Autumnal Shape Shifting

I don’t know about you, but I love this time of year. A lot of my memories and emotions are…should I say melancholy? The days are getting shorter, the air becomes chillier, and it seems the world is preparing for hibernation. If I had any doubt before, it is evident that summer has ended. As the holidays approach, this time of year for me has always had a reflective, peaceful, and sometimes sad feeling that surrounds it.

It is captured perfectly in “It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown” when Snoopy is roaming the countryside as his alter ego the Flying Ace is off fighting wars before he crashes the kids Halloween party. It’s a simple story, equal parts of sincerity; honest affection for certain aspects of children and childhood but there is a blunt admission of the failings of people and their world. Halloween always brings a certain feeling to the air, a shape shifting of sorts. I love this time of year and I love Halloween. I love to see the city come alive when ordinary people become whomever they want. It’s the chilly winds and longer nights that make up for this wonderful and strange time.

Seventeen

Dear Lana,

My bad. I know it. You know it. We both know it. Everybody fucking knows it. My shitiness is a thing of legend, okay. Great. Good deal. In my defense, though, I told you distance wasn’t my thing. You asked me if we could do it and I didn’t beat around the bush or anything, so let’s not pretend like anybody got blindsided here. Was it tactful? Not in the remotest sense. Was I justified in it all? Who am I say? You’re the smart one. But, when your girl calls me in up at two in the morning shouting like it’s the fucking Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and I call smell the alcohol through the phone, I think it’s getting a little out of hand.

You want sorry? Here’s sorry: Sorry for flying to Spain and not texting you for the entire two weeks. Sorry I saw you at Flags at one in the morning and all I did was wave. Sorry I never got the Kearney CD to you. Sorry I didn’t drink that Jack with you. Sorry I told you you were pretty and I meant it. Sorry I didn’t choke you with that word. Sorry I was seventeen.

You're married now.

letter

Dear Jordan,

I know you probably hate me, and I can't really blame you. You were my best friend and knowing I lost you is a physical ache in my chest. I know it's just an excuse, but I was young and reckless, and I can admit, selfish. It was through carelessness that I hurt you, and through fear that I never apologized. I am still afraid to find out how you really feel. I don't know if you will believe me, but I love you, and I miss you, and I am so, so sorry.

Crafting Voice

Mrs. Dara Ann,

When I was first told about you moving in with us, I was not excited. I haven't talked to you in years, I knew you as the little cousin that we would hang out with when we went to see Grandma but nothing more. I always had this image about you, this religious goody good that always followed the rules partly because of Grandma's description and bias of you. That however, was not the case. It took awhile when you moved into get comfortable with each other but after we did, it was as if it had always been like that. I learned that the perception that Grandma had of you was wrong and that perhaps she didn't know you at all, but I did. I knew all your secrets and you knew mine. When I found that handwritten letter in the mailbox of a pathetic attempt to try to explain your actions, lets just say Grandma wouldn't approve of the words I wanted to use. I was hurt. I was broken. I trusted you and you abandoned me. You moved clear across the country to marry some guy in the army. I didn't understand. Why would you give up your life for some guy? You had plans. I get it now. I don't agree but I get it. You were right in not telling me what you were planning on doing because I wouldn't have understood but now I do. It makes me happy to hear that your happy. As always, hope all is well.

Your little Cousin,
Rennaroo

Dear Craig, Its been too long since I last saw you. I miss you. We were never really very close were we? Yet each time I saw you you seemed happy, content with life. I remember when you out to North Dakota for a job with the oil fields out there and how the money was good and your friends a great support group. I remember the time you brought over a baby duck that you found and how it followed you like you were its mommy. I enjoyed the dinner we had on that one night, I want to say it was in November, sometime around thanksgiving. You were a good conversationalist and brought life to the people in your lives. Craig, I wasn't there for your in your darkest hour, I didn't feel the despair your parents felt when they heard the result of your girlfriend breaking up with you. It was too late for me to get to know you better. This last September I was at Grammy's house; I remember that you would call her grandma. Grammy showed my dad and I that she had the rifle that you killed yourself with. When I first caught sight of it I kind of wanted it. When I heard whose it used to be, well... I realized I didn't want it. I didn't want the object that had caused my extended family so much pain. What is a weapon like that good for other than a constant reminder of the fragility of life and the tragedy of heartbreak? I thought about telling you how I've been, but how I have been seems cold and insensitive to how you have been. I am sorry that such despair should have come to you and I am sorry that we couldn't have been closer. I wish that we could have been closer. I wanted us to be closer. I think that you needed someone to be closer. With Love and Sincere Wishes, Your Second Cousin Jacob

Grandpa,

I don’t remember a single word you ever said to me. I remember your face…the way you smelled like pipe smoke, and the way your hands were always stained with ink. That is all… Yet I always wanted to be like you. You were always so dignified and quirky in my eyes. I loved how mom told me stories about watching you write. She says she could always tell when you were writing. Sometimes it would be in the middle of a conversation. She said you would just stop and twirl you cigarette… the hand rolled kind… round and round in your fingers as you stared into the distance. Mom would tell me how you loved red wine and sea food, and how you would spend all day at your type writer and leave with only a sentence. She told me of all the times you would walk with her through the red woods and the advice you gave her. The way you called her your little monkey face. I always wanted to be monkey face two… as silly as that sounds. I wanted to be a part of your life. So I decided to be a writer. I was 7 and I got a gold star on a silly little handmade book I made about horses. My mom said writing ran in our blood as did good wine, and a good taste in art. She also said we were gypsies. So I was going to be a traveling gypsy writer, who drank red wine, and trained horses. The horses came with the story of course. I remember writing you letter after letter and you never responded. Then you died… I feel like I missed meeting an incredible man. Sure you were a horrible dad and a worse husband. You were never a perfect person but who is? You were a great artist. A tortured soul who had a story to be told. A story that got lost somewhere in your push for fame… I wonder who you would have become if you hadn’t gone to LA. If you hadn’t left mom and grandma and Pattie, and Bart and Gayle… I wonder what it would have been like if I could have been around you as an older person. I wonder what it would be like if I knew you now? But wondering goes nowhere…. The point is I love you. I miss you. And I hope life is good wherever you are.

Love and mountains,

Riley 

No Title

The Facebook notification on my phone this afternoon let me know that you ‘liked’ a picture I was tagged in… from 2009. What the fuck is that about? I haven’t seen you since that picture was taken, in a bustling coffee shop, each of us wearing fantastic scarfs and cheesy faux-shocked grins. Your hair was flawless, always in the right place, at the right time. It was January, so my hair was frizzy and bleach-blonde, in-between dye jobs. What color was next? All blue? That January might have been the point in our timeline when you stopped knowing those details. The same time you stopped driving through the desert in the middle of the night from one tiny city to another because you wanted to watch reruns of Project Runway with me. The exact same period when you couldn’t be bothered to answer my calls; I just needed you to keep breathing on the other end so I could stop being alone.

The last comment on the picture was in late 2009. Five years ago. It was from a girl we graduated with, Beth, who wrote “part of me wants to smile, and the other part wants to get in my car and come see you.” That was right after you dropped the k from the end of your name—making you appear infinitely cooler to your new friends— but before I felt the same as Beth. Before it was surprising to see you acknowledging that we were friends, (not just) on Facebook.  

Crafting Voice

Dear Lacey,

I saw you again today. I saw you in every five foot nothing blonde walking away from me down the sidewalk as I passed them by and looked over my shoulder just to make sure it wasn’t. I still check every white Ford F-150 with the grated grill to see if it might be you driving which I know is stupid because you’re in California where your husband that you don’t even like dragged you off to. I saw the other day that you delivered a second child seemingly 9 months exactly after your first and that this time it’s a girl. I wondered if they were keeping you happy and remembered how you would light up when you talked about having your own family. I remembered the first time I saw you and how our eyes met with a look of unreasonable understanding that would lead us to some arcane place beyond any familiarity where we would be robbed of our innocence and stripped of our assurance. I remembered finding out that you were engaged earlier in the same week that you came to me with watery eyes and no control of the previous three months since you said you would let me know when you wanted to see me again. I remembered how angry I was when you wouldn’t decide for yourself and how desperately we reached for one another as we both looked away. I paced along those years leading up to the spiral of invitations, expensive photos, and white chrysanthemums, pawing at the ground for missing pieces or forgotten promises only to, once again, have no one but myself to blame for what didn’t happen, and what did.

Voice Exercises

Dear Dad,

Last night I saw you again, and I counted the years since you died.  Forty.  But there you were, and the first thing I noticed was how, when you smiled, your cheeks would only hint at dimples, cavities that ever so slightly hollowed out your face.  I noticed, too, how your black hair on your forehead curled into a neat, long wave, and I wondered at that.  I wondered if it bothered you as much as it bothered me.  But then I thought that when we are boys we don't care about our hair--not one whit--and you were so clearly a boy with the curled hair and the rabbit on your lap.  You stroked the rabbit, and despite the flickering black and white film, I could see the concentration on your face when you did it.  It is possible that you were posing for the camera; these old films have lots of that.  It's also possible that when I watched the film of you I was looking hard for the you I needed to see, the one before vodka and cigarettes, the one before the long, messy end of your life.  For whatever reason, I saw  the clear face of a boy with a rabbit on his lap, the gentle friction of his hand stroking its fur, and the static of a simple pleasure.

"Life experience is what makes a good writer"

I heard this quote, or something along the lines of this the other day while watching a movie. It made me wonder if this was true. Thinking about it a lot of the super famous writers had some kind of trouble in their life, death of a loved one, loss of love, writing in times that forbid them to write etc. I did a close study of a poet for one of my other classes, Sylvia Plath which is a super known poet. In her life she dealt with depression and tried committing suicide twice, only succeeded once.

With all that being said, is it a writers experience or better yet tragedy of their life that makes them a good writer? Do people have to go through hardships to be a good writer? Or can it be that everyone has their own hardships, some obviously greater than others?

If we are going along the definition of having to deal with tragedy to make you a good writer, I wouldn't be a good writer at all.

This kind of relates to my last post. My struggle with non-fiction. It's an odd thing to look at your life and go "that, that is a story." It's even more odd when you are able to look at different pieces of your life and string them together with a common theme. It's like assigning meaning to something that may not have meaning. Someone's obsession with nature may just be an obsession with nature instead of a complex revelation on what nature truly means to them. Someone who scabbed their knee a lot as a kid, could have just been clumsy or really liked riding their bike down hills without using the breaks without any other significant value. Neither or those instances really has meaning behind the story, so how does someone change that in order to write about it?

Another difficult part about non-fiction is feedback. How do you tell someone what to edit when you have to stick to the truth? You could tell them to describe something more, but maybe they don't remember anything else. You could tell them you really like one character, but maybe the character didn't say or do anything else in real life. Non-fiction limits the options for feedback in workshop as the writer is they only person there who knows what happened outside the story.

little people, little books, little reading, little love left

This summer I realized that there was an insanely long list of classic children’s novels that I failed to read as a child. I never read A Wrinkle in Time, or Little Women, or even The Little Prince. Apparently I read nothing about Little people (to add to the list, no Thumbelina or Stuart Little, either), so I vowed that I would read 50 books for children or teens in the next year that my friends recommended and were considered “classic” or “essential.” There was a lot of books suggested with talking animals or just horses in general, most of which were immediately vetoed, but primarily I saw the same titles showing up over and over: The Phantom Tollbooth, The Secret Garden, and a gaggle of Judy Blume titles, among so many others. The list initially felt overwhelming but I vowed to document my journey with each book in a blog, which I thought would be interesting to reread once I was finished so that I could reflect on the experience of reading classic children’s novels as an adult, with adult perspective.

I started off strong, adhering to my reading schedule, taking notes and meticulously recording all of the elements that I loved so I could include them later in my blog post. After two months I hit a roadblock—the start of school—and lost all motivation for reading anything with more than 10 pages that wasn’t required reading. I seriously only made it halfway through The Little Prince before I put it down, vowing to come back to it later. IT’S ONLY 40 PAGES LONG, WITH HUGE FONT AND ILLUSTRATIONS!!! It’s not that I wasn’t interested or compelled to finish, but it’s now been two months and I still haven’t read those last 20 pages. I guess what it comes down to is that reading outside of academia has become a burden, even though it’s been my favorite activity since I learned to read. The more troubling aspect is that I don’t know how to get over feeling that way.

Maybe it’s become a Pavlovian response, but picking up a book immediately makes me feel tired, but not in the relaxing, before-bed kind of way that used to be the case. It’s almost as if my brain cannot physically handle being utilized one bit more after spending all day analyzing texts and making persuasive arguments in conversation and in writing. All of my effort is sapped up trying to sound smart instead of trying to be more intellectually and emotionally engaged in something I love.

I have no idea how to fix this, but I hope it goes away once I’ve gotten some distance from this much school work.   

Please Don't Eat the Baby

Of all the roles we play, I think being a parent is the weirdest. 

I didn’t intend to have children. So I was particularly surprised when I got knocked up at 21. It was, as these things tend to be, a “blessing in disguise” or whatever. My son is awesome and has definitely made my life better. Plus my kids are super funny and appreciate my weirdness, so there’s that. 

Anyway, I still struggle with the idea that I am a parent. My son is about to turn 12, so obviously it’s been something I’ve thought about for a while. I don’t act like other moms. Nor do I look like them. I have a very different parenting “style” (whatever that means) than others. I tell myself it’s okay, because my kids really are good people. They are polite, they are empathetic, they have big dreams of making a difference in the world, they stay out of trouble (so far). But I still question my ability to be a mother sometimes. And then I find out there’s a thing where moms feel compelled to eat newborn babies. I’ve never had that urge, so does that make me a bad mom?

I know you’re thinking that’s a crazy thing to say. But it really messed with my head. I don’t typically *like* kids (because they scare me), and I’ve never felt particularly motherly. At least, I’ve never felt motherly in the way I think mothers are supposed to feel. So to me, not ever having the urge to eat my newborn makes me wonder if, biologically, I’m not actually supposed to be a mom. Like maybe the stork made a mistake. 

Obviously I’m going to keep on doing the mom thing, because I don’t want to fuck up my kids, because I super love them, and because I also don’t have an urge to un-mother myself. But I definitely wonder about the roles we shouldn’t actually be playing but somehow accidentally play anyhow. And maybe these accidental roles fulfill some other greater purpose than what we think initially. I’m probably a little bit better of a person because I have two miniature humans who have depended on me to keep them alive and wipe their asses.

I Write About Fanta and It's Pretty Dramatic

Their Fanta is yellow. Yellow! Can you even imagine? I sure can't. There's not a soul about us who can. It's positively unnatural, I say. I mean, here we are–civilized individuals, mind you–waiting ever so patiently on our meal, and this waiter, this apron-donning charlatan, has the audacity, the bravado to deliver us this-this what? This falsity of American consumerism. Oh, the humanity!

Of course, it's not my Fanta. I ordered wine. We're in Naples, by God! Who orders soda in Italy? Nobody. Nobody that isn't still sporting Spongebob underwear, that is, and my nephew is perennially culpable on that offence. Here's how it all went down:

Max, our Italian waiter whose mother must have missed that memo when she was doing the naming, rolls on out of Neverland, or whatever lives in a Neapolitan kitchen, and asks us what it is we'd like to drink. My dad tries to order a Pepsi, but Max ain't having it, says they only have Coke products. Real wise guy, he is. Fuckin' Max. Anyway, my dad just gets a water and everybody else gets drunk. Except my nephew. He gets a Fanta, bless his soul.

Eventually, and I mean eventually, Max finds his way. Out he comes with nine wine glasses in tow. Like, what the hell, Max? Can't you even count? I'd heard Italian schools were top notch.There are only eight of us, Max, and you know we all didn't order wine. Now we have a surplus. Great.

So, my sister cracks that baby right open. Chc-fshhhhh, it says, like it belongs here, like its very existence isn't a fraud, like it's not some wolf dressed cozy in a coat of wool. Nobody thinks a thing of it, either. Why should they? By all metrics, this is a entirely ordinary can of Fanta. A little slim, maybe. Taller than some. But this is Europe. They do things wonky here.

No. No one even bats an eye until my nephew–he's a venturous spirit–decides to snatch up one of those excess wine glasses and do some emulating. Bam. The room stops. Is that Fanta yellow? one of my brothers exclaims. My God, it is! So, there we are, massed around the wine glass of a brave little five-year-old, mesmerized, transfixed, taken.

I thought you ordered Fanta. That's what we all thought to say, at first, in our empty attempts at rationale. But we all see it: that can of Fanta, plain in our view. This is the real deal. This is happening.

Thither comes Max, and now he's got our pizza. He doesn't understand. He never does. Max. And so we restore our facade, return to our false reality, but there it lingers. There's something, tacit, that we now all share, that connects this family. The Fanta is yellow. My God.

Am I a Narcissistic Writer?

Having workshopped both of my essays for this class, I find that I am oddly unsatisfied with most of the "how should I improve this draft" feedback that I have been receiving.  While I do receive numerous compliments, which I greatly appreciate, the constructive criticism that follows usually seems to weight the most on my mind, and I feel that, instead of consisting of suggestions for how I could improve my essay, it is attacking my personal style of writing as a whole.

My responses tell me that I am too wordy of a writer, that I over complicate the situation with my language.  Some even went as far as to say I am too dramatic.  (A little drama can't hurt though, right?)

I have always thought of myself as a skilled writer.  I would certainly not presume to call myself the best, as there are writers with significantly more talent than me, but to say that my writing is sub-par, I feel, would be a lie.  I like to think that I have a unique voice, combining creative and academic writing styles to create a highly poetic and sophisticated essay, with bits of wit and cleverness thrown in for comedic effect.   As a result, I am very proud of the way I write, and perhaps this is my problem.  Maybe I am too biased towards my own writing--too in love with it to see its flaws.  Does this make me a narcissistic writer?  Is that even a thing?

Furthermore, because I work in the writing center, I am fully familiar with the process of "improving the writer, not the writing," so why am I so put off by the comments I am receiving during our workshops?  Perhaps it is because I don't appreciate my style of writing being viewed as a flaw in need of improvement, which, again, relates back to the idea of writerly narcissism.   I have never encountered feedback that has addressed my style of writing like this, so how do I get past my ego?  How can I become more open to this conversation of revision?

Withholding Information

One of the things I've noticed in your drafts since we started the class was a tendency, particularly in the beginning of a piece, to withhold information from the reader about the four w's (who, what, where, and when), choosing instead to keep these things vague, presumably for the reader to find out--or figure out--later. I wonder if this approach is something we glean from watching film or television, or reading mystery and suspense novels.  It is a common technique in dramatic narrative to leave the resolution--who done it and why--for a reveal at the end.  Or I wonder if vagueness is meant as ambiguity.  We withhold information because we want to exploit the drama of a reader figuring out the mystery of time, place, characters on his or her own.  What do you think?

I often feel that withholding information, particularly in nonfiction, doesn't work very well.  Either it feels overtly manipulative (the writer knows the end of the story after all), or, well, vague and therefore less interesting.  I think I look for time, place, and character footholds to orient myself in a narrative.  I want to know exactly where I'm standing with the narrator, sometimes quite literally. The particulars of a certain time and place don't make the narrative less universal for me, they make it more so.  The clarity gives me enough to more readily see how a narrator's situation fits into contexts that I my recognize in my own life or others' lives.