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.

1. Anyone who knows me well could tell you something that most of them find surprising about me. Despite how fiercely independent I am and my belief that feminist rhetoric should be followed by feminist actions, I have to admit that I fit a very negative stereotype: I’m afraid of being home alone in the dark.
2.  I wish I was kidding. As long as I can remember being home alone, I have checked the locks, turned on an unreasonable amount of lights, kept a phone of some kind within inches of my hand with an emergency number on speed dial, and kept various weapons within my reach. I jump at small noises, recheck windows and locks, try not to think about every single entry point in my house that could be easily broken into without my knowledge, and try to stay awake as late as possible, because the alternative, of being asleep when someone breaks in, somehow seems worse. I have slept with kitchen knives and pocket knives under my pillow and/or the pillow next to me, and I’ve slept with a phone handset on my bedside table as well as a cell phone under the covers. Repeatedly. There have been no less than four times that I asked someone to sleep at my place simply because I was afraid, and the number of times I considered asking someone to stay over is exponentially larger.
3. My entire childhood and adolescence was spent living in a house with Australian shepherds and Labrador retrievers, one of whom shredded the wooden front door on a daily basis in an effort to attack the mailman. No one has ever broken into a house that I’ve lived in, and I don’t remember either of my parents being paranoid about break-ins. I grew up in a safe neighborhood, which is something that we tell ourselves matters, even as we learn again and again that it doesn’t. I live in a safe neighborhood now. I have a dog who’d certainly bark if she heard glass break or a door forced open. None of this actually helps after the sun has gone down and I’m sitting around waiting for a knock on the door to indicate that my life is about to become a Flannery O’Connor story. Or worse.
4. None of these utterly illogical and pathetic actions line up with how I’d like to be perceived. When I admitted it to two of my oldest friends, both male, they stared and asked if I was joking. Not with any condescension or rudeness, but what they knew of me simply did not line up with what I was telling them. When I joked to a female friend one night about how I’d be pulling an all-nighter because I was alone in the house, she, without knowing about any of the insane habits described above, immediately offered to spend the night. She understood instinctively. This is not to say that one gender fears being physically attacked and another doesn’t; we know that’s not true. But we also know that those who appear fearless are afraid, too. Maybe even more so than anyone else.
5. I receive emails on my phone, as many of us do. A week ago, a Google Alert notification arrived. I’d set an alert for my name months ago because of my job, hoping to catch any event-related publicity in which I was quoted. I’d forgotten the alert still existed until I looked at the email. “30 year old Melissa Huggins was found dead in her apartment…” I stared at my phone for a second, put it down, and tried to go back to work. I did not follow the hyperlink to read the gruesome details of my death. Read more »

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 »

It’s hard to make time to write in spring because I want to be on the move. When the sun finally takes back the sky, I should be hiking under Ponderosa Pines I think, snapping last season’s dry needles under my feet.

Yet winter is hardly a better time to write. I have to bundle myself against the cold and drive to the mountains to snowshoe, else the sinkhole of depression give way. Without those weekend sun-chasing afternoons, I’d lie in bed eating cheap, frozen pizza and watching reruns of The Office. Without motion, my mind and drive are far gone.

I feel so good in motion that I often wonder why I make time for the catapulting thoughts, why I bother to write at all. Is crowding out other things I love in order to have time to write worth it?  I ask why write too often, and I always find a different answer. This time I go back to a source, to the earliest surviving poem of any form of the English language. I return to Caedmon’s Song. It begins:

Now we shall praise heaven-kingdom’s Guardian,

the creator’s might, and his mind-thought,

the words of the Glory-father.

There is praise embedded in the roots of language, and it occurs to me that I write because I do not sing. I have no choir to lift me, no chorus to match the seasons or ease my grief. What I do have is the craft of my own song. I trace my roots through time, through language, and through the shifting identities of migration.  My past is spread far across the globe.

It is only in this moment, in this song, that I find unity between the world and myself. And of the restlessness of my body, my bone locker as Caedmon would have called it, I think, writing makes my thoughts more solid. The words I want to write, as they find a rhythm in my head, become a cadence. Without a body, I would have no vessel, and without the mind, I would have no reason to run.

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 better writer than I’ll ever be

Last June, when life felt uncertain due to my impending graduation and unemployment, I started listening to stand-up comedy. And I didn’t stop for months. The soundtrack of my 2012 summer was underscored by the laughter of strangers.

Up until that point in my life, I’d only been exposed to stand-up comedy in random punctuations of happenstance. Other people dragged me to comedy clubs, I happened to catch the end of a Comedy Central special, or friends emailed me youtube clips. I had some people burn me CDs of Mitch Hedburg or Dane Cook, but I never pursued any individual comics with any intent. So it’s funny to me that I ravenously started to consume it and couldn’t stop. Even after hearing bits over and over and over. I know certain sets verbatim, but don’t mind hearing them again.

But then something funny started to happen. My poet-heart started connecting with my comic-ear. And after hearing sets over and over something clicked: these comics are damn good writers. But not just in the “oh that’s funny!” way but in the “they edit on a level of self-awareness and audience connection I can only hope to someday achieve in my poetry” way.

My comedy adventure started with Pandora (did you know you can make stations for stand-up comics?) This is how I was introduced to a lot of my new favorite comedians — through the Pandora algorithm. I can track my love affair with comedians through the stations I’ve created in the past year.

I created a Jim Gaffigan station, which led me to -> Mike Birbiglia -> Aziz Ansari -> Patton Oswalt ->Kathleen Madigan -> John Mulaney -> Wyatt Cenac -> Hannibal Buress.

Most recently, Hannibal Burress is my favorite comic. But that’s also been true for each comic listed in my chain-o-comics. I find a comic I enjoy, create a station, then declare “YOU ARE MY FAVORITE” until I get seduced by a new one wherein I shout again “No wait YOU are my favorite!” 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.

Slept out on a limb, too, did you, Star?

Then fell to the highway, stranded.  I understand

you had to get away. I understand

why you’re on the road tonight.

Your milky-eyed companions –

they had a lot to say about you–

gossiping in your language of constellations:

grumblings of distant measurements, Read more »

Spokane, April, 2013

Words travel at tremendous speeds.  The incorporeal messages fit slim wires.

*   *   *

At first, words transmitted and received without the physical exchange of objects carried catastrophic intelligence. Couriers, death’s own angels.

*   *   *

Then, plummeting expense and advancement. Telegraphy was used for sending announcements, negotiating business, and delivering news.

*   *   *

In 1850, it cost approximately twenty-five cents per hundred miles for ten words or less.

*   *   *

At a slight sacrifice to smoothness, but with a saving in tolls which often more than compensates, small words may be eliminated from your telegram without impairing the sense. Read more »