Seriously, what was this movie about? All I remember was that the air conditioner kills himself at the start of the movie.

In my dreams/daydreams/wandering thoughts, I often find myself in situations where a gang member/werewolf/ex-boyfriend/Republican attacks and I have to defend myself and all the people in whatever room/hallway/beach I happen to be in.

So I kick some ass. With all the fake ghetto karate skills and magical powers I am willing to attribute to my dream self. I save babies from burning buildings. I defend my colleagues and friends from armies of invading aliens.

I am awesome. In my dreams, that is.

The sad truth is, however, in reality I live in a cave. I see a handsy drunk man coming my way, and I hide in the bathroom and sit fully clothed on the toilet for a good five minutes. An old lady tells me that I’m getting fat and will never get married, and I laugh awkwardly and wait until I get home to tell off the ghost of her in front of my cats.

The truth is, most days I’m not even certain what my voice sounds like, and the last time someone did mildly attack me, I cried. Read more »

When a star falls across the night sky, and lands on the road in the front of you,

as you’re barreling down the highway at 75 miles per hour,

you can choose to take it as a sign. You can choose to do a lot of things,

like turn around and go back. Or keep going, right foot married

to the gas pedal. You can choose silence,

as much silence can be had over the hum of your bald tires, and the yowl

of the cat in the carrier. Or you can choose to turn up the radio Read more »

Recently, I wrote a poem.

For many people, this is not a big deal. For me, it’s the first I’ve written in a long, long time. Seriously, it’s my first since I was writing poems about listening to Lisa Loeb while crying over boys. (I also wrote one about a thunderstorm when I was in high school, but it contained the line “antithesis of justice and peace.” Yeah, I was a cool seventeen-year-old.)

I named the poem “My first poem.” Obviously this is a working title.

I do not know what to do with this poem. I hear one submits poems in much the same way that one submits stories (i.e., research some publications, submit, wait, wait, wait, try not to cry over the rejections, resubmit, etc.), but poets also get to do different things, like submitting multiple poems at one time. Unfortunately, I don’t yet have a poem called “My second poem.” I’m averaging about one poem every ten years right now, so I figure I’ll have a submission packet ready in thirty to fifty years.

I’ve showed my poem to one person. She liked it, but said the structure was very fiction writer. I don’t know what that means. What I do know is that line breaks are hard. I also didn’t capitalize the beginning of every line. I think I should get some sort of fiction-writer bonus points for this.

I don’t know what I think of my poem. When I worked with Willow Springs, the poems I liked most were the ones that got rejected fastest. I don’t know much about poetry. Poets often tell me I need to stop trying to “get” it, but I’m not sure what the opposite of “getting” it would be. Not getting it?

I was too afraid to take a poetry class in grad school, but I’ve been reading it since I left. My favorite collection so far has been one by Jacek Gutorow. It had been translated from the original Polish, and each poem was presented in both languages. I admit to spending almost as much time trying to learn a few Polish words as I did actually reading the poems. The author had also taken the opportunity to perform a few more edits, and I also amused myself trying to identify what they were. Okay, so maybe I liked the puzzle aspect of that collection as much as the poetry. It was, however, hearing a poem read aloud that prompted me to write my own poem.

Since I wrote this poem, I have worked exclusively on my fiction. I don’t feel any different, except I do like seeing a Poems subfolder in my larger Writing folder on my computer. It’s like I’m a secret poet, like I’ve snuck into a club to which I don’t belong.

“Great Writers,” my mother says, “are vessels or conduits who are able to open themselves to stories and language outside of their own experience.” I believe this idea — that men can write truthfully and realistically about women, that a woman writer can capture the voice of a man, that any aspect of diversity can be accurately portrayed by a writer with empathy, sensitivity, and an eye for detail. I believe this, but I don’t want to be this kind of writer. I don’t want to be great.

Joyce Carol Oates is great. There is no denying her mastery of craft. In 2001, I picked up We Were the Mulvaney’s because it was still impressive to me when a book had Oprah’s book club seal on the front, and I was not disappointed. Even as a 16 year-old high school student, I could recognize a caliber of writing above most of the teen angst books I was reading at the time. And yet, I didn’t read another book by Oates again for years because every time I happened upon one, as I was drifting down the library aisle or reading reviews online, the overriding theme of tragedy in her books put me off. No, I don’t need a book with a happy ending – Kazou Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go has one of the saddest endings in a book I’ve read in a long time but I love it still. Nor am I opposed to a certain level of depravity, moral decay and perversity in writing, these are real facets of being human,  the reality of what often lies beneath the surface and must be represented — But do I have to read about it? Read more »

Hey, y’all.

You’re damn right he hydrates.

Do you have a Bukowski-sized hangover today? Are you in the process of renouncing all of your Irish, or pretend Irish, heritage? Are you making promises to never drink again?

Let’s get real.

Here are some natural hangover cures because I care about you.

1. Drink water. While this may seem obvious, it’s wicked important. Try to avoid coffee. Even though it’ll make you feel more human and awake, it’ll make your hangover last even longer since coffee dehydrates you.

2. Drink Coconut Water. Coconut water is full of natural electrolytes, which will both hydrate you and keep you hydrated. Avoid the gatorade-like drinks because they’re full of dyes, chemicals, and toxins, that will make you retain water, which you probably don’t want. Nothing worse than being hungover and puffy. Read more »

This year while the world plays at AWP, I’ve decided to start a cult. I broke into a fellow faculty member’s office and left the following statue:

The placard reads:

Bunnythulhu
2012
chicken wire, constitutional rights, spray paint

“It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-rabbit-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. [...] The leporidae head was bent forward, so that the ends of the facial feelers brushed the backs of huge fore paws which clasped the croucher’s elevated knees. The aspect of the whole was abnormally life-like, and the more subtly fearful because its source was so totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, and incalculable age was unmistakable; yet not one link did it shew with any known type of art belonging to civilisation’s youth–or indeed to any other time.” – H.P. Lovecraft

Need assistance getting your FAFSA processed, your car registered, or any other terrifying reality of bureaucracy? Ask the great elder deity Bunnythulhu to help you through the chain of command, defined responsibilities, and mirrors of professionalism.

The German sociologist and administrative scholar, Max Weber, writes that while bureaucracy may be essential for modern geopolitical entities, it can lead to a “polar night of icy darkness,” where individual human freedoms become trapped in the “iron cage” of rule-based rationalizations.
Read more »

For those of you who’ve never heard of Degrassi (and I’m sure that’s most of you, let’s be realistic), in a nutshell, it’s a Canadian teen drama that’s been on since the eighties and has had several reboots.

This is the most accurate description of this show I’ve ever seen.

I’ve been watching the current reboot—known as Degrassi: The Next Generation—for about ten years now, and while I’m not really a fan of the original, I find that I cannot get enough of TNG. I don’t know why. The storylines aren’t particularly new: drugs, pregnancy, abortion, self-harm, suicide, gangs, social pressure, child abuse, sexual identity, mental issues, HIV scares, gambling problems, bad boys and bad girls and good girls who go bad. It’s basically a Canadian Dawson’s Creek with a huge cast of characters and their arcs, but what I really enjoy about Degrassi other than the omg drama, is the way they never let a particular significant event disappear. In season three, we discover that Ellie cuts herself to cope with her mother’s alcoholism, but in each season thereafter that she’s in, there are a few episodes that appear where she’s still struggling to keep herself from cutting. When Liberty gives up her baby for adoption, two or three seasons down the road, it is still something that affects her. Degrassi is also the first show in the history of television to portray a transgendered character in a genuine manner. It’s as realistic as an over-the-top teen drama can be, and I cannot get enough of it. Thus, here are some facts about Degrassi that should make you want to watch it as much as I love watching it. Read more »

Two weeks of daily posts about television and what it did to us, or how glad we are and lucky, or how bland and distressed, embarrassed and enlightened, horrified and charmed, that kind of thing — starting next Monday.

So you should probably watch this.

Last October I drove to Stevensville, Montana to visit a friend.  I had been planning to visit her last summer, but I came down with a nasty case of the shingles and had to reschedule.  I chose the date because it coincided with the Montana Humanities Festival of the Book, Missoula’s annual literary festival.  My friend and I were delighted that Pam Houston was going to be there, an author we’re both completely enamored of, or with, or whatever.  I saw Pam in passing but we missed her reading from Contents May Have Shifted (an AMAZING book) because it takes a bit to get from Stevensville to Missoula.  We found an interesting sounding panel though, something about the American culture of money, and sat down.  The two authors on the panel were David Wolman, who chronicled a year in which he lived without cash in his book The End of Money, and Mark Sundeen, who wrote The Man Who Quit Money.

The panel was interesting enough that I bought Sundeen’s book and my friend bought Wolman’s, with the idea of switching after we read them.  I just finished Sundeen’s book and am getting ready to pass it on to my friend.  But first, a short review:  Decent read—the story will stay with you.  The writing didn’t knock me out.

The book’s about Daniel Suelo, who has lived without money for over a decade.  Sundeen goes over the who, what, when, and where pretty quickly.  The rest of the book is dedicated to the “why,” mostly, and that’s one point where I think the author failed.  Obviously there are situations in which a writer might want to get that stuff out of the way so that we stay focused on the “why.”  I just don’t think it worked particularly well here—I felt the story was over after the first 15 to 20 pages and I couldn’t see what he was going to do to fill up the rest of the book.  The rest, of course, turned out to be fairly interesting—Suelo grew up in a religiously fundamentalist household.  He struggled early on with the injustices and indignities of using money.  He realized, like a lot of us, that those who have the most are the least willing to give, while those who have little are more eager to share.  Through the years Suelo studied many religions and religious texts, gleaning what he felt important enough to carry on from each set of ideas, and eventually melded them together to make an ever-changing, ever-evolving base.

Suelo seems like he’d be a great conversationalist, and the story’s a good one—the man leaves behind all money, lives in caves around Moab, Utah, and lives quite well doing so.  It’s inspiring, and though not many of us could do what he did, for various reasons, not the least of those being that it’s unfortunately illegal to camp out indefinitely, it makes for a great story with a moral.

            Looking across the fields, we could see that Mathew and Melony’s house stood just a hundred yards away, a literal stone’s throw from this Eden.  It seemed truly mystical how unfindable, moneyless Suelo had materialized from the ether and led us across the desert, to Melontopia.  To the abundance.  Mathew and Melony and I filled our arms with melons, hoarding them like iGadgets we’d liberated from Best Buy after a hurricane.  But Suelo chose only a single, small green fruit.  He lowered it into his crate and silently pedaled off.

Either it’s over-written, or it’s too early.  We haven’t yet learned anything about Suelo’s religious and economic ideal, why his commitment means so much, all the underlay.  Because by the end of the book I could see that section working better, but where it’s at is too much too soon. Read more »