– An abscence of comments means one of two things: 1) you’ve written something so profound and true, no one can even take the time to say, “Right on, dude.” Or, 2) Even your friends don’t know how to tell you that you should’ve marinated on you’re argument against grammer alittle longer.

– Spellcheck is a frenemy

– The post you spent three hours on will have less mass appeal than the post you wrote in 45 minutes, after six pina colada  flavored wine coolers.

– Drink heavily and write. Edit with strong black coffee in the morning.

– You will still miss mistakes. Don’t worry. Sam Ligon will edit them and say they were “minor”.

– Write about what you know.

– Be okay with having what you know completely shitted on.

–If you share a blogging home, read the other bloggers’ posts. Comment, if you have things to say. Compliment them in a loud voice in public and repeat the name of the blog.

–If you can’t stand the silence, phone The Network. Your mother, grandmother, brother, mentor and best friends will gladly comment on your posts. Read more »

It'll Make Sense in Time

It’s beautiful. You wake at 8 A.M. on a Sunday morning. You’re healthy, 24 years old, and you have no other obligation today other than you have to write.

You stay in that meandering, foggy limbo between sleep and dreams for a bit knowing that you should get up and write. You think about your work. How the end goal is to become a super writer. Something like the Six Million Dollar Man, where your writing is the cleanliness of  Hemingway’s prose (without the deeply entrenched misogyny) combined with the energies of Kerouac, the metaphor and dream state of  Murakami, paradox of Kafka, sense of place and lyricism of Dybek. You’re going to write the next great American novel, start a literary movement where even the people you’re loosely associated with become famous. They’re going to coin a new term after your style and you’re going to spearhead the next cannon of American writing, just so long as you wake up. But your bed feels so lovely, almost like it’s made out of cotton swabs and billowy wisps of clouds that drift by on a sunny day. You’re going to accomplish so much, you just need a little more sleep.

12 P.M. You wake up feeling that drugged, heady feeling that comes with having overslept. You certainly can’t write in this state. You put coffee on and take a warm shower during which you wonder why you don’t grind your own beans and really is there much of a benefit to doing so. Doesn’t that decision mark the turning point where you become a coffee snob. The type of hipster we all love, who, when ordering coffee at a cafe winces after their first sip and says, “the stuff I brew is a million times better,” yet they go to the same cafe everyday.

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“What I am particularly interested in exploring is the border zone between consciousness and unconsciousness, between then and now, between self and other and self as other.  The border is not a fixed site but a movable one where exchanges occur, where encounters happen (between people, between imagination and language), where some material doesn’t get through and what does get through flows out in the odd dream logic of condensation and ongoing deferral.”      –Thomas Heise, The Missouri Review (Vol. 34:111).

Gabrielle Giffords, the Congresswoman from Arizona, is thankfully recovering from the point-blank gun-shot wound that she sustained to her head.  Forensic analysis showed how the bullet entered her skull and exited after passing through the area of the brain associated with speech, and if it hadn’t passed through, the energy from the trauma would have been too much.  The victim would not have survived.

As of last week, of course, we see that Giffords has done considerably more than survive and suffer the comatose or vegetative conditions associated with the aftermath of such horrific events.   She has cast votes in Congress.   She has done interviews.   And most recently she has resigned from her post in the House of Representative and will now be devoting herself full-time to recovery, which may involve a trip to the African continent with her astronaut husband, Mark Kelly.   It may also involve a sojourn to the “border zone” that Heise describes above.

I find myself irresistibly drawn to this story for a variety of reasons:  the relationship between Giffords and her spouse is simply beautiful to behold and I can only imagine the way their private conversations also manifest all that’s good about marriage and the way it’s supposed to work.   I also might point out how Giffords actually stood for very controversial things, gun control among them, and that in Arizona, where the wild, wild west is a point of nostalgic pride, that’s a courageous stand to take.   But most of all, what strikes me about this amazing person’s progress involves the tears associated with her overwhelming drive to communicate, and to communicate in ways that may prove instructive for those interested in semiotics and how language becomes tethered to the rawest right-hemisphere processing of the brain.

Giffords weeps and weeps most often as she attempts to retrieve words and form sentences, things that are now much more difficult than they used to be.  Regarding the violent act which precipitated her injuries as well as the death of others — including a federal judge who appeared with her in the Safeway parking lot … including a nine-year-old girl who idolized her — she is now painfully aware.   That is, she grasps the tragic loss of life, and that she miraculously survived.   She comprehends the psycho-path’s premeditated act, perhaps his warped world-view.  But the visual imagery associated with the actual firing of the weapon is blissfully blacked out… cryptically erased… redacted by the powers of the soul (or the hard-wiring of the brain, which may be inextricably intertwined)…

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Because seven is a cooler number than eight.

Some people would have you believe there are no new stories to tell. Christopher Booker would have you believe there are only seven plots in all of existence (though he does allow for subplots under his comedy and tragedy headings, because (I can only assume) most people with a brain could tell you that “tragedy” is not, in and of itself, a plot). I admit I’ve never read his book, and I know better than to let TV Tropes suck me in while I’m trying to get anything done, so I’ll take a stab at those seven plots and say they’re something like this: Lord of the Rings, Oedipus (marrying your mom—is that comedy or tragedy?), Cinderella, Twilight (though I’ve never read it), Star Wars, Inception, and To the Lighthouse, though I still can’t tell you what happened in Inception, and something tells me Booker hasn’t read much Woolf if he thinks her plots would fall under a heading such as “The Monster.”

In grad school, we sometimes talked about someone (and, forgive me, I forget who, because I was almost completely uninterested in simplifying plot this far) who had said there were two: someone comes to town, someone leaves town (or, perhaps I’m mis-remembering because I just looked at Cory Doctorow’s page on Wikipedia; have you tried the random article feature? It’s as much of a time sink as TV Tropes). Read more »

Fact: 71 days until the Get Lit! Festival begins.
Fact: A person who may or may not have a serious medical condition still showed up the other day, worked hard and stayed the whole shift without a whiff of self-pity or complaint.
Truth: I want to be more like that.

Fact: There are ___ days until your thesis is due.
Truth: Don’t count. Don’t even think about counting. Make sure everyone understands that if they continually announce the countdown until their/your defense date, you’ll punch them in the throat.

Fact: When you’re planning fifty events, every person thinks their event is at the top of your priority list.
Truth: Most of them aren’t. Sorry.

Fact: Everyone around you will assume that their level of stress about thesis is greater than yours.
Truth: Everyone will be stressed, to some degree. It’s not a competition. Be kind to each other.

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Early in the new Murakami novel, a young writer named Tengo edits/rewrites a novella, originally written by a teenage girl, to win a debut literary prize.  As the novel progresses, the world he lives in changes to resemble the world Tengo embellished/ created in his work.  Notably, he describes two moons in the novella, and lo and behold, eventually he notices there are two moons in his world, and the second moon looks exactly how he described it.

On occasion, I’m struck by the similarity of something in the real world to something in a story I wrote.  Am I special person, like Tengo?  (I’m aware Tengo is a fictional character) Or did my sub-conscious give me the idea, which I used in the story, and then noticed in the real world?  I lean toward the latter.

I tried NaNoWriMo this year.  I failed.  I wrote about 1,500 words my first day, but decided they were so bad, and I mean really bad, that I couldn’t bear the thought of pounding out 48,500 more terrible words.  (NaNoWriMo seems to work for some people and that’s great)  I share this because in those first few pages, my main character hits a little girl with his car on his way to work.  It’s not his fault.  The girl darted out in front of him, but he feels guilty, and wonders if he could have prevented it had he been paying more attention.   Read more »

My fellow poet and girl crush, Danielle Shutt,  had a poem called “Narcotic Winter” in the September 2011 issue of Pank. It was accompanied by an interview conducted by J. Bradley. I’d heard the poem before during our monthly graduate reading, Voice Over, and I was excited to see what Danielle had to say about it.  I wasn’t disappointed.  As usual, Danielle was eloquent and witty, insightful and self-deprecating when speaking about her impulses as a writer. And it made me wonder how I would’ve answered questions about my own poetry.

For the next few months, I hounded my fellow poets. At parties, I got drunk and asked each one to “Describe to me your writing aesthetic.” I wanted to know what contemporary writers they would compare their work to. I wanted to know about their opinions on rhetorical questions in poems and how they viewed titles that had no seeming relation to their poems. I wanted to know about dashes. I wanted all these answers because I couldn’t answer them for myself. 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 »

Although the boxing gym looks nothing like this, there's still a bit more fighting involved than I prefer.

On Monday, I went with three other EWU MFAers to a boxing gym. I know this sounds like the start of a joke – four writers walk into a boxing ring and – but it’s not. My friends joined the gym at the start of the quarter and have been working out there three times a week. At a party last weekend, they were singing the praises of the experience and I, a few drinks deep, said something along the lines of “Take me with you! I wanna punch some bitches!” So on Monday, they took me with them.

I got an introductory lesson on how to stand, how to protect my face, and how to throw a punch. This was pretty rad. I’m sure to anyone watching, I looked like a giant Gumby doll wearing boxing gloves – floppy, too-long limbs folded at awkward angles. But just being in a real boxing ring with my fists up made me feel kind of tough and cool. Plus, my tiny, feisty girl instructor shouted “get your shit together” every time I lost my balance, which is a surprisingly effective instruction. I wish some one would come by my desk once an hour and say it to me while I write. Anyway, it was a great workout. Afterward, the gym’s owner pulled me aside and asked me how I liked it and if I wanted to join the gym. I told him I did like it, but I would have to think about it.

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No one likes to be misunderstood.

At least I’m assuming, and shamelessly projecting upon others the alienation that I myself do not savor…

The fact is — as I write whatever I write — I do not really know what I’m intending to mean, and therefore appreciate another soul making the effort to comprehend that proposition or observation or truth claim around which my words take tentative and perhaps over-confident stabs in the dark.

This, I’m afraid, is the best any reader or any literary critic can offer by way of definitive credentials.   “Ours is in the trying,” muses T.S. Eliot (italics mine).  We put our stuff out there and hope for a dialogue partner, and at our best, do not react with a hyper-critical defense which degenerates into the slinging of mud or jello…  Or even the defense which ostensibly folds its arms and snickers in condescension.

Daisy Fried, in her New York Times articles and in her Poetry Foundation commentaries, has exercised her readership’s cerebral capacities for over a decade now.  I love that about the poetic graduate of Swarthmore College — that she pushes and prods and gets our synapse connections firing on all cylinders.   And I want her to know that I used to ride my bike through that upscale campus and pick up, as through osmosis, the academy’s deepest thoughts.   I did this, however, not for the sole purpose of one day asserting that  William Carlos Williams is the Dante of the American twentieth century (a comment that makes me want to dig further into the Inferno and perhaps learn the epic in the original Italian).  But I thought those thoughts, which were clearly above my blue-collar rank, because it seemed to me then, and seems to me now, that no one owns this dialectic terrain… that intellectual property is nothing more than a cold, stony seat in the amphitheater where scholars and non-scholars may cool their heels, listen and perhaps chime into the conversation.

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