Spring Breaking and Spring Mending

The academic calendar tells me this is spring break. The all-day snow yesterday suggests that the "spring" modifier is perhaps a little ahead of itself, but the break from my everyday schedule is as advertised.

As is the case with most academics, there's not much "break" in my break, in the sense of vacation, but it is something different for a few days, and on the heels of a frigid February, that'll do. My plans for the week involve writing two conference papers and putting together my AWP presentation. Planning and writing new scholarly papers is a task both daunting and refreshing, and when I can put the intimidated feeling on the back-burner, I am reminded of this oft-quoted sentiment from Brenda Ueland:

“I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten—happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another. ”
~from If You Want to Write

I feel that way much more with scholarly writing than with my novel. That's likely because my scholarly writing must start with some defined line of inquiry; the conference abstract has already been submitted, so I'd better go on writing the paper around the idea I submitted. Perhaps it's my particular area of research—Anglo-Saxon studies, which is well-loved and well-studied, particularly with regard to the texts I love most—but I don't feel like I'm "discovering" anything. If anything, the bead metaphor is more apt still: I'm sitting beside the same box of beads as everyone else, threading them together in a hopefully pleasing pattern. Hopefully no one else is stringing together the exact same colors in the exact same sequence, but at the end of the day, the beads will be recognizable as beads, even if I've managed to find some bits of bone and shell to add, too.

This is not to categorize all scholarly writing in this way—just my own. I know I've read scholarship that felt like Byron on the mountaintop, and I'm grateful to it. My own process simply seems quieter than that. Maybe it's because of the contrast I feel when I shift between genres, from scholarship to novel and back. With the novel, even one with a historical timeline and a significant number of pre-set events, it doesn't feel like beads most of the time. Sometimes it does, mornings of quiet productivity where the manuscript is somehow two thousand words longer than it was the day before, and the scene has transitioned, and everything proceeds apace.

More often, though, it feels like making the beads—drilling through bone and shell and glass with nothing but a pen-tip—or chasing each glittering seed as it bounces across the floor (right for the dark space under the stove or refrigerator—or stringing them with eyes closed because I'm not sure how it's all going to look together. I like that feeling, too.

***

I was smart enough not to plan a slew of grading for the week, but I had to provide another wrinkle: home inspections for a casa we would like to buy. On Thursday afternoon, think good thoughts for me while I'm hanging outside with the home inspector and trying to pretend I'm not freezing to death.

***

Here are some cool things:

52 Habits: My grad school friend and digital rhetor/Writing Center Director/poet Julie Platt is embarking on a completely ambitious, wholly inspiring, year-long project of cultivating new, positive habits, and her friend Dalyn is also participating. I've been leeching motivation and great ideas from this jawn since January. Check it out.

Every Game A Story: A new series from The Classical. I've joined the editorial staff at The Classical, and here on the brink of baseball season, we're looking for some baseball-centric work. Check out the  new general guidelines, too. Send us some stuff.

achieving some greater better

Earlier this week, my commute-music shuffle dropped Southeast Engine's "Try" on me, and so I'm stealing their lyrics for a title and a jumping off point here.

Because I graduated from Ohio University in 2005, it wasn't possible even for me to miss that Southeast Engine existed, and I saw them play live, I think at Casa Nueva. More importantly, I left Athens with one of their CDs, Coming to Terms with Gravity, and though I haven't really kept up with them since, I'm always glad to hear them (like on NPR's Mountain Stage). 

While I was driving, it was misty, as so many of this autumn's mornings have been, and I thought a bit on my time in Athens, where the fog rolled in off the Hocking in similar white waves. As an M.A. student, I definitely did my work and kept my head down. While there, I certainly had some great classes and professors and some marvelous colleagues, some of whom are still among my favorite people, but I stuck to my comfort zone, wrote the short stories my workshops expected. Despite having the opportunity to take workshops in creative non-fiction and poetry, I just couldn't take the chance at doing so. What if I was terrible? I'd written essays and poems as an undergraduate, had gone through rather rigorous workshops with exacting and inspiring professors, but I definitely didn't identify as an essayist or as a poet, and so I couldn't gather up the bravery to make the leap. I was only there for two years; what right did I have to encroach on another genre's territory?

When I got to my Ph.D. program in Binghamton, I did stretch myself at least so far as to take a poetry workshop, but it was largely generative, rather than with an intense critique component. So I wrote poems, and I shared them aloud, and when the semester was over, I put them away and didn't think about them again. 

Then I got a job in Wyoming, and maybe because I was teaching multiple genres of writing to my students, maybe because I didn't have to answer to a workshop anymore, maybe because no one was going to grade my attempts, maybe because of the high altitude—whatever the reason, I wrote a few poems. I wrote some essays. I found the guts to pitch a few essays, and then to simply submit, and someone even asked me to write a piece. 

And so I've gone along, up to my elbows in two novel manuscripts (one finished, one not), and still sometimes writing other things, while the novel percolates, while a draft rests, or when I simply can't not write the somethings else. 

In the past several days, it's been the somethings else that have brought the most exciting news. 

A poem I wrote while at the American Antiquarian Society was selected as the Writer's Block Poetry Contest winner. The judge was Rebecca Morgan Frank, founder and editor of Memorious, and I'm just so pleased about it. The poem will appear in a future issue of Memorious. In the meantime, you can read an interview about the poem at the Louisville Literary Arts/Writer's Block blog.

An essay I'd been working on for more than a year, too, was published at The Rumpus. "Leaving Early" was churned out of an experience I had while actually gathering material for my Brandon Nimmo/Sand Gnats piece. The essay is about baseball, sort of, though it's more about fear and living in the world. "Leaving Early" also makes use of something I read while I was at Ohio University in David Lazar's History of the Essay course, which seems strangely fitting, given my own cowardice when it came to actually signing up for one of David's essay workshops.

I'm still pretty peeved with myself for not taking better advantage of those other writing experiences I might have had when I was younger, simply because I didn't want to fail, didn't want to risk a B on my transcript. But I don't have to be myself at twenty-two or twenty-five anymore, and I'm glad I sent this work into the world. I'm glad it's getting easier to simply write without worrying about what it means that I have written X or Y or Z. I'm glad it's easier to simply write. I'm glad, too, that these things found homes. I'm starting to feel the same. 

connecte(d)isconnected

I think I watched six minutes of Game Four of the Stanley Cup Final, and that was the balance of the end of hockey for me. And that hurts me, somewhere in my hockey heart (damaged goods at the moment, thanks to Pittsburgh's fizzled season and off-season travail).  It's unsettling, too, that I can't quite remember what I've seen. I know, at the end of May, I watched some of Kings-Blackhawks because I was in a small, dark, Dickensianly damp hotel room for a week, but I know also that I fell asleep before any of the games were over. It's all half-memory, scores and highlights and Twitter reactions and forgetting what is first-hand and what is second. It's the same with baseball, though it's a long season and what I'm missing isn't the last firework burst for months.

But I have been seeing a lot. With two weeks of my fellowship now complete, I can say I don't lack for what Annie Dillard calls eye-food. The days are all about diving deep, about filling both lungs with air and fixing a light on the brain, between the eyes, and plunging. Coming up for breath at the end of the day has actually been difficult; the first week, I couldn't. After the archive closed at five (eight p.m. on Wednesdays), I spent nights reading PDFs, something both charming and uncanny in electronic versions of documents three hundred years old. (And painstaking: I discovered that I would much rather turn physical pages than execute the several clicks it requires to advance to the next page and size it to readability, even if that means re-typing large passages of notes instead of digitally highlights or annotating them.)

There have been books, too:

This book, Seamanship, Both in Theory and Practice, has been immensely valuable (not to mention immensely beautiful).

The diagrams are consistently excellent, including this primer on knots (one of several), and it includes written explanations both of the physics of sailing (why sail A on mast X drives the ship in N direction when the wind strikes from Q direction at H force) and how to execute specific maneuvers on-board (like the very particular process of dropping the anchor on a ship of any particular size). If you are going to be time-traveling and expect you may end up in the Age of Sail, or if you are the sort of person who may be marooned on an island where an eighteenth century ship is moored, take David Steel's book with you.

I am very much adrift in the contemporary world right now. There are some lunchtime snippets of World Cup, and President Obama spoke here in Worcester last week and that precipitated some conversation about this city on that particular day, but there is otherwise little talk of here, of now. But everything in this project I am researching feels anchored well, encompassing, whole. It is hard to cope with that sometimes--there are many conversations happening in the places I usually spend my time (both online and in Wyoming and in Pennsylvania) that I know I'm missing and feel I shouldn't--but there are also many conversations here (with actual human beings and texts and the funny writerly place inside my skull) that I would not miss for the world.

***

And a little plug: my short essay, Final Mica and Final Mare, is the second piece in Narratively's Tales from the Pitch folio in The Beautiful Game feature, in which I wrote about an intercollegiate soccer tournament in Sibiu, Romania.

I Learn All My Best Lessons From Baseball: Revision Edition

A year ago, I was on my way to Scottsdale, AZ, to spend my one-week spring break watching baseball and finishing a revision of my novel. It was a week of heaven.

I'm here in my mind.

This spring break, I'm still watching baseball, but it's from my desk, and I'm still working on that novel. This morning, I sketched out all of the things I have to finish this week. The list includes an academic paper revision, a review I promised to do, two grant applications for the Equality State Book Festival, and innumerable small tasks related to said Book Festival. There are other things (remembering how to cook actual food, finishing reading any of the six books I am halfway through, finishing some gifts I am in the process of knitting) that I would certainly like to do, but the others are non-negotiable. March 16 cannot slip past without the first set complete because this life is full of deadlines and some of them actually matter.

This morning, too, I took something off of that list, something that had been on my Spring-Break-Absolutes since last fall. I took "finish the novel revision" off of that list. It's the same novel I was working on last spring break, though it's changed a lot since then (for the better), and idealistic me thought that I'd surely be done with it by now (wherein done means "ready to send it out," really, really ready, not only kind-of-ready like I was last spring and still tried three times, stupidly).

I didn't take it off the list because I don't want to work on it. The opposite is true. I've spent most mornings since January sitting with the manuscript, re-reading, re-considering, understanding the big changes that I've been avoiding. I am getting closer to really understanding it. And I've revised it on self-imposed deadlines twice before. Rushing it at the end is not the thing this book needs. It only took a year to understand that, but understanding it doesn't make it easier to swallow.

Back in February, when I was certainly at the height of the now now now feeling this novel has been causing, someone on Twitter linked a post by Sonya Huber that begins

Your book is taking a long time to write. You see updates on social media about the release of other books, and you get a racing hopeless feeling inside, as if your little book with its million little legs were trying to climb up a mudslide. You have been through this draft so many times. You have been asked how many drafts it takes you to write a book, and you want to say that the answer is really the number of times you thought you were finished, plus one. (read more)

Huber's post gets at what I've been feeling for a year. It's agonizing, feeling like I'm very close to being done, but not being done, and realizing more and more with each revisiting of the manuscript that it deserves better than hurrying. There's a piece of feedback that I need, and there's a slowness that the book needs, a consideration and a deep thinking. Neither of those are going to appear according to a schedule. The week since AWP drove that home.

On Monday morning, I woke up and spent my writing hours organizing my notes and my revision plan. I was doing that in preparation of this week: my plan of attack. How would I approach the revision in a way that would let me get it finished while also finishing the necessary tasks I mentioned earlier? What happened was that, while I was puttering about in Evernote, making checkboxes beside planned edits (so when I made them I could put that little mark in the box--it is so incredibly satisfying and so indicative of why my scheduled process has its pitfalls), I figured out something I hadn't figured out yet about the ending. I did the same thing on Tuesday, just slowly puttering and shifting notes from one file to another, and I understood something else. It happened again on Wednesday. In two hours of slow thinking--not even writing at all--I made more real progress than I had in the two weeks before, at least as far as substantial work goes. Sure, I line-edited and tweaked, but I hadn't learned anything. When I had three mornings to think about the project, clarity came. When I had long days in airports and that post-AWP muteness that makes it hard to say anything, I could hear it. (And I could hear the answer to the hard question I've been asking about a chapter for eighteen months. I've known the answer for six, but I didn't want to listen.)

Writing this novel has taught me more about writing than I was ready to learn, most notably that my process has always been about drafting. I'm only now understanding that my process has to change when it comes to revision. Being goal-oriented is great--when it's time to get the draft out, when the point is to make the words happen in the first place--but it's not the answer for finishing anything.

So maybe, actually, it's good to have last year's trip to Scottsdale on my mind.

It wasn't possible to stress out during those games.
Sit in the grass. Take a nap. It's just a game.

Everything about the baseball on that trip was about taking time, seeing how it goes. Yes, there's an end to Spring Training and hard decisions have to be made, but they can't be made before we understand what we have. Don't rush this: it's going somewhere. Watch. Wait. That's part of the process, too.

the start of another semester, plus some fiction

Today was the first day of classes for Casper College students, which means it's well nigh time to get back on all of the horses. Part of me protests I never got off the horse, didn't have much time out to pasture over the break, so to speak, because winter break is always a flurry of final grades and airports and preparing to tackle new things. This winter break, it was preparing to teach a compressed video/distance education course for the University of Wyoming. Teaching Middle English Literature using brand new technology in a brand new building is both peculiar and perfectly fitting. It also means slipping into old favorites and re-reading texts I haven't looked at since graduate school, and that reminds me so much of why I'm in this profession.

This afternoon, after from doing a little Beowulf prep (which mostly consists of me writing hard time limits on my class outline because I know myself), I settled down with Richard Waswo's article "The History That Literature Makes" (New Literary History 19.3). Waswo's article looks most particularly at the legendary history of Britain, its hunger for ties back to Troy and an older, more civilized civilization.

Aside from reminding me how much I simply enjoy this article, Waswo's work got me thinking about that reaching desire to see oneself as part of something larger, something older, something lasting. And of course I thought about writing, but also reading, and also American literature and culture, and I was again struck at the way my writing projects inevitably intersect:

One thing that happened while I was away from the blog was that I was awarded a Robert and Charlotte Baron Creative and Performing Artist Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society. I'll be there in June, working on the pirate book. As a 18th century transatlantic narrative, seeking and also resisting ties--to religion, family, nation, and even narrative itself--are certainly at the forefront.

And because I just wrote that last sentence, which is unrelentingly academic, let me make it up to you with a baseball story: To the Wall, appeared in the inaugural issue of The Rappahannock Review in December, and it offers up rookie-level minor league baseball in Casper, Wyoming, with a side of painkiller addiction and Justice League references.

This post is not a great post, but it does serve some purposes, including making those two pointers about my own writing that I'm pretty excited about. But more importantly, it's pulling the Band-aid off on the blog-drought. I've been thinking about what kind of post I could make after more than two months that could justify the absence, and I didn't have one. I have this, which is a post, after which another can be written, more easily.

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.

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.

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.

"Ae fond kiss, and then we sever": When is a story done?

It's cold here in Casper. I have hot cider. It seemed correct to start with a Robert Burns line, then. But the Burns line is purposeful in that I have reached what I consider to be a rare thing: the place of being finished with a story.

I have many times had stories be finished with me before I was finished with them (the ones that never quite went anywhere, the fragments in computer folders and notebooks where the relationship ended on a note of mutual ambivalence), and there are many stories that aren't quite there yet, something shoe still waiting to drop (as soon as I find the damn shoe--maybe waiting for the shoe to be thrown). There are the stories, too, that are only pretending to be stories, that are really just novels waiting to leap. To them, I crack my whip and brandish my chair: back! back! (Or at least admonish them to queue up in an orderly fashion.)

But sometimes, the piece and I have said all we have to say to each other, and the story goes out into the wide world and finds its right home, and once it's there, there's no reason for me to meddle with it. I'm speaking mostly of publication, which has traditionally been the marker of done (not always, of course, but oftener than not). I've had the good fortune of placing a short story that I wrote a eight years ago (it doesn't feel like that long ago) in Stymie Magazine, and so now I can talk about writing with actual concrete referents, rather than vague hand-waving at the book-in-progress.

So this is putting "Middle Infield" to rest. Walking away. Saying a fond farewell.

There is a particular pleasure in finding a journal for a story that feels right for it, and because of the specificity of this story's major pieces--baseball, queerness, teenaged characters--it was not an easy fit. Any one of those things seems to have a number of markets, but the Venn diagrams seldom overlap. And so I am especially pleased to have it homed in Stymie, where so many facets of sport (and a lot of various and interesting hybridities) are showcased.

I wrote this story in one of my MA program workshops, and I owe, of course, a great deal to a small group of excellent workshop colleagues that I had there. I remember, though, that even in its shitty first draft, it was the first short story that I'd written as a short story, all self-contained, with no lingering desires to become a novel, that I was even remotely happy with. Because I hadn't written it as the obligatory workshop submission (because workshopping novel chapters in a short story workshop is seldom productive)--I'd written the story on its own terms, and it went quickly because so much of it was so dear to me. False and fictional and all of the things I stole from the world of the real had been dragged through algae and sunflower seed shells by the end, but dear to me still.

I was in Ohio at the time. Most people don't think of Ohio as markedly different from central Pennsylvania (or any of the other mid-Atlantic states), but it was the furthest I'd been from home in the long term, in a way that was truly on my own. Campus housing, during my BA, even if I seldom went home, certainly didn't count. As a TA in graduate school, I had a job, a regular paycheck, the first semblance of a functional adult life. Gone were the thousand activities and club meetings of yesterdegree--now onto serious academic study. Now into an actual college town, which is all that town was: bars (a perilous lot of bars), great music, independent restaurants, and twenty thousand twenty-somethings. Nothing at all like my no-horse childhood home or my unfriendly, working-class city and its idyllic campus island that we seldom left.

I think now that some of this story was born of homesickness. Maybe a way to pay homage to where I'd come from because everyone else I knew seemed to be from a much more recognizable version of somewhere. Maybe a way to hold up small things I loved about a place where I no longer fit myself. No matter the reason, and I didn't know it then, but Cal and Brendan and the smaller details of their lives were ways of reaching out to the place that I'd left. That's completely contradictory in that it is all firmly fiction--it's set in upstate New York, even, years before I lived there or ever knew that I would--but the characters play out on the landscapes of memory.

A list:

1. The snapping turtle was real. My brother and a friend of his fished them out of a farm pond, though never so big. I remember them showing me the hook they used for it, three inches long and the wire of it too stiff to bend. They did bait it with a raw chicken wing. Stevie's mother did not make soup from the turtles they caught. The turtles did eat ducklings. But I don't know how they killed them after catching them. 


2. I harbor no ill will toward turtles, snapping or otherwise. In a visiting writer's talk while I was in Ohio, though, Clint McCown read from his novel, War Memorials, in which a lizard meets a dire end via a window sash, if I remember correctly. I remember feeling more guilty about killing off that snapping turtle in the story than I did for any number of other injustices I'd committed against characters. I do not remember if McCown felt similar remorse. I know the question came up.


3. The pond Cal and Brendan stand beside is not in upstate New York. It is in my parents' neighbor's pasture, and the pond is roughly the size of a regulation ice hockey rink. It was fed by a small stream, though, and it never froze hard enough to skate on it. Or we never knew how deep it really was and my parents said no to our desire to skate on it. Both are true. It did house a number of fish, though, and we caught bluegills and sunnies there, on small, flimsy rods. There were turtles, snappers in that pond (as in so many ponds where I grew up), and they would have cut our four-pound test with no effort if we'd fished with any bait that tempted them.


4. Cal's grandparents' basement belongs to my friend Bill, who was also my middle school boyfriend. Its ceilings were too low for Bill, who was already nearly six feet tall in those gangly years. In high school, a whole knot of us hung out there, stooped over the small pool and air hockey tables, and we didn't drink, even though we knew we could have. We played terrible nineties music and there was often a strobe light on because why not. There was a fat plastic barrel of pretzel sticks. One of my grandfathers still keeps them beside his chair. The basement had its own bathroom, too, one where the concrete block hadn't even been painted. It was always cold. The cold was a good excuse, and it often lead to some pair of people making out on the couch. 


5. Ted Williams hitting walnuts with a broomstick may be apocryphal. I feel like I remember my dad telling me about it. It feels true. That's what matters.


6. Regarding a tiny reference buried in a paragraph--a guy who went to my high school, Dominic Rich, who played baseball with my brother--did rip it up playing for Auburn. The Blue Jays drafted him in the second round in 2000. The whole valley was kind of gutted, I think, when he didn't make it past AA ball. (My hometown was blessed with excellent baseball players while my three-years-older brother was in high school. I wouldn't love the sport the way I do if I hadn't been raised on such a beautiful version of it.)


7. The high school I imagine here is my own. Rural. Conservative. Full of people who would not let neighbors go hungry or leave anyone to change a flat tire on one's own. Full of the kind of silence, though, too, that lets Brendan say, of the possibility of queer athletes (and really, for his context, queer anyone, queer him, queer them), "No one talks about it." The silence that makes Cal continue with the affirmation that what cannot be said cannot be done. Queerness is not an option. 

This is the place where I want to say goodbye to this story. It ends with some hope because I believe in hope and I am an optimist. But this story was written years before the You Can Play Project, most of a decade before, and it was written in the fullest sense of Brendan's wishful thinking. (I am reminded of Oscar Wilde and Miss Prism's famous line: "The good end happily and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means." Because Oscar Wilde didn't have the luxury of that wishful thinking.) I say goodbye to this story on Spirit Day, in hopes that Brendan and Cal, wherever they are, whatever they are doing, together or alone (because characters, in my mind, keep moving forward in their worlds, aren't stuck where the last sentence leaves them--they have trajectories and there is no friction great enough to bring story to a complete halt), are well and happy and no longer in a place where they feel that hard weight of silence.

I have more hope still for the real LGBT youth because of the many organizations and individuals who are speaking out, who are acting, who are changing this landscape of silence. 

Cross-posting

This is probably a case of too much social media/too many platforms, but I wrote this over on Tumblr and I liked it enough to at least put up a pointer here:

Learning from Hunter Pence's game-winning flail swing last night

In other Phillies news, happy Cole Hamels day!

The Return of the Light

It's not the end of winter. I live in Wyoming--the third week of February is nothing like the end of winter. And it's still dark early enough. So what is this light my title speaks of?

The return of baseball. Opening Day is still a little more than a month away, a bit longer than that for Opening Day in the States, but today was the first proper day of Spring Training. The rest of the teams join their pitchers and catchers in Florida and Arizona and other sun-kissed places, assembling with new and old teammates. There are, of course, the dramatic (and frankly tired) stories regarding last year's scandals and heartbreaks; I'm a few hours of coverage deep in the season, and I've already heard enough about Manny and more than enough about Rallybeers/Chickengate in Boston. Those kinds of narratives are inevitable.

But they're certainly not everything, and they're certainly not where my interests lie. Nor, even, where the anchors' and sports talk show personalities' interests lie. That much is visible. It's that, for those of us who love the sport, baseball is back. It's in the childlike joy that's been percolating in the breasts and brains of baseball fans since November, or, if you gave up on the playoffs because your team didn't make it or you simply decided that there was no way to top the last day of the season, since the end of September. And maybe that's a little hackneyed--"childlike joy"--but I can't think of anything else that really gets close. Last week, The Classical ran a piece by Matthew Callan about Gary Carter that really holds up that sense of joy as not something just pertaining to the fans, but to the players themselves. And that's sometimes strange to think about for career players, and it certainly doesn't hold true for everyone, all professional athletes. Major League Baseball is a profession, and there is an emphasis on the professional. I'm a Phillies fan, and my husband and I are still trying to decide if Chase Utley is people or a baseball-playing robot. My jury's still out; Utley's a blank wall for fans like me who love the colorful personalities. And there are all the jokes about Roy Halladay being a baseball-bot, but that's derived from the mechanically indefatigable nature of his arm, from his near-legendary work ethic. Halladay doesn't need to sleep and to rest like normal mortals. But looking at Roy Halladay's face when he's pitching--that's pure humanity. That is sheer drive and a little bit of rage and more focus than I can think of applying to anything. He might be super-human, but he's definitely human because his prowess all about desire. It's all about want.

And that's what this week is about, too, for fans: being perched on the edge of desire. The season looms, the narratives start stitching themselves together. And we wait. We wait and watch and hope: how will it happen? How will this season reveal itself? What are the stories in the wings? This week (and during the whole off-season), the analysts and the announcers are working their predictions for those stories. They gather the data, they crunch the numbers, they spin scenarios from sunflower seed husks and leather oil. And I watch, and I listen, and I agree and disagree and none of us really knows anything and we all know that and it doesn't stop us. The pleasure is in the conjecture; the pleasure is in the wanting to know. Even if it ends in heartbreak. We want to know how it's going to end.

Last October, Gary Smith wrote a piece for SI called "We're In Baseball Heaven." As an English instructor and a writer of fiction and a member of the editorial staff for a damn fine literary journal, I should probably not admit that this article was the thing I loved most of all of the things I read last year. I won't recap the whole thing; I'll just say it's well worth the time to read the whole thing, particularly if you (like me) love the Phillies. If not, you're probably still able to imagine a time when it felt like everything was coming together for your team, how light each step became. Even as you knew it was silly because you still had to go to work, your job still sucked, you still had to pay rent. Nothing changes, but everything changes.

Smith's piece captured everything Phillies fans were hoping for about the 2011 season: that perfect storm of pitching, the near-invincible feeling that accompanied looking at the record. But it didn't pan out, of course. It was just four days after that article went up, October 7, that the dream season ended. And that stung. I won't lie: I sulked. And then I had to watch the rest of the season feeling that sense of despair, the we should have been there, using that first person collective as though I had anything to do with it. But I was still watching because those were the last games of the season, the last breath of summer before the long, baseball-less winter. Any baseball is better than no baseball. And so I watched every last minute of the season, even when it felt like sandpapering the insides of my elbows.

But why the burning need to know? There's a thirty to one chance that your season's going to end in heartbreak. I know those aren't weighted odds (if you like the Yankees, historically, your odds are better than most other fans'), and yes, at the start of every season, some of us have a better all-over shot at the World Series, but there are no guarantees. Our October proved that.

So, why? This is why. In Smith's piece, he asked a number of Philadelphians to talk about the 2011 team. Bryan Dilworth hit it:

 "And it all just keeps getting better and better," he gushes. "When the Roy Oswalt thing goes bad, the Vance Worley thing appears in its place. Everyone here loooooves Worley. He's fearless, and we won—what?—14 straight games the kid started? That's crazy. The dread we used to walk around with, it's gone for 75 percent of this city. And now Hunter Pence. He's perfect for this team and for this town. He just wants everything so badly. He's like watching a baby giraffe run. This has to be heaven. An angel just appeared here—Hunter Pence." 

This is that paragraph of childlike joy. It's in how Worley and Pence play. It's in how these players--not just these two, but the players we love for so many reasons. The way Gary Carter played: not perfectly, but passionately. Wanting everything so badly: desire. We share that much.

I get tired, sometimes, of overblown sports metaphors, even as I'm desperately guilty of it, too. (As a writer, I spend most of the time being tired of myself. Goes with the territory.) But baseball is, at the end of the day, a game, I keep reminding myself. Just a game. If I see one more comparison of sports to war, I may scream. Because sport isn't war. Ask people who've been in wars. They'll clear it up for anyone who was confused. But there is a magnetism in sports, in following a team, and I may go my entire life without fully understanding it in a way that I can properly articulate (though, of course, I'll keep trying--that's what we do).

In thinking about this, I turn again, as I often do, to Annie Dillard. She's not talking (much) about baseball in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, but she says this:

"The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there." 

She's speaking most particularly to observing the natural world clearly, closely, sharply. But it holds true for me, here, perched on the start of a new baseball season: good things are going to happen. And I don't just mean victories (though I'm lying if I think I'm going to be happy with the Phillies not making the playoffs); I mean every one of those triumphs of spirit that takes place on the field. And those things certainly don't confine themselves to professional athletics--everywhere we turn, there are quiet marvels taking place. I encourage you to look.

But spring training, the emergent baseball season--this is just one place to see those things, and I plan to be there.

Another little adventure

I, like many other nerds in the world, have been spending a good bit of whatever spare time I have knee-deep in George R. R. Martin's A Dance with Dragons. (I'm not quite finished with it yet, so no spoilers. On pain of maiming.) I've also had some visiting family, and the family visit included a trip to Denver. This post is about that trip, and I'll be back with something a little more focused in the not-so-distant future.

We've been and will be in Denver a whole lot this summer, at least compared to our first year in Wyoming. That is, though, never a bad thing--Denver's a great city, full of a lot of beautiful spaces and good food. And Pacific Mercantile Company, which is where I have to go if I want to get any Asian comestibles that haven't been on the shelf for two years already. (That makes me sound a lot more sophisticated than I am--I bought udon and some black vinegar, sure, but mostly I bought three kinds of gummy candy, including a delicious mango/tamarind sweet, strawberry daifuku, Ramune to drink on the walk back to our hotel, and panda cookies. Japanese candy makes me so happy.)

We also made return visits to the Denver Botanic Gardens and The Denver Museum of Nature and Science for their Real Pirates exhibit so that we could share two brilliant places with the visiting family members.

I don't know much (or what kind of
plant you are, but I know I love you.

No photos from the pirates exhibit, alas, but it is the most excellent thing and only there until August 22, so if you're in the area, you really need to get yourself to the DMNS.

I took a number of photos at the Botanic Gardens, though (with my phone, sadly, because I managed to leave home with a camera with a dead battery and no charging apparatus, but the phone did okay, all things considered). This image to the left is some plant that was housed in the Boettcher Memorial Tropical Conservatory. It was potted beside a resting bench, and there was no marker of what it was called, but I thought it was striking because of its center. The purple inner leaves that shade out to regular green are very cool, too, of course, but look: at its heart, there's a small tuft of what looks like  moss, and it's sprouting its own flowers, tiny violet blooms with pointed petals. I was reminded of very, very small mountain harebell--it's just that color. The plant was also cupping a bit of water around the moss, making a wee island. I could have sat in front of it for hours, but I was already planning to spend an inordinate amount of time in the pirates exhibit, so one has to pick one's battles.

The visit also included a visit to Coors Field to see the Rockies play the Brewers. Coors Field is a lovely ballpark, and I have to admit a real fondness for the Rockies. My blood is Philadelphia red, but the Rockies (and their Casper affiliate, the Casper Ghosts) are great favorites of mine. (In August, when the Phillies play the Rockies in Colorado, it's going to be hard to not cheer for the Rocks, too. I might be that idiot at the stadium just clapping and hooting after every play, no matter what happens.)

Ubaldo Jimenez pitched for the Rockies, and I had a chance to watch him warm up in the bullpen, Coors Field being one of those places where fans can actually look down from the concourse into the bullpens. This is possible because Rockies fans are rather kind. You'll notice that, at Citizens Bank Park, where the Phillies play, the Phillies bullpen is not in open view to the public. That's because Phillies fans will harass their own relievers just as much as the away team's.

Ubaldo!

And then, because it was a bit rainy before the game, we were treated to a very lovely bit of rainbow above the Qwest building at Coors Field. The Brewers are on the field there. The Brewers got beat pretty badly at this game, but we did get to see Corey Hart hit a home run late in the game. The Rockies' Ryan Spilborghs also went yard. The only disappointments that I had at the game were that Carlos Gonzalez was still out following a collision with an outfield wall just before the All-Star break, and I didn't get a photo of our section's beer guy. Captain Earthman is apparently an installation at Coors Field, and I absolutely see why. I've seldom seen anyone who enjoys the job as much as he appears to enjoy his. If you're going to Coors Field, try sitting in the vicinity of Section 155 or nearby to get the most of the experience.

A very lovely weekend

The fact that this was a three-day weekend two weeks before the end of the semester certainly didn't hurt its quality. There was a great deal of grading, of course, but there was also a lot of cooking, two excellent meals out with friends, and baseball. Roy Halladay pitched another masterpiece today for the Phillies. Glorious.

One of the other things, though, that made this weekend so lovely was the amount of time I was able to spend engaged in making things. I finished knitting a baby sweater for a friend in the most perfectly delicious Malabrigo (Silky Merino) in a brilliantly cheerful creamsicle color. Just have to find some buttons for it and sew up the seams. That was mostly what I did between grading sessions over the past week, and it was comforting to have a knitting project that I really enjoyed again. (The last two times I knit something, it was with yarn that I really, really disliked. My next project is the same way, alas, but I'm hoping that large needles and such will speed it along.) More significantly, it was lovely to have something to do as a break between necessary professional tasks that felt both purposeful and relaxing.

That brings me to the other exciting part of this weekend.

As I mentioned in my last entry, I ordered some new journals and some pens. And some ink. I was particularly excited to finally get my paws on some Noodler's Black Swan in Australian Roses, and for good reason. I adore it in my Levenger True Writer stub nib. The ink behaves quite beautifully on all manner of paper (as I discovered while using it for grading--bright enough to see, not red-red enough to give things the Ink of the Damned feeling), and the slight shading qualities are enhanced by the stub. Inkwise, I also picked up some samples of Noodler's Kung Te-Cheng, Diamine Green-Black (currently in my True Writer Fine and currently lovely), and Diamine Syrah from the lovely Goulet Sample Shop. In the same Goulet order, I also picked up an Exacompta Basic Sketchbook. With which I am in love. In which I am trying not to write until it's time because that journal is going to have a specific purpose. I'm staving off my desire to use it by using a blank Clairefontaine journal, and that's been a pretty good fixer. (I got a blue cover. I am so pleased that my randomly-chosen cover was blue. It is, so much, my favorite.)

And then, because I was having a crisis over writing implements on my upcoming trans-Atlantic jaunt, I skittered over to JetPens for some non-fountainy options. I did get a few Uni-Ball Signo 207s (black, blue, green) and a Zebra Sarasa (0.3 mm brown) for my travel workhorses because both have gotten such positive reviews on PenAddict & OfficeSupplyGeek. I also had an artsy whim and got a Uni-Ball Pocket Brush Pen. I am, of course, quite pleased with all of them--they'll serve their purpose and give me some color options with very little fuss.

I also might have blacked out and ordered a lime green Pilot Prera with a fine nib.

The lime green Pilot Prera is not a pen I expected to be interested in. For one, it's lime green. You can tell by the color scheme on the blog and by the inks I mentioned above that I'm not really a lime person. (They're quite delicious fruits, and I may occasionally be limey, but I don't do much in the "bright color" spectrum.) It's also a glossy, single-color barrel. But I love it so much I actually woke up at 5:15 on Friday morning (the day that I had designated as my "sleep as long as you want" day) because I was excited about using it again. (I stayed up past midnight on Thursday--well, into Friday--doodling with it.)

And I think that's why I was so excited. I was actually drawing things with it. Before I graduated high school, I made certain to take an art class every year. I was, by no means, any kind of natural talent, and I don't have one of those spatial memories that can envision--with great clarity--the far sides of objects or what something might look like lying on its side and so on, but I did okay. Most importantly, I loved it. And because I had my life-goals set out in front of me (and they didn't involve visual arts), I could love it simply, easily, without pressure or expectation. I hadn't realized how much I missed that in the past few years.

In the past three days, I've doodled a lot of my favorite, recurring subjects: fruit, trees, branches with cherry blossoms, bamboo. I also tried drawing a few faces, based on some useful tutorials (proportions, and so on) that I stumbled across. I've never much liked drawing people, but I managed a few who actually look like people, and I really enjoyed it.

And I drew this bamboo. I really like drawing plants. They don't give me any lip.

I did this with the Prera, fine tip, with a Pilot/Namiki cartridge in blue/black. The color is really lovely, and I'm sad that it isn't waterproof because I'd love to do a watercolor-tinted sketch with this pen. (I don't get many options for FP-safe waterproof inks, do I?) I think what I love best about this pen is its ability to make soft, sketchy lines. I'm a big fan of my True Writer for writing because, despite its fine tip, as a Western fine, it makes a pretty assertive line, especially given my usual inks (Levenger Cocoa, Iroshizuku Tsuki-yo). When I write, I generally do feel assertive. Writing isn't always easy, but I feel like I know what I'm doing. I know my strengths, my weaknesses, how to play to one, how to challenge the other. When I'm drawing, I am much more tentative. I certainly feel rusty at this point, but even when I was drawing something in class, two or three times a week, I still made the same line, lightly, a dozen times over, before I would commit to a bold line. (And even then, I kind of resented it.) I should get into the habit of sketching in pencil and then doing cleaner lines in ink for that reason, but I also like instant gratification and can never find a pencil or a decent eraser when I want one.

The only problem is that now, I will want to have this pen and a blank journal (in addition to my lined "everything" notebook and all of my other pens) with me at all times. That runs counter to my (often futile) attempts at traveling light. Ah, well. Small price to pay for a rekindled love.

No Pelikans, So How About Pelicans?

So, as I am wont to do every time I go to some sort of major urban center, I checked out St. Petersburg for fountain pen stores. I didn't find any. (Granted, my search wasn't super-thorough, as I knew I'd be confined to the area near my conference, but I didn't get a sense of there being much choice in the matter.) Thus, instead of Pelikans, you get pelicans, and the pelicans are doing their thing at the St. Petersburg pier.

This pelican is a rock. He is an island.

Hail, hail, the gang's all here.

I spent a full day squeaking every time I saw an anole. Which was a lot of times. They are so cool. Almost as cool as stegosauruses.

And, because we went to a Tampa Bay Rays game, have some baseball players. None of them appeared to be using fountain pens at any point in the game. That's probably wise.

Vladimir Guerrero & Brian Roberts, warming up at the Rays vs. Orioles game.

Also, this seems like a fine time to show off some new pen gear I got for my birthday: an Aston pen case and a small, blank Rhodia Webbie. My delightful husband picked them up at GouletPens. Oh, I have a new appreciation for a blank journal. I don't use blank journals much, since I'm far more a writer than an artist (and I have an inability to write in a straight line), but getting this little blank journal made me want to sketch a few things. On the page spread that you can see below, I sketched one of the conference presenters' water glass. It's not by any means masterful, but I can tell it is, in fact, a little cup. The Rhodia paper is, of course, dreamy. It's a very pleasant cream color, which I didn't expect that I would like, but I do. Particularly for my sketchy little embarkations.

Closed journal & open pen case. True Writers, both of them. 

All of these things in action.

Because some of you may wish to know: the writing is done with a True Writer stub filled with J. Herbin Bleu Myosotis, which is the black pen in this photo. The Waterlilies pen is filled with Iroshizuku Tsuki-yo. These are easily my two favorite inks thus far in my inky experimentations. Interesting thing about the Bleu Myosotis: it seems to mellow and lighten with age. By age, I mean a few hours. When it's newly dry on the page, it's a much more saturated and dark tone, nearly purple. After a few hours, it gentles to its highly shaded periwinkle. Mostly, I point this out because it's neat.

It's going to be a hard choice when I have to pick a journal to take with me to the UK this May. I purchased a slightly larger one (lined, not a Rhodia) for that purpose, but I really do like the blank paper in this Rhodia because of the urge to sketch things. And, well, the paper behaves gorgeously. It is a bit small, though, to do a whole lot of real writing in--I feel like I should write much smaller than I usually do in the small pad, and that slows me down a bit. 

Decisions, decisions.