I’ve been writing a lot about families lately (and by lately, I mean the last few years). The pieces I keep returning to again and again are much more interested in familial relationships than in romantic ones. In rereading these pieces, I’ve found that I frequently use personality mirroring to show their relationships. For instance, despite working to differentiate herself from her mother, the main character in my thesis has consistent traits that come from her mother.

I don’t know whether this is real or not. Probably both real and not real, depending on the situation. But assuming for a moment that it is true that families have certain shared traits (be they genetic or otherwise), I have come up with a list of reasons why I might, then, be adopted.

1. My dad is building an airplane. Not a model airplane. A real fly-through-the-sky airplane. He’s been working on it for a few years and it should be finished sometime in July. I once tried to build a cheap DVD case. There were approximately four steps. I got bored with reading the directions and, consequently, screwed up.

2. My mom doesn’t mind cooking so long as someone tells her what it is she should be making. She hates having (or being invited) to select the dinner menu. I prefer baking, from scratch (no bread machine here!), and one of the best parts of the process is, for me, deciding what to make. Read more »

Yesterday, the soccer team I coach lost eight to one. It might have been nine to one; to be honest, I stopped keeping count at six. It was a tough game, and my team looked off from warmups. I don’t really know why. I don’t think I’m a fantastic coach. Not bad, just not awesome.

The team I coach is fifth grade girls. Most of them are eleven now, but a few are still ten. We have one sixth grader. Our league has tryouts, but we cut only two girls this year. It’s really a rec league. I work hard to make sure the girls get equal playing time, and while I usually let them play the positions they like, I make them try out new ones as well.

We were in first place and undefeated before our game today. My girls may be ten, but they aren’t stupid. They know that the score matters, no matter how much I sometimes wish it didn’t. They were ashamed and sad, and each goal made it worse. After the game, after we shook hands, the other team made a tunnel for my girls to run through, and they chanted B-R-A-V-O bravo! at them. My girls couldn’t meet their eyes. They were embarrassed. Not just because they lost, but because the other team pretended like it didn’t matter, when they all knew it did. If it didn’t, the other coach wouldn’t have screamed at the ref when one of my girls got too free with her elbows (and we got scored on anyway). If it didn’t matter, he wouldn’t have kept his star player in for all but five minutes of the hour-long game. Read more »

And also just because they are cool.

This week the NYC Municipal Archives released over 800,000 photos from its collection of 20th century NYC photos. I’d post some of them here, but there’s a license fee, so click through to enjoy.

Note: Of course I’m not the only one to discover this awesomeness. The online archive is currently down due to overwhelming demand. In the meantime, here’s a site with a bunch of the images.

I’ve talked on here before about how I don’t quite get the concept of place. I theorized, back then, that this was perhaps because I don’t associate myself very strongly with any place—and I never really have. Place, to me, means a room, or a family. My place is where I belong, or where I am. It’s a location rather than a feeling, or a force, or a character. Place has shaped me, I’m sure, but in uninteresting ways. I read authors who deal with place and think, yes, that! Rachel from Bonnie Campbell’s Q Road shows us the power of place, for instance—a place that is a location not far from where I grew up but may as well be as distant as the moon.

I’ve been paying attention to place since that last post—almost a year now—trying to recognize it in places I never before believed it existed. Haslett, Michigan, I still contend, is the antithesis of place, or perhaps the place place goes to die—it exists, but not in our hearts or souls. I spent an evening at my old high school lately for a talent show my dad helped orchestrate, and though I sat at the same tables I ate lunch at for four years, in the same chairs, though I found a plaque on the wall with my name on it, I couldn’t envision myself ever existing there. It wasn’t a negative thought, exactly, but more of a lack of thought. Surely high school is some memory someone has planted in me. Read more »

When I let slip to my students last week that I was going straight from class to the movie theater to wait in line for the Hunger Games movie, I got the two expected reactions. Those who had read and enjoyed the book were jealous, and they found they finally had something in common with their professor. The other students mostly responded with quiet disbelief, though one girl went so far as to tell me I was a nerd.

Naturally, I reminded her that she should keep such thoughts to herself until the time I am no longer grading her.

It’s a good thing I didn’t also mention that I had a specially ordered t-shirt bearing my district logo (district 2) and ID number.

I loved the movie, though this isn’t a movie review (and Cathie already has a great post on why she loves the Hunger Games). Instead, this is really a discussion of the rhetoric I’ve seen used around the Hunger Games. There’s the Battle Royale discussion, of course, though the people hating on the Hunger Games mostly seem to not have read it, and the people dismissing Battle Royale seem to have not seen or read that either. What concerns me is that whenever you have something so well-loved by so many, you can’t avoid the people who seem to want to be contrary for the sake of being contrary. Read more »

I would guess it’s not that uncommon among book lovers, but I tend to buy books at a faster rate than I can read them. As such, my to-read list is often quite long, and sometimes I buy a book that will spend a few years on my shelf, staring at me and leaving me feeling guilty about how long I’ve left it gathering dust. So here are eight books that I vow to finally get to this year. Maybe.

1. A Thousand Sisters, by Lisa Shannon; a gift from my dad that I was very excited to get, but as I was currently reading a similar type book (Half the Sky), and so I set it aside.

2. The Stranger, by Albert Camus; I keep putting this one off, hoping I can read it in its original French—something that will probably never happen.

3. The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner; this book was originally on my thesis list, but it intimidated me to the point where I ended up replacing it.

4. Cronopios and Famas, by Julio Cortazar; this was assigned in my one pre-grad school fiction workshop, and while I meant to finish it after class (only portions of it were assigned), it’s still sitting on my shelf.

5. The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan; I’ve even started this one—there’s really no excuse except that it’s really long.

6. The Bonesetter’s Daughter, by Amy Tan; this book has probably been in four or five apartment with me.

7. A Death in the Family, by James Agee; this book was given to me during my visit to Eastern Washington, and as it’s the first book, alphabetically speaking, on my bookshelf, I should really pick it up.

8. I’m Sorry You Feel that Way, by Diana Joseph; this is a book I started right after buying, but then something came up, and something else, and now I want to start again from the beginning.

What books do you want to read but somehow never seem to get around to?

I’m a rereader. Some people don’t get enjoyment out of a second read, preferring the sparkle, shine, and surprise of the first read. I am not one of those people. Ever since I can remember, I’ve enjoyed reading books two, three, four, twelve, twenty times. I taught myself to read by demanding my parents read me The Little Mermaid so often that I eventually memorized it. Re-experiencing something isn’t, I take it, an unusual thing for a child (we all had that one movie we watched day in and day out; for me, it was also The Little Mermaid), but it does seem to be less prevalent in adults.

Until recently, I’ve never had a problem with rereading. I like studying new aspects of books. I like noticing things I didn’t before. I like trying to figure out how the author built tension and suspense, like being to see how the pieces fit together. But then I started rereading my declared favorite book of all time: Wicked.

First, a story.

On the first day of my second workshop in grad school, the one taught by Bark’s own Sam Ligon, I was asked to name the best book from the last twenty years. I asked for a minute to think of a book, and so the rest of the class answered first (each getting a nod of I-can-see-how-you’d-say-that-even-if-I-disagree), and then it came back to me.

Of course, I still had no answer. The trouble, you see, is that I had done next-to-no reading of books from the past twenty years. I was fairly well read in the classics, and I read a fair bit of fantasy and young adult books, but somehow I knew that wasn’t the question. So I said Wicked. Instead of the yes-I-see look, I got the you-have-got-to-be-shitting-me look.

But back then I really did love the book. I did think it had literary merit. (Can you see where I’m going with this?) It was my favorite book, I said. I could read it over and over, I said. Except I wasn’t reading it, and I had no real plans to. Grad school was quickly changing the way I viewed and critiqued literature, and one of the things I was learning about myself is that, despite once writing this way, I no longer had any appreciation of quirk for quirk’s sake. Even in my glowing mind-review of Wicked, I knew that was something the story suffered from.

The final book in the Wicked Years series came out a few months ago, and I bought it. I wasn’t impressed by the other books in the series, but I hate leaving things unfinished. By this point, however, I was feeling very nervous. Not liking anything else I’d ever read by Maguire, really feeling disinterested in the other two Wicked Years book, knowing how much I’d changed as a reader and writer—I was understandably nervous about jumping back into this series.

A few weeks ago, I finally did it. I picked up Wicked and decided to give it a go.

My copy is heavily marked. I’ve highlighted and written in the margins. Apparently one of the times I read the book was soon after discovering the loveliness of the serial comma, because I spent pages circling the little curlycues before and and or. What is most evident in my notes, however, is that, back then, I was more concerned with theme and symbolism than I was with storytelling. These days, that idea has been turned completely on its head.

And Wicked, my favorite book, is, well, bad.

Okay, it’s not bad. It’s highly successful, and I’m uncomfortable writing off any piece of success so easily. What I mean to say is I think it’s bad. It’s littered with quirks, lines and events that seem to be winks at the reader: “Did you see what I did there?” Maguire seems to say. “Can you believe my editor didn’t make me cut that?” And my god, I’m not squeamish or anything, but I really don’t need any more descriptions of bodily functions, nipples, crazed sex acts, and phallic objects. In moderation any of these elements can work, but when you get multiple on each page? It’s like seventh-grade locker room humor.

I’m going to finish the book, and I still plan on reading the new one I bought (Out of Oz), but while some books keep me up at night because I don’t want to stop reading them, I can’t put this one down because I can’t wait to be finished with it—forever.

It’s that time of year when the literary writers of America converge upon one (cold) city to drink beer, socialize (aka drink beer), network (aka drink beer), etc. I think it’s a rule that every Bark post in the coming two weeks or so must include a reference to the conference. I thought I’d get the ball rolling.

But really, I’m just wondering—pre-conference—about who I’ll be seeing this year, and what events/tables/panels/readings my fellow attendees are planning on, well, attending.

Myself, I’ll be trying to snag a signed copy of Cataclysm Baby (by Matt Bell), listening to Sam Ligon and Jason Sommer (and a host of others) at the Propaganda reading, and attending Gregory Spatz’s signing. I’ll also be on a panel Friday afternoon. What are your AWP plans?

Also on a death, a funeral and a hospital stay I watched a loved one endure five year previous.

Sitting in the hospital waiting room, I’ve only recently decided to apply to graduate school. I start my writing sample there with the words My grandmother is dying. Later, when she didn’t die, against all odds, the guilt I felt from making a type of prediction. My own gain from others’ grief.

Five years of close calls, five years of bad days, of oxygen levels insanely low, and a piece of me begins to truly believe that she’ll beat every odd, that she’ll live forever.

Last week, Valentine’s Day, my aunts and cousins singing hymns I have long since forgotten. I listen, and watch as my grandfather holds her hand and struggles to sing through his grief.

Five minutes after, there is laughter again, because my family can laugh about anything, and it helps us through. She would have wanted it that way.

A half-eaten sandwich on the table, mayonnaise leaking out the side. It’s been cut in half, but now it lies forgotten. Read more »

The depressed writer is perhaps one of the most pervasive writerly stereotypes. There are debates about whether it helps or hinders work, whether for some people genius is linked to addiction, depression, thoughts of Suicide. Last year, I reviewed a book by a French author in which the narrator’s friend had committed suicide, then, shortly after delivering the manuscript to his publisher, the writer, Edouard Leve, committed suicide. I was out to dinner with my parents and, after telling them about the book I’d selected, they both gave me long looks. “Is there something you want to tell us?” my dad asked.

We’ve all had those moments, I’m sure. The moment after someone else reads your work, or reads a story you love, and he looks up, hesitates, and you can just see him searching for the best way to pose his question, can see him wondering. When you write a depressing story, some people wonder what you’re trying to tell them—not about life, but about yourself.

To be fair to my family and friends however, I am someone who has suffered from depression and other related problems in the past. This, combined with some readers’ habit to project, is one reason I’ve developed a strong resistance against letting those close to me read my work. They can’t see the art and the artist as separate, and after twenty-some-odd years of hearing the depressed writer stereotype, sometimes I wonder myself. Read more »