow people to transcend.” Okay, okay, maybe she was my favorite because she’s a scientist-historian sorta empiricist and I’ve got this fabulous science teacher boyfriend and I’m totally prejudiced in favor of the scientific explanation for everything all of a sudden. Whatever.)

At one point during the seminar a disgruntled audience member stood up and begged to differ after a panelist seemingly dissed the personal essay as “easily replicated” and therefore never under consideration for publication in the small press she edits. That’s when it got fun.

You got the purists standing up: “make sacrifices in other ways, stay pure with your writing. Don’t sully the well with normative drivel.” And then, in response, the few non-poets: “What makes you think writing poetry is harder than writing prose?” Food fight at AWP! Can’t wait ‘til tomorrow!

AWP day one

I’ve been at the AWP conference for, like, 24 hours so far and half that time I’ve been “working.” Such a dilemma this when-to-illuminate-the-off-duty-sign question.

I’m here to immerse and absorb and ponder, but am pre-occupied, as always, with paid client work. As a project-oriented independent contractor with hourly billing, every time I illuminate the don’t-flag-me-down sign I’m just saying no to my ever-increasing mortgage payment!

Apropos to this, one of the two, count ‘em two, seminars I’ve attended thus far included a “balancing your writing against other concerns” component. One of the panelists—the token purist—said, “There’s always going to be the need to make money, that’s a given. If you’re really a writer, you make time to write.” Period.

A few years back my friend Monica Drake and I pitched our “Fueled by Distraction” workshop to AWP. They declined. But they shouldn’t have. I think I need to revisit some of the materials we used to demonstrate how to use the distractions presented by every day concerns as fuel (as opposed to barriers) to satisfying creative work.

Paramount to the success of this method, as I recall, is how to mine nuggets of possibility from quotidian detritus. I’m talking how to turn a library overdo notice into a short essay. Or how you can, say, leverage negotiating tactics employed when aligning the needs of a client with the aesthetic concerns of a graphic designer into lovely, conflict-ridden dialogue! Maybe the workshop should be renamed: How to step out of your busy life and become God. Hm.

More later…I have to go absorb.