Hey – it’s been awhile. My MFA-related job as a line cook has taken over my life, my dreams (literal and figurative), and my time to read and write as much as I want and need to. I did just read (before I received a text, asking if I wanted to come in to work early to help subdue today’s behemoth prep list) a great essay, Darwin and the Art of the Three Star Review over at Vouched. I personally tend to read more music reviews than book reviews – often times more than I actually listen to the music, but anybody with a fetish for reading book reviews, often times more often than the book under review, ought to check this essay out. Perhaps I’m a little biased, as it’s written by my friend Kyle Winkler and published on my other friend Christopher Newgent’s website, but it’s a great look at the phenomenon of judgement over a lifestyle that goes unrewarded more often than not. That’s all. I miss you guys. Time to go make gumbo, mainline corn pasta salad into the Appalachian veins of morbidly-obese yuppies, and slice off an opposable thumb.

Someone wise & judgmental once said to me, "imagine if you were in their shoes."

If I open a new tab with my internet, I’m shown a display of my most-visited websites. Handy. Convenient. And potentially embarrassing. A friend recently used my computer and when my most-visited results popped up he turned to me and asked “seriously?”

Two of them were celebrity gossip sites.

It was like he’d opened my nightstand goodie drawer,  I suddenly felt ashamed. I wanted to deny everything like the time I took a huge shit in the single-stall bathroom at work and opened the door to a waiting coworker Hey, Gary, it was like that when I got here. Read more »

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.

Read more »

Fine, this is what it looks like.

It took me forever to get this review written.  I bought Blue Nights, Joan Didion’s latest work, in November, soon after it came out.  It’s a small book and I figured I could read it in a day and get to work. I started it pretty quickly and read 40 pages.  And then it sat on the night stand by my reading chair in my bedroom.  I took the cover off, and the back photo haunted me every time I saw it—Didion’s daughter, young, sitting on a chair, elbows on knees with towhead in hands, too serious. And I couldn’t read it.  I knew it was about mortality, and as Didion says “When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.” I knew her daughter, so ill in the first memoir, was going to die, had died, and so I spent a lot of time not reading it.  And when I went back to Blue Nights in January, I opened my reading journal to see what I’d written, to remind me.

“There’s a sense of clinging about this…it’s humbling and haunting and it makes me want to stop reading it and go read a book or play a game with my kids.”

Read more »

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 »

1. The essayist will take pride in neuroses. He will go on an on about the joy of scratching his ear with a pencil or brag about how long he hasn’t driven a car.

2. Everyday outings, such as going to the grocery store, will become overwhelming adventures. Huge adventures, like swimming with whale sharks off the coast of the Yucatan, will sound like everyday activities.

3. You will never know where she is. She will insist on trying a diverse range of activities, from accordion lessons to firing a machine gun, claiming it is research for a “Never Have I Ever” column.

4. You will realize that your world is more bizarre than a postmodern short story. You will start anecdotes with, “You can’t make this stuff up!”

5. You will not know whom you’re with at any moment: the character, the narrator, the persona, or the person. You will begin to wonder if you are a character or a person and sometimes narrate the recent past as if a memory from childhood. He will hear you and violate your POV.
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 »

You start to look a lot like Egon, when you're crazy.

Near the end of last school year, when I had run into a creative wall—long before the assignments stopped being due—I was doing everything I could to avoid writing. Mostly listening to hyper-emotional music. The sad stuff while lying on my back, under a sheet. The pop punk while jumping from my bed to my desk chair…because the floor was lava.

It all made sense at the time—unlike my final workshop story, which chronicled, among other things, an argument with my garden gnome, Armando, as to whether or not I was the reincarnation of Egon Schiele.

Sounds great, I know.

The piece may sound like it had no redeeming value, but there was this one anecdote from my actual childhood that stuck out through all the weirdness. It was about a time during high school when I tried to comfort Thomas, a victim of bullying, who was contemplating suicide, and how I ultimately failed to respond effectively. Read more »