I may well have just changed my gender. I have taken the scissors to my hair—eight dollar Goody scissors meant specifically for the purpose, not the orange-handled office kind—and now the trash can is full of dirty blonde curls. And the sink. And the floor. I’ll be feeling the scratchy shards of it on my shoulders for days.
It started with just the bangs, but people with curly hair haven’t pulled off bangs since the ’80s. Then a few chunks came out of the sides: once you start cutting your hair, you can’t just stop. You have to keep snipping and snipping, trying to find that hairstyle that you imagined when you first began. You have to find the sculpture within the marble, the bob within the mass of curls. You cut one bit just a little too short and then have to trim the rest to match, eroding your mountain of hair until there’s practically nothing left. You start out methodical—measuring the strands against each other, trying to work in sections—and then you get artistic. You chop and hack. You feel instead of thinking. You’re not just cutting off your hair; you’re setting yourself free. Read more »
O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend/The brightest heaven of invention!/A kingdom for a stage, princes to act/And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
–Prologue, King Henry V, William Shakespeare
If I have a muse, she’s a bit of a strange one. She doesn’t whisper things in my ear too often or write my words for me; her favorite method is to get me reading the right books. She’s of the teach-a-man-to-fish variety, I guess, and lately, she’s been on a roll. I say to myself, Where are all the books about actors? and she tells me to read Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea, which I purchased at the used bookstore a year ago because of the kitschy 1970s cover and a previous positive experience with Murdoch’s work. Turns out, it’s about a retired actor/director/playwright. I wonder about the intricacies of rewriting a Shakespearean play as a contemporary novel, and she sends me to my bottom shelf, where Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres sat unread for goodness knows how long, thinking I’m reading it because it’s about family. About a paragraph in, I realized I’d read about this family before.
At first, I thought A Thousand Acres might only incidentally reference King Lear Read more »
I like going into other people’s houses and looking at their stuff. I like open houses and estate sales; I’ll take garage or yard sales if that’s as close as I can get. If you’ve ever looked out your living room window and caught a passerby looking in, that might have been me. It’s not that I’m a snoop–even when house-sitting, I’ve never been one to go through other people’s drawers and cupboards–it’s just that in many ways, the things people decorate with or leave lying around say so much about them. Maybe it’s because I grew up with a messy mother and a father who loves to remodel the house, but the more someone has on their mantelpiece, coffee table, or kitchen counter (aside from rotten food or garbage) the more comfortable I tend to be with them. Minimalists strike me as secretive, as do those who go in for too much interior design. I like to go into someone’s house and see their books and pens and teapots, their kids’ toys, the board game they played last night, their toothpaste. I like tchotchkes. Knickknacks. When I say, “That’s an awesome lamp,” I’d love it if you told me where you got it, why you like it, and why you chose to put it where you did. Read more »
This is what they show students to entice them to come here. Idyllic, huh? But where's the rest of the town?
In about two months, my husband and I will be moving. We have a rental van booked. I’m so excited that part of me hesitates to tell you about it, lest I jinx it. I just have to remind myself: Laura, you don’t really believe in jinxes, just like you don’t believe in the curse of Macbeth or the power of positive thinking. And even if I do believe in those things on some level, I’m too excited not to tell you.
You see, I’ve been living in this armpit college town for seven years (seven is lucky, right? should ward against jinxes?); my husband has been here ten. We both came here for college: he from Montana, me from California. I was a third-year transfer and he came as a freshman.
I didn’t know anything about Pullman, WA, when I decided to come here. I wanted to get out of Southern California. I wanted to start fresh. Washington State was the first school to accept me, so I dove. I packed everything I owned (minus my Barbie collection) and my mother into my Hyundai Elantra and drove the thousand miles north. I wanted a new experience and, boy, did I get one, if not the kind I was looking for. Read more »
When I was a senior in high school, I had to fill out a form detailing my career goals. Based on this form, I was assigned a group for career day. Each group would spend first period in a classroom with a group of adults who had succeeded in their field of interest. I knew kids who spent their mornings with engineers, doctors, and teachers, but on my form, I said I wanted to be an actor. Maybe a director. That I’d like to start my own theater company. This put me in the miscellaneous group.
The miscellaneous group contained about fifteen kids out of the eight hundred who would graduate with me that year. We got the whole performing arts center to ourselves, presumably because it seemed aesthetically appropriate and not because we needed the space. We had speakers from a variety of careers in arts and letters: a radio personality, a journalist, a novelist, and a couple others whose presentations I can’t remember because I was busy counting the empty seats in the auditorium. The radio personality was the closest to an actor the school could scrounge up. They didn’t even bring in a drama teacher for the occasion, though a small handful of us had theatrical aspirations. Maybe they were trying to tell us something.
Of the presenters we had, the novelist interested me most. He was middle-aged, portly, and had put on a plaid button-down for the occasion. At that point, I hadn’t dreamed of being a writer since about sixth grade, when I wrote what I believed to be a novel (finding it years later, it was twenty-five pages in fourteen-point font) about a cute boy who fell inexplicably in love with a girl like me. I had been immersed in the theater for several years, moving from show to show with hardly a breather, often doing my homework in class or on breaks during rehearsal. I had no time for writing. But sitting in the cavernous PAC, listening to a man who finished a mystery novel every six months or so, I remembered how much I’d loved it. I listened with fascination as this man told us how many novels he’d published (I wish I could remember his name) and how, if you filled seven legal pads with fiction, bam! You’d have a novel. Read more »
I go out for coffee. A lot. I’m probably in coffeehouses more now than I was when I was a barista. My coat smells like coffee. My hair smells like coffee. My breath, quite often, smells like coffee. I drink caffeine even when I’ve gotten ten hours of sleep and have no reason not to take an afternoon nap. And in my little college town, there are a lot of coffee options. Downtown alone, I have three coffeehouses to choose from: Cafe Moro, where I used to work, and which is now owned and operated by one of my former coworkers; the Daily Grind, which though independent and delightfully quirky is sort of the local giant; and Thomas Hammer, the slick newcomer, with its mod furniture and quippy drink names. Since I live a nice one-mile walk from downtown, these are my usual haunts. I know their menus, which days they throw in an extra shot free or give you a chance to take fifty cents off by answering a trivia question. At Cafe Moro, I know most of the customers by name and drink, though it’s been three years since I worked there, and I know what time to arrive if I don’t feel like chatting with the table of gentlemen who sit near the door and know just about everyone in town. I know which places have the best deals on drip coffee, and have developed a sort of coffee-to-ambiance formula to determine where I’ll go, depending on what I feel like ordering, how chatty I’m feeling, etc. Read more »
I’ve heard a lot of writers say that when they’re working on a novel, their characters are always with them. Their characters ride around on their shoulders, whispering in their ears until their stories are down on paper. It’s a good reason, they say, to make sure you’re writing characters you won’t mind living with for a few years. Even when you’re not expressly working on the book, they’ll be at the corners of your mind. I’ve often doubted this would be the case with me, I suppose because I imagined this kind of absorption as a constant longing for the pen or the keyboard, an unending flow of ideas. I’d written a “novel” before–a disastrously autobiographical string of words written by the enforcement of quotas and deadlines that is now in a box under my bed where the cat has most likely puked on it–and I never felt that way. I had to force myself to write more words, not because the story needed them, but because I was determined to write a book-length work. My characters were my family members, thinly disguised, and the only one who seemed to follow me around was, predictably, based on me.
Now that I’m a more experienced writer and committed to a novel that is 100% fictional, I understand what those writers mean. Read more »
It’s 1986. Mickey Shaw is a thirty-five-year-old female New York cop who mostly works behind a desk, answering phones and filling out paperwork, processing masses of drug dealers, prostitutes, and domestic disturbers passing through. Being a woman, she is often asked to make coffee. She usually ignores the request. She is a compulsive knuckle cracker, and every morning before work she hits the gym; her favorite workout is boxing. She is a bit of a worry wart, always thinking, never shrugging anything off unless you count her husband, Stanley, who is a paper pusher but still earns more money than she does. She and Stanley have been married for fourteen years, and he isn’t as fun as he used to be, worn down by his job, plus he spends so much time alone in his office that he’s become increasingly clingy. He calls her several times a day, both at work and at her friend Olive’s apartment, where she spends one evening a week playing Trivial Pursuit with her high school friends. She quit drinking a few years ago and so is usually the only one of them fully sober, and often finds her friends heartless in their criticisms, but that’s just the way they are, and she accepts it. After all, she’s known them longer than she’s known her husband. She’s not one to throw friendships away. She walks with her hips wide, toes pointed slightly outward, shoulders square. She carries her gun in her purse at all times, though she’s never fired it outside a shooting range. As a kid she was addicted to Gunsmoke. She moves quickly, with purpose, but doesn’t always look where she’s going. Her effort/shape (a description of how she moves through space) is sinking, widening, out, bound, quick, strong, and indirect. She leads from her hips and her toes. Read more »
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