a thought on a poem by Deborah Poe

When things* are broken, I turn to poetry. Suffice it to say, this is a broken week in the world. But it is a week in which I am still trying to impose order on at least my world, and part of that ordering is preparation for teaching some literature and writing in Romania in less than a month.

This morning, as part of the class preparation, I was considering Deborah Poe's extraordinary collection Elements, which is a book inspired by and arranged according to the Periodic Table of the Elements. The poems are scientifically acute and lyrically imagistic by turns, and this morning, "Manganese (Mn)" caught me.

The poem opens with the lines,

this is not the chemistry of hibiscus blossoms

or the color of lithium steam coming off spring

and continues, a few lines later, saying,

these shivery nodules, like ancestors,

are immortalized--i mean in ways

loneliness is related to time

Loneliness, indeed, must be related to time. There are equations in my head: velocity & time & distance, and so many people think of loneliness as it pertains to distance—to be so far from x—and that distance is only time that’s been thrown, fast and away. And by this math of words, then, where there is no time, where time is suspended and held, there can be no loneliness because time and distance never meet and nothing speeds past.

I read this poem, and the morning—how much waiting we are doing and have done and how we are watching seconds tick while someone bleeds out in a street or a building collapses or the ashes won’t stop their hot glowing and we wait longer and watch the hours and tragedy spin us further and further from that which weaves together home and here—the morning stopped. Time paused in washes of color and mist and everything was whole and connected, just for a moment.

In less than a month, I will be in Romania, which is the farthest from home, as Samwise Gamgee says, I’ve ever been. I will spend twenty-two hours flinging myself fast and away in the bodies of airplanes, walking fast through doors and gates that permit no reverse, but I will be taking this poem with me, and I will never be lonely.

*productivity, sentences, peace, silence, noise

snow day

The second winter storm in a week has dropped another foot (and more) of snow on Casper, and I am (mostly) done whining uncontrollably about it. We are three weeks shy of the semester's end, and the only word on my lips is acceptance. Things will be as they will be, and everything will get done because everything always gets done. And this is Wyoming: nothing meteorological has permanence. Despite near whiteout conditions here and there last Monday-Wednesday, despite the fact that my Serious Business Snow Boots were not high enough to keep the snow from winnowing down and melting, plastering cold denim against my shins, by Thursday, the roads had mostly melted clean and the sidewalks (where the sun struck them) were nearly dry. The snow here is powder-light, and the wind will whisk away what sun and dry, dry air doesn't sublimate.There are no high, gray banks of snow that last and last here.

But for today, it feels quite constant--quite deeply, silently constant--because it's supposed to continue snowing until last tonight, and all of the schools are closed, even Casper College. This is my fourth year here, and it is my first snow day, and yesterday, when it snowed all day again, there was the soft, hopeful buzz of snow day? flickering all over campus. Last night, my brain had already committed to it--I stayed up far, far too late, and I set my alarm an hour later than I usually do, for 6:01 a.m., because we were told that if there was a decision to close campus for the day, it would come by six a.m. At three I woke up, again at five, at five-fifteen, and then when the beeping started, the message was there: all classes and activities for the day canceled.

I tried to go back to sleep. It is the first rule of Snow Day: go back to bed. But it's the middle of April and the small window in the bedroom had let in enough snow-filtered light to say morning. And it's a snow day: assignments cannot be collected, meetings do not meet. It is the kind of quintessential freedom that rarely happens--a full gift of a day.

I'm trying to use mine wisely. I did clean. I have writing to do. I have course-planning to do. But mostly, I keep looking outside, thinking about James Joyce, specifically the last paragraph of his short story, "The Dead" (the last story in Dubliners). I read this paragraph to my Composition II students yesterday. I always introduce it as "the most beautiful paragraph written in English," and I have yet to find anything that convinces me otherwise.

Read it out loud.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. he watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned softly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Fifteen minutes after I read this to my students, I saw the first news of the explosions at the Boston Marathon. I didn't tell them about it. I didn't interrupt. They were working and so many of them have that haggard, purple-circled smudge around the eyes that says, right now, they're always working and they need to be working to get everything done because it's the end of the semester and the only word that we have for it is acceptance. We accept that the next three weeks are going to be hard. We accept that this part of the semester always sucks. I accept that I probably should have told my students what was happening and I accept that I did not because if they could have seventy-five minutes of calm, computer-lab quiet that added up to having free the same amount of time last night when they were with family or friends to process the news or ignore it and keep working or play video games or throw snowballs, I could give them that.

Today, the weather gave me time, gave my students time (even if I don't think they'll use it any more wisely than I probably will because I keep looking outside and simply staring). Today, the weather gave this state more snow, and this state needs snow to feed its spindly streams and rivers, to melt slow from the tops of mountains. Today, the weather gave slowness and quiet to Casper, and in the face of all of this fast noise from the news--suspects, arrests, fear, speculation, inaccuracy inaccuracy inaccuracy--I am glad that I can hear the snow falling faintly and faintly falling, these dry, ice-fine flakes.

Spring Training: The Point is to Learn Things (and Maybe I Did)

The baseball season has officially started. Amen.

This post has been a long time brewing, and it's only a little about baseball, but baseball is in the margins. At this time of year, baseball is always in the margins.

When I was in Scottsdale, I had the privilege of having four really extraordinary meals, and one of those was extraordinary for several reasons not only related to the food. Thanks to Keith Law's excellent dining guides for the greater Phoenix area, I happily, happily recommend you visit Barrio Queen and Hillside Spot immediately if you find yourself there. I also had great food at Nourish, which I hunted down on my own.

The famed pulled pork sandwich at Hillside Spot. What a bloody perfect sandwich.

But at Il Bosco, I had a fig and goat cheese pizza that was easily one of the best things I've ever eaten, and I liked their house-brined olives so much I bought a jar to take home.

Olives. Man. These olives.

(I didn't think I even liked olives, generally, before. In the gamut of delicious food-stuffs often served with olives, I'd never turn down bread or cheese in order to pursue the eating of olives. Clearly, I had not had the right olives.)

Still, I'd been prepared for the food to be superlative (and I planned for that--I definitely ate an entire pizza by myself that night). The more unexpected thing, though, was how marvelous the staff (and the proprietor, I think) were. I'm not talking about quality service (though that was certainly part of my experience): I'm talking about how welcome I felt, as cliche as that sounds.

I'm not someone who often feels welcome because I don't necessarily desire it. There's a clean, crisp impersonal hospitality that I tend to seek out both at home and abroad (which sometimes makes going out in Casper difficult because I have students who work everywhere and they generally rock but it's hard to go anywhere and disappear). Usually, if I'm alone, I've brought work of some kind with me--there's always writing to do, and if there's writing to do, I admit to being that jackass mostly buried in pages. It's also a way to say I'm fine--you don't need to entertain me. I'm not particularly social, and I have a loathing of rote small-talk that I can't explain and feel horribly guilty about.


But that week was a suspended paradise, a whole collection of Things I (Have) Never Do(ne), and when I arrived at the restaurant (nothing fancy--wood-oven pizza in a small dining room and a slightly larger patio) at four, too early for the actual dinner crowd, I was the only patron there. I felt obtrusive, but at least I wouldn't have to rush out on my dinner to catch the Team USA vs. Colorado exhibition game I was heading to. I could eat my whole pizza in leisure while editing: perfect.

When the server seated me, her demeanor was friendly and maybe glad at having something to do--even though I was there for more than an hour, only one other family came in, and even then, very near to five. After she left me with the menu, after she came back with water and olives, after she came back in yet another trip with my drink, she fiddled with the already wrapped silverware bundles, straightened menus just at the edge of the empty bar. With every trip, I received a little burst of language: about the water, about the olives, about how the pizza I ordered was her favorite thing on the menu. Though pleasant, none of these things are strange or surprising or special, or even particularly reaching for connection. But I'd spent the previous four days nearly mute. I'd had some short and enthusiastic exchanges with ballpark volunteers (God love you, Peoria volunteers, and the Jobing.com arena usher who commented on my Malkin jersey and got my I'm visiting former Penguins speech), but even my communications with friends and family were via text message. Maybe it was a cumulative effect--I usually spend fifty percent of my days doing public speaking in a classroom, after all--and maybe it was because the server seemed interested and I wasn't keeping her from anyone else and maybe it was because she asked questions she didn't have to ask.

She didn't have to ask any questions, of course, but I had some of the usual markers of being a traveler: a Phillies hat on my head (no denizens of the Cactus League they); a backpack full of books and notebooks and camera (and the bag-searcher at Peoria cheerfully forbade me to do work while I was there); aloneness. The conversation is already created: what are you doing here?

I had a three-fold answer. I could say that I was there (at the restaurant) because of Keith Law's recommendation, and that did later lead to the proprietor coming out and telling me more about the restaurant, which was really lovely. I could say that I was there to watch baseball and enjoy my spring break. I said both of these things, and both of these things were true. The last answer--that I was there to write--was the most important to me, and it is the one that I hadn't really mentioned to anyone in my admittedly few casual conversations of the week. (I did blog about it, but people choose to read that and I don't have to look them in the eye while they read it.) I made myself say it. She asked about everything.

As I was talking to her--about many things, including her trips to visit her sister in Colorado Springs, her late husband--I saw myself coming to the understanding that I didn't particularly feel like a fraud. For the first time, claiming myself as a writer, I didn't feel like an imposter. For all that I write about writing constantly, for the three degrees I have, for all the time I spend writing and teaching writing, I have never really convinced myself that I qualified for the monikker. At that moment, it felt like it applied, all at once, even though it's been a slow and gradual sojourn towards it over the last six months, and it's fitting that the understanding settled on me there, during Spring Training. Baseball has been one of the primary ways I've made meaning in my life, and in that place, at that time, I felt justified in saying that writing was the thing I was doing there, that writing was the reason I'd made the trip. A fair bit of that courage came from the fact that I had an actual writing task while I was there, a task that turned into this piece at The Classical, not just that I was revising.

The server asked, too, for a link to my blog, and there was a hit on it a few days later from Phoenix. I surely don't know if that was her. There are a lot of people in the greater Phoenix area. But if it was--if she visits again or visits ever--I thank her, for being there, for having a conversation because she wanted to, because it was possible. 

I am choosing to read this incident in the most positive and generous light because I have no reason to believe otherwise. I am choosing to read interest and kindness into that server's speech because this is about believing. Spring Training, I saw, is the very essence of believing. Opening Day, not two weeks ago, is the culmination of this. David Roth wrote about that at the Wall Street Journal, and Diana Moscovitz wrote a Pirates-specific paean on the hope against hope. The start of the baseball season is about thinking that this could, in fact, be the year.

Fingers crossed. It might.

This is the fig & goat cheese (and prosciutto & arugula) pizza from Il Bosco. It was life-changingly good. Maybe life-changing is a thing they specialize in. You should give it a shot. Worst-case scenario is that you get damn fine pizza.

Making Things Up is Decidedly Easier

Recently, my first piece of published non-fiction* entered the world, and non-fiction is a genre I adore, so I'm particularly grateful to see my writing in the field housed in a good home like The Rumpus.

I have to say, though: Oh, I find making things up so much easier.

When reading fiction, a reader can be bored or dislike something and put the work down, but, barring really egregious research fail, it's hard for the fiction writer to be wrong. The suspension of disbelief is embedded in the art of fiction; readers are more inclined to give the benefit of the doubt until given specific reason to do otherwise.

In non-fiction, which purports to represent reality at least to some measure, one can be wrong so much more easily, I think. I'm not talking specifically about facts, though that's certainly the most immediate and recognizable incorrect, but rather that the assumption is then, if non-fiction deals with reality, then the writer and the reader are approaching the subject matter from the same locus. That makes it easier to assess--and sometimes easier to engage in and identify with, and that's one of the great pleasures of non-fiction. Readers know reality; we're all in it. You know, theoretically.

I often worry that I fall more into that "theoretically" category than is probably healthy. I'm not sure I have the strongest grip on reality, in that fiction has always felt more real to me. I can categorically say I spend more time thinking about fiction(fictional worlds, people, and situations, well above and beyond the actual fiction I am or have been writing) than about my own experiences. I apply narrative to things that have no entrenched, absolute narrative (often in sports and music, where narrative may be suggested but not definitive). It's not a particularly conscious act on my part; it's simply how it's been.

I also question reality because it's become quite clear that people do not see the world in the same way. There are mounds of evidence culled from massively important social, religious, and emotional spheres to illustrate this, but the one that makes it stick is a memory from a graduate school fiction workshop. The professor brought to class an ashtray, a fairly conventional-looking, deep indigo blue ceramic ashtray. He asked the workshop to write about it, to describe it, and he gave us ten minutes. We wrote, we shared, and at the end of the exercise, he slapped the table.

"None of you got the color right. None of you. It's the exact shade of Minnesota Vikings purple. The exact shade of their helmets."

I tell you, reader, that ashtray could no more be called purple than the Vikings' helmets could be called blue.

But the moment drove home an important point: in that very talented writer and professor's eyes, the ashtray was not only capable of being classified as purple, but as a most pure and saturated purple. My father had a navy blue minivan for a while (so very definitively navy that it was described so on the from-the-dealer tag), and that van was called purple by many. As a lover of color-related words, I was (am) a little mental over this phenomenon, particularly with regard to my own dad, who can differentiate between a dozen dozen shades of brown to locate the particular hue of a whitetail deer in autumn.

But color must be as all things are: subjective, to a certain point. Linguistically, the differences in various languages for expressing the colors blue and green seem particularly fraught and complex. Left with time to percolate, this understanding that my eyes do not process color in the same way as someone else's (and colorblindness is a wholly different issue) has seeped into a lot of other areas. I wonder about the real version. I'm not often so full of hubris that I assume my own version is the most true (though it is really, really hard when I'm naming colors), which leads me to questioning everything.

At its most basic, it's lead to me being angry about situations that necessitate wearing sunglasses because sunglasses distort and cool and shade (which is their function, yes, but I dislike it--I want the "most real" version, eye fatigue and all). At its most ridiculous, it leads me to wondering whether I'm the only one seeing the traffic signal turn green. What if it's still actually red? After a pretty terrifying bit of driving outside of Flagstaff as I returned from Arizona, it had me actually considering whether I might have already died. My mind turned the morning into a film cliche: the ghost that doesn't know it's dead. As I crept along in four inches of wet, heavy snow, looking at other cars that had slid from the road, spinning circles into the median, and holding my breath every time a tractor trailer passed me because the slush-spray threw an impenetrable white blindness over the whole car, I was really starting to consider it possible. Or inevitable.

By the time I emerged from the worst of the snow, I decided that at least my half-baked grip on reality was entertaining if I was going to spend the next eighteen hours in the car, alone. I am never bored.

The drive ended well enough (and late/early enough), and despite the very concrete physical evidence of it all (like how much it hurt and lessened yet other hurts when I peeled myself from the driver's seat for the last time), it still didn't feel like what must be someone else's version of real. What does a haze of snowflakes look like at three in the morning? The weather became a wholly different thing when I turned on my high beams. In lower light, in the final hundred miles, one snowflake hit the windshield once in a while, not even enough to make me turn the wipers on. In brighter--which I used whenever I could because my eyes staged pronghorn ready to spring at every mile marker--it looked like heading into warp space, a thousand thousand white speckles approaching from the deep because the storm was coming from the west to the east, and I was driving toward it. The light caught each flake, turning it into one of those small stretched lights, like this was the U.S.S. Enterprise. Back to low-beams? Six white dots in lazy distance, an afterthought. Again to high? A deluge of powder.

But I didn't see a single pronghorn--in fact, not a single creature in the trip--because wild things are smart enough to hunker down in the face of bad weather. They did their moving before the wind changed. Ungulates, too, are mostly crepuscular, not nocturnal, and I know that. And yet, there they were, in the reflector-glint at the roadside, eyes in every discarded aluminum can. Both caution and exhaustion create these phantoms, which revealed their mile-marker or litter-based nature as I passed, but I want to know, empirically, which is the more real: the way my mind did make those shapes and the way I saw that heavy slanting snow; or the concrete knowledge that there were no pronghorn beside the road?

I know that there are principles of velocity that give reason to the snow's appearance. I know there are neurochemical explanations for the imagined animals. I'm asking the wrong question in wanting one or the other, and perhaps that's what non-fiction does: it lets the writer and the reader contemplate that intersection. It's still an anxious place, though, for me as a writer. When I write fiction, I know what constitutes that imagined real. It is finite and it is absolute because it's mine. If I've done my job at the sentence level, there isn't that same intersection of maybe blue, maybe purple. If it is deep indigo blue, it is that. The same holds true at the sentence level in non-fiction, too, of course; the writer still has to choose the words carefully to arrive at whatever version of true or correct or real is being represented. But in fiction, I am certain of that version. Fiction is one of the few things in this world about which I am certain.

When I walked to my front door that night, at three-thirty in the morning, all I can say is that it was snowing hard, and still there was no trace of it on the ground.




* I'm going to use non-fiction instead of creative non-fiction in this, though I have to say that I really mean the same thing by both terms as I apply it to my own work: writing grounded in truth. Essay--but essay, in my mind, connotes more breadth, depth, and length than my own pieces I'm referring to here, none of which are over two thousand words. Creative non-fiction--but that connotes a less pre-determined course in the actual act of writing, and the pieces I've linked here were done with quite concrete goals and final purposes in mind. So...wibbly-wobbly lingo-bingo writey-blighty stuff.

goodnight, spring break

Sundown at Salt River Fields at Talking Stick, Scottsdale, AZ

It's tipping past bedtime on Sunday night, and I've accomplished what I set out to do this spring break: I finished the revision of my novel. Admittedly, it took until the end of tonight instead of the end of my week in Arizona, but it's done. All 673 pages of it. Now I enter the really difficult part: sending it out into the world.

More importantly, I can now move on to the other shorter writing projects I have simmering.

The week I spent in the greater Phoenix area was nothing short of magical. Look for odds and ends of that sort of thing in the not-so-distant future.

Arizona Calling

It's been a long two days of driving (though it was also good driving: 191 South and 17 South were, on the whole, everything I ask for in a highway). Have a little photo collage of things I saw, offered with surprisingly little commentary. (I saw a great many more things, but I did not take pictures of everything, because, you know, driving.)

Dam at the base of Flaming Gorge, UT

Cameron, AZ

Another view of Cameron, AZ (near the South Rim of the Grand Canyon)

Scottsdale, I consider this to be showing off.

I like this view, too. The little hand-held tape recorder definitely wins MVP for the trip, though the wee blue speakerlet will certainly get a lot of love in the post-game interviews, as well.

Hunting Spring: The Writer Goes South

I am going to Arizona in seven days. During the semester spring break, I am, for the first time since my middle year of undergraduate (which was in 2002), going to have a proper spring break in which I do "spring break things."  I understand that most of the world does not get any version of spring break, let alone a proper spring break, and I am grateful for any break at all, spring or otherwise. But I spent last spring break coming home from AWP and then having the worst flu experience of my life (really for ten full days). Generally, "spring break" means one or several simultaneous variants: grade like a lunatic; go to AWP and run around feeling exhilarated or abjectly miserable (with truly no middle ground); complete grant applications; visit family; feel guilty about not visiting family. Spring break has been part of my life for the last thirteen years. With any luck, it will continue to be so. But spring breaks have never really meant break, and spring breaks have certainly never meant writing. 

I aim to change that, at least for this year. I am doing so by doing a lot of things I've never done before.

1. I will be making a two-thousand mile round-trip solo. I've done a lot of long road-trips in my life, but never with just me for company. ...I should probably add some new tunes to my collection before I go and put fresh batteries in my hand-held tape recorder. (Taking actual notes while driving is a poor choice.)

1a. If you have strong opinions about music I should be listening to, recommend me stuff in the comments. I will have a long time to test-drive a lot of tunes.

2. I will be creating a writing retreat for myself for the first time. Over the summer, most days were "writing retreats" for me, at least in the sense that I had the house to myself for the bulk of the day, but being at home is never a place I can really isolate myself. There's too much familiar, too much waiting. Too many feelings of You should be doing ___.

3. I will be finishing my revision. Come hell or high water, this is the heart of my trip.

4. I will be going to MLB's Spring Training in the west. I've never been to Spring Training (as I have never lived closer than a thousand miles to it, but apparently the distance matters not this year). I've got plans for a handful of Cactus League games, and I'm staying within walking distance of two different stadiums. I will hopefully get to see Hunter Pence. Twice.

5. I have non-fiction writing assignments for myself, as related to this event. The novel revision comes first, but I've got some ideas, so much so that they've become assignments in the journalistic sense. I'm not thinking so much of straight reportage or anything, but I very, very seldom know what I'm going to write before I start it. Right now, I have some actual plans. I'm interested to see what happens with these, in an experimental sense. Am I even capable of following an idea formulated in advance? How long will it take before everything takes the unexpected left at Albuquerque?

6. I will watch ice hockey in the desert. The Ducks come to Phoenix, and I'll get to see a proper handful of former Penguins. (I miss Steve Sullivan. There, I said it.) Is it tacky to wear Penguins' gear to a Coyotes/Ducks game in support of former Penguins...even if said Penguins' gear is not specific to said former Penguins? Am I a douche for showing up in an Orpik jersey when Ray Shero decided the Penguins did not need now-Duck Ben Lovejoy's services on defense? Am I over-thinking this?

6a. After consulting my brother, he doesn't think the other four people at the arena will care. I can just move to sit in a different section.

To get there, though, I have to get through another full week of the regular responsibilities. It's going to be a busy week, for a number of reasons, some of which I may write about at some point.

what comes after the draft?

On December 20, I finished the first draft of the novel I've been working on since June. The euphoria of it lasted for about as long as it took to print a copy, stack the pages evenly, and bind it with yarn because it was too large to fit in any manuscript box that I had. I put it in the mail to Laura, e-mailed it to a few more readerfriends, and that was it.

We should bind more piles of paper with string. It's a theory.

The draft was done, and it was time to start the mellowing process before revision. Most writers will say they need a cooling off period before doing a thorough revision, some emotional and intellectual distance, and I generally agree with that. It's probably wise (to try) to fall a little out of love so I can look dispassionately at the narrative and characters before I make the hard decisions.

It was good to get the draft done. I got on a plane to visit family for the holidays less than thirty-six hours after I finished. The trip was part of the imperative to complete the book: if it wasn't out of my hands, it would have been in my hands through that whole trip, to the exclusion of the people I flew two thousand miles to see. I tried to leave it all behind, actually, but couldn't. I put a complete printed copy in my carry-on. I read my own draft on the plane, in airports, and even in the rare stray moments between visiting mania. I called it line-editing, and that wasn't a complete lie. At my parents' house, I was an insufferable prat who dropped the whole brick of it in front of my brother, onto the floor, so he could hear it. The physical shape and heft are things that everyone gets, even if talking about the weight of a novel means something quite different on the inside of this writer.

I have (mostly) stopped carrying it around. I have feedback from each of my readers, and as of the end of January, I've begun the actual process of revising. I even rearranged my desk to accommodate that.

Drafts to the left of G, drafts to the right, but he's stuck in the middle with Blues (versus Kings, which totally didn't fit into the lyric I was going for).

But between late December and late January, without the anchor of working on the novel, I nearly flew to pieces. I don't know what actual mania feels like, but maybe it was like this. I picked up knitting again for the first time in nearly a year. I didn't just pick it up--I tore back fifteen hours of knitting and started over, eclipsing my previous ending point in half the time. I spun several hundred yards of laceweight yarn. I completely disassembled my spinning wheel, re-treated all of the wooden pieces, and put it back together again. I've had it for almost six years and have never done that. I spun some more afterward. I made a lot of bread. I tried new recipes. I went to the gym. I reorganized my spice cupboard, cleaned the oven, listened to minor league hockey games, and tried to teach myself Russian. I agonized over whether to join a fantasy hockey league and decided I was too emotionally compromised by hockey to add an additional dimension to that. I applied to more residencies, I wrote some pieces of essays, I started working on the next novel in the queue. I cleaned all of my fountain pens and turned to writing everything long-hand for a while. I bought a brush pen and tried to learn to use it. I found an opportunity to teach in Romania for two weeks this summer. I prepped a brand new class I'd never taught before. I planned a road-trip and a vacation.

And I went back to the manuscript, over and over. I couldn't help myself. No matter what else I tried to put in those hours, there was no staying away. I looked at the first set of comments I'd gotten and made notes, questions to ask my other readers. I cheated and started fixing details and continuity blips; I rewrote the first chapter entirely because I'd decided to do that anyway. I spent the week after New Year's with a friend (who was in the process of reading the draft) and explaining to her what the characters thought of the music we listened to, the food we ate, the scenery.

There was, in sum, no clean break, and I couldn't figure out how to actually take time off. The only way I can conceive of getting that real distance, the editorial coolness and indifference that other people talk about, is infidelity. I will need to fall faster and harder in love with the next thing, and it isn't happening now. I don't want it to, either: the revising is getting done. In the past, I've gotten that distance because familiarity bred enough contempt that I didn't want to look at the piece anymore. Then I came back to it, weeks or months or even years later, when it had ceased being mine in any significant way. The contempt for this project hasn't come, and the revision is getting done because the trail is still fresh, still compels me to follow. The metaphor has gone from romance to the hunt. They are, of course, the same thing: both about blood, which is the vehicle for desire.

Annie Dillard writes, in the first chapter of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,

Certain Indians used to carve long grooves along the wooden shafts of their arrows. They called the grooves “lightning marks,” because they resembled the curved fissure lightning slices down the trunks of trees. The function of lightning marks is this: if the arrow fails to kill the game, blood from a deep wound will channel along the lightning mark, streak down the arrow shaft, and spatter to the ground, laying a trail dripped on broad-leaves, on stones, that the barefoot and trembling archer can follow into whatever deep or rare wilderness it leads. I am the arrow shaft, carved along my length by unexpected lights and gashes from the very sky, and this book is the straying trail of blood. (13)

I'm following the blood on this book because the trail is still fresh, and it feels like an open wound in that I'm always conscious of it, like something's carved open and dripping red if I'm not working on it. That's new for me.

Gregory Orr, a lyric poet, and John Gardner, of Grendel and The Art of Fiction fame, talk about writing as coming from a wound, as trying to stitch together what will never heal. Both of these writers have some concrete experience with an extreme version of this--Orr shot and killed his brother in a hunting accident, and Gardner's brother was killed in a farming accident while Gardner was driving the tractor. I understand that every word may pull toward those kinds of moments because how can they not? But I don't think the wound is always tragic. I don't think the wound is always even real, insofar as to mean an event or a happening, but I cannot help but think of writing--any writing--as something in the blood or of it, even the raw flesh sting of a hangnail. Maybe that's the crux of it, really: it doesn't have to bare anything to the bone in order to exist.

I have a triangle of broken skin at the edge of my left thumbnail. It's not even a proper hangnail. It scabs flat and thin and my idle worrying at it makes it bleed without even hurting. The blood follows the line of the nail, pools under the short white rim of keratin before I can get a Band-aid. It's been this way for long enough that I can't picture this hand without it. Certainly there was a time, and not so long ago, but I don't remember it. The feeling, the vague itch, presents itself as forever. So it is with this book and revision. I can show you on a calendar when it became a part of my life--June 4, 2012--but it feels like always because imagining before, where there must have been some empty space that has become so filled, is too dire to contemplate. And for the three or so weeks that I tried, really tried, to make it not be present, there was a small, raw place on my thumb, my brain, my heart, my left ankle, just above the hard jointed knobs.

I'm still working on that knitting, but I haven't cooked much of anything since the Superbowl.

The pattern is Catkin by Carina Spencer. It's a cracking brilliant design.

My phone has two Romanian flashcard apps on it, but I haven't looked at them in a while. My Russian dictionary is beside my desk, but it's only there for the book. It's even been a little over a week that I've been to the gym, but I'll tip the halfway point on revising tonight. There's still a red seam on my left thumb, but both hands have been too busy to worry it.
 

The Next Big Thing: I'm Doing It Wrong

Two months ago, Olivia Chadha, a friend and former graduate school colleague whose lovely novel, The Balance of Fragile Things, was published in 2012 by Ashland Creek Press, sent me a set of really excellent writerly questions. These questions are part of a forward-rolling blog series called The Next Big Thing (and the nature of it is to pass it forward, and so if these questions would help you, reader, please take them, please use them, please post), and Olivia was awesome to pass them to me.

What is the working title of your book?

Where did the idea come from for the book?

What genre does your book fall under?

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Who or What inspired you to write this book?

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

The problem is this: I can't answer them. 

I mean, of course, I could. These are all things that I've thought about before (though the "who would you cast?" question is a rabbit-hole that I could fall down forever and still not get it quite right). One of the reasons that I have (again) dropped off the face of the blogging-earth is the completion of the first draft of the novel I've been vaguely alluding to since June. I have a draft. I have a whole, complete project and it's the first time since I finished my dissertation. And I have never been happier with a manuscript. (Don't let that fool you; the revisions will be vast, of course, but I'm already feeling like I know what those revisions are, which is a wholly new experience as a writer.) But I look at these questions and all I can hear is jinx. 

I've written before about being, on the whole, unable or unwilling to discuss the work in progress. That's true and it isn't. In one way or another, this book is the only thing that I've spoken about in six months because even when I'm not talking about it, I am. In the back of my mind, every conversation arrives there. (I spend considerable time hoping no one notices that, too.) But there are probably only two people who've heard real details throughout the process, and now the process is done (at least draft one). Now, there are six people who have or have had the manuscript in-hand, to help me figure out the algebra of revision. I'm glad to be in this space. 

But I still can't talk about it, not in this specific, useful way. It still feels too soon (and I'd be lying if I said there wasn't a little writerly paranoia underwriting it all--don't give away too much, lest someone else take the idea and fun with it, better, faster, farther, nevermind that I also believe, truly and firmly, that there are no new ideas, only new ways of approaching them, and all of those ways are valuable. I am aware that this is a vast hypocrisy). I do think that these questions are phenomenal for someone whose book has just come out or whose book is under contract or for someone who is far more brave and confident about the publication process. 

Part of me, of course, is convinced that my reticence here is base cowardice. Part of me thinks it's pragmatism. I'm thinking that it's some of both and a bit of neither. What I am certain of is that these are important questions to be able to answer, particularly in the context of seeking publication for one's work. And so I am answering them, just not here. I hope, in days and months to come, to be able to answer them properly, clearly, and without the sense that I am somehow sabotaging myself.

Blog post the next: What do I do after the draft? (More about writing than Fantasy Hockey, but that's sure to factor in.)

now is the only answer

“One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better.” 

~Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Yes, Dillard again, and a Dillard quote that is one of those things that I know, that I have known since the first time I read The Writing Life, something that has been comfortingly true since that class at Lycoming College. That doesn't mean that I don't forget it sometimes, and I had one of those moments tonight, working on the novel.

I've come to that heady and dizzying place with the manuscript: the end is in sight. How that breaks down in any kind of temporal way, I certainly can't say, but I can say that I can hear it now, and it's not an echo. I'm doing a pass through from the beginning of it right now, ironing out the wrinkles for the elements it has taken me all of these pages to properly understand, to finish the scenes that I skipped because I had no idea what was really happening in them or I didn't feel like writing them just then (sometimes, I don't want to deal with conversation, in person or in print; some days, there is no stomaching a second more of interiority, mine or a character's) and onwards was always better than grinding hours of stalemate. I need to see what may now need to flex and change.

Among those points of flex and change was a scene percolating in my mind, one that's been saying you need me while I kept saying, "No, not yet. Not yet. Surely not yet." And then I hit this flat spot in my read-through, about forty percent of the way through, a plateau that extended on into the distance because it was also one of those unfinished places. Unfinished because it wasn't going anywhere, and I didn't want to write it because it wasn't going anywhere and I didn't know what direction even to point. 

Tonight, a fair bit of it got pointed directly at the book's scrap heap: cut and paste, right out of the proper living text and right into file that's a kind of dry dock for me. I don't actually delete very much. I wrote the sentences. Yes, sometimes they are truly trash, but more often, they're the back of my brain telling me something I'm not ready to hear yet. I'll come back to it. 

I can't tell you how useful a scrap heap or graveyard file is. It's the thing that lets me cut with impunity (yes, paring away is ninety percent of my editing process and no one at all is surprised). It's the thing that gives me the correct spaces to see the work, too: if I can't see past one of these dead zones, I tear it out. Maybe I don't need it at all. If I can't understand what that pile of words is doing because there's too much gravity pulling at the befores and afters, I put it on blank pages in the scrap heap, read it alone. No matter what, that text is not lost. I can (and do) go back to that detritus later, when I am searching for something that feels familiar, something that feels caught on the tip of the tongue (or the fingers). Chances are, I already wrote something of it. I just put it in the wrong place. 

That may be the best lesson I've learned while working on this book: trusting my own process. Not worrying forward or backward, but feeling reasonably confident that the pieces I need would reveal themselves in time. It's been working. (The scrap heap is good insurance. Trust, but also keep records.)

But now comes the point in the process when everything must be in the present. If I want to finish, I am past the point of "deal with it later." 

(I do want to finish.)

And tonight, it became incredibly clear: to hell with not yet. Now is the only answer. Put in the scene I've been saving. 

In the process, too, I had to ask why I was holding it back, and the only answer to that is that I wasn't sure what it would lead to, wasn't sure where else it could go. I was thinking of the side-to-side movement, of shifting, like eyes, like my narrator rocking foot to foot when the only thing to do is to climb. I have given her a new hill.

Tomorrow, I trust that something else will arise after. She'll have new places to put her feet.