magic hat

This past weekend, we decided to go to a Hershey Bears hockey game (and you can read more about that at The Classical sometime next week). During the preceding days, I was on campus, working to get everything necessary for the semester settled. The process for preparing to teach four classes and direct four creative writing portfolio projects entailed three course redesigns and one curriculum revision, which was a lot, but all of it will be helpful in the long-term.

The week was also, in some ways, a trial of the everyday: timing and morning routine, lunch options, going out into some seriously frigid temperatures and not whining about it too much, getting my office in order. I spent more time than I want to admit to testing out various winter hats, too, because I didn't want my ears to freeze and fall off, and nor did I want my hair to be doing the thing it does when I've worn a hat, even for as short a time as it takes me to get from home to office. The thing that it does is what comedian Elvira Kurt does in the linked clip. (Short version: it's not good.)

The week ended, and Saturday came, and with Saturday, a meeting of the knitting group. Just before walking out the door with a just-started sweater project in my bag, I decided I was going to knit a hat. I was going to knit a hat I had my eye on for more than a year, and I was going to knit it in time to wear to the hockey game. I scrounged around for yarn that would suit the pattern, coming up with a partial skein of bulky, cream-colored wool and a ball of leftover blue laceweight. The blue, I was certain, was more than enough. For the other—the part that would actually become the hat—I could only guess. In my hand, it seemed like it would work.

I knit like a fiend at the meeting, and I knit through one and a half televised hockey games. Around the second period of the Bruins vs. Flyers, I started to get nervous about the amount of yarn I had left. While Pekka Rinne stonewalled nineteen of the first twenty—and eventually thirty-seven of thirty-eight—Minnesota shots, I got really nervous.

Fifteen minutes before we had to leave, I wove in my ends with this much yarn to spare.

Doesn't have to be a lot. Just has to be enough.

The hat itself has proven to be exactly what I wanted it to be, so much so that I am considering making one in another color. 

I don't usually make things that can be done in a day. I gravitate toward fussy things on small needles (socks, lace) or large things on whatever size (blankets, sweaters). For all that they're the first things most people think of, I've knit perilous few scarves and hats, and Saturday's project felt strangely like magic. In the morning, I wanted a hat. In the evening, I had one, and it was one I'd wanted for ages. 

I need to keep remembering how uncomplicated that process can be. All I needed to do was decide. All I needed to do was start.

give me stitches

I have the luxury of being able to write this from the sweatpants-clad comfort of fall break. For two days, students are (theoretically) able to study and prepare for the mid-term onslaught, and professors are (theoretically) able to grade and prepare for the same. I've been doing my part, trundling pretty happily through English literature exams and Beowulf papers and composition papers predicated on students arguing for which single track to include on a Golden Record single. (The idea for that paper came after reading Elena Passarello's essay "Space Oddity," in Let Me Clear My Throat.) It's good reading, especially when I get to learn about new music, and extra-especially in these occasions:

When I read that sentence in a student's Beowulf paper that is so impossibly perfect I have to make joyful flailing gestures at the paper.
— Holly M. Wendt (@geatland) October 5, 2014

In the in-between, I've slept more than I usually do, and I've watched as much baseball as I can, and I've knit. I'm reaching the point on a project I've been working on for more than a year where it is actually becoming itself. For all of my various organizational obsessions, I'm a poorly organized knitter. I don't plan yarn purchases for specific projects. I have a Ravelry queue of more than a hundred patterns, and I can safely say I'm not really intending to knit most of them. So when I began the Virelai Ancien wrap, it was mostly an experiment in ridiculousness, and I more or less accepted that it was going to pattern on in shifting shades of blue and green forever. But I've finally reached the end of the colors I had put aside for it, and I'm very nearly ready to begin the border. I'm still trying to decide on what I'll do around the edge—surely black—but it's reaching that point where the edging is becoming a reality. It's something I'll need to do soon. And like the process of finishing a novel draft, once the end came into sight, I felt this barreling feeling. I couldn't stop.

Entrelac. All of the entrelac.

Which meant that I've probably spent something close to thirty hours knitting since I came home on Friday, which is roughly 1000% more knitting than I usually do in a given three-day span. Which has precipitated me needing to dig out the wrist braces I bought back in the dissertation days.

Andrea Barrett's story collection, Archangel, is pretty great, though.

I'm wearing them now, and I wore them as I graded this morning, fully anticipating that I will spend all of the night's MLB playoff action knitting. I will do that even though I know it's going to hurt—

(Read this by Kyle Beachy wherein he talks about pain and acknowledgement far more gracefully and pointedly than I do here.)

—and tomorrow, when I have another morning of typing and grading ahead of me. At night, I will put my hand under my pillow because the weight of my head holds my wrist flat, and the eventual warmth will feel good. And I will probably knit more tomorrow because I'm close to the end and I'm excited, and the project isn't of such a complex nature that I'd screw it up by continuing to work on it.

The barreling feeling gets me in trouble at the end of writing projects. I finished a draft of a short story today, and I wasn't even out of the shower before I figured out that I'd rushed the ending. I made myself spend longer on breakfast, making a Fancy Coffee in my own kitchen (because leftover salted caramel and some frothed milk never hurt anyone) and eating my toast before I went back to the computer. I fixed it then, and there was still that heady little buzz of finished finished! when I closed the file and got on with today's grading.

The story is short by my usual standards, just over 3,000 words, and I'm doing my best to wait at least a day before looking at it again. Wisdom says I should wait longer. If a story is a small wound—and for me, they usually are, painful in so many ways—I should let the whole thing heal, wait for the work's edges to become whole before I look again. Then I'll see what's gone right and what might need to be opened again, where the stitches went awry.

in good company

For a good part of the time I was in Casper, I was lucky to have knitting friends, and friends who didn't knit but who liked to get together with good food and conversation who weren't bothered by the constant twitch of yarn and needles. Still, I did—and do—most of my yarn-based pursuits in private, usually in my living room, while watching baseball and hockey. It's something to do with my hands that simultaneously justifies the act of watching and is a pleasure in and of itself. I don't knit a whole lot in public, though, and while I love to talk about it, I don't tend to do so unless I know I have a like-minded conversation partner.

On Saturday, I attended a meeting of the Cocoa Area Fiber Enthusiasts at the Hershey Public Library, where I had the distinct pleasure to spend nearly three hours in the company of people who are not only knitters but also spinners, dyers, felters, weavers, crocheters, and so on. Many of the participants also expressed interest in other creative pursuits: paper-making, historical crafting practices, dichroic glass-making, quilting, and on and on. Through the midday, we worked on our projects and talked pretty exclusively about similar creative pursuits, showing off current projects and older ones.

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.

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.
 

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.

Oddments

I'm heading into one of those wacky-busy weeks (it involves papers coming in in five out of five classes and two trans-continental flights in February), so this post is going to be an assortment of oddments.

1) I'm doing some knitting for charity, which is awesome (how much do I love organizations who appreciate support demonstrated in yarn?). What is slightly less awesome is that the knitting has to be done with yarn that was given to me for the project, and the yarn is not pleasant to knit with. If the same event happens next year, I'm going to try to find a way to suggest that knitters may also wish to make a donation of yarn, too (which may save on the basic cost of the endeavor as well as entice more knitters to take part). I know that many knitters' love of natural fibers and such can pose issues with regard to allergies, but perhaps some careful labeling could help.

2) The object of the trans-continental flights is the Associated Writing Programs conference. Four days of writerly and readerly chaos. I'm looking forward to seeing some old friends and some new ones, as well as possibly finding plenty of good reads.

3) I'll be within a long walk of Fahrney's Pens. I don't have much hope of having enough free time to make the trip there, but it is terribly tempting. Of course, I'm planning that my next fountain pen purchase will be an Edison Mina, so I should probably resist that temptation.

4) I write my fiction long-hand for several reasons. The most immediate of those reasons is that I occasionally have problems paying attention when I'm at the computer. The less immediate, but likely more substantial of these reasons is that I find that I feel much closer to a scene, to a character when my hand is forming the words, the curves of letters. I think my access to my vocabulary improves, too (which is key when I do most of my writing between 5:45 and 6:45 a.m.). And so while I really loathe the act of typing up my hand-written process, the system works for me, and that typing gives me a chance to do a very rough first edit.

5) Writing my fiction by hand is also a pleasant sensory experience with the advent of my fountain pen interest.

6) Have a photo. This is from the end of June, above Alcova Dam, somewhere in the vicinity of eight-thirty in the evening. I miss summer. I miss it terribly.