show me where it says that

I've had my current Samsung cell phone for nearly 6 months, so naturally, it's broken. Or nearly, anyway. Actually, it's in great shape if I don't want whoever's on the other end to hear what I'm saying. So I did what I always do when one of my family plan cell phones break. I played upgrade leapfrog on my $225 a month AT&T plan which includes my phone number as well as Sam's and Maggie's.

I wanted a BlackBerry. That was my first mistake. Well, no, actually, going to Radio Shack would have been mistake numero uno. "I want to upgrade to a BlackBerry Pearl," I told the customer service man at the RadioShack. Chelsea Cain has a BlackBerry Pearl, and she'd shown me the features and explained how easy the user interface is, and because I have a bit of the dreaded late adopter stupidness going on, easy user interfaces are crucial.

The customer service man was friendly enough. Especially while engrossed in a nonstop conversation with his colleagues who all seemed to be experiencing a lull in their need to provide service. Halfway through his servicing of me, he slid out the most noxious SBD ever. That really grossed me out, especially because at the time I was leaning over the counter to correct the zipcode error he'd affixed to my address.

After 45 minutes or so, my free BlackBerry was ordered, and supposedly I would receive it in one business day. All I had to do was pay a $25 activation fee and sign up for another 2 years with AT&T. I mean Cingular. No, wait, make that AT&T.

A queue of emails awaited me once back at my computer:

1. Congratulations, your new BlackBerry is on its way!
   
2. Here's the tracking info on trackmyphone.com where information on your BlackBerry awaits!
   
3. Aw, too bad, your phone number is not eligible for an upgrade. You get shit.
   

So I studied the paperwork with the guy's sign-in information and noticed that the young man with the horrible gas had pushed the wrong button at the end of our time together and disallowed my eligibility. Perhaps due to my carbon monoxide/methane poisoned state, I hadn't noticed. My next mistake was to try and fix this myself, online. Which I thought I did, because the Congratulations! emails began anew and two days later a FedEx truck pulled up with my brand new BlackBerry inside.

I unpacked the phone, I put in my chip, and, voila, everything worked. I was quite happy. Until I got the $170 bill for my NEW phone service from AT&T. So I called AT&T and asked them who authorized this new service with a 333 prefix sitting benext to the part that said I needed to pay 170 extra dollars, above and beyond my usual family plan of $225. A clusterfuck ensued. It involved a long conversation and a subsequent phone call to the third party "equipment" people at somethingorotherwire.com. That didn't go well either. I felt a tad racist asking the offshore Customer Service guy to repeat his name and the name of his company five times. And even more racist when I asked him to slow down and enunciate.

My friend Laura coined these halls-and-mirrors phone calls "Show me where it says that" calls, after one particular testy bill dispute call with AT&T in which she was asking them to reveal where in the contract it says "only to other AT&T" customers after the "unlimited texting" option she checked off when adding her teenaged son to the plan.

The upshot is this: I have a BlackBerry phone. I have the chip from my regular plan's phone number. I have a plan--my original plan, not stretched into another two years of crappy service. But AT&T is now telling me that I must somehow return the BlackBerry in its original packaging to the third party vendor who was unable, when I called him, to reveal the address to which I was to send said "equipment." I must return the 3^rd party BlackBerry so I can then buy a new BlackBerry from AT&T for $25 (which, they tell me, is a special deal), re-sign up for an extended term on my plan, and then they can set me up with the inflated BlackBerry service on my original plan.

I don't think so. I think I'll keep the phone, and the chip, and the regular already inflated service I have with them. Who needs a phone that issues email, anyway. I really just wanted the cool little tracking ball and a better phone camera. Which I now have. Let them call me if they want something. I'll leave a greeting that says, "If you want to speak to Suzy, please press…" and then not give them the call to action number. Maybe I'll even ask them to take part in a customer service survey after they speak with me, for quality assurance purposes.

sugar high

Okay, I admit it…I'm a closet sweetened condensed milk eater. I'm not so sure I'd call it comfort food. It's more like neurosis food. When I'm super busy and preoccupied and don't breathe right or stay in the moment or inhabit my body as I'm flying through my day, I get a powerful sweet tooth. That fancy cow with the necklace of daisies on the little tin can. That's all I want.

Here's a kickass treat:

Take the leftover coffee from your morning carafe, heat a tablespoon of condensed milk in the microwave for 12 seconds, and then stir it into the coffee. Add three ice cubes—or, better yet, add a heaping scoop (or three) of Sharon's All Natural Coconut Sorbet.

So, so good. Yum!

Can you tell my boyfriend's out of town?

Okay. So tonight I'm going to write the chapter about the rhesus macaques and their mating rituals and somehow metaphorically tie it into Frances's relationship with her philandering feng shui practitioner husband. Or maybe I'll finish that short story that I'm supposed to have sent to Kevin Sampsell already for the Portland Noir anthology.

Maybe I'll pull an all-nighter, like back in my college days.

I need more coffee and condensed milk!

could I be any busier?

Wow, it's been awhile. Here's what I'm up to:

1. Researching the sexual idiosyncrasies of rhesus macaques
   
2. Resisting the next scene in my novel (which will include specs from the above)
   
3. Working in my yard (Chuck reminded me that I've always considered yardwork as 'writing time')
   
4. Fixing up my website (check out the services section of suzy vitello dot com )
   

On the day job front, I'm writing text for a telecom company, an IT company, a salad toppings company, a Friends of the Library org, an environmental trust, a yoga studio, a Pilates studio, as well as occasional editing jobs that have been trickling my way.

Tasks big and small: have a ginormous French drain trench in my back yard with plans to make flagstone-paths over it, tomorrow is the "laurel hedge trim," an annual event with the neighbors that involves shaving three feet off of our zealously fecund dividing bush, Kirk goes to bio camp on the McKenzie tomorrow for two five-day stints, my daughters stolen-recovered car has been fixed and sterilized, my son's oil-burner still sits at the shop unable to start, I have to mow the lawn.

On the physical location front, an extremely cool thing happened yesterday (besides that it happened to be my SO's birthday AND the summer solstice): long-time writing pal and gallery owner Erin Leonard is going to rent me an office in her new gallery in NW Portland! I couldn't have lucked out more, given that Laura is moving out-of-state. We'll be able to continue to base our business in Portland, and I will have access to a very affordable work space and a conference room right down the street from where I currently hang a shingle!

In other news—getting geared up for Bread Loaf in August (okay, okay, shouldn't that mean I'm pumping out pages???), Carson comes back from the desert tomorrow, my sister is coming to visit at the end of the week, we're doing a sibling road trip down to mom's in San Diego (complete with Sea World and Disneyland stops), and Kirk and his son are in the final month of training for the World Championship Dragon Boat races in Malaysia.

Oh, and btw, I just got a BlackBerry and I'm drowning in its learning curve. I thought these phones were supposed to be smart! Is it time for bed yet?

the suicide squeeze of motherhood

This last week has been murder. The best way to describe it is in baseball terms. Kirk explained to me last night what a suicide squeeze is—when a player on third base has to count on his legs, and the perfection of his teammate's sacrifice bunt to get him home. Apparently the Mariners did something like this yesterday in the 10^th inning and it paid off. The thing about a successful suicide squeeze is that is depends largely on factors beyond one's control.

Right now, I feel very much like someone on third base with high stakes and lots riding on my potential sprint towards home. All I want to do is go back to my dugout with a big smile on my face, but there's a lot of screaming and yelling and people counting on me executing my next move flawlessly. Or so I project.

This week both of my kids' cars were involved in some sort of crisis and/or brokenness. My son's car blew a seal inviting oil to coat his engine, while my daughter's car got stolen, inviting a merry band of drug addicts to use it as an ashtray. My phone cuts out for no reason. I think I have a fever. I have a pile of bills a mile high. My business partner is moving away. I think I may have gotten salmonella from the bad tomatoes that found their way to the produce shelves. My little boy has had hiccups all afternoon. Is that something I should be concerned about?

I'm down to one working light bulb in a light fixture I hate. I need a new blade on my lawn mower. My car picked up a screw and a weird light went on on my dash (thank God for Les Schwab). I've been popping ibuprofen all day. Isn't that bad for my liver? I'm supposed to pose in a tank top tomorrow for a summer catalog and it's barely 56 degrees out. My cat is drooling on me. My little boy is playing an annoying game on his DS next to me here in bed. Today was his last day of school. What are the symptoms of salmonella poisoning? I had to take gross junkie paraphernalia out of my daughter's car because she was freaking out. I paid the impound lot $175 to get the stolen, dented, stinky car back. I'm pretty sure I have a fever.

I took my son's car to the guy who fixed it last time, he charged me $257 and then it wouldn't start, so I took my daughter's stinky car with shards of broken cd all around the floorboards back to my home, and then to the other fixit shop this morning, and then I took the bus home. Which was good. Reducing my carbon footprint and all that. I took my son and his friend to the skatepark after school today to celebrate their last day of school. It actually didn't rain until we were done. Another good thing. My daughter came over (on the bus) to forage through some art supplies to try and recreate a project that was stolen along with her car (a list of items that includes her $400 glasses, her team's rugby uniforms and her asthma meds, etc). My little son still has the hiccups. My big son got kicked in the head last weekend in a soccer game and was dizzy for 48 hours. His car is still broken and at the first fixit shop. I'm exhausted.

But. I just sent my manuscript excerpt to Bread Loaf. I'm going to Bread Loaf in August! I hope I'm over my salmonella poisoning by then.

the dangers of working from home

I have now dragged my finger through the frosting of those ginormous, leftover from our Memorial Weekend BBQ, Costco cupcakes three times. I've microwaved the same cup of coffee a half dozen times. I'm still in my bathrobe. It's after 10 in the morning.

A leak in my NW Portland office, and the offending black mold smell that now wafts through it, is keeping me and my laptop at home today. It's not that I'm not productive at home, it's that I'm a different sort of productive. I've back-burnered client work and novel work in favor of, um, this post, and updating my suzyvitello.com website. Not to mention checking in with various online distractions that shall not be named.

But, I did manage to tap out a working synopsis for Secret to Love. I'll slap it up on a further post, after I have another fingerful of icing.

observing our city's bridges on foot

"The Broadway Bridge has the best Suicide Hotline sign. Very readable. Better than, say, the faded Sellwood Bridge sign. It's not as easy to convince yourself to stay alive when you're confronted with a faded pink, barely legible phone number."

Observation by my friend Max, who's been doing a lot of walking of late

eavesdrop of the day: category, chivalry is so dead.

Two young men walking along in NW PDX. One guy says to the other:
"So I go, 'Dude, why don't you come on over,' and she goes, 'Is it public transportational?' Shit man, like we live in the freakin' city, so I go, 'Yeah, we got a bus,' and she goes, 'Will you meet me at the bus stop?' and I'm like, 'fuck that.' "

once a soccer mom...

So yesterday afternoon, in 100 degree weather, I embarked on the 100 mile drive south to U of O to watch my oldest child kick a soccer ball. And, to upgrade his clunker with an older, higher mileage, but safer one. A safer clunker without, I must add, air conditioning.

I had the little guy with me as co-pilot, and after myriad sweaty stoppages in rush hour Friday afternoon I-5 traffic (made worse by the litter of broken down, burnt engine, smoking hood vehicle detritus along the side of the interstate), I arrived at the field in time for the second half of Sam's team's game.

Carson and I lugged the Gatorade-filled cooler to the field and cheered on the Thundercats (a name usurped from the glory days of high school--for a team that included many of the erstwhile team's members--a deeply satisfying terminal soccer mom moment). I missed Sam's first half goals (they won 4-1!), but got there in time to watch him suffer in the heat--squinting, sweating, red-in-the-face. Like many native, or nearly native, Oregonians, Sam's not a big fan of the sun.

We followed the game with a trip to a brew pub for dinner, where I found myself trying to get used to the fact that I have a kid old enough to say, boldly and legally, "I need a beer!"


Watching my two boys side-by-each in the darkened McMenamins tavern it's hard to miss the fraternal look. Both are blond, blue-eyed and fair-skinned. True to phenotype, they both have my half-closed eyes stoner look, but personality-wise they come from opposite poles. Carson ordered a kid's burger with fries (as opposed to tater tots). When his meal came with tots instead he ate half of them, then summoned the waiter, pointed to his plate and said, politely, but firmly, "I think I ordered fries." After which the server scurried off to deliver same.

His make-no-waves elder brother was visibly impressed. Not only would he never have pointed out a mistaken order, he frequently goes out of his way to avoid even the appearance of disappointment. "Dude!" he said to his little brother, and then pirated half the fries.

We finished our repast and then swapped titles, cars, glove box crap (including a pair of rear view mirror breasts), and then I got to fill the old Honda with gas, buy a quart of oil and embark on the 100 miles north. The check engine light went on pretty quick, directly on the heels of the unmistakably foul smell of burning oil. Oh yeah, and the belch of gray smoke coming from the tail pipe. So much for using the air-conditioning I was looking forward to.

I'm not good with stuff like this. I tend to exclaim that I'm freaking out, even though I have a nine-year-old beside me saying, in his best I-statement, "When you say you're freaking out, it makes me feel freaked out."

Visions of the earlier car fire we witnessed filled me with worst-case-scenario dread. I pulled over, bought more oil, and got some attendant guy to muscle off the oil tank cover that was welded on due to excessive heat.

Upon restarting the car there were more smells, more sounds, more plumes of smoke. But no check engine light. We made it back to Portland in tact, and just before midnight.

My fingers still smell like an oil refinery.

It's still really, really hot outside.

I'm so glad I have a brand new Element so when Carson and I go bike-riding and skateboarding and tennis playing later today, we can look forward to interludes of not being freaked out.

Fuckery Fridays

It's a particularly summer-like day in the Pacific Northwest. I suspect it will be hard to focus. I want to play. Laura and I have branded these Fridays "Fuckery Fridays," a sort of nod to Amy Winehouse and her "what kind of fuckery is this" song.

But what we mean by Fuckery Friday is somewhat different than in the done-her-wrong parlance of Ms. Winehouse referencing Her and Mr. Jones. It's not so much, You don't mean dick to me, but more, Let's take a break from the hamster wheel. An invitation to meander over to whatever calls us the loudest. Let's see. I should water the lettuces I planted. And the geraniums, and the hanging basket. And then I should clean the kitchen before it gets too hot. I should take a shower. I should do the crossword puzzle. Oh yeah, and probably, I should WORK!

the curse of context as compensatory device

I have this affliction called alternate extropia. (I have no idea how to spell it, and I'm loath to consult Wikipedia lest I find out stuff I don't want to know.) It boils down to this: I only look out of one eye at a time. Hence, I have zero depth perception. I parallel park by instinct. I have to guess, based on experience of velocity and angle, where the tennis ball is likely to come down.

I remember biology lab, looking at cells through one eye or the other. I never got that 3-D peek at life, up close. The thing that's right in front of me? I'm never sure what it really looks like and where it truly is. But I'm really, really apt at context. Ergo, if you'll take this leap with me, I have a wee bit of trouble staying in the moment. Everything is assessed for its potential for inclusion in the masterpiece, at the expense of its value in and of itself.

This come-to-Jesus weekend I had with Laura…it became clear that we both lament the speed of expectation, the feeling of never being caught up. That to survive, one must multi-task—not just a few things at a time, but everything. One must carry upon oneself, at any point in time, all the things of a given day. A masterpiece on our backs, laden with heavy frame and thick oil paint and the musty odor of the ages. That's the myth, anyway.

I feel as though I have to actively practice an antidote to this madness. Dismiss the intrusion of context. Practice multi-tasking with just two things, instead of seventeen. Sort of like weaning myself off of coffee by mixing in the decaf portion by portion. Like now. I'm writing, listening to Lucinda Williams. Two things. No checking e-mail, no lining up the client work, no mowing the lawn, starting the laundry, scrubbing last night's salsa from the kitchen floor.

Going back to the eye affliction. When I was eight years old, a scary eye doctor made me wear a patch over one eye and look through prisms in an attempt to cure me. He was trying to get my individual eyes to strengthen so they wouldn't take turns checking out when they were part of a team. Alas, it didn't work. But maybe I can revisit that experiment with other parts of me—see if the parts can be strengthened in and of themselves by detaching from context for a while.

mother's day

Yesterday, Mother's Day, marked the end of our retreat, and, as Laura pointed out at brunch, "The first day of what's left of the rest of our lives."

This sentiment was repeated later in the afternoon, at the 4^th Annual Mothers Need Cocktails Party at Sheri Blue's house. Mothers gathered around the pear vodka and organic herb-infused mixers lamenting inertia and job dissatisfaction. "A toast to who the fuck knows what!"

As daughters of Mothers who may or may not have been Joni Mitchell Ladies of the Canyon types, or Joan Crawford highball types or, even, Joan Fontaine exotically depressed types, a lot of us, gals ranging in age from late thirties to early fifties, are feeling discontented and confused.

Our world-weary intuitive powers have been churned to death. We're overly competent, but shy to take what we want—lest we be branded, ala Hillary, power-hungry she-men. We're sick of being teachers, administrative side-kicks and support professionals. Some of us just want to be there for our kids when they come home from school, and be taken care of, financially, by spouses. Spend our days creating that lovely oasis, or painting, or writing or plucking weeds from the flower bed. Truly be, as Laura put it, CEOs of our families.

Then there are those of us who are still not giving up on the "save the world" dream. As long as it can be done part time. The entrepreneurial spirit is illusive. The idea of creating a new business sounds exciting, but largely overwhelming. The concept of the "life coach" is spreading like cover crop, with middle-aged women hanging shingles announcing that they have the secret formula to help other middle-aged women change their lives. A sisterhood of experts in professional coffee klatching.

All of us at the cocktail party, we're starting to be old enough to see kids we used to teach in the working world—engaging in messy relationships, unwanted pregnancies and Svengali bosses. We don't want to welcome young people we knew as children to be our peers, but, hey, who else is going to explain to us what "tagging" a photo in Facebook is.

tip of the weekend

"You go down to Newport with your pots in August. Tear up a raw chicken. Put a little motor oil on it. The crabs can't resist it."

-from a waiter at the Lincoln City Mo's Chowder who doesn't condone this crabbing practice 'cause he's an environmental sorta guy.

monkey mind

blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah the sun was out today.

disaster as muse

I'm beginning to rely on narrative entropy to get The Secret to Love bouncing along the trail toward completion. As I ponder the verticality of my main character and her merry band of screwed up relatives, my natural tendency is to have her in that, as Steve Almond calls it, "man alone in a room," conundrum. I love delving into her motivations and ruminations as she bumbles along. Unpacking her deep scars with backstory.

But, alas, I'm having to trade some of that in. It's sort of like when I helped my ex-husband fix up and resell houses. I got into painting "effects". Sponge, rag, glaze. Stencils, sometimes. Sometimes checkerboard. Once, I painted with milk. The process of "treatment painting" fulfilled some sort of need for imposing design-graffiti on these houses that were so briefly mine. Okay, maybe with the stinky milk paint it was more akin to pissing on the fence posts.

At some point I realized that simply rolling out a room with whatever mistint was on sale at Miller was the more efficient way to go about preparing a house for the fast sell. And then, I lost the taste for ragged and sponged walls entirely. After that, each time I stepped into a room festooned with "treatment paint," the complexities and patterning and nuanced shapes embedded in the look became altogether too tedious to ponder.

And so it is with narrative.

Now, don't get me wrong, I will always be a fan of vertical characterization, to an extent. But, I've grown eager to see characters behave and react. Thus the onslaught of disaster in Secret to Love.

In part two of the book, there's an icy night on the eve of a major development. The next chapter (day), I was just going to get on with the forecasted event itself, when I realized I had set up an opportunity for a big messy situation—a tree cracking from ice and falling into the character's house. A lovely disaster, actually, near enough to Christmas and a big family gathering to set up more texture and torment and bad behavior amongst the characters.

I've left my day's writing mid-disaster, hoping that my puerile interest in messes re-ignites the muse tomorrow.

Farewell, Peter Christopher

"From the darkness, a bird's whistle rouses him."

That's the opening sentence of Flight, a lovely story by Peter Christopher, who died last Tuesday of cancer. I only met Pete on two occasions. Once, he was my teacher—the revered friend of my mentor, Tom Spanbauer. He and Tom team-taught a writing workshop at Haystack back in 1992 I think it was. Us Dangerous Writing disciples had heard all about Peter from Tom. He'd share letters from him at the Thursday night workshop nights, and all of us not-yet-published students were tickled, in a sort of star-fucker way, that we got to hear personal correspondence from the desks of these famous guys. Two real writers who had books in bookstores and inside jokes about Gordon Lish and Columbia and all sorts of literati scuttle-butt. So when Peter came out to teach a week with Tom, it was like the Stones and the Grateful Dead and we all had front row seats.

The second time I met Peter, he had just married one of the Dangerous Writing devotees, Carolyn Altman. There' some love triangle dish about Tom and Peter and Carolyn that I don't know the details about, but what I do know is, Carolyn and Peter took off for the East Coast, and stopped speaking with Tom and that there was a sadness whenever Peter's name came up.

I heard that Peter Christopher died when I attended Tom's 20th Anniversary of Faraway Places reading last week. It was, what Tom (and the French) would call, the sous-conversation of the evening. A whisper through the crowd. Tom addressed his friend's death at the reading, fresh as it was. He dedicated the reading to Peter, and sort of choked up, and it was a bit like those Thursday nights and the letters, but without the laughs and the starry-eyed envy.

Peter told me that first time I met him that he kept spitting out stories, writing at a fast and frenzied pace, because he suspected that he would die before he could get it all out on paper.

And, as if via objective correlative, the last line of Peter's story, Flight goes, "From that height, he sees the woman and the child walking together under the far trees, their slipping away from him as his own life has--and that is the moment he lets go, throwing himself higher, farther, into the light that will burn him clean."

God bless you, Peter Christopher.

prodigal daughter

Just completed a whirlwind trip home for my father's 70^th bday. I get back there (Warwick, NY—a smallish upstate town) every year or so, and with each passing visit I feel a diminished claim. There is, of course, the idyll. Warwick is beautiful in that pastoral, rolling hills way. But I feel no kindred connection to the populous. Aside from my family and an ever decreasing pool of friends there, the townsfolk seem displaced to me. As if they were newly minted plastic figures set out on my father's boyhood train set. The Brooklyn accents, the suburban mannerisms and pushiness—it all feels odd and wrong and not how I remember it.

I fielded the usual queries: will you always live in oray-GHAN? Do you think your kids will ever move back East? Don't you miss Warwick???

Steeped in the nostalgia brought on from a father's significant birthday, we rolled up to the high edge of the cemetery, where my grandfather is buried and where his wife's name and birthdate awaits the final inscription (she's nearly 96 and in a nursing home). I had not been to "the grave" in years, though I think of my Opa often. Much to my surprise, I noticed a flaw in the epitaph punctuation. Apparently nobody ever proofed the tombstone. I felt snotty and mean bringing up the mistake (an apostrophe in the possessive its), but I couldn't help myself. It sort of sealed the deal for me, this little thing. As if something like this could never happen in the much-hipper city in which I reside.

Warwick is a lovely town. Though provincial and quaint and full now of transplants, I couldn't have picked a better place to wander through adolescence. It's just that I realize now my ruby red slippers are appointed with moss, fern bits and mud instead of oak leaves and lightning bugs. I'm in the Newark airport Marriott at the moment, decompressing and about to suck down a vodka and cranberry from the bar. I'll toast to the East Coast, but I can't wait to see my snow-capped peaks, lie in my native Oregonian boyfriend's embrace, and wake up to the sound of rain plinking my gutters.

clearing the clutter of things and pages

This weekend I cleared a path. In feng shui terms, I invited my chi back in. I'm not exactly finished. If my chi were arriving via jet, it is somewhere between the Portland airport and here. For me, very few tasks invite this level of navel-gazing quite as enthusiastically as sorting through my terrestrial stock. I rifle, examine, sigh, move boxes around, lie on my bed, sometimes weep, sometimes laugh, sometimes entertain road-not-taken scenarios. It's emotional tedium that knows no parallel.

I started with my closet. I held a tattered vintage silk blouse in my grip for something like 18 minutes, imagining the possible blazers I could still wear it under without the rust stains or rips showing. I once took this blouse to a drycleaners hoping they could mend and de-filth it, and the normally poker-faced Asian woman bowled over in mirth. Eventually I gathered half my clothes and jettisoned them to the storage area. Another third got crammed into plastic Goodwill sacks. (Much to my delight, Turbo Tax has an index that allows you to write off thousands of dollars worth of donated clothing).

The Spring Cleaning dominoed itself throughout. My closet, Carson's closet, my "office," the front porch, Carson's room, etc… Before I knew it, my boyfriend was helping me move my crappy plywood desk into Carson's room and, voila, gone is my former "writing space." The little appendix of a room that bulges out from the main part of my bedroom is now all but vacant. I wrote my MFA manuscript in that space. I jammed all my stories and half-finished projects into files and boxes and folders and hard drives in that space. There is so much psychic detritus in that little rectangle I should cut down a sage brush and set it aflame like the Olympic Torch.

Truth is, I haven't written in that space in years. The combination of wi-fi and Carson not needing to be closely supervised from a window has placed me and my work downstairs, at the edge of the dining room table that David Millstone left in my care when he high-tailed it to Houston.

Kirk and I are going to turn my former writing space into a haven. A place to stretch, nap, gaze, breathe, and, you know, whatever. I'm divesting my bedroom of the paper clutter and relieving it of its duty as repository for inert objects. But first, I have to revisit each and every piece of writing—which makes the tedium of sorting clothes look like unfettered frolic. In figuring what to keep, what to recycle, what to sequester, what to burn I spent a good part of today loading boxes, taking the boxes elsewhere to sort, then deciding to reorganize and reapportion said boxes, and then getting so frustrated I just gave up and lay back down on my bed. It's hard to admit that I'm like this. I have no respect for this type of unearned sentimentality. After all, if I really gave a shit about the bronze toad letter holder, why has it been in the bottom of the Turkish tin for six years? And what's up with holding onto every higher education id card I've had since 1979? And do I really need another wind chime? A cracked vase? The broken oval photo frame adorned in the motif of fox hunting? My freakin' dressage helmet? When's the last time I mounted a horse, anyway?

The analysis that goes into painstakingly deciding what to banish forever is halting. It takes time I don't have. But somehow, it feels necessary and luxurious. Like a gathering up of haunches before a big leap.

poetry month

Today I had the pleasure of receiving this e-mailed poem from a colleague (who is also the Director of Wordstock). Enjoy, and READ MORE POETRY this month.

DANCING WITH POETS

"The accident" is what he calls the time

he threw himself from a window four floors up,

breaking his back and both ankles, so that walking

became the direst labor for this man

who takes my hand, invites me to the empty strip of floor

that fronts the instruments, a length of polished wood

the shape of a grave. /Unsuited for this world/ --

his body bears the marks of it, his hand

is tense with effort and with shame, and I shy away

from any audience, but I love to dance, and soon

we find a way to move, drifting apart as each

effects a different ripple across the floor,

a plaid and a stripe to match the solid navy of the band.

And suddenly the band is getting better, so pleased

to have this pair of dancers, since we make evident

the music in the noise -- and the dull pulse

leaps with unexpected riffs and turns, we can hear

how good the keyboard really is, the bright cresting

of another major key as others join us: a strict

block of a man, a formidable cliff of mind, dancing

as if melted, as if unhinged; his partner a gift of brave

elegance to those who watch her dance; and at her elbow,

Berryman back from the bridge, and Frost, relieved

of grievances, Dickinson waltzing there with lavish Keats,

who coughs into a borrowed handkerchief -- all the poets of exile

and despair, unfit for this life, all those who cannot speak

but only sing, all those who cannot walk

who strut and spin until the waiting citizens at the bar,

aloof, judgmental, begin to sway or drum their straws

or hum, leave their seats to crowd the narrow floor

and now we are one body, sweating and foolish,

one body with its clear pathetic grace, not

lifted out of grief but dancing it, transforming

for one night this local bar, before we're turned back out

to our separate selves, to the dangerous streets and houses,

to the overwhelming drone of the living world.

-- Ellen Bryant Voigt

myers-briggs for character development

Whenever I share pages of The Secret to Love, typical feedback about my narrator is that she's removed—somewhat cynical. Ironic. This isn't the first time I've come across this sort of critique of my characters. I like writing from the POV of the ice queen. My mother is an ice queen. At times, I too can be one. It's my alter-ego.

In Myers-Briggs, though, I'm an INFP. That's a healer/idealist if you buy the Keirsey spin on it. Introverted, intuitive, feeling, perceiving. Romantic doormats. Women who love too much. Blah, blah, blah. But that's not who I write about. Who I write about are INTJs, it turns out. At least that's what this online test indicated.

Frances is the quintessential scientist. Rational, scientific, judgmental. And she's married to another INTJ. Why so many INTJs? What's the appeal?

Well, if the process of writing a novel involves following a depth of inquiry, then I must confess that the enigma behind INTJ looms large for me. I have often flirted with the idea of becoming a pragmatist (or as a college roommate once put it, having an interest in having an interest). And at various times of my life I've sought structure to the point of self-alienation—again, it was play-acting.

Following Frances down the garden path, trying to get inside of her, pry her open—it's intriguing. But, here I run into the danger of that old saw, imitative fallacy. Risking writing a "boring story about a boring man." My prose, through this POV, has a tendency to be pedantic and snarky if I'm not careful. It's a rhythm that gets going. Ponderous. Laborious. Sometimes I just want to slap.

The best thing about being an INFP though? We're the goddesses of the Myers-Briggs sectors. And as such, we can shape our characters however we see fit.

here’s a list

Open-heartedness

Clarity

Grace

Adventurousness

Passion

Integrity

Self-awareness

Perseverance

Intuition

Light-heartedness