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.

Travel Light: A book recommendation & a November impossibility

Several years ago, the inimitable Linda Koons sent me a book: Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison. It's a short, sharp tale, a Norse fairy tale, rubbing up against allegory in a way that reminds me of The Little Prince, but the unrelenting, marvelous Norseness of Travel Light also means it is nothing at all like The Little Prince. It's been years since I read Travel Light, and it's on my campus bookshelf, so I can't really turn to it now and dig you up a quote or anything like a proper review, and that's not what I'm doing here this morning, anyway. It's simply that I'm on my way to the airport quite soon and I was thinking of it and I wanted to say so. It's a beautiful little book, hard around the edges, the way stories of its kind are, and it's also a wind-bitten, incredibly sunny November morning. How can I avoid thinking of it?

And I am thinking of practical details. I'll be in Corpus Christi from Wednesday until Sunday, and I'll be attending the National Learning Communities Conference. As a new Learning Communities program director, this conference is an excellent opportunity to learn a great deal, and, having looked at the schedule, I fully anticipate shuttling from session to session for three days straight. This is a very good thing. But I'll also be in four different airports, twice, on six flights all together, and there are mornings and evenings and stray bits of time between events, and it's hard to know what to bring.

Writing wise, it seems I've never been better equipped: I have a few dozen small projects to work on. But because this wouldn't be a post on my blog without me whinging about my novel, there's that, too. There's always that, looming (and companionable) in the back of my mind, and it's ridiculous to even think about traveling light. (That Corpus Christi also requires me to add a rain jacket to my suitcase, too, adds a material dimension.)

...Middlemarch is also going with me. The edition I'm reading is a Norton Critical, which means it weighs more than it should because there are so many of those onionskin pages jammed between its covers.

I want, very badly, to take knitting along. The best project for it, though, is getting too large, and it's something that requires multiple colors of yarn, which means multiple balls, taking up more space, and I am dedicated to a) not checking luggage on a trip like this b) actually respecting the dimensions allowed for carry-on items. I also am not-taking the knitting because it's an excuse. It is always an excellent excuse: I can neither read nor write while knitting, and I know myself. During my five-hour layover in Houston, when I could probably finish a draft of a short story or finally get to the back cover of Middlemarch, I would knit (and listen to hockey). And it isn't that I don't love knitting; it's that it's always too easy to love.

And that weighs on me. (Every breathing moment I am not writing or reading weighs on me. I intended to write this morning. Instead, I cleaned some things because I'm going to be gone for four days and I went to buy toothpaste because I didn't have a TSA-approved size in the cupboard and I had a bunch of angst about how I did those things instead of writing.)

And that's ridiculous.

It's a constant struggle to balance good discipline (which leads to good craft) and masochism for the sake of it. Ten minutes ago, I decided that I'd rather be the person in a suit carrying a be-patched and be-buttoned backpack because it's just a lot more useful to hold my stuff than the laptop bag I have for work. And that's going to be fine. There's more room, for one. There's a pocket expressly for my indispensable, unspillable travel mug.

And because there are a few minutes until I have to leave, I reserve the right to change my mind about the knitting.

Travel light.

It's an excellent book. I still take everything too literally.

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.

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.)

Goodbye, plot issue. Goodbye, sense.

Not quite a placeholder, not quite a proper post. Two things:

A) My bike's "tune-up" is still not complete. They've had it since Thursday. I've been inventing versions of what might be taking so long. These are some of my favorites:

• It died in the bike shop's care. Its jankiness was terminal, and it passed on. They hoped I'd forget about it, but I called today, and now they have until tomorrow to find another bike exactly like mine and hope I won't notice. BIKE SHOP GUYS, I WILL TOTALLY NOTICE. The mostly non-functional right shifter's numbering is worn away in a very specific fashion, right at the point where the shifter, as I discovered, basically becomes a chain-disengaging sponge. Bike-shop-guys will only see a reason to put it in a woodchipper. I see distinguishing scars.
• It's actually sentient and has been carefully self-destructing in small, mostly innocuous ways so that I would let it go. It has left the bike shop and found a metal-smelting shop. It has lowered itself slowly into a pool of molten metal because it's the only way to destroy itself before it can be used as a weapon against its own fight for good.
• They took the bike to a ranch where it could hobble about with rusted Huffys and the bikes that had never been put together properly by department store summer temps. But misfit bike had learned to love its new home, and now the misfit bike, and its new friends, are slowly making their way back across the prairie to return home. 
• Misfit bike hates all of these movies and is insulted by this nonsense and it refuses to come home ever.

Or, more likely, none of the bike shop guys (because they are all guys, and they're all about twenty-four, it seems, with the exception of the owner) can bring himself to touch the thing long enough to fix it. 

B) I said this was a series with elegiac flavor. Instead of just inventing farewells and returns for my misfit bicycle, I also got to say goodbye to a really vexing plot hole in the novel. I wrote about it on my Tumblr, here. (I've been hanging out on Tumblr tonight because Roxane Gay rocks my world.) It was also a reconnection with some things I know about my writing process, and knowing things--what works and what doesn't and how to effectively manage that--is the much longer, possibly less ridiculous post I'm working on.

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.

Recharge & Refresh

This is a strange post title for anything that happens in April for an English professor (as April & May, like November & December, are The Months of Interminable Grading), but this has been a good weekend for feeling a little more refreshed. One thing that has contributed to that is the stubbornness of greenery. It's cold here, still, in Wyoming. We haven't had lots of snow like certain parts of the Dakotas and Colorado, but it hasn't been very warm, either. There haven't been many overt signs of spring from the atmosphere. The ground, though, refuses to be contained: we have a few tulips sneaking up around the front porch, and folks lucky enough to have daffodil bulbs planted are seeing persistent knots of brilliant yellow ringing their steps. The grass is the kind of saturated green that I have missed from the east coast, the kind of color that doesn't last long here. We're not really getting leaves on trees, not beyond the limy fuzz of buds, but there's promise. I'm holding onto that.

There's been grading, too (there always is), but I also spent an hour this afternoon playing with some Derwent watercolor pencils and a thoroughly ancient set of Prang watercolors. (Yes, I know. We used the exact same sets in middle school. It's likely that this set came from middle school.) I didn't turn out anything that I was particularly excited about, particularly because I went into it without any kind of plan, and it's been so long since I've painted that I need some sort of visual reference. Which I didn't have. None of that is the point. The point is that I was inspired a few days ago by Lavinia Spalding's book Writing Away. We're using that book for the travel-writing component of a study-abroad class I'm co-teaching with some colleagues in a few weeks. Spalding talks a great deal about journaling (which I'm not very good at, in any kind of organized way), and she talks a lot about creating pictorial art of varying kinds. I got the itch. I'm now waiting for an Exacompta journal and some other shiny things from Goulet Pens & JetPens.

When those things come in, I'm going to try to have an organized journaling experience, at least in the context of this trip. We'll see how that turns out.

The other point of it is how excited I am about this trip, now, in this context. It's not that I wasn't looking forward to it before; it's that there's an anticipation associated with the creation of the artifact around the trip, too. (And it's not just the anticipation of new stationary fumes, of course, though that's certainly attractive.)

Hopefully I'll have some pictures of something sometime soon. Right now, there's The Fall of Sam Axe and more grading to fill my evening.

The Pony Express or How Mail Gets to Wyoming

Or maybe the mail doesn't get to Wyoming at all. I'm starting to think that's the case--my mother sent me my calligraphy set last Friday. As of the last post (on Saturday, a week and a day later), it still hasn't arrived. I'm miffed about that because noodling about with some ink and so forth is what I'd like to do just now. I spent literally all of my Sunday grading (all right--all of my Sunday minus a longish tea break at 10 a.m. and a very shortish dinner break at 5:30), and if I were a smart person, I would return to my stack of papers before I go to bed.

If I were a smart person, I also would do something else with my night that doesn't involve holding a writing instrument. Or typing. Or knitting. Generally speaking, I would do something with little or no involvement of my wrists and fingers.

Does anyone have any actual hobbies that fit this bill?

Perhaps riding Pony Express and getting the mail to Wyoming faster than its current pace would suffice.

Now I have my good and practical reason to get that horse I've always wanted.

Vampire Bats

Seems like a more appropriate title for a post from last week, no?

Yesterday, I attempted to be a responsible, health-conscious adult.

Yesterday, I failed pretty spectacularly at it.

There was a free campus blood draw & test (the kind where they take your blood and then mail you an analysis of all of those things adults are supposed to know and monitor: cholesterol and glucose and triglycerides and so on), and I decided that I would go. (Not only because doing so would help along a program we have for reducing one's insurance premiums, but because I'd never done so before, and I would like to know what's going on with my hemoglobins.) Friends of mine were also going, and so it was going to be a group activity and, because I was expected there, I couldn't chicken out. (Believe me, I thought about it.)

You see, I have an incredible aversion to needles. It's not the pain level (it's really a very tiny pinchy feeling), but it is the kind of pain and the concept of it. It's invasive, and having teeth drilled doesn't freak me out even a third as much. Also, it's traumatic: I have small veins, and I have blood that doesn't really want to come out of them. My one trip to the Red Cross Blood Drive left me with a collapsed vein and a full hyperventilation. How very embarrassing, on top of everything else.

I reasoned that yesterday would be different because they weren't trying to fill a bag; it was just a wee test-tube. I was nervous, though, and just holding my arm underside-up is enough to give me palpitations. The elbow is there to bend and protect, like the knee, and I don't even like to look at the insides of my elbows, let alone bare them for needles. It's against every instinct I have.  But I survived the stab, and I felt the needle withdraw, and I was relieved. I hadn't cried, I hadn't hyperventilated, and it was over.  And then I was told (because I certainly wasn't looking at the process) that she'd missed, and rather than stab me again, I was to be sent to Roanna, two tables down, who was an expert, and she'd get it in the other arm, no problem.

Roanna did, indeed, get the blood lickety-split, with no fishing or anything, but the damage was done, so to speak. While I didn't hyperventilate (thank God) this time, I teared up, I shook, and I was thoroughly mortified (because there's nothing like being sniffling and blotchy in front of people you've only just met).

Luckily, there was a good 2.5-hour cushion between that and my needing to teach, so I sat in my office and answered e-mails until I calmed down, and then I had coffee with one of the friends who went along and tried very valiantly to be comforting and cool about the whole thing. And I survived. But I'll be wearing long sleeves and avoiding my own elbows for days.

Here's the question for discussion, then: how does one get over fear of something if doing the thing consistently contributes to the fear?