Tiny tiny beautiful worlds
I visited my parents over spring break and because I was suffering from a condition called “too many emotions” (known to doctors as Poets-Syndrome) I tried to keep myself as busy as possible. Organizing old photographs? My pleasure! Cleaning the toilet? Don’t mind if I do!
While emptying a closet I found an old gardening book. Inside were pictures of terrariums. They were adorable and whimsical. I instantly whispered You will be mine. I chose to ignore the obvious metaphor of wanting to create a small world since my own felt a little unraveled and instead looked at it as another project to keep my hands, and mind, busy.
The first terrarium I built was lovely. All the materials in the Mason jar came directly from the backyard. I even added some leaves for authenticity. I impatiently waited for my mom to walk past. Despite being an adult, I still yearn for her approval. I find myself shouting praise me! more than someone in their mid-20s should. She leaned in, squinted through the glass and said “it’s just full of weeds.” Then she stuck her fingers through the opening murmuring “a dead leaf accidentally got in here.”
This is not unlike her reactions when I show her my poetry. It’s not that she doesn’t care, she’s just practical. I once had her read a poem I’d written about my grandmother: “It’s good, but it might have too many words.” Read more »
Dear Health Insurance,
I know that it’s too late to tell you now. I know there’s nothing I can do. I know I should have appreciated you earlier, I should have been more thankful of the reasonable co-pays, the affordable medication, the lab work coverage, and the ability to choose my own doctor. I should have loved you when I had the chance. I should have run and played more, free from the fear of breaking a bone or needing stitches. I should have taken up an extreme sport like urban skydiving and really taken advantage of your reasonably priced power. I took you for granted. I didn’t realize your full potential. I could have gotten X-rays and MRIs. I could have caught more than the common cold or pneumonia. The emergency room was an option. It would have cost some money, but not the kind that you’ll spend the rest of your life paying off. What I’m saying, Health Insurance, is that you were always there. And I knew that. I knew it, but I’ve been spoiled, Health Insurance. I took you for granted. Please don’t go. Read more »
I spent three years in deep East Texas, at Stephen F. Austin State University, getting my BFA in creative writing. For those last two years, I had two roommates in a three-bed/three-bath apartment. One of those roommates was often naked.
This is pre-nudity, in which she is abiding by our roommate-agreed zombie contingency plan.
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I was out on my daily walk with Moose when I found the notes. I’d recently lost my keys on this particular route so I had my eyes open for anything of interest on the ground. There were a bunch of papers scattered across the road, crumpled into various configurations. So I picked up a few pieces, furtively, and put them in my pocket to read when I got home.
The letters told the story of Ann Marie and Rick. After a recent fight, she had decided that it was time to move out of his motel room. That Rick was right; he was too good for her and she’d tried long enough. She’d take her kid in the morning; she’d have left right then if the kid wasn’t in bed, sick. They’d find someplace else to stay, if she had to.
It was a story about drugs, how she’d only started dealing to help her son and how could she have known that using his car to distribute would make him so angry. They discussed God’s love, which, for Ann Marie, wasn’t enough most of the time. Rick pleaded with her, that she was a good mother, and she would never allow someone else to love her until she started loving herself. Read more »
A while back, I barked about my love of choose-your-own-adventure books and how I would really like for someone to write one for adults. Then, last night, I was thinking about my thesis (as I often do these days) and how I sort of wish it was a choose-your-own-adventure thesis. Sadly, it’s not. But then I thought, wait! It totally could be! In blog form! Kind of!
So, what I’ve done here is break the stories in my thesis down into their essential components and put these components into categories. Pick one or two or three or four items from each category, jam them together to create your very own brand new story!
Yes, I know it’s not exactly the traditional choose-your-own-adventure format where you pick whether the protagonist fights the evil wizard or goes home to eat a ham sandwich, then turn to page 93 to find out what happens. But I think this is better because it gives the reader waaaaay more creative control (in fact, it’s almost like you’re writing the story yourself….hmmm…). And I’ll admit I found constructing this to be delightfully self-indulgent. Ridiculously self-indulgent. Like taking a bubble bath in my own work. Come, won’t you get in this warm, frothy, self-indulgent bathtub with me?
Characters (Pick 2)
A teenage anarchist
A cynical journalist
A lonely grad student
A (alleged) meth dealer
A slacker boyfriend
A widower Read more »
I’m going to try an exercise today in English 101/Section 10.
In previous classes (for previous courses) I’ve done things like play Jenga (analogies TBA), arm wrestle (to illustrate dialectic), role-play a Greek tragedy (to flesh out the human condition), and lastly I’ve hurled a hard boiled egg into the throng of a crowed lecture hall. “Poetry differs from prose,” I proclaim with this latter demonstration… “Everything is coming at you — and potentially it’s going to be messy.”
You may, of course, call that a gimmick, or the hobgoblin of an inexperienced college professor’s tortured mind, but I love to see the bodies scatter, while others cover and duck.
And yet, with Tuesday’s educational schtick, my hope is to play things a little more close-to-the-vest. The exercise will consist of a free-writing response to five poems and will hopefully allow the students (ages 18 to 20) the opportunity to resonate with an image. An image or two… I’ll let you know how it goes. My thinking is that many of these first-generation freshmen have never encountered the likes of Denise Levertov, Gary Snyder, Sharon Olds, William Stafford and Anne Sexton, and that some of their word-explosions might shower down body-parts into the blend-in style of dormitory prose.
You see, thus far, we’ve muddled through one Essay Exam and assorted supportive gigs in which I’ve asked them to harangue the system in which they’re all clamoring to become a cog. How to write a thesis statement... How to identify key words, indexical concepts, supportive evidence… This is the standard fare of what every incoming neophyte should learn about academe. Later in the quarter, we’ll marshall our skills of mimicry in the service of a Persuasive Essay. Whoopee! Potential research foci may include The Decline of the Hipster In What Used To Be Pop-Culture, The Resurgence of Dallas and Other ’80′s Nighttime Dramas and Snooki: The Femme Fatale of A Post 2001 Generation. And, for all the fantastic insights these papers may elucidate, I’m not expecting that the full-throated ‘second naiveté’ of Paul Ricoeur has caught up with the budding intellects. That is to say, I trust the wounded hearts of these students more than I do the reductions of rationalism we often require them to make.
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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 »
As my first post for Bark, I figured I should go ahead and introduce myself. This is awkward for me, as I never know what kind of information people actually want to know, so I’ll start with what I feel is (slightly) relevant.
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So I begin teaching at a local correctional facility this week; I’m there on behalf of the EWU MFA teaching group, Writers in the Community. Led by program director Greg Spatz and current 2nd-year Fictioner Liz Moore, a few of us MFAers go out and teach Creative Writing classes at local schools, nursing homes and prisons every quarter. Rather, I suppose I should use the form prison, singular. There’s only one prison slot in the program, and this quarter, I’m it.
1. Half-Life 2 ~ Nova Prospekt
The facility I’ll be in is a combination medium/long-term minimum security installation. It houses over a thousand inmates, and sits west of town beyond the pines and hills, on the edge of the vast flat scabland that is Central Washington. There’s only one way in or out, and from the road all one sees are hardened structures, high fences, and floodlights. I actually approached it for the first time and thought of our old bases back in Iraq, all guard-towers and razor wire, and felt my throat close up for a moment. Odd, that what should inspire trepidation about this place was not the nature of the facility, nor its population, but rather its associations with someplace else. Read more »
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