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Coming to you a little later than normal ...



And they call it "No Fry Left Behind"

Trying to piece myself together

The weather has been very summery of late. Abhorrent humidity one day, then pouring rain, then chilly 50s ... it's summer in Michigan and it's only May!

I have been on an equal roller coaster. I feel that I really should just write something and stick with it. No project hopping. But I keep slowing down. I'll figure it out. In the meantime I read this, laughed, and felt not so alone.

Last night I woke up every couple of hours.

At 2:40 a.m. the party moved from inside to outside my apartment. There's chattering, the too loud talking of the drunk, then a fairly sober sounding male voice tells them that they should really move it elsewhere/inside. Some girl starts getting pissed: "All this cause a one guy. We haveta leave cause a one guy." The sober male (a cop maybe?) states, "It was more than one guy, it was a coupla guys."

Then a third voice seems to see reason and tells angry-drunk-girl, "Come on, let's go before he brings the cavalry."

To which she responds, "I don't think he's got enough cavalry. He hasn't got enough cavalry for this." At which point I started wondering if she really knew what the word "cavalry" meant in the original idiom.

They (or someone else) then buzzed my apartment four or five times, at which point they perhaps realized that I was not their friend and I was NOT going to buzz them into the building.

At 4:30 a.m. a domestic-type-dispute woke me up. Some chick had decided to confess to her boyfriend that she'd been sleeping around. Most repeated phrase: "I can't fuckin take this anymore," screamed by him. Mostly she just sobbed. And it really was a child's sob. You know how kids have distinct crying patterns because of how they space out the breathing? Well her sob seemed fairly common to many of the children I've hear wailing but I don't think I've ever heard an adult with a similar pattern. Very annoying.

I'm not certain if this dispute happened on the sidewalk or if I was getting it through the walls of my building. But eventually he stopped screaming "I can't fucking take this!" and started going through a list of names, making her tell him which people she'd slept with.

It was just really bad form all around.

I think they might have made up but by 5 a.m. I was back asleep.

6:30 a.m. the cat threw up and finally I had to get out of bed.

I don't feel bad about my neighbors and their problems. I don't even feel bad about it waking me up. But I feel awful that the kitten got sick. Part of me is certain this is because of something I did or didn't do. Why should she suffer? It's not like she's the one sleeping around.

Harshing

I was feeling so chill. I was really buying into this whole Artist's Way thing. I started a new story with no idea of where it was going to go or how long it was going to be. I'd start writing each night with only the vaguest notion of what was going to happen next -- and really that's all you need -- and I was quite happy to sit and type with the notion that if I provided the words in quantity the rest would take care of itself.

I had "opened myself to the possibilities."

And right when I was getting mellow people wanna start harshing on my buzz.

Economic situation in Michigan = poor
therefore
economy + bureaucratic administration + writing program = OH SHIT

Now I'm concerned. Perhaps unduly so. Perhaps with reason. I really can't say any more.

Supreme Court Nominee Named!

Crazymakers

In the second "week" of The Artist's Way, Julia Cameron spends quite a bit of time discussing CRAZYMAKERS, how to identify them, why we have them in our lives, and firmly planting the idea in our minds that we need to rid ourselves of them.

Simply put, CRAZYMAKERS are drama kings and queens. Although that definition may be too simple. They're drama queens combined with school yard bullies; people who cause drama to elevate themselves and keep you subservient and uncreative.

I'm happy to say that I got rid of the last few CRAZYMAKERS in my life near the end of 2007 and that I've let no more back in. That feels pretty damn good.

Morning Pages

Every so often you hear writers, artists, and people in general talk about "morning pages" like it's a term everyone should know like "metaphor" or "poem." To me, the use of the phrase "morning pages" in conversation was a verbal signifier of subscription to a granola zen-like writing-type-thing.

Well, bring out the granola 'cause I'm on the zen boat.

I've been reading Writing Down the Bones for the past ten months. It's snippets of advice and suggestion and anecdote are never longer than a few pages long but I find I can't sit and read through more than two before putting the book down. I needed to up the ante. I needed a new writing regime and I needed it to ask a lot of me. I knew, vaguely, of The Artist's Way because I'd read/skimmed The Writer's Diet while spending long hours in a bookstore last year. The author frequently referred to her first book The Artist's Way and basically said that many of the people who successfully completed her twelve week workshops not only "unblocked" their creative selves, they found what was wrong in their lives -- what was "blocking" their happiness. And, happiness found, they lost a shit-ton of weight.

Whatever! I said and left the store. Wrote a blog about it. And never forgot.

So I've was searching bookstores -- unsuccessfully -- for a copy when it dawned on me to check the university library (there are three copies). And it so happens that the university let me check this book out for three months (no idea why) and it's a 12 week program. Sounds fated, doesn't it?

So here I am one week in. I'm doing it. Writing my morning pages ... not quite as stream of consciousness as they should be. They tend to take me an hour when they should take only 30 minutes, but they still feel good.

I'm hoping that this poor man's therapy will help because I find myself not writing these past few months. No new ideas. No work on old ideas. No editing of half-baked ideas. Sure, I'll open a word document, change a couple of phrasings, get frustrated and close the thing, but that's not helpful, nor is it forward progress.

Ad of the Week

NPR ran a short segment on this ad campaign, basically that it was "creepy." I have a feeling they read the campaign before the saw the ad because, frankly, I see a lot creepier things on a daily basis on TV and those things don't get their own 5 min on NPR.

This is also the corner stone for our linguistics group project on the language of food advertising.

ACCEPTED!

Last night, I drove to my father's house for a last minute visit. I got in and my father greeted me, asked how the drive was, told me where my pile of mail was, asked what I'd like for dinner.

I went to the pile of mail and there was a large envelope from some university in Iowa. Dad said he wasn't sure if he should have kept it and I joked that it was probably an advertisement from a law school (yep, they're still sending me those). Instead I opened it up to find nice quality paper with a letter that began Dear Eileen, we would very much like to publish ...

Eeeeeeee!

There's no date for publication yet, but North American Review wants to publish a poem of mine sometime in the near future! *squeal!*

This particular poem had been out for so long (over ten months) that I assumed the magazine had rejected it (and its packet of friends) without even dropping my SASE back in the mail to let me know the gig was up. It appears I should have been more patient.

I'd come to assume that my first publishing credit was going to come from online newbies that paid only in karma*, so acceptance from someplace like North American Review is really flooring.

*more squealing* Eeeeeee!

(*Not that I'm going to stop submitting to those journals or hoping that I get published in them, just saying this is pretty damn cool.)

So this is fascinating

I came across an interview with first time author Rief Larsen at the Border's Website. I started watching because it claimed not just be a straight novel but to have all these sketches and diagrams done in the margins of the novel making it both the author's and the kid's notebook. (The kid, btw, is the main character.)

He's also done something interestingly innovative with his website for the book www.tsspivet.com.

The novel -- I just realized I never stated a name for it -- is The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet and it's set primarily in Montana.

Could be interesting. If nothing else, in segment five of his interview Reif discusses his notion of the web and writing and how the book and the website interact. That is a happy, upbeat theory (insightful too) of how all this stuff works together in the modern world.

Obsessed

I've become obsessed with this linguistics approach to literary criticism. Which is good since I have to teach/present today and turn in a project very shortly after that; I don't have time to "warm up" to a slight interest.

My group is looking at advertisements for food items as well as "food writing" in nationally distributed magazines. (No recipes, just essays, etc.) Particularly, we're hoping to find statistical data to back up the idea that we mix up food and sex language all the time.

This is a huge undertaking -- or it should be to get useful, telling data. So it's a great thing that this midterm project only requires us to do the prep work (pose the question, read relevant research, write a proposal). It does not require us to do all the leg work. Sweet!

Back to working on that presentation now.

Between Panic and Desire

This weekend I finished Dinty W. Moore's Between Panic and Desire (2008, University of Nebraska Press). Loved it. The term he uses for it is "cultural memoir" and, to an extent, it is. But it's also just a collection of insanely witty essays (employing many forms or genres of writing along the way) held together by the search for father-identity, drugs, music and Nixon. And it's the only memoir-type-thing I've read all the way through in a long time.

I still want to call it a collection of essays rather than a memoir -- most of the sections are 3-5 pages in length, have independent structures and themes and (my fave) frequently abuse other forms of writing to their advantage. There's also only minimal chronology between each of the pieces. If you put the book down and come back to it in a week or a month, there is no need to reread all that stuff you only vaguely remember; if it's important, Moore will reiterate what the hell he's talking about. Thumbs up for that.

And how can you not love a memoir-type-thing that closes the first part (there are three in the whole book) with a quiz. Two multiple choice questions, four true/false and one short essay. All insanely easy if you have indeed read the thirty-two pages prior.

The quiz is one of the forms of writing I previously mentioned. (If I were to explain it to my composition students I would call them "genres" and then I would sigh lovingly over how easy Moore makes it look to stuff "odd" content into traditional forms, like ---, and then grit my teeth and try to explain to my students that yes, they can stretch their imaginations and create a full page resume for being an invalid, or dog owner, or girlfriend, or car accident victim without lying about what has happened to them.)

Some of the well-abused forms in Btwn Panic and Desire include an A to Z list of father figures (annotated), a screenplay, a presidential timeline, an Aldous Huxley quote annotated line by line (that may sound so cerebral that it turns you off but, really, it's readable and kind of magical), a coroner's report, and a segmented essay titled "Number Nine" in which each segment is numbered. Almost all of the segments are numbered 9 with no ascending or descending numbers following.

"Number Nine" I found before I found the collection; it had been published in the back copy of The Pinch which I purchased on a whim while at the AWP conference (they had a plastic flamingo at their booth: I had to stop and buy something). The essay leads the edition and it totally screwed with my head then dropped me back on my feet -- content-wise. Form-wise, I'm still smiling.

Uber-cool Paper Products (and discount)

As blogged before, I am a big, big big fan of moo.com and all the fabulous Moo printing services. Last summer, after a recommendation from a poet I met at the Kenyon workshop, I got these kickass business cards to go with my website.


Moo promotes themselves as being great for small, funky businesses (because they let you personalize -- as in 100 business cards with up to 100 different designs!) but they're also cool if you're doing an event like a baby shower or wedding. What could be easier than making business cards (that don't look like business cards) with the happy couple's actual picture on it along with the address?

Why am I bothering to do all this "selling"? Because I (1) I think it's frickin sweet and want to see more stuff this pretty out in the world and (2) have a freebie code for you:

Simply share your unique 'referral' code: 9J6SH3 with a friend who's never bought from MOO before, and they'll get a 20% discount off any 1 MOO product. Good through May 29.

Have fun with it. I know I would, but then again, I'm addicted to paper products. :)

Research

My linguistics class is proving to be research -- or at least "search" -- heavy. Two projects, a midterm and final, are standard, but given that they're done over eight weeks not fifteen the load seems much more intense.

My group does not yet have a specific linguistic question to pose for our midterm (the midterm is just about posing the questing and doing the appropriate outside scholarly reading rather than answering the question--that's for the final) but we are considering the language of food writing. Particularly the sensuality/sexuality of food writing.

Well, the group has not yet settled on it, but I admit that I'm leaning toward it (and so's the prof) since I admitted that a recent writing obsession of mine has been conflating food and sex. It's blatant in "Cuttin Wood" my little red riding hood poem and a bit more subtle in my short story "Cake" probably because "Cake" is about pregnancy not the sex act itself and -- at least for my generation -- sex and pregnancy are thought about as separate entities. That seems to go against common sense, but it's true. Has it always been that way? Or is this a way of thinking based on readily available and fairly reliable birth control?

Anyway.

All this research has lead me to scholarly articles on linguistics, items with titles such as "Naming of Parts: Gender, Culture and Terms for the Penis Among American College Students." It's a 15 page scholarly (read: grant funded) statement of research. And then there's the article about how we conflate food language and sex language and we're really all just cannibals. Oddly enough, it made sense.

Outta This World

HOLY SHIT! (it was a toss up whether this or the pun would be used as the post title; obviously, the pun won)

If you follow news you know that there was a shuttle launch this week and they're on their way to the Hubble telescope to do seven years of maintenance in one trip (yeah, sure).

What you might not know is that you can follow the astronauts on twitter.

From space.

No shit: He tweets from outer space.

Screw feeling superior because you have BlackBerry access to your email. I'm not worthy!

(follow: Astro_Mike)

I think this settles it: I'm gonna do a space race/first man on the moon project in my writing class next fall. It'll go with my pop culture/Americana theme. I think I have to. Consider this: my grandmother died believing man had never set foot on the moon, that it was all an elaborate Hollywood-style government made publicity stunt. From that ... to an astronaut that twitters ... yeah, that's worth talking about.

I Think

I think. I need to go on a novel reading binge.

Maybe I should call it a bender. I'll get back to you in a bit.

Ad of the Week

The above is part of the ad campaign for a video game. Who thinks of this stuff? You know how genius boarders on crazy? ... Yeah.

Stolen Memery

(from Jud)

1. What are your current obsessions? Good question. a writer should never be without an obsession. For a while it was "family story" -- you know, those stories that your family repeats again and again at the kitchen table when they get together. Lately I think it's been academic citation and how I can help/teach it in student work. It's a dull obsession.

2. Which item from your wardrobe do you wear most often? flip flops -- 2 for $5 at Old Navy ... mine are gray, and navy.

3. Last dream you had? Well I know I dreamed the night before last but I guess this is my most recent remembered dream.

4. Last thing you bought? Groceries. Hello diet Dr. Pepper sale!

5. What are you listening to? Katy Perry, "I Kissed a Girl"

6. If you were a god/goddess who would you be? Athena -- love that shit

7. Favorite holiday spots? um ... Disney World really is fucking-magical. Other than that every "holiday" I've ever been on has involved too much stress to be "special" that it disappointed, or felt like more work than staying home. On that note, spending a week in June at Kenyon College is pretty damn magical even if it doesn't involve dancing mice.

8. Reading right now? Dinty Moore's cultural memoir Between Panic & Desire, about to start Dennis Johnson's Jesus' Son collection of short stories.

9. Four words to describe yourself. Dreamer. Creative. Reclusive. Uppity.

10. Guilty pleasure? Slutty romance novels and "Rock of Love" (and other bad reality TV like "The Bachlorette") although in searching out that link I just discovered that I had missed yet another season of "Rock of Love" so maybe I'm not as addicted to bad pop culture as I thought.

11. Who or what makes you laugh until you’re weak? Things that truly startle me. The things that really make me laugh aloud are those which take me by surprise.

12. Favorite spring thing to do? Reading novels. Wait ... maybe sitting with a purring kitten.

13. When you die, what would you like people to say about you at your funeral? I want them to tell funny stories about our times together.

14. Last thing you drank? White wine to go with my cheap dinner.

15. When did you last go for a night out? Well I've been out to bars and house parties in the past few months, but I think the last time I seriously took on the night life scene was last Memorial Day weekend in Fort Worth, Texas. Yes ma'am, Rochelle that was all your doing. You will be missed at this Year's MDW.

16. What album did you get a copy of most recently? Album? As in the physical item? I haven't bought one of those in a long time. I was checking out 90s alternative music from the library last summer and ripping it to my hard drive. Dishwalla, Stone Temple Pilots and Oasis ("don't look back in anger" is fucking sweet even now). The last full album I downloaded was Collective Soul's Afterwards. That said, I picked up some sweet (then) free music from AG Silver -- worth checking out if you're into the new scene of alternative music, especially "Now or Never." Can you tell I have a certain passion for music? Maybe I should be looking into radio station internships.

17. Care to share some wisdom? Don't eat yellow snow.

I feel like if I saw a memoir with the above as a title I would buy it without reading the back cover.

18. Song you can’t get out of your head? "Ocean" by Blue October.

19. Thing you are looking forward to? MDW with my sorority sisters, Kenyon Workshop, finishing a novel.

20. Which disease or condition would you most like to see eradicated? Cancer. That covers a lot of bases.

21. What is your most irrational fear? being shot

22. Who are your favorite comedians? Stephen Colbert, John Stewart.

23. Name a "social grace" pet peeve of yours: When someone says "How ya doing?" and they really mean "Hello" -- I stop to answer the question and they've already moved on. Grrr.

Rules of the game. Respond and rework. Answer questions on your own blog. Replace one question. Add one question. Tag 6 people.

Consider yourself tagged: Aquarius, Margosita, Jolie, JES, Kat, Tonya.

It's spring. It has to be.

Today I looked across the street and realized that the bare trees I've been staring at for five months aren't bare: they're covered in tiny green leaves.

My nose has been telling me that spring was underway for several weeks now, but the leaves are a more certain sign.



Just over three months ago the same street was covered in snow. Lots and lots of snow. I went back to dig out this photo and that's when I realized that I'm about to start my fourth season in Kalamazoo.



I've been here through the fall when the trees changed colors one fiery blaze at a time.



And I've been here in the hot green summer (just barely).

Odyssey

As the odyssey to get published continues on into yet another month and my ship goes further from land with no known destination in sight, I read this from Thomas E. Kennedy's essay on Glimmer Train's website:

[B]ack when I had only published two or three stories, although I had been at it for years, when someone asked me what I did, I felt funny claiming to be a writer. Did I really have to identify myself with the office job that paid my bills even though I considered writing the most important thing I did?

I asked a former teacher, now friend, Gordon Weaver, who had published a dozen books, at what point he felt comfortable saying he was a writer. His answer was something I wrote behind my ear, an important statement that I share with my students to this day: "A writer is someone who writes. A serious writer is someone for whom writing is the most serious activity he or she knows. The amount of publication, money, fame you might get—these are extra-literary factors." With those words, I felt I could call myself a writer.

He goes on to quote Rilke's advice in Letters to a Young Poet -- advice that got me here to begin with -- "Rilke wrote to his young poet that he had to look into his heart and ask himself, Must I write? If your answer is yes, then that matter is settled. But if your answer is no, you have also gained important self-knowledge. If you can quit, you probably should seriously consider doing so."

No, I'm not quitting. In fact, I'm not even feeling distraught enough to consider it, I'm just plodding along -- or paddling along if you'd like to keep with the sailing metaphor I started at the beginning of the post. Earlier this week I mailed out another half dozen submissions, some snail mail some electronic. I'm anxious to find that first break but patient.

Until then I'm doing that thing which makes me a writer: I'm writing. My projects at the moment are much more "commercial" in nature, but writing is writing. And as more and more authors make a living stratling several "worlds" of publishing (literary and commercial) I have almost no qualms about doing the same myself. I know some may still balk, but this is a strange new state of mind for me: a year ago I feared not being able to write the "fun" stuff along with the "art" stuff. Now I'm a whole lot less skeptical about mixing the two. Even if they don't mix perfectly, we need things in the world that don't mix perfectly; however else would we get salad dressing?

Start of Summer Semester

Around here there's no winter semester but two summer semesters. Don't try to figure it out, just accept it as I have. On Monday I began coursework for Summer I, and I'm still debating if I want to attempt Summer II.

With semester came the return of the migraine. And here I thought I was going to have a nice, easy semester.

The tension induced headache probably comes from sleeping funny (I've switched beds several times now that I've been back and forth from my family's house), settling back into yoga-ball-as-desk-chair and generally stressing out about money.

Go figure. Money. What everyone is stressing out about right now.

I should really be out seeking part-time menial employment but these headaches are keeping me in the house. The part of me that does not want to spend time scrubbing counters or folding slacks (again) wonders if a combination of tiny freelance gigs and selling plasma will keep me afloat until I can teach again. On that note I need to do like many a Michigander and trek down to my local jewelry store to sell some outdated gold jewelry. Sheesh. I'm so high class right now.

The summer course is on Linguistics. Linguistics appears to be its own freaky little world with theories that might undo all the good writerly habits I've picked up this past semester. But more on that later.

Ad of the Week

Check out the shot of the pizza dough tossing guy reflected in the woman's iris. That's sweet.

Obnoxiously Cute

I think "cute" is a good way to start out the month.