I could nail this theme.

There’s one journal I want so bad. We all have that one. Maybe it’s the first journal we remember falling in love with, or a journal that has an editor we admire, or the cover art is gorgeous….but we all could probably think of The One.

I have five rejections from my journal. And after each rejection I have to wait another 6 months for the next reading period. I tell myself I will use those 6 months to write more. Revise more. Edit. Read.  Learn the journal better.
And I sort of do this.
But mainly I wait. I wait for them to announce the theme of the next issue. The theme is always just one word such as Eccentric, Foreign, Fear. And I wait for that one word.

I have a love/hate relationship with Theme issues and especially with the way I write for a theme. Ideally the theme of the next issue is released and I have pre-existing poetry that fits the theme (or can be easily revised to fit). But more often than not I see the theme and instantly start scrambling to create poems that fit.  Fury? Yeah? I can write about that. Fury. Like, wind? Sure give me a minute.

On the one hand, it’s really helpful to have something motivate me. The one-word-theme always pushes me to generate. It pushes me to think of that one word in different contexts and from different angles. By seeing that single word I immediately feel excited about creating new work that might reflect that one word.
The problem is I end up submitting work that is brand new; I submit work written just for that theme issue. It’s rough and often rushed. It’s no wonder I’m collecting rejections from them.

I think I’ve come up with a solution. I will create themes for myself. For each month. I want to come up with a calendar, where each month has a different one-word theme. I’m not entirely sure I will stay as motivated without the journal (The One) sitting on the other end waiting to see my work, but I hope it will at least get me thinking.

If you’ve been fortunate enough to take a class from Sam, you know what I mean when I say I often hear his writing insights inside my mind. There are so many great quotes by Sam in my head, many of them involving curse words, all of them spoken with that intensity and passion that is uniquely Ligon.

For those of you who have not encountered Ligon Wisdom in person, here’s a taste of what you’ve been missing: Sam was interviewed by Katrina Hays in the latest issue of Rainier Writing Workshop’s Soundings.

My favorite quote:

That’s why we’re afraid of novels. We get into this thing and we might not know if it works for five years. Or ten. It’s risky. But the thing is—those five years are going to pass anyway. Whether or not you’re in there with a novel, those five years are going to pass. And then you’re gonna die. At some point you’re gonna die. So, you can not write your novel and die, or you can write your novel and die. You might as well write.

See what I mean?

Reading Monet’s post from Friday, made me want to post about something I first heard about last week.

The volunteer editors of Wikipedia decided that the American Novelist category was becoming too long and decided to move the female authors to a new page named American Women Novelists.

This little change may not have been discussed or even noticed, if it wasn’t for Amanda Filipacchi who discovered the change and wondered how come there weren’t two pages created, one for American Male Novelists and one for American Women Novelists. She wrote an Op-Ed about it for the New York Times and shortly after, that’s exactly what happened.

So you would think then that this was just an honest mistake. The editors of Wikipedia just weren’t sensitive to how wrong it is to qualify books by the gender of the author. But it doesn’t end here.

As Filipacchi describes in a NYT follow-up article, her Wikipedia page was altered. In twenty-four hours, there were 22 changes. Links to outside sources like interviews and reviews were removed. The link to the Op-Ed disappeared. Before this, her page had been changed 22 times over a period of four years. Much wiki-cyber bullying later and Filipacchi’s back on the list of American Novelists, but says, “Taking women’s names off the list of American novelists makes it harder and slower for women to gain equality in the literary world.”

To me, the Wikipedia incident is just another example that shows we still have work to do before women gain full equality, not just in the literary world, but everywhere.

My office at work is in a cluster of six with a student study area in the middle. The day after I’d heard about Filipacchi’s articles, I passed by the whiteboard in the study part and saw an old joke I first encountered years ago while I was a physics undergraduate student. Here’s the joke: Read more »

                                                A profile of Susan McCarty, and her story, “Fellowship.”

I wanted to tell the story of a girl who is really starting to struggle against the values of the culture around her in a way that was bound up with, but not directly caused by, her parents’ impending divorce. I wasn’t interested in revisiting specific details or scenes from my own life, but I did draw on my own emotional experience of my parents’ divorce when I was eighteen. I was interested in that moment when everything seems to be stretched to the breaking point, that moment right before the release of this person into the world, just before her escape. But I was uninterested in moralizing that tension. Sometimes it feels like every story about a teenage girl who has sex ultimately ends with the girl dropping out of high school, pregnant and alone and, yes, that’s a reality for some girls, but ultimately the dominance of that narrative in our culture speaks more to a fear of female sexuality and the resulting desire to control it. I’m interested in another narrative, where girls have sex and parents and boyfriends disappoint them, and life goes on.

Trying to keep my head above water. Writing poems about trains, Amelia Earhart, and all the old loves. Trying not to think about the future. Thinking obsessively about the future. Drinking too much coffee, sleeping in too late, not running. Staring out windows (most often, at trains). Writing notes on my hand. Buying another bookshelf for the books I don’t have time to read. Eating too much chocolate. Wondering how it is, still, that I don’t know what I’d be happiest doing. Wondering if I’ve wasted my time. If I’ve improved, if I know what I’m doing. Pouring expired milk down the drain. As if I have some kind of plan. Making lists: clean the bathroom, pay the bills, organize my papers, submit to magazines.  The same list for weeks. Not writing letters I’d promised I would write. Not calling people I’d promised I would call. Not writing poems I’ve been meaning to write: letters to Amelia, poem about throwing bottles into the river, poem about the robin’s eggs I broke open when I was young.

Trying my hand at nonfiction, trying to get out of my own way. Trying to forget that I have a body. Letting the words come easy. Taking my camera with me when I drive, thinking about the mountains. Their shape, their distance. The clouds as seen from an airplane. Trying to map the land however I can. Wondering where my feet rest most firmly. Sitting in my car on Cliff Drive, above the lights of this place, on and on in front of me, wishing for once I was a smoker. That easy motion, that distraction, that taste in the mouth. Missing cities, New York and Paris, knowing I couldn’t have lived there. Planning how I could do it. Dreaming of wading through pools, of people I hardly know and their detailed faces. Reading enough words to fill me. Pulling on my warmest coat to walk in the desperate days of winter. Heat on high, water on for tea, candle for atmosphere.

Today? Not enough. Or yesterday. Or any day, lately. Waking up as an ostrich, head hidden from sun. Telling everyone, “It’s going fine.” Puppeting the days. Organizing the pages of poems in my head. Re-arranging, disordering, erasing. Wishing to be granted a day of disappearance. To a porch surrounded by mountains, a cold day. Or the rippling skirt of a lake. The black sand of a foreign beach in Majorca or any land with a name just as musical. Dancing my fingers along the table as though it is a violin again. Listening to those sounds with twitching muscles.

Reading the old favorites, trying not to feel inadequate. The best lines kept as glowing talismans in my hand.  —You is from hunger, Mr. Bones.  Asking, what else comes from hunger? As if the earth under our feet / were / an excrement of some sky. And how the imagination can save us.  If we know how to let it. If we can bring ourselves to the right place. Read more »

Jonathan Groff in C.O.G.

The first film adaptation of a David Sedaris piece premiered this year at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. Written and directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez, C.O.G. is based on the autobiographical short story by Sedaris about a young man who graduates from Yale and decides to experience the “real world”, which for him means a small apple farm in Oregon. The film was recently acquired for theatrical release later this year.

Sedaris gave his blessing for Alvarez to adapt his work and is quoted in The Harvard Crimson saying: The reasons I agreed to it were that a) I liked the first movie he made, and b) the story that he wants to adapt doesn’t involve my family. I’m in it, but none of my brothers or sisters are, or my mom. Because I so liked his first movie, I said OK. I don’t want any control over this movie. I don’t want script approval. I trust him. Most movies never get made, but I hope this one does because I just think so highly of this young man.

Kyle won the prestigious “Someone to Watch” Award at the 2010 Independent Spirit Awards for his writing and directorial debut film Easier with Practice. The film was also nominated that year for a Spirit Award for “Best First Feature.”

Kyle wrote and directed C.O.G.

Bark: Your first film, Easier With Practice, was based on a GQ article by Davy Rothbart and now C.O.G. is based on a short by David Sedaris. What about short form writing lends itself to film? Do you feel it gives you more focus as a screenwriter?

Kyle Patrick Alvarez:
For me, I find the short story format can fit a film structure really nicely. I have an easier time adapting something if the themes and characters are really contained. Some people do incredible work adapting novels, but that’s the process of reduction, and the goal in doing that is to maintain the essence of the book while making it shorter. What’s nice with a short story, is that you still have room to create and add and translate instead of just cramming and that’s exciting to me. Having said that, COG is a relatively lengthy short, about 40 pages I believe, and that made adapting a lot easier than with Easier with Practice which was only a 3 page article! Read more »

Arching star dashed across the night sky landing without sound on the road ahead of you,

splitting itself cleanly in half . These two no-longer-wholes, each with an edge paper sharp, kept rolling –

in them the momentum of one thousand years – so instinct made you brake while also looking up

to your rear view mirror, to see what was about to hit you from behind.  This is a kind of metaphor. Read more »

                                                        An interview with Erin Belieu, from Willow Springs 71

I am very aware of anger—of female anger—as transgressive. And female anger is something that’s not spoken to often in poetry. Or anywhere, really. I think of women artists who’ve addressed this feeling directly and the backlash is usually intense. Very much a how-dare-you reaction. Which is absurd when you think of how surrounded we are by expressions of male anger in our culture. How venerated they are. Male rage is cool! But female rage is still disturbing, displacing, abject, unnatural. Except it’s not. It’s normal. And more than any other poem I’ve written, people come up to me and say, “Thank you for writing the Red Dress poems. They’ve meant a lot to me.” Which is about the nicest compliment anyone can ever give you.

One of my favorite moments in
cinematic history…pretentioustastic.

This past week I attended numerous events at the 15th annual Get Lit! Festival in Spokane, WA.
After one of my first events (a panel discussion about memoir by the seriously awesome Joe Wilkins and Anna Vodicka) I walked away thinking, “I want to be a writer.”

I didn’t think much of the statement until I (once again) said it at another event. This time out loud. In front of people. In front of friends. Someone laughed.

I imagine they laughed because one of the following reasons:
A) Anyone who walks around saying “I’m a writer.” sounds pretty douchey
B) I have my MFA in poetry. So technically I have a piece of paper that says I’m some kind of writer. Maybe.

The Get Lit! Festival helped me re-remember that I want to be a  writer. Not in any kind of glamorous or widely-published way, but in the simple, soul-anchored, I-love-to-just-sit-and-write kind of way. It reminded me that I love words. And I love people who talk about words. And I love being surrounded by people who also love words and are happy to answer inane questions about words like “can you talk about maintaining the integrity of your work when distracted by external obligations?” That kind of way. Read more »

The GetLit Pie & Whiskey Reading is this Thursday, 4/11, 9:00, at the Spokane Woman’s Club, 1428 W. 9th, with readings by Kim Barnes, Dan Butterworth, Jonathan Evison, Kate Lebo, Sam Ligon, Jim Lynch, Laura Read, Marianne Salina, Gregory Spatz, Shawn Vestal, Jess Walter, and Robert Wrigley.

There will be pie and there will be whiskey. There will be short readings about pie and whiskey. Then there will be more pie and more whiskey. Until we’ve had enough.