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.

variations on a leaf

I turned on the heat in my car the other morning as I drove to campus, and I have worn jackets. But this leaf was on the apartment complex sidewalk while neighbors still sweltered poolside, I took the photo because the leaf is lovely, peach-tinted instead of aflame. But I didn't notice the piece of dead grass lying atop it, and I didn't want to pick it up and press it flat between book-pages because I didn't want its loveliness. I never want fall. It comes anyway.

My days are bookended by thirty minutes in the car, which is new. I listen to music, setting my digitized music collection to shuffle, and while I drive, every musical whim I've had confronts me. Sometimes the randomization creates patterns—three and four songs by the same artist in a single drive, out of hundreds of artists and two thousand single tracks—and I sink into when and where and everything is fleeting. The player is set to fade tracks in and out, so the beginning of one song overlaps with the end of the previous, partly for the unexpected juxtapositions, but mostly to avoid flat air.

There isn't much music I've ever grown out of. Some things fade out of intentional listening patterns, but when the music I loved best at ten and fourteen and twenty-four cues up, I usually let it play. When there are too many things to think, often on Monday mornings and Wednesday evenings, I turn the music louder and louder and it isn't until I park that it seems far too loud.

I drive with the windows open. I remember that I actually like the smell of skunk, and I remember how close the scents of manure and earth and drying cornstalks. With the windows open, sometimes bits of leaf and chaff blow in, sometimes rain.

Sometimes the air here smells like melting chocolate and roasted almonds, but I still only want to eat peaches, all summer-tasting and sunrise-hued, the colors of this heatmapped leaf. 

There's no sense in me saying not yet. Waiting until I'm ready only means dead time between tracks.

of the nature and use of maps

I spent another month churning miles under my tires, and in two more weeks, I'll do it again. The first leg of my into-June journey was, of course, arriving at the American Antiquarian Society (preceded by a quick tour of apartments in the Hershey area so we have a place to sleep when we head east at July's end). And, since no fellowship lasts forever, I had to leave Massachusetts and go into the west (but only for a little while). I spent a long time agonizing about my route back to Casper. Because the trip east at the end of May and the trip east again at the end of July need to be the most efficient versions (the first for available time and the second because my two cats will be miserable enough in the car), I wanted to see something I hadn't seen before, and so I buzzed north into Canada, skirting Georgian Bay and the western edge of Lake Huron. I drove through Whitby, Ontario the morning after James Neal had been traded to Nashville, and I thought about Nealer, and I hope(d) that some day he'll mature into the human being his hair deserves. If he (and Nashville, mostly because of Pekka Rinne and completely despite Laviolette) do good this season, I'll be happy about it. 

Mostly, though, as I drove north by roads slightly less traveled, I thought I should have gotten a map. I wrote down my directions dutifully before I left Massachusetts, as my phone GPS wouldn't help me in Canada, but I only wrote down the distances between turns when they were really tight. As a result, I spent most of my time on ON-12N being certain I'd missed something, but I hadn't, and then I passed Lake Simcoe, which was so beautiful in the late afternoon sunlight, all blue sky and glitter, that I actually swore at it. (With love, Canada, so much love.)

The title page to William Ailingham's 1703 A Short Account of the Nature and Use of Maps. The red ink is just fantastic.

In my route through Ontario, I didn't get into any new provinces, which made me sad. My first choice for my route to Worcester was actually to go north through Fargo and Winnipeg and finally have a good reason to drive through Manitoba, but that was before I knew I was going to be moving. That route is about fifty hours of driving, all told, and as much as I wanted to, I couldn't really justify adding at least two more days to my travel time when I'd already been gone for almost six weeks and there was everything to pack. Since last summer and the perfect days on the Gaspé Peninsula, I wanted to see more of Canada, particularly the parts I wouldn't necessarily have other reason to see. Several people told me there was no real point in taking the route I'd taken, that there wasn't much there to see.

Even the 1714 Calendar of State Papers attests that Gaspé is a draw.

If you judge from my camera roll, I didn't see anything. I didn't take any photos–I was driving solo and trying to make good time with my persistence since I'm not much for making good time with speed. By most standards, too, I didn't see anything "special"–no particular landmarks, as I remember (save a sign informing me that Orillia is the hometown of Glenn Gould). But I saw lake after lake, pool after pool stretching out on either side of the highway, shadowed here and there by trees. All the way up ON-400, cairns of small stones peppered the roadside cliffs, marking the presence of adventurous and climbsome visitors. I saw a place I wanted to come back to, and the tricks of sunshine and my mosquito-free cockpit probably painted a rosier picture than the reality, but that doesn't particularly matter. New places are always more inviting for their newness, for the greens and golds and granite grays that are never quite like those I left.

A small ship sketch on a 1688 map of exactly this part of the world, though a bit out of currently known proportions. Never has anything made me want a tattoo more than this map and its small ships.

During my time at the AAS, I looked at a lot of maps, inked on three-hundred-year-old paper and folded down into tidy, in-volume references that could spring into another level of detail for the accounts they contained, and I looked at one rather large French map, from 1688, that was lovingly hand-detailed, the interior margins of waterways inked a pale blue. Little ships, like the one above, sailed in the little-known parchment seas.

Marbled end-papers of John Oldmixon's 1708 British Empire in America.

The history of these maps and books and what they contain, recorded and elided, is more often violent and heartbreaking than not, because those are the wages of colonialism, and wonder is frequently coupled with disgust or fear. It's impossible to forget that. Most of my research saw me elbows-deep in the various ways human beings can be wretched to each other, wittingly and unwittingly, and I spent a lot of time, I think, investing myself in the objects of study as a way to maintain some distance and maybe, maybe, to find some hope. These small sketched ships, the marbled end-papers–these I read like those cairns, small and perhaps unspectacular and not quite secret, but still as invitations to notice, to step a little further in.

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.

long walks

I've taken some longish walks lately, and the photos turned out all right. Because it's officially September, that also means I've entered official mourning for summer, but the scenery's lovely and I'm trying to focus on that instead of how spine-crushingly depressing I find fall to be. 

Aspens on Casper Mountain, showing the frightful start of autumnal leaf-gilding

The view from Casper Mountain's Bridle Trail

 I've written about the Bridle Trail before. My general not-in-Casper-ness this summer has made it so that I didn't get into the near-daily traversing of it, but I made a point to go on the second day of classes, after I was done for the day. It's so very different in the afternoon--and it's functionally different, too: while I was away, the trail was re-done so the ascent/descent are actually in different places, and the surface of the trail has changed. (The sandy/rock-peppered parts have expanded and deepened, which makes it a bad choice for me to run on it, as I tend to trip on the relatively flat parts.) But the view, the sunlight, the Wyoming blue--that's always perfect.

On Labor Day weekend, we went to Denver to collect my parents and brother, who visited for the week, and we made a very brief stop at Rocky Mountain National Park, taking a six-mile round-trip hike to Jewel Lake. That's the source of the rest of these.

This chipmunk--just scritching away, a foot from my shoe.

Another tree, turning its colors.

Just before Mill Lake, Longs Peak in the distance.
(I want there to be an apostrophe in there, but it seems there isn't one.)

It was in the mid-nineties here in Wyoming for the entire week my family visited, and today, it's only been about eighty. The rest of the week, the temperature is predicted to hover in the seventies. Fall is falling, and there's nothing I can do to stop it.

What I can do is keep busy. My intention has been, with the start of the semester, to start the next novel, and I worked on it the first two mornings. But the old book is still in readers' hands, still waiting a bit, and I'm still tweaking it in my head. Those characters are still absolutely omnipresent. So I'm going to try, instead, to finish up some old business. I have essay bits hanging around, a few short stories that need a good hatchet-job. I spent a big chunk of today cleaning out my office so I have a place to work again. (While my family visited, it became the room where I threw everything I didn't have a place for, everything I usually put on the edge of the upstairs sofa or piled in my papasan chair.)

Every end-of-summer, I end up writing a post a lot like this--this is the academic's New Year. But the last year wasn't like all of my other old years, so this one feels a bit different because of all of my time away. I wouldn't trade my travel this summer for anything (and to be perfectly honest, I wish it were still going because obviously), but it changed the rhythm of the summer on me.

I bought more new music this year than I've done since the middle-school days of the Columbia Record Club, and a lot of it is, even by my own standards, a little ridiculous. (For perspective, my favorite band that isn't The Clash has an album called Polka's Not Dead, and I admit to curating a love of peculiar music.) But this year, I bought things I heard on the radio (Canadian radio, out of Vancouver & Ottawa, but still). I bought things I should have heard twenty years ago but didn't because the nineties didn't actually get to my hometown until I graduated and went to college. (I also bought t.A.T.u.'s greatest hits album. I bet you didn't even know they had a greatest hits album. But they do, twenty songs, and I can sing all of it now, so, so badly.) It turns out I will forgive music almost anything if it takes me to a narrative place, and that's a chicken and egg: does everything I listen to now become narrative--important to my characters or illustrative of something in my writing or amusing to my characters who have opinions about every.damn.thing.--because that's what I'm thinking about ninety-seven percent of the time? I'm guessing that's the truth, and I absolutely don't mind. I will listen to all of that Imagine Dragons album with ears that I'm apparently sharing.

And that's been fun.

So this is me, trying again with autumn, to do what I did with some of that music: shut up. Sink in. See where it takes me.

...and hockey starts soon. So there's that.

Re-entry

My Jentel residency has come to an end, and the upcoming days are my re-entry into the usual world. Given the presence of the Perseid meteor shower and that we spent our final two nights at Jentel sitting on folding chairs in the driveway, heads tipped back as we watched these clusters of dust and ice immolate in atmosphere, the idea of re-entry feels appropriate. It's been a summer of overwhelming good fortune, but there's no getting away from the overwhelming part; it's hard to really understand the imminence of the semester and so on.

Before the meteor shower, too, the summer sky shed its usual measure of stars. It’s not that I’ve been particularly attentive to that—I tend to be asleep well before the interesting astronomical features take place—but there’s so much sky, so much night that even I can’t miss it all. 

 

That’s been the feeling over the whole month: there’s so much good here that some of it must stick, well past the end of our tenure at Jentel. The work was good, the scenery was good, my lovely, lovely fellow residents were more than good, and this is all following in the Jentel tradition of understatement.

Have some pictures:

Like it says on the sign. 

Just a few days into our time together, we thought it was a good idea to take a 4-mile round trip hike to a fire tower none of us had been to on a trail that is not marked at all. (No one will be surprised that it was my idea. I wanted to research something. How hard could it be?) The hike had its challenges (including a need to be a little inclined toward mountain goatishness to get to the actual lookout), but it was worth that much and more. And we stopped to get ice cream together on the way home. That's how you know you've bonded: passing around your order to let five people you just met taste the chocolate malt or rootbeer float or butter pecan milkshake. 

Shadow portrait of the residents, Big Horn Mountains in the distance.

And in Big Horn, Wyoming, Holly discovered she loves watching polo. Because everyone expects polo in northern Wyoming, right?

I had four weekends in the greater Sheridan area. I went to four polo matches, and that was an experience that will get its own writing project of some sort. In the meantime, visit Flying H Polo and Big Horn Polo Club. Also, read Alyson Hagy's spare, beautiful novel, Boleto. I read Boleto last summer, actually, in Montreal, and I will read it again, now, knowing a little more about the backdrop to Hagy's fiction. 

This sky, you know?

Wyoming sunsets. They're all right.

A thousand thanks to the Jentel Foundation. A word I kept using while I wrote postcards to folks was transformative, and it's true. This residency changed the way I think about my work (in some very practical, tangible ways and some not-so-tangible ways) and about myself. At Jentel, where art and the artists that make it are so clearly valued and honored, there was so much burning brightly, sky and self. I'm taking that with me.

it's dangerous to go alone--

I'm not Link, but if I were (and I kind of wish I were, because honestly), this is the point at which the old man offers me a wooden sword.

Instead, because I'm not a small, green-clad adventurer in an 8-bit RPG but rather a small, Crosby shirsey-clad writer in the fourth day of a writing residency at the utterly gorgeous Jentel Foundation, I've taken these:

They're as good as swords--or better, really, since I'm doing a lot more reading than slaying bats in caves--and they are excellent company (and my fellow residents are good company, as well). These are books and chapbooks and zines by people I know or that have been gifts from folks I know. In order, from left to right: Deborah Poe's the last will be stone, too, Vanessa Stauffer's Cosmology, Kim Barnes's Finding Caruso, Chris Collision's Queen City Fall, Sean Thomas Dougherty's Sunset by the Chain Link Fence & The Blue City, and shortandqueer #10, The reawakening of my baseball fandom. 

I've also brought a ton of reading for research purposes, some directly related to projects, some indirectly. If you want to carve yourself open while an author carves herself open on the page, pick up A. L. Kennedy's On Bullfighting. A. L. Kennedy is always brilliant in the fiction I've read & her regular column for The Guardian, but this book is hard and beautiful and bleak, and also contains one of the most powerful meditations on Lorca I've ever read. Melissa Montgomery, wherever you are, this was the conversation on duende that your Lycoming College honors project wanted.

Here at Jentel, I have a room of my own and a studio in which to work, as well as gorgeous common spaces for absolutely everything else.

My studio, before I decorated it with piles of books, three separate & full travel mugs, and a plush stegosaurus.

There's much to say about Virginia Woolf and rooms of one's own and that's something that I believe in desperately. Space is such a necessity and a privilege, and the Jentel Foundation has provided truly superlative space in the way everything has been planned. But to have this space as well--even with a first-night rainbow over these prairie swells, the not-quite-foothills of the Bighorns--is something particularly moving.

On Tuesday, in those hills, I also got to see my first rattlesnake in the wild. It was lying beneath a clump of sage I was intending to step past, and my preceding rustle gave us both twenty-four inches of warning. I didn't have a sword, but I didn't feel much of a need to have one, either. The snake moved slowly and silently in its direction (without shaking its tail--I'm a little disappointed not to have heard it, but glad too I didn't vex it to that point), and maybe I decided to change mine, but that's all right. I had friends waiting at my desk.

space and time

The second and third legs of my travels, which took me to the Maritimes & Quebec and San Diego, respectively, have come to a close. Have a few photos of some of the highlights from the first few days of the east coast excursion:

Waves at Acadia National Park, Maine

Bowsprit of the Tall Ship Mar, Halifax, NS

The lighthouse on Cap Gaspe, Forillon National Park, QC

Another view of Cap Gaspe, from the Mont Saint-Alban lookout tower

There are quite literally hundreds more photos from everywhere that I've been in the past six weeks and thousands of miles (also literal: my friend Heather & I put more than three thousand miles on her car in our New England/Canadian adventure). I'm looking forward to sifting through them more carefully in the future. Just now, I'd like to pause a moment on how strangely productive all of this travel has been. 

I certainly don't mean in terms of production, any finished project. I've been a shameless and capricious dilettante, starting a dozen different pieces in three genres and finishing none of them since I set out on May 16. I blame some of this on the fact that I was working almost exclusively in my notebook, with a pen, and it's much easier to do the big organizing/re-writing/overhauling that I need with a keyboard than without, so instead of crashing things out, I took notes and then moved on to whatever was next, returning to make more notes as necessary. (I will say that Evernote may be revolutionizing that annotation process in a really easy and useful way, and it was incredibly helpful even when I didn't have actual network or wireless access with my phone, which was incredibly often through the Maritimes and the Gaspe Peninsula.) But while I still have my many, many pages of notes and scraps and snippets to actually type up and organize, the overarching sense of it all is that much of what I started deserves finishing. I don't often feel that way, and my folders are a hive of the unfinished. But all of these things feel quietly, calmly alive in a way that says Take your time. We will be here when you're ready. This is good. This is important. Because there's no way, of course, to finish all of these things at once, and it's madness to try. It's madness enough to be still at work on a novel's revisions (more on that in a moment), preparing to start drafting the next, and having some non-fiction planned that really does need to be finished. But this is good madness (I think). At least the back of my writing brain thinks so. It must think so because it's finally let me think some useful things about the novel I "finished" over spring break. 

That was the first substantial revision. It was a revision that needed to happen, but when I put the files away for the end of the semester, I knew there were some things that weren't quite right, and, in early May, trying to think about those things made me feel frantic, panicked, and riddled with failure, even though I know that excellent novels do not come about on one-and-a-half drafts. A novel is work, but, in May, it didn't feel like work, which is familiar, which is what one does, which is strangely comforting in its way. In May, it felt like just one more thing I couldn't get right. 

So, an ocean, then most of a continent, then the spine of the Rockies and wide deserts between me and it. Up to nine timezones. More than a dozen new students and a host of wonderful new people and a wealth of new landscapes and climates and a lot of delicious food and miles passed beneath my sneaker-soles. A jumble of new ideas. The constant smell of sugar in the air in Sibiu, the pine freshness of Gaspe, everywhere marine salt from Maine to Montreal and then in San Diego. All this distance, all this stimulus. And in small, quiet moments--under the rain-wet tent in Maine, on a silent, red beach on Prince Edward Island, on yet another lookout over Gaspe Bay, with coffee in hand in the Quarter of Spectacles in Montreal--things became clearer. Some small changes, adjustments to scenes and moods, and some cuts, of course, and then, last night, as the last flight started its descent into Casper, the thing I probably needed to know most about the book crept in. I had to write my notes on my actual boarding pass, given the timing, and there are scrawls in all of the white spaces, in the bigger block of white following my name, in the smaller white rectangle beneath the large DEN-CPR, on the back around the advertisement for United's Mileage Plus credit card. The ideas filled themselves in, wherever there was space. All I had to do was find that space. 

In fourteen days, I leave for my residency at the Jentel Foundation. I'll have four weeks of space, too, to listen and to work, thanks to the fantastic people at Jentel. In the meantime, there are smaller things to manage, a semester to prepare for, and some finishing to do. But I know where I stand, and the footing is good, and for now, the listening is easy.

The View From Here

It's been a busy few days in Sibiu. ...well, I say "busy"...that mostly means me walking in ever-larger circles. The experience of being in a place where I have the language skills of a half-trained Labrador retriever, comparatively speaking, is both hilarious and intimidating. Universally, people have been awesome and patient and kind, and I am having small victories like remembering how to say good day and good evening (I keep jumping the gun and skipping good morning; Romania has some very specific criteria about when one says which greeting). I have mostly managed to decode menus and grocery store items, too, so there haven't been any unpleasant surprises, food-wise. Actually, all of the food has been marvelous, and the bad news is that all of the work I did to curb my sugar cravings over the last six months or so is probably shot because there are so many pastries. (I am using the excuse of trying to have a real Romanian experience, and one thing no one does is worry about the sugar/salt/fat content every obsessive waking second. I miss that, actually, pretty intensely. Eating healthy foods is one thing. That's probably a post for another time.)

I continue to be thankful for the people I have met; I've several remarkable outings with one of the MA students here and her friends. I also got a crash course in Turkish culture and art, thanks to two other visiting professors. The intersections of culture are unlike anything I've ever experienced, and the immediate hospitality and welcome I have received (even so far as to be invited to dinner with the Turkish instructors and their students, which turned out to be home-cooked Turkish food by the students) startles and awes me.

In today's picture pile, two views from the clock tower at the edge of Piata Mica (literally the small square), one looking onto Piata Mare (the big square), and one looking over the city toward the Carpathian Mountains. And then two images from my personal souvenir take: yarn! The large wall of yarn is the shop (I am responsible for the gap), and the six skeins are my haul. Each is 400-500 meters of fingering weight loveliness, from a variety of wool/mohair/angora blends. For about $35. I just. Enough yarn for four lace projects.

I found the yarn in the Dumbrava shopping center, which has almost everything ever. I should have arrived with an empty suitcase and just bought clothes here; they have things I actually like. Ah well.

I also went well to two games in a college-affiliated soccer tournament. Yay, sprots! It continues to be strange waking up as the west coast games are ending and getting only highlights/postgames for east coast evening starts.

Still. Let's go, Pens!

Between rainshowers

This morning, I got to scope out the university a bit more, and the administrative assistant helped me get the technology in the classroom to cooperate with me, which was awesome. Yesterday and Saturday evening I spent with one of the graduate students, Renata, and her friends, and that was fantastic. They took me to the massive folklore/traditional civilization museum, and they were kindly very patient with me touristing about. We had a long discussion about an English equivalent for "dumbrava" (a small forest with water, but that isn't a swamp), and everything that we ended up with in English was either fairly archaic (coppice, spinney) or very precisely affiliated with a different climate. And that was rad. Then, I was invited to a backyard barbeque, where I got to meet more excellent people and also Renata's cat, Charlie. I have to say that there is something infinitely reassuring about the globally consistent behavior of cats.

Today, in addition to the trip to campus, I also went for groceries again and bought a gogosi, which is that golden pastry of awesomeness in the photo below. (Sorry for the wonky photo pile at the bottom of the post: the Blogger app I am using doesn't appear to allow one to move the photos around.) It was easily as big as my spread hand, and it was still warm when the clerk dipped one side in powdered sugar. I regretted that I was (as usual) wearing black, but that's all I regretted. They apparently come with fillings, too, though I got a plain one this time (gogosi simple). What I was most proud of was that I managed the whole transaction in Romanian (badly pronounced Romanian, to be sure), and I almost got it in the grocery store, but the clerk had to switch to English to ask if I had a 10-bani piece to avoid handfuls of change. I am starting to get the hang of making buna ziua a little more automatic and understanding when passersby shorthand it.

After groceries, I went on a walk, where I found a very large rose garden in Parcel sub Arini. A few plants are coming into bloom there, and it looks like it will be amazing in a week, so I'll try to keep an eye on that. Also in the park, I saw one of Sibiu's ambient dogs having a nap in a gully. The dogs have ear tags to show that they've been inoculated, and they seem both chill and in good condition. I saw another one on my walk home, just a beautiful shepherd-ish looking fellow (like if you mixed an Australian shepherd with a Husky). If one ends up in my suitcase, it is not my fault.

Finally, there is the photo of what I've been eating here in my room for dinner: bread and cheese and a tomato and cherries. While it continues to dump buckets outside, too (intermittent violent thunderstorms), I have covrigi (Romanian pretzels) and a chocolate hazelnut spread that I think I like more than Nutella.

...Also, there is day baseball, which will be my soundtrack for sleep. (I have to say that waking up to score of games just-ended is a little bit of a let-down. If I wake up early, I can probably listen to the end of the west-coast games while I write, but hockey will be just ending around 5 a.m.)

Buna seara from Sibiu!

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.

Arizona Calling

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

Dam at the base of Flaming Gorge, UT

Cameron, AZ

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

Scottsdale, I consider this to be showing off.

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

Jaywalking in Montréal: A Meditation on Home and Belonging

I'm a big fan of making overly dramatic statements about fairly inconsequential happenings. Last weekend, I was in Montréal in the first part of a week-long vacation that included that city, Utica/Cooperstown & Buffalo, New York, and two days of Phillies baseball in Denver before heading back to Casper. In the course of walking toward the Métro station near our little hotel, I said something to my husband that went something like "Death before looking like a tourist." I had just jaywalked through an empty, but orange-hand-marked crosswalk, though at least twenty seconds after all of the native Montréal folks had gone through it. My husband is not a jaywalker.


People in Montréal do not wait for walk signs. I didn't see anyone defy death and step out into traffic or anything like that--the issue was just that if there was no reason to wait for the signal, if the streets were empty, why, in fact, should anyone wait? (This makes perfect sense to me.) At busier intersections, it almost seemed as if there was a silent competition to see who could cross first. No one dashed out--people in Montréal seem to only run when they mean to, particularly on the paths of Mont Royal, in terribly attractive running shorts and coordinated shoes and with appropriate and attractive accessories. (The citizens of Montréal are collectively at least sixty percent more gorgeous than people in other places, excepting maybe Brazil. I had heard Montréal was full of beautiful people. I admit I hadn't believed it, but I should never have doubted.) But all of this is to say that people jaywalk there. Not stupidly, at least in my estimation, but with a decided lack of patience for the technicalities of timed lights in the face of stopped or absent traffic. 

I was doing likewise at the first intersection we came to after disembarking the bus from the airport at Berri-UQAM. I am not, on the whole, an impatient person, at least when it comes to things like that. I queue like a champion. If the necessity is to wait, I can wait, quite happily. But leaving that bus station, because it is the drop-off point from the airport and thus many tourists, I saw a lot of people with maps tiptoeing up to intersections. 

Let's not pretend: I had a map. It was definitely in my hand. I was dragging a suitcase. But I couldn't bring myself to tiptoe up to the intersection like I didn't know where I was going. Nevermind, of course, that I didn't know where I was going, not with terrible certainty. I'm just lucky with directions in the sense that luck favors the prepared (excepting that one time on the Tube when I was distraught over not getting to see the Beowulf manuscript and got myself and a friend going in the wholly wrong direction for a bit, but I blame acute emotional distress). The heart of it: it's not like anyone was fooled by my attempt at feigning nativeness. It's not like Montréal, at three in the afternoon on a Saturday, is one of those places where appearing to be a tourist is dangerous or ill-advised. 


And so I have to ask myself: what is so terrible about being the person on a journey? Why am I apparently so invested in not being that person, at least from the outside? Because I really am invested in it, it seems.


I've noticed it on the last several trips I've been on, this impulse to pretend I belong, to feign being a native. It didn't work on the trip to Sweden for many reasons (being short, dark-haired, and possessed of a striking lack of Swedish language skills being among them), but we did succeed in being taken for German tourists rather than American tourists (quite unintentionally and without speaking a word of German). It worked quite well in the UK, and I think it worked out all right in Vancouver. 


Since coming back from Montréal, I've tried to figure out why that is. It's not necessarily that it makes things easier. I actually got myself into several moments of intense awkwardness by replying to hellos in French (which is just about as far as my French can get me), and then having to backtrack and repeat the ensuing conversation in English. One of those happened over a pint of strawberries at the Marché Jean-Talon, and my apologies for being a doofus and my gratitude to the young woman who spoke with me for being kind. I want to participate even when I actually can't do it. I can't fake knowing a language. I know that. It was silly of me to do. Terribly silly. But it's become a reflex, a desire to respond in-kind.


Last summer, I spent two weeks in the UK and Ireland, and it included my third trip to Edinburgh, the only city that is currently vying for my affections the way Montréal did. There, of course, when I open my mouth, everyone knows I'm not From There. But it's not often that people can pinpoint where I am from because I'm a sponge and an Anglophile and I use strange syntax that's peppered with pieces of language from the things I've read and the places I've visited and the places I wish I lived. People often ask me where I'm from. 


I don't know how to answer the question. I feel obligated, always, to say that I am from Pennsylvania. I always specify that I'm from the middle of it, too. (The middle, of course, is quite different from the sides, culturally, linguistically, and so on.) But I haven't lived there since 2003, and I've been in Wyoming three years and have a career and a life here, and so I have to say Wyoming, too. But it's not possible to say that I'm from Wyoming--that's untrue. Even in the sense that people say they're from wherever they're living all the time--it's too untrue for this place. Being truly from Wyoming is a fairly rare thing; it's too disingenuous to own that to let even a perfect stranger leave with the wrong impression. (Maybe this is part of the root: if overtly identified as "not from here," I stand a likely chance of being asked, then, where I am from. The answer I am compelled to give is complicated and probably longer than the asker really wants to know. If I blend in, I save us all the trouble.)


On occasion, people will ask, instead, "Where's home?" Technically, that should be easier, shouldn't it?


But the word "home" is one I will use interchangeably. Central PA is "home" in that it is where I grew up, where the bulk of my family is. That home is the place that shaped so much of who I am. I "go home" at Christmas, and it takes three flights to do it. Home, though, is also any place to which I am returning. In the space of a weekend, I can refer to a hotel as "home." After Christmas visiting is complete, I also go home, to Casper, to this house. I've often wondered if this bothers my parents, to hear me call so many different places home, if it feels like a slight. (I used to call going back to college in my BA days "going home," too, even though I was also going home when my dad picked me up outside of Skeath Hall.) Home is wherever I happen to be. And there are a thousand clichés about that, and a Billy Joel song that connects home to another person, and so on. But there is a sense that home is the place that one misses most, maybe, the place one would rather be. It's the last part that I am missing, it seems.


I have never been homesick, not that I can remember. There was one morning--I think I was in the fifth grade--when I really desperately did not want to go to school. There wasn't any reason for it--I loved school until high school, and even then, it wasn't bad. I simply did not want to leave home (and I am often like that now). But when I am gone, once I leave for parts distant and/or unknown, I don't miss it. I would not rather be at home than in Montréal, or in Denver, or in Thermopolis, or in York, England.  

The altar of the Notre-Dame Basilica of  Montréal.
Everything is so lovely and blue.

That's a terrible thing to say. At least it feels like a terrible thing to say. There are people I love and adore in all of the places I call and have called home. But I don't generally ever want to be back. I often wish X person were where I am, but until the moment I get on the plane or in the car, the idea of a fixed home, of the place of belonging, evaporates*. Why should I be so happy to be gone from so much that I love?  It's a question I haven't found an answer to. Maybe it's because I love places easily. Especially places with public transportation and cassis beer and maple cotton candy and the Notre-Dame Basilica of Montréal**. But also places with no transportation and only the peanut butter sandwiches one has to carry in oneself.


But I have to see all of this as related: perhaps part of feeling at ease and at home almost anywhere, part of not missing home, is the sense that there is no home for me, no one true place. (I like to think Edinburgh could be it for me, and maybe someday, but I'm not there now.) I tried on the habits of those who call Montréal home, at least in crossing the streets, and it was grand. Even fooling no one at all--except maybe myself, for a little while--I was in one place where home was.

On the plaza of Kondiaronk Belvedere at the top of Mont Royal. 

*Once the trip back starts, though, I generally want to skip it. Usually because the route involves O'Hare or I-25 between Douglas and Casper***, which makes fifty miles feel like forever because it's always after at least four hours of driving. Sometimes it involves both.


**I should really do a post on the food of Montréal. I would use so many superlatives.


***The ninety miles between Casper and Shoshoni, though, is the longest distance I have ever driven. Nebraska is shorter than those particular ninety miles. Be careful in Wyoming. Time and space behave differently here.