on writing: coming-of-age stories

It has been two summers since the publication of The Swallows, and I am finally back at the point where I can consistently write again. Working on The Swallows was pretty intense. I sold the book when I had only finished about half of it and had an outline for the rest. That (one-hundred percent) is an amazing thing to have happened, especially because without the looming deadline, I don't think I would have finished it. Too many overwhelming things were happening in life, and I could have easily checked out from the writing. For better or worse, I used the book as a way to work though all the negative life happenings. This was not easy. Especially with the outline. 

The outline forced me to stay with the plan, to get there no matter what. It did not let me follow my feelings and recent tragedies, it didn't let me mope. It was a sharp-edged sword that forced me to keep my eyes straight ahead. 

Lots of times at dinner lately, Evelyn says, "Mom, are you thinking again?" and it is true-- I am staring out the window over her shoulder, watching the fat tabby from next door navigate the logs over the bog, trying to trace an inner pattern that leads to the character I want to follow.

Tim always tells me I need to write about myself, but I always get hung up on thinking about Pearl. It isn't that I want to write about Pearl again, its just that she is the only hero I've ever written. She is who I wanted to be when I was fourteen.

And this brings me back to the question of who I want to be now. Who I am now. When I was fourteen, I realized I couldn't draw my own face, and if I closed my eyes, I couldn't picture myself. Even then, I knew it was a dangerous separation I needed to overcome. And I did. But how can I write a new novel about myself without unpacking everything? Sometimes I imagine myself in Florida, dumbstruck and aimless, wandering and cruel, and I wonder if I could ever write about her. Even she is someone I've hidden-- the true opposite to who I am now. 

I guess that's probably something. Some understanding. 

And this application of being confounded by the self is nothing new, not even close. It is the basic outline of the coming-of-age story. 

Margaret Atwood's early novels and short stories walk the very personal line of who a woman is as an artist and an adventurer, how she navigates the space between desire and expectation, how she manages social pressures for better or worse, and how she can blow it all up and do what she wants. But there are consequences. Atwood employed this outline again and again (Surfacing, Cat's Eye, Lady Oracle) her characters aging between thirteen and thirty. And maybe she had to write through her own life before she could get closer to the imagined lives and histories she is so famous in foretelling.

Some writers never make that trip.

Even if Pearl is who I wanted to be when I was fourteen, in the story, I am not Pearl. I am the dead mothers. Every one of the them. On the whole, The Swallows is the confrontation and expulsion of my greatest fear, and it could be any old fairytale: like any wicked witch, the crone murders the mothers to get what she wants. Youth. Time. The fear is amplified by how the women are thought of afterwards. How their memories are even less acceptable than their lives were. I know that's pretty dark, but there is some light too (Benny is Langston, and Langston is all light). At least as much light as I've ever been able to write, which I suppose is far less than I thought it was. 

At least that's how it was two years ago. Even with an outline to save me, feelings still have a way of breaking through.

Sofia Coppola recently said, "There's a depth of being really in touch with your feelings and noticing details that I think adults are too busy to notice. I feel this is a superpower that teenage girls have."

I've decided that novel no. 2 will be something different: a complete inversion. It will mostly be light, so distractingly light, so dreamy, with the horror on the edges, like a tide coming in. And the tide always comes in.

I still have the notebook of the first story I ever wrote.

It is black and spiral bound, covered in kitten stickers. Inside, the story is called "The Campout", and it definitely follows too closely to Jason at Camp Crystal Lake, but none of the other fourth graders knew that. They just liked to see their names in print; who would be offed next and how. The best friends and the cutest crush almost made it to the end. And that definitely meant something. 

Everything in writing always means something.

on ghosts

Yesterday was a strange day for me. I drove to Bangor to attend my first ever book fair as a writer, sitting behind a table, talking to people about my book. I don't know what I was thinking when I signed up. Maybe that I would be a different person, one who is actually pretty okay at talking to strangers, which I am not. I've never been. I remember one of my first times in New York, my friend David threw a party at his apartment so I could meet all of his friends and what not. I think I lasted 45 minutes before I disappeared into a dark room to watch movies, spending half the time trying to will myself back into the party and the other half of the time asleep. The party lasted a long time. I have no idea what happened.

Yesterday's book fair was kind of like that, except the only room to hide in was the author's break room, and it was full of delightful writers who were wonderful at speaking to others, so it wasn't really the same as a dark room to watch movies. I spent most of my day at my table, writing in my journal. It was at the book fair that I really started working on my new writing project. I don't know if that sounds more romantic than it actually was. 

If you went to undergrad or grad school with me, you know I read books in public places to avoid talking to people. Writing in my journal was equal to that. I was on the third floor of the library, under very bright lights, next to a very kind author who gave me tips on how to do the selling part of all of this. 

I left the book fair having sold a few books and a plan on a post-it note for how to better handle the weird space of the book fair. Have you ever read Kafka's "The Hunger Artist"? It sounds dramatic, but it felt like that. Maybe I wasn't the Hunger Artist himself, but I was definitely part of the show, and I did not like it. I want to learn to like it though, or at least make friends with other writers in the area, so it isn't so much of being a stranger.

Anyway, I left the book fair with:

• having sold a few books
• a plan on a post-it note (I've already sent an email to my local library, ordered businesses cards with QR codes, and a large matted poster of the book cover-- I am heeding all advice)
• and a few pages of writing about the house I grew up in

When I spent the two or so hours writing at the book fair, I stayed on topic, but my mind wandered through the space of all these old memories. I remembered Bunky and JR, Fran and Candy. The pink trailer, the burned down walls, the dog house castles around the yard. The swamp and skinned rattle snakes, the legs of my crib in bowls of water to keep away the ants. I wandered the space, paced the rooms in my mind, all while in this incredibly uncomfortable physical space of the book fair. 

At the end of the day, the roads were bad. The state police closed the interstate between Bangor and home. I drove the state roads home, which ended up being the very, very, very best part of my day. It was like driving through a silent snow globe, through all those small towns covered in snow. If you grew up in Florida and closed your eyes, imagining what Christmas in New England would look like, it was just like that. The road took me all the way to my front door, which seemed unbelievable. 

I should have know all these remarkably disparate spaces would come to something, and here it is. A dream:

I was at a baseball game with the cheerleaders. It was summertime-- everything was green and gold and humid. We were in an open-air stadium with metal bleachers and an awning. The cheerleaders were spread throughout the stands. I called for the "Hello" cheer twice, but there were so many people in the stands, munching popcorn and excited to be there, that it was too loud to hear anything. We decided to leave the stands and head down to the field. I walked down the aluminum stairs and waited at the pass to get to the field. There were a lot of people still coming into the stands. That's when I saw my dad. He was in the sunshine, about to come into the shade of the stands where I was. He was wearing one of those old Clanton Welding t-shirts that my mom made when he first took over the shop. The writing on the shirt was gold-stitched and slightly crooked. His face was turned away from me, but I knew he was smiling. He had a big belly and really long, golden brown hair. He was holding a little blonde baby. I was stunned. I reached out to touch his shoulder, but right when I did, I realized it wasn't him. It was a thin man with short, thin hair. He was wearing a black shirt. It was like right when my dad left the sunshine, he wasn't there anymore.

That was the end of the dream. When I woke up this morning, I read what I wrote yesterday. I should probably come to expect these visits in my dreams because I am now letting my mind go into rooms I've pretended weren't there. Its like the old stories of the old families who only lived in one-room of a castle. 

on writing

Ever since I was a little kid, there has been a distinct separation between the inside and the outside. And at some point the world of the inside and the world of the outside switched places. 

The outside used to be the dark parts. The outside was things that happened, most of which I did not have language for. The things on the inside were arts and crafts, my friends and pets, girl scouts, making up dances. On the inside, I was all kittens and rainbows. 

Even when i was a kid, I knew there were shadows at the edges of things, but I tried to ignore them. It's like when you were little, and you knew there was a monster in your bedroom, but you were too scared to move. So you pulled the blanket over your head and tried to be so, so still. That totally works for the monsters that aren't really there, but it never, ever works for the ones that are. Even if the inside and outside have switched places, the monster is still the same. 

Ever since first grade, the bridge between the inside and the outside was writing. When I was small and I didn't have the language for my experiences, I wrote scary stories about camp outs. I wrote about haunted houses. things like that. 

But when I got a little older, and I had the language for my experiences, everything changed. The things that happened on the outside were now on the inside. I stopped writing stories and started hiding everything in the abstract space of poetry. And the weird thing about poetry-- at least the thing I think is weird about poetry-- is that it can pull a person in and push them away at the same time. It mirrors the dichotomy of the inside and the outside. 

Writing is the expression of the outside pulled in. It is a way to name, to braid the parts that unraveled. To tell the story of what it looks like to be in those dangerous spaces when you have nothing but a blanket to pull over your head. 

This expression is safer-- for me -- in poetry. Fiction demands that a writer be brave. In poetry, you can "tell the truth but tell it slant," just like Dickinson said. But that's transparent in fiction. 

Whenever anyone talks to me about The Swallows, I instantly get weird. I don't do it on purpose, but the book itself feels like I accidentally said all of the things I'm most afraid of. 

When I wrote the book, my main goal was to get Pearl through it. To see her and Benny through to the other side, as safe as I could make that happen. It was more than I had ever done for any of the other heroines I had ever written into my stories. If you've read my other stuff, you know this. My girls never get through anything. They're always devoured by the circumstances of their poverty, of their family lines, of the things that pushed them out onto the road.

I thought Pearl was different, and in a lot of ways she is. She is probably a fuller version of who is meant to be there. 

I finished The Swallows last Thanksgiving. I remember waking up at 3 am to write and being done with it. I didn't write for a year. and even now, I don't feel like a writer. I'm in this strange place where I'm collecting ideas, but I haven't been able to put them anywhere. Part of it, of course, is the way I feel I am bulling though the happenings of my life. My best quality is my ability to recover and keep going. I'm not sure if this is a quality of youth or an actual part of my personality. I will know soon enough.

One year to the day that I stopped writing, I started journaling again. I think the journaling is helping me to put down some things I haven't wanted to write about, but none of it is creative. Not even close. 

Tim thinks I put the idea of being a writer on the mantel and look at it, like I never see it as a part of who I am. That might be true. It's that dichotomy. He says that I need to write about myself. He says I need to write about my childhood, growing up, those kinds of things. 

I don't know. He's probably right. For a while I thought he wasn't. But after avoiding writing for a year and finally coming back to it, I am seeing that I am already writing about it, and it is probably what I am supposed to do. Right now, I am reading this really wonderful book called The Playwright's Guidebook, and Spencer has this part at the start about how some playwrights he has worked with have lost their minds over working on a play they were forcing. They were writing the thing they wanted to write and avoiding the thing they needed to write.

Maybe the need comes to nothing. But you have to get through the need in order to write the want. 

I guess, in the end, Tim is probably right. I need to write it out, even if it means nothing. 

However, tonight I came up with an idea on how I am going to do this. And I think it is the structure and strangeness I need to balance out the dark parts and the beautiful ones. 

the need for shelter

I went into 2020 with the idea that fallout was happening, and I just needed to light a candle, stack the canned goods and hug my kids; do some push ups on the concrete floor, run in place and read my kids all their best books in all the best voices I could muster. Then go to the second string and third string stories, bake the cakes and make everything as bright as possible. Turn on the golden lights and imagine they are the sun. Tell stories about that. Sing songs and wash clothes, stay underground and wait. 

Do all this and time will pass. Eventually the quiet will be consistent, the unwanted interferences will stop, there will be no feeling that the Trojan horse is on its way to my doorstep. I just had to wait, wait emphatically. And do it all, do all that waiting and living, as gracefully as possible-- be open with my kids, honest in a way that is bright and clear, but also stay out of the really dark corners, and work to stay away from absolutes-- and all would come through. I'd unlock the door, stick my head out of the shelter, and all would be well, better than I'd left it.

But, as you know, 2020 went along with all this. It leveled the ground, made all exceptions absolutes. We all ended up with the idea that fallout was happening, and all of our fallouts happened concurrently. So there we were: separate mostly, all with the need for a candle and a stack of canned goods, push ups and high knees, and the honest-to-God good work of everyday, of mustering the best face that one can possibly make when right in the middle of chaos and stasis. 

And because of all the shelters we had to build or find, my need for shelter blended right in, and that was just fine. The physical space of 2020 and the personal space of the individual in 2020 kept together, and they kept to themselves. That's how self preservation happens, I think. That small space between shelter and God forbid is where we make our most important decisions. With our chins to our chests and eyes down, we lean into that small space between chaos and stasis and choose based on the parts of ourselves that we often do not consciously understand. It is there, in that space, where it is impossible to communicate the difference between everything and nothing. 

Translating the Muse lecture

My friend Natasha and I presented a lecture at the 2017 MCC Creative Writing Forum, and it was recently posted on the MCC CW site. 

Our lecture was called Translating the Muse: The Collaboration Between Creative Movement and Creative Writing. Creative movement is a collaboration with the self and with others. By focusing more on the body and senses while writing, writers can develop a deeper understanding of their world and the narratives and images they are creating through the process of composition.

If you're interested in watching the lecture, you can see the full presentation here

On Writing

I've seriously dedicated myself to writing for about twenty-two years now. This doesn't include being a small kid writing stories and playing them out with my friends, making puppets or building sets out of the few things we could carry. I don't even really think much about the years I've consistently worked, exploring an idea to its (almost) end. I think a lot about that (almost)-- those times when I've abandoned a project completely and then didn't write much of anything for a year (or more) because I knew I had to work something out in my head. Or maybe it's more than that.

Maybe the first twenty years of writing was just getting out and getting over all the ghosts that haunted and hurt. The simplest, most personal realizations can often become the most profound. At the end of William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist, the demon is raging in the bedroom, assuming the voice of Damien Karras's dead mother, who Damien feels profound guilt over. He and Father Merrin are at the door, and Merrin tells Damien about his own loss of faith. Pretty much, Merrin says he has a difficult time loving everyone. He says that a lot of people actually disgust him, and he felt a loss of faith because God asked him to love. Then one day, he finally realized that he didn't have to actually love everyone, not even close. But he did have to act with love. It always comes down to the act. 

I am often asked about how one can go about writing. If you read any book on writing (most of these books are terrible, minus Stephen King's On Writing), in so many words, they all say you have to meet the muse. Like Father Merrin's act-- or faith in any pursuit-- you have to be there, in the room with the pencil and paper, writing it all out. Eventually, you'll come to something. This is what I tell people because it is the easiest way to put yourself in the head space, to tap into that psychic energy you need to write. But as I said before, because of those (almost)s, I don't write this way. I'm more like Roethke: I take my waking slow. 

I've been working on a novel for about two years now (those different two out of the twenty-two), and I'll pause for a month (or months) to work through an idea because I don't want to fall into the old traps. I don't want to get sick of myself. This time, I am willing myself to do something completely different. That difference has taken a considerable amount of clearing out the ghosts and internal clutter so I can write something in front of me and not behind. 

And this is what led to the most basic of realizations: I've always written horror. Of those twenty years where I was writing what was behind me, man oh man, those stories and poems were bombed out and broken. I thought I was writing capital-L capital-F Literary Fiction, but it really started out as Gothic horror and then moved into gore. In poetry, I've mostly published Gothic horror. In fiction-- with the exception of the last two years-- it's all gore. And the gore is painful for me to read. Whenever I workshopped the pieces, I would always hear that the writing is beautiful, but the story hurts. And man, I loved that. But then something changed, and it got to where my own stories made me nauseous. 

Because I only wrote about girls, and all the girls I wrote about were in monstrous situations and they couldn't get out. They followed the breadcrumbs because their was no where else to go. And I wouldn't let up. I wrote out the worst parts, the willing walk to destruction. I thought this was romantic (you know, Literary Fiction, even sometimes Southern Gothic), but I was really writing slasher stories where the girl had absolutely no power, and there was always a force (usually a stranger, sometimes a boyfriend, once a mom) that runs the girl to the ground. 

The realization came yesterday, and it was this: I hate gore horror. I won't read it, I won't watch it. But it's all I wrote. I thought I quit those stories because I'm a bum, when really, I quite those stories because I truly hated their drives. 

I only recognized this because of the novel I am working on. I met a man on a bus who I could have easily turned into an active monster, which is far different than the threat of violence. I could have taken the power away from my main character, fallen farther into the world of splatter horror and out of the supernatural/paranormal. I took a month to figure out who everyone on the bus is, how I was willing to build force and vanquish it, and yesterday, I was finally able to write the scene. Afterwards, I felt like high-fiving my old self, and all those sad girls I buried in all those old stories.

audio of Pearl Walks Home

This is a link to the audio of "Pearl Walks Home"

Pearl Walks Home published in Arkana Magazine, Issue 5

The first chapter of the novel I am hopefully writing was published in Issue 5 of Arkana Magazine, and I couldn't be happier. 

You can read it here: https://arkanamag.org/2018/12/03/pearl-walks-home/

That's Just the Feeling

This fall has been a bizarre season. No matter how much I tell myself that a single life is only one timeline, with a definite beginning and end, I can't help but constantly give myself over to that American idea of perpetually having the capability of beginning again. I think part of it is that I believe people can change. I mean, there are two ways of going about it: people change or they don't. And if I believe people change, then I have to believe I have the capacity to change too-- for better or worse. And man oh man, does the idea of ever growing worse startle me. I can't be the only one, though I may be in slim company of those who are infinitely conscious of it at most every moment, even in dreams. 

One of the reasons I married Tim is because we speak the same language. He has the exact same capacity of the infinitely conscious fear of being one who grows worse. I'm not saying that it's because of, but maybe only informed by, that fear that he is pretty good at saying something I've never heard before when I need to hear it. For this strange fall season, Tim told me that the worst tragedies happen on otherwise beautiful days because it's the only way anyone could cope with it. 

I mean, damn. That's poignant. 

Throughout this strange fall season, with all it's dramatics moving in completely disparate directions, along with other things, I keep thinking of what Tim told me. Maybe part of it's poignancy is connected to staying in the center of things. When things get to feeling like you're being tosses around at sea, I hear the best thing to do is remain a stone. So for this strange season, I've tried my best to remain a stone. But even living in this little city, one can only really stay a stone for so long, hardly anytime at all.

I keep going back to that scene in Broken Flowers too. When Bill Murray is at the end, all busted up and broken, suffocating under the gravity of life and being, and all the repercussions that stem from both, and he's holding those terrible, cheap pink flowers. He's leaning against a giant old tree, squatting next to the grave of one of his last loves, crying. Whenever I picture this in my mind, it's raining. I've seen the movie at least twenty times, and the greens are so fresh, they feel wet with the weight of falling rain.

But it isn't raining at all. That's just the feeling. 

For the most part, outside my love for Tim and Langston, I don't know where I'm traveling. But I know I'm capable, and I know people love me. (I dyed my hair pink this month, and immediately, my wonderful cousin texted me, "Are you okay? It's pink not brown, but does it mean the same thing?")

I think art is inside/outside-- part of the time is collecting, the other part is creating. Sometimes the stages take years to navigate. This week I've realized that it's probably just time for the other side of things.

About David

This entry, most likely, won't make any sense, and most likely, I will keep writing on it, over and over, as an attempt to reconcile my feelings. I started this journal eight years ago as a way to cope with death and loss. I thought then-- and still believe now-- that if I could write it out enough, I could find my way through to the other side. It's like the story of when people die. Their spirits are on one shore. A man on a boat arrives at the shore and drops anchor for the spirit to board. With the spirit on the boat, the man guides the boat to the other shore, drops anchor again, and the spirit makes it to the other side.

When I think about all the people I've lost, this is where they are. And in that space, I wonder what the man on the boat would say. When I try my hardest to write my way through things, I try to tell myself what the man would say.

When I was young and angry-- and I was young and angry for a long time-- I believed in God and believed in heaven and hell. There are pictures in my mind that I can't imagine existing on any other plane of consciousness. People I can conjure that I can't imagine being a part of my life again, over and over, in endless worlds, with both of us in them. 

Outside of my great grandmother and great Uncle Joe, the first real loss I experienced was when Manny died. I was nineteen. David didn't know how to deal with my grief. In his defense, no one really did. My dad told me I was being stupid, my mom cooked me food and bought me an inspirational wall hanging with an inspirational quote, and none of it was good. When Manny died, I burned everything down. I swore he was haunting me, and I left everything behind. I started a new life-- frantically-- then that didn't work out, and I ran away. I went to Nebraska to be alone for a while, lived off of my savings, spent my days in the library, and I wrote my way through the tragedy. I didn't tell anyone in Florida where I was.

I eventually went back to Florida, but it was only to keep writing. Literature classes were my church, the books my Bible, the professors my spiritual guides. I saw a dream specialist for a little while-- an old anthropology professor who acted a lot like the man on the boat, leading me into those old and frightening rooms so I could confront what was in them. I lived in my brother's old bedroom, slept on my childhood bed, and spent my days listening to records, writing, and frantically reading everything I could. I was looking for something I needed to find. David had already moved to NYC by then and I didn't care too much. Anyone that was out of Florida I was happy for. We wrote letters and talked. He sent me postcards and songs. He sent me pins and a shirt from the record shop he managed.

When David's mom got sick and slowly died, he could hardly cope with the grief of it. We talked for hours and hours, we spent years talking about it. I was the man on the boat, David was the spirit then. At that point, I had spent so many hours on that boat. He had been my friend for so long already, and meant so much to me, that I didn't mind. For years and years, until I was about twenty-six, we flew back and forth to see one another. 

We would have magic days and nights.Dancing until 7a at a pop-up party in Brooklyn, surround by a thousand people, all dancing to old blues and doo wop 45s. That time in Central Park, on Davis Islands, at that sushi restaurant in Brooklyn that played Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark".  The punk concerts we went to. The mix tapes he made me. All those nights we stayed up til morning laughing and talking, moving from one party to the next.Then the next day David would be dead quite, totally freaked out by all that happiness. One of us would go home and then the whole thing would begin again. There were a lot of trips that fell apart too, planes neither of us got on, at the last minute, yelling and upset feelings. Over the nineteen years, we tested our loyalty to one another a lot.

The last time I saw David, I was twenty-six. It was the 4th of July. He was living in NYC and called me. He said he needed help, asked if I would move in with him for the summer. I thought that maybe the dark half of things would go away, and all that happiness would not be overwhelming at all. I took leave from work, packed my bag, and flew to NYC. I took a cab to the apartment, and he could hardly get to the door. The way he was acting stunned me. The fact that the room I was supposed to stay in was completely bare stunned me. It was 100 degrees in the apartment, except for in David's room, where he had air conditioning. He stayed in bed all day. He slept until after dark, after the 4th of July fireworks really got underway. I had been there for a good 8 hours, in the empty, suffocating side of the apartment, trying to figure out what to do. I unpacked and repacked my things twice. Eventually though, I pinned a 900 dollar check to the refrigerator and took a car to Jersey. I flew home the next day. David called in the middle of the night to see where I was. I told him I was visiting friends. We didn't talk for a while after that. I know what was happening in his life, and it wasn't what was happening in mine.

Over the years, I've thought a lot about my decision to leave instead of stay. I think that the who I am now-- who I've grown into-- could have stayed and been okay. Who I am now could have probably had the strength to changes things. Who I am now is who he needed then. 

About a year after I left, we talked again. It was awkward for a few years. We were both still making bad decisions-- mine with people, his with other things-- and he was angry with me. But in the last few years, we talked almost everyday. In the last two years, he told me things, gave me every answer to every question I've ever had about how things happened, from his perspective, since we were sixteen. This summer he gave me too many truths from the last nineteen years. He said he just thought he should tell me. I'm glad he did. 

This year, David and I had been friends for nineteen years. From his perspective, he said it was twenty. The last year he'd say, "God Kristen, I've known you twenty years, and..." That's the part that's keeping me up at night. I always thought I'd see David again. He'd make fun of me for living out in South Dakota, but he always talked about getting time off of work to go to Wyoming. He talked about saving his money to get out of NYC, go some place quiet.

On Monday of this week, I found out David died at the end of last week. I didn’t sleep much Monday night as I found myself trying to catalog everything I could possibly remember about all we’d been through together. My first thoughts went to the hard times, all the coming of age stories of navigating each other through the deaths of loved ones, the strange feelings of time travel that you can only experience with someone you’ve known for so long. Then around 2a, I started to remember all the magic, all those moments in my youth that will forever be cataloged as some of the greatest nights of my life. after that, I spent hours thinking about that magic time travel, and how every time we talked, we could pull at those same strings. There’s a part of Rocky V where Mickey talks about how suddenly, you look around and realize you don’t know anyone anymore and you wonder what you’re still doing here. We grow older and the tethers to our youth— who we used to be— start disappearing. And we have to carry that old, reckless world around inside of us. As we grow older, that’s the only place the past keeps living. That was a lot to deal with at 4a. Milosz believed that the purpose of writing is to create a space for the dead. Writing is what helps to pull the world on the inside to the outside, which has the power to construct a similar sense of time travel that only an old friend can do. And I have nineteen years of journals, a stack of poems and stories all about David and the magic we could conjure. 

When I say I'll miss David forever, it isn't an understatement. I'll miss him everyday. Outside of Tim and Langston, no one has impacted my life so immensely. 

Since Monday, I've tried not to think directly about it. Some moments, when I am with Tim and Langston, when I am fully present, I feel okay. I live in a place where I don't know a lot of people and am surrounded by people who don't know this part of my life. When I was a kid, I would always ask my parents who they used to be, what they did before being my mom and dad. They always said "nothing." I tell Langston how much I miss my friend. Yesterday, he told me that when he lived in my belly, he could see my friend on the "Network". I asked what the "Network" was, and Langston said he built a little TV in my belly, so he could watch everything. Then when he moved out of my belly, he broke the TV and took it with him. 

This is kind. But I'm still not sleeping. All the love I have both comforts me and makes me nostalgic. It makes me feel like giving things, giving everything I can.

And I know my idea of death has changed. Now, hope that when we die, all of us, in all of history, are in the same place. We are all on the exact same plane. There is only one of us, there's only ever been one of us, and that idea of separate planes of the same people is gone. And I am okay with that. If the people I am scared of are there, that's okay, as long as everyone else, all the people I love so much, are there too. It wouldn't matter then. 

On the Mute

The hard and horrible rooms of growing up always find their way into my writings. It's a fact. In real life, I am sunshiny and bright (I think), but my writing is not. My writing is considerably harder than me.

But for long stretches of times, I block the hard and horrible spaces out. My mind has this mute, one where my conscious thoughts can only reach so far back. A few days back. Months, maybe. But not really. Mostly, when the mute is on, I just look at the things in front of me. It's like I become one of those small little dots in George Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte. It's kind of wonderful. It's so easy.

And my body commits to the mute. I stop doing things that make me reflect, things that rely on muscle memory, and rely on keeping my mind right in front of me. The mute makes me tired. I sleep a lot on mute, or I want to sleep a lot, but when the mute's on, I have horrible nightmares. Not just dangerous or violent, but heavy. Sad. Nightmares that feel like an inevitable trajectory. Nightmares that feel like dark portents from my subconscious mind telling me to turn the mute off. That even though the mute is wonderful, it isn't wholly me.

The mute's been on for a year. It's been on since last October. I probably turned it on because too many changes were happening, and I really had to keep my eyes and mind on what was right in front of me. There were so many immediacies. 

It's also been since last October that I was able to write anything. That probably goes without saying. It had been a year since I'd written anything, until this week. 

Now all those spaces and rooms are rushing back to me. When I do the laundry, when I walk down the street-- my conscious mind pushes back into the spaces of things. 

I was actually able to find the thread in the novel, again, this week. Last October, it got all knotted up, all bogged down into old methods, old ways of how to explore the thing. So I put it away.(On the writing side of things, there isn't much worse than the feeling of repeating myself). Over the last year, every time I read what was there, I'd still like it, but I didn't know how untie the knots and bear traps I'd set up. I didn't know how to build something new and stay out of the rooms that were no longer beating. Rooms I'd already ripped to shreds and devoured completely, piece by piece. 

But suddenly, the mute is off again. My creative mind is ambling back into being, and I found my way back into writing.

"fire truck bed" is code for the best writing space I've had since my dad built me one of these things when I was eight-years-old.

on Stephen King and bullshit

Before I even began reading Stephen King's On Writing, one of my fiction students (actually, the final person in a ten-year stretch who has recommended this specific book) told me that King says journals are never for collecting amazing ideas-- no one ever returns to those ideas, picks them back up, and writes something stellar. Great ideas stay in the skull-- they can't be shaken loose, they can't be put away in wait.

Truly enlightening, lifting the veil kind of information. But what I actually gleaned from the conversation is that journals are, in fact, bullshit.

This was last week. Believing this truth, I stopped writing in my journal-- I actually threw my journal away. After being a steady journal writer since I was eight-years-old, I stopped. 

It felt okay. I guess. It felt like the same jumbled anxiety that has been my normal state for the last 2 1/2 years. okay.

But last night, the gods must have been creeping through my dreams because I woke up this morning to an epiphany: I need a space for my bullshit.

Fact of the matter is, there is so much bullshit, so much chronicling of minutia in my mind, that if i don't stick it somewhere, the bullshit becomes fully animated, stomping around my skull in beatle boots,  creating muck of my brain. so here I am-- back to the bullshit.

But also back to fiction.

And don't think these two things are not synonymous. When I quit writing fiction 2 1/2 years ago, and transitioned back into poetry, it was the beginning of when my pressure of chronicling began it's beating to the summit of my psyche. My journal writing changed. No longer a place to store bullshit, it became the bullshit itself: a space of obsessive lists and behaviors. It was the self under a microscope, a complete dissection of the spirit. ugh.

But thanks to Steven King (and Ira  Levin too, actually) some stupid stone got kicked against the wall of my skull, and startled me back into the singular, cutting out the fascination that the distraction of bullshit can bring.

"Story Mountain" published by Fine Lines

One of my poems, "Story Mountain," is in the current issue of Fine Lines.

three of my poems published

 "Showing My Husband what I Learned in Elementary Ballet during a Whiteout in Omaha, Nebraska", "Memorial Day Weekend, Omaha Boarding House " and "Rapture" are included in the spring 2017 issue of the After Happy Hour Review. The selection is definitely influenced by relocating to the Midwest.

"Lisa in the Galaxies" and "New York party scene: twenty-four and" published by Thistle Magazine

two of my poems-- "Lisa in the Galaxies" and "New York party scene: twenty four and" are in the current issue (Growth) of Thistle Magazine. It's a gorgeous mag, and if you hate to read, you should download it just for the aesthetic. It's that beautiful. www.thistlemagazine.com

two poems, "Lisa in the Galaxies," about my Aunt's death a few months ago, and "New York party scene: twenty-four" were picked up for publication in the forthcoming issue of Thistle Magazine. 

I'm super stoked to have two poems I really love in such a gorgeous magazine.

"New York party scene: twenty-four" is the poem I like best to read aloud, at least of my own work. I get to every woman in it. I get to be the antagonist. The person I am when I'm at my best, one I mostly feel when I'm in the streets with a little pocket money, the day bright and perplexing, knowing that the universe, just at that moment, pushed me out the door. Dropped me from the stars with every bit of force I'd need. 

Reading at The Slowdown a few weeks ago, on 30 January

"Paper Trees with Paper Plums" published in Fine Lines

on this snowy day, I found the vibrant winter issue of Fine Lines in my office mailbox today! So happy to have "Paper Trees with Paper Plums" published in such a long-standing and beautiful journal.

"First Individual Lesson with the Ballet Mistress Trained at the Royal Academy, set to the Coda of Swan Lake" published

"First Individual Lesson with the Ballet Mistress Trained at the Royal Academy, set to the Coda of Swan Lake" was published in the annual issue of Paper Nautilus. And it's beautiful.