Invert, Cosplay, Jilt: Shake Up Your Writing Habits

I’ve been reading Jane Allison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode—her craft book about narrative patterns beyond the classic arc—and I love that trio of dictums as writing advice too. There is no right way to write. There is no template routine or habit. In fact, I like the idea that most of what works for most of us is to meander: to trail away from our current habits when we’re stuck and try something that (for us) we don’t normally do.

What I mean is: what kind of writer are you most of the time?

Take inventory and then—subvert.

take INVENTORY

Do you typically write at day or night?

On weekdays or weekends?

Do you write every day?

Do you write longhand or type? 

Do you have designated writing hours or steal time when you can?

Do you revise and polish one paragraph at a time, or do you write a fast, rough, complete draft? 

Whatever your usual habits are—that’s your baseline. That’s what works FOR YOU. Or, what usually works for you.

But even what usually works will sometimes fall flat. When you feel just stuck.

So—shake things up.

INVERT

This one’s my go-to change-of-pace: whatever I usually do, I invert.

Let’s say, for my baseline, I’m this kind of writer:

• I type my stories

• Usually in the afternoon

• Usually for as long as I feel like it

• Usually picking up where I left off

• Usually pruning and polishing my writing as I go

So….to shake things up, I’ll:

• Write longhand

• At midnight

• For a timed 20 minutes

• Starting a brand new story

• Without crossing out a single word

Now, you might not have the ability to invert every habit. That’s fine! But switch up one or more significant habits. Writing longhand, I find I produce really different work than drafts I type. I’m a different writer on a clock than untimed. I’m a different writer at different times of the day. I’m different when I’m angry, when I’m hungry, when I’m tired. I’m a different writer when I smooth out each sentence in a paragraph before moving on versus the writer deep in the havoc of a messy first draft. 

COSPLAY

In her craft capsule essay, The Schedule, Jordan Kisner calls it “cosplaying the work”—her attempt at building regimented schedules, habits, routines. She writes, “I’ve never managed it. I work in spurts, at random hours, crashing deadlines and taking ill-advised breaks and wasting just so much time. And of course there is no right way to have a writing schedule; of course brilliant writers have written at all hours and according to all manner of quirky or mundane habits; of course the only thing anyone cares about in the end is whether you wrote and whether it’s any good.”

So many of us are this way! And yet—we want it to be as simple as a militaristic writing schedule, as the 5 AM writers club, showing up every day, waiting for the muse to show up too.

But it just…doesn’t…work for us.

Often trying to imitate these really rigid daily schedules ends in failure and a sense that we’re some kind of imposters. We weren’t productive. We have so little to show for those hours with our ass in the chair.

But—I like Kisner’s idea of ‘cosplay.’

What it we—only temporarily—put on the costume of the kind of writer who gets up at dawn and writes for an hour? What if we did this for one week only? Or only a day? What if sometimes we just play act what works for other writers to see if it works (for a short while) for us?

For example you could:

• Rent a hotel room and write every morning at six-thirty (Maya Angelou)

• Write all night (Kafka)

• Write laying down all day (Capote)

• Write standing up (Virginia Woolf)

• Write outside, in the countryside, preferably while looking at a cow (Gertrude Stein)

Kisner has many more examples in her essay, and also points to Daily Routines if the cosplays above aren’t adventurous enough for you.

JILT

Okay this last one sounds wild—jilt. To cheat. To desert. To abandon. I don’t mean forever, but I do mean—don’t. Don’t write for a little while. Cheat on your writing with other creative stuff instead.

Paint.

Throw clay.

Sculpt.

Cook.

Bake.

Make a podcast (ugh).

Play the guitar, the piano.

Sing.

Make a powerpoint.

Make a cocktail.

Make a meme.

Do new kinds of art badly and happily.

What I mean is take time off from the art that you’re best at. Unlimited time off! Because sometimes you just need it. Because sometimes it’s hardest to do the thing you’re best at badly.

But it’s easy—EASY!—to do art you’re not the best at badly.

It’s easier to not be hard on yourself, too.

Take time to paint a flowerpot or something—something you don’t really know how to do—just to remind yourself that all art starts as mess-making. As amatuering. Take joy in that mess.

When you come back to your writing, don’t be afraid to take that mess-making instinct with you. To allow in glee, experimentation, disaster. Have compassion for that person who sometimes looks at the blank page like they’ve never seen one before.

HIATUS

This is an extension of jilt: because jilt, while a fun word, implies cheating. Like, writing is your spouse and you had an affair with acrylic paints.

But seriously, writing is not your spouse. Writing is more an extension of the self than an entity outside it.

And I guess what I’m arguing is—you can’t cheat on yourself.

And sometimes you need gentle permission to take a long, long, long break. That’s hiatus. Even the word—sounds soft.

Sometimes you, a writer, need expanses of time (months…years…) to not write. You need to breathe. You have life stuff. You are good-busy or bad-busy. You deserve a chance to recharge without some sense of ‘why haven’t you written anything lately’ looming overhead.

You are human, and you need rest.

But you can still shake up how you rest. The same way you might produce really different writing if you invert your routine, you can also recharge really differently depending on how you hiatus. So first, take stock. 

INVENTORY

When resting, do you tend to tune in or tune out?

Do you usually rest at home or vacation elsewhere?

Do you rest with your phone/device or ‘unplugged’?

Do you recharge alone or with others?

Do you recharge indoors or outdoors?

What foods or drinks recharge you?

How do you want to feel at the end of rest? What does “recharged” feel like to you?

Just like with writing habits, there are no better or worse ways to rest. What habitually works for you works for a reason—it probably means it’s working. But it also might only be habitual—easy or accessible. Consider what an inversion of your resting habits looks like.

For me, I typically rest at home, indoors, goofing on my phone. That’s what usual, daily rest looks like for me. But: sometimes I surprise myself.

I take a nap in the hammock.

I read at a cafe.

I take myself out to dinner.

I take a midnight swim and float under the stars.

As an introvert I often (but not always) recharge alone. But one of my favorite (surprising!) ways to recharge was to read in the same room as a friend for an afternoon. I had company. We were reading different books and each sunk into our own couch. One of us might laugh or smile. We each dozed off at different times.

An extrovert might have a really different way of recharging. An extrovert might look at my list and see it as (quietly) adventurous, just as I might considering long nights dancing, backyard BBQs, chatting with strangers, karaoke.

What I’ve learned is that I recharge most differently when I am intentional. When I “take myself out”—treating a hiatus as a date or special treat, rather than an ‘escape.’ This is why I feel very different after hiking for an hour than scrolling Twitter for an hour. One helps me tune in (gently), one helps me tune out.

I feel different singing, windows-down-in-the-car than afternoons floating in a pool. I feel different browsing Bookmans than sipping lavender lemonade. I get different degrees and kinds of joy. 

I am glad for all of them.

Aimee Bender's Character Motivation

I’m a huge fan of THE WRITER’S NOTEBOOK, a collection of craft essays published by Tin House. Aimee Bender’s essay on Character Motivation is one of my favorite.

“You shouldn’t be able to boil a story down,” Bender writers. “The elements of fiction should expand rather than contract. Two plus two should always equal more than four.”

I love that metaphor because for me, the pleasures of math and writing are opposite ones. I loved the clarity and definitive nature of solving an equation. There was AN answer, a landing spot. But in fiction—in poetry, in sentences, in text—there were a thousand directions and a thousand more landing spots. Fiction was not ‘correct’ when it landed happily any more than it was ‘incorrect’ when it landed tragically. Characters were not computers. Two characters could take the same action with drastically different results. Sometimes writers talk about there being a limited number of stories available to tell, but there are infinite characters those events could happen to.

So when talking about character motivation, especially in a workshop setting….we need to leave math at the door.

Because humans are messy as shit.

---

Aimee Bender gives us permission in this essay to GO AGAINST the common writing advice that you should know what your characters want. SHE SAYS IT’S OKAY TO NOT KNOW. And to let the writing be a process of discovering that instead:

“I don’t always know what a character wants. I know some things about the character, but to know what he or she wants feels like the final answer, why I’m writing in the first place.”

I remember reading a story in undergrad workshop that made me feel this way. It was a story written in reverse, with each section opening with the words “And before.” The opening scene was of a young woman drowning her baby in a bathtub. And as the story progressed, we moved backwards, seeing her pregnant, making sandwiches in the kitchen, her disappointed parents, dropping out of school. I don’t remember all the details but I do remember this sensation of feeling around with my hands in each scene, like….how could this gentle, hurt person do something like that to her baby? And maybe that’s how the writer felt moving through time too, exploring those complicated factors and knowing it wasn’t a simple one-to-one ratio. We get a big reveal at the end, which is the beginning: that it was her father coming into her room at night, raping her.

Part of the horror of this piece for me was that we never get a reason why—neither for the rape or the drowning. And it struck me, that’s how it is with much domestic or sexual violence—often the abused never really know why they’re being abused. It’s disorienting and terrifying. It’s part of the trauma. And in re-reading that piece, I could feel the razor edges to her scenes, that tender-footed-ness you get when you’re around someone you know might hurt you. You could tell there was something trapping or coercing the young woman, and you never get a clear answer “why” — there were lots of reasons. There were lots of razored edges.

---

In a lot of ways, allowing motivation to be messy is the same as allowing a character to be multi-dimensional. It’s about going in with like two pieces of information and kind of following your character around from there, seeing what they do. Seeing what’s in their purse, what they do in a car crash, how they break up over the phone. Aimee Bender says, “It’s about following hunches about character and really trusting those hunches.”

Maybe her best piece of advice is this: Allow for mystery. What she means is:

“Often writers will rush to an ending that completes, or sums up, or reduces their story as opposed to moving to a place where it goes to say something they may not understand and that may be incomplete but is more honest.”

For me, this often means writing BEYOND the ending. I say for me because sometimes I’m a little tender-footed about the unknown, and what I’ve found is that pushing beyond what I think is my final scene usually yields something much more strange and illuminating.

Adroit Summer Mentorship - Beginnings

I start my Adroit Summer Mentorship syllabus with this quote from Amber Sparks because I think one thing all writers have in common no matter how long we've been writing (or not-writing) is our uncompromising imposter syndrome:

I love this program. I love working with young writers and I love a summer of reading and writing stories. I’m so grateful we get to chart out and explore, imposter-syndrome-be-damned, together.

__________

This year, the first reading assignment on the syllabus is Ocean Vuong’s Beginnings. Like many stories of beginnings, it’s a portrait of contrasts. Of art-making versus survival. Of privilege and poverty. Of lucidity and dementia.

Vuong starts his poetry studies with a full scholarship and nowhere to live. He couch surfs as long as he can, and then spends what he describes as “three long weeks” homeless, sleeping in Penn Station in New York City.

What he experiences during those weeks isn’t just homeless. He feels himself turn invisible. “Your body, the space around your body, blurs into the landscape,” he writes, “you are seen less and less until you actually become the landscape. No one looks at you, even as you shout and beg, even as you scream for help. The psychological effect is startling mostly because it isn’t all external. You are an outsider not only because others deem you as such, but also because you start to see yourself as one. That’s the power of social isolation.”

Even his use of the 2nd person emphasizes this—it’s intimate and detached, close yet faceless. For me as a reader, it brings up feelings of shame, of the times I’ve turned someone else invisible, of the way I learned to be unresponsive to strangers in a city, to act as if they were translucent until…they actually kind of are. I’ve never been the ‘you’ Ocean Vuong is talking to.

__________

Vuong is writing a poem one night, when he’s approached by a man in Penn station—Sage, who writes poems too. In little scraps, fast food wrappers, the blank pages of books. It’s compulsory, it’s something a lot of writers have felt in common—that fire at your heels. Sage gets excited, pulls out poems, shares his favorite—and then starts giving Vuong advice.

Vuong has been isolated for so long—because, invisibility—that he’s like hungry for this, for connection and conviction:

“There was no one to turn to and say “ Can you believe this guy?” and get a reaffirming shrug or nod or eye roll. I found myself losing the ability to measure normalcy against the rest of the world. We were surrounded by the drone of hundreds of people and yet I found ourselves enclosed inside a sort of booth, occupied by me and Sage. What was sane or insane suddenly had no bearing. It just didn’t matter anymore.”

And of course writing is about connecting, about it not-mattering with who or when or what else is going on. It’s kind of life-saving that way. Reading is and so is writing—there’s a quote I like about how writing is sending a sound out into the dark and listening for what sounds come back. Writing is about listening and being listening to. But also that’s how we survive? We can not survive invisibly. Or alone.

__________

Oh my god. Then Motown.

“[A]s if from some sort of distant memory, there was music. Just like that. Not the light and bland train lobby instrumentals—it was real music, it was Motown.

[...] I saw the other homeless men and women begin to cheer up as they gathered and lay down around the song. Their limbs started to move and gesticulate as they warmed up to one another. As if through the song’s familiar landscape, they were able to see each other as human begins again.”

God I love this scene. I love how what brings people together is song, lyric, music, word. How communal song and poetry is.

But also how our sadness connects us. How we are less alone because we are not the only ones in pain.

I believe in writing for this reason—I believe in the empathy it creates, the invisible strings that connect us. I feel often the first person we’re writing to is the self because the self is lonely and hard to understand. In my case, I’ve been pretty hard on her. I’ve worked hard to be more gentle. And writing, then, is a way to hear and listen to the self but also to send that word out into the dark—to find a separate self. Who is also in their own way alone and tangled in their own invisible strings.

__________

It is such a relief in Vuong’s story when a friend calls and offers him a free room in exchange for caring for a woman with dementia. I feel relieved. I have been spinning with his four sporadic hours of sleep each night, his shame at telling his cohort and friends, the way he’d been turning invisible. I am on his heels when he grabs that train and heads to a brownstone in old Brooklyn.

He meets Grazina, the woman he’ll be living with and caring for.

And again I’m struck my Vuong’s absolute kindness:

“To make her feel at ease, I would always use her native tongue and say “Labas” instead of “hello.”

[...] Eventually, she just called me Labas and to keep it simple, I called her Labas as well. From then on, we would greet each other by saying, “Hi, Labas!””

There is care here again with how words create comfort—how he even doesn’t mind not being called Ocean because, for Grazina, it may make her feel shame, that she is confusing a man for a body of water. That they call each other just “Labas” is so kind. What is a hello if not a beginning. What is a beginning if not a name.

__________

Vuong is shown his room.

A room of his own.

In the corner is an old laminate desk with three and a half legs. He asks to keep it and realizes—this is his FIRST DESK. He writes:

“It didn’t occur to me until then that having a desk of my own, something I did not have even in Connecticut, somehow legitimized my identity as a writer. It was a badge, a label, a dedication, my vehicle and anchor. And, having no publication and barely any respectable poems, the desk was a promise of possibilities, that good work would be done, and it would be done right here.”

A desk is permission, in a lot of ways, a place of possibility, as he writes. An anchor. A lot of us writers, when we think of writing, we think of that place. That quiet room, that flat surface, the way the light falls—ochre or blue or white—through our windows. The desk too is a kind of beginning. It is permission to start.

---

I’m going to off-road briefly. I’m thinking about Vuong’s novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

His book opens with the line, “Let me begin again.”

And that to me sums up what writing is—we are always beginning, first-timing, inhaling, anchoring when we come to the page. We’ve done it a thousand times and will do it thousands of times more, but it is brand new each time. Let me begin! Again! Because the blank page is no joke! I usually don’t go near it unless I’m already armed with a sentence, an idea, a string of sounds in my head.

I think about how Vuong is talking about beginnings in Beginnings, but also in his novel. How we’re again-ing. Labas.

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In this essay as well as his novel, Vuong explores what it means to be survivor of war—that trauma that’s almost etched into your DNA. He shares a memory of his grandmother telling stories that almost turned into songs. They were beautiful—but that beauty was almost like an armor. They needed to be beautiful to be palatable.

He writes:

“She would close her eyes, the words coming slow at first, but soon they sputtered and surged, always growing into a song—albeit a fractured one. It was as if pain could not be told in any other way, that only through singing, could the memory exit the burden of a body and flourish as something abstract and, therefore, tolerable.”

It is hard to write, to tell stories. Stories can’t exist without pain.

And they can’t exist—again—without connection.

__________

This is a sad essay, but that’s okay.

Grazina’s dementia makes it hard for her to understand Vuong is not her 48-year-old son Eric. Sometimes she is baking cabbages hoping to feed a guest who never arrives. Sometimes she waits hours for a person she hopes is coming. It must be so hard to know you’re not connecting, to not entirely know why, but KNOW something is off?

It must be so hard not knowing if you’re going to connect or not.

That too is a kind of invisibility.

__________

One night when Grazina is having a particularly bad attack, Vuong is able to bring her back. He sings to her.

“I start to sing a Vietnamese folk song, mostly to comfort myself. My voice unsteady and crackling, I guide the dirge of my grandmother’s lost country into Grazina’s ears and through her buckling body. I sing, the long sad notes of ancient Vietnamese poets. And, after about thirty seconds of this, Grazina begins to wilt from her body’s long and tarnished history and returns to the present. I keep up the song and can feel her breathing slowing, her clutch easing. My singing softens into a whisper. It’s suddenly quiet.”

He is doing that thing when he’s making something for himself, first, to ground himself. He is unsteady but grows steadier. He reaches her. She finds him and together they soften and calm. This is what song, poetry, story is about. Maybe it’s not only about sending a word out into the dark but our hands as well—we are searching for each other.

We are no longer alone.

__________

We get to the thesis at the very end. I like that. It’s very contrarian, to not start with a thesis.

He writes:

“Before I sit down to write, I always hum my grandmother’s song, the one I sang and would keep singing to Grazina. The simple ritual helps me focus my attention to the page, like a call to prayer, if you will. I write because I believe in the unquestionable power of words, that poetry can change a life, perhaps not in that one sweeping moment of profound epiphany, but like the words we chisel into the page, our world, and the experiences we make from it, is changed through time, through that steady erosion and resurfacing of meaning.”

Rules of Writing

Rules I Won’t Break

• The sentence is music.

• Make me feel something.

Rules I Might Break

• Give characters names.

• Only one mystery at the start of the story.

• Write past the ending.

• The title should do work.

• Allow everything in.

Rules I Have to Break

• Write in complete sentences.

• Literary realism only.

• No comma splices.

• Times New Roman.

Rules I make up as I go

• Start with a first sentence that sets your feet on fire.

• Read it aloud, hear how it sounds.

• Where can I get to know them a little more? Go deeper.

• It’s okay to be funny.

• White space, scene breaks—use it.

• Follow your obsessions.

• It’s okay to read, watch TV, play videogames, and just be.

• There is no point in time where you once were a fake writer and then became a real one.

• Read writers doing things you want to do.

• Just try. See what happens.

Why Demand Perfection When You Could Be Softness

I had this inspirational quote wall in my bedroom, back in high school.

I pasted my favorite words about writing into a word doc, changed the font to something squiggly, and printed them out on acid-free cardstock thinking I would be carrying these words around with me forever. They covered a full wall in my bedroom, and I would look at them—a kind of teachers—and feel that weird hope-fire that teenagers sometimes need to think they’re anything at all.

Now 31-years-old, I’m not sure where my quote wall lives. Probably in a manilla envelope carefully labled? Like, maybe in this very filing cabinet next to my desk which will surely be rummaged through mid-quarantine as a thing-to-do, as a thing-needing-to-be-done, as an exploratory and organizational activity, as a distraction, happy accident, containable nightmare. Even if/when I find them, I won’t want them on my walls again. I’ll want to look at them, bathe briefly in nostalgia, and put them away.

But the impulse to collect words about words hasn’t exactly gone away.

I have three small notecards on my wall right now. And the first one reads, “Why demand perfection when you could be softness?”

And that’s probably because my biggest takeaway since being a 16-year-old writer and a writer now is that: to stop demanding perfection. There doesn’t have to be a 100%-ness about it. To let it be messy, soft, quick, unfinished. To not write sometimes. To allow imperfection, and to allow gently. To embrace it, actually. To actually love that ugliness and to stop calling it ugly.

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“Writing: to send out a word in the darkness and listen for what sound comes back.” —Mary Ruefle

It’s not new to think of writing is a conversation.

Initially, it is a conversation with myself—between what I see in my mind and the shaping of sentences. Or how the shaping of sentences kind of builds the image in my mind.

But Mary Ruefle describes writing as a listening. And a waiting.

There’s patience. (Impatience.) I don’t always know what I’m listening for, but I do know what Ruefle means. I’m collaborating with the quiet. I’m waiting to see what sounds take it up.

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 "My language is so imprecise.  I am thrashing in what I can't tell you."  —Claire Schwartz

I found this sentence mid-way through Claire Schwartz’s powerful essay in NOT THAT BAD.

I appreciate that a lot of telling is not-telling. That there is something untranslatable about experience.

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“Beginning as a way out.”—Ocean Vuong

Yeah, I’m bad at starting. A lot of us are. Often I come running to the page with a sentence already in hand, like I’m arming myself, grabbing the closest, sharpest thing.

Without a way IN, I feel lost. Totally unanchored. Sometimes I end up googling “how to write a poem” because I don’t know how to arm myself with the first lines of poems the same way I do stories. I feel the exact opposite of bulletproof. I take comfort in Ocean Vuong’s words:

“I am thinking of the word ‘beginning’—beginning as reopening, as a start, as an origin. Beginning, from Old English beginning meaning ‘to attempt, undertake’; the word a compound of be and West Germanic ginnan, or ‘to open, open up.’ Beginning as failing, as trying, as opening, as possibility and surprise. Beginning as a way out.”

Foraging

It makes me sound like I’m avoiding it and partially I am. 

But for me a lot of writing is not-writing. 

@HopFrog, FORAGER

I’m playing FORAGER right now and it’s classically addictive. 

Trees and stones and hot peppers and faeries are cropping up, there are forges to forge and skills to unlock. The world expands square by square and the bigger it gets, the messier--the more complex, the more possible. I’m reading it like a metaphor for life, but more interesting it’s a metaphor for not-writing. All my not-writing time is me foraging, collecting (sometimes useless) shit, and in spare moments when I’m not clearing land or running from bulls or starving to death, I make.

I make a sentence and then I make another sentence. 

I make them so they go together. 

I hit enter a lot. 

I use a little plus sign to break apart the sections, and each section is a little like a footstep, or like a call for an ingredient, and I like that writing is combining, processing, the application of heat, that you can feel it when a story really gets cooking.

For me, making is only possible because of the foraging. The 8 hour workday. The weird glass-breaking joy of singing loudly in the car, windows down in the dark. The broken dishwasher and the dream of repairmen. Playing FORAGER. Feeling my throat burn. Listening to it rain. Googling “how to tell if a ghost is haunting your house.”  

I find value in not-writing. 

I like that when I do make, I carry all this shit in my pack.

That I get to forge. 

Cesura

A caesura is a strong pause within a line. A pause. A break. A stop. An end. An occurrence.

photo created by mrsiraphol - www.freepik.com

I’m thinking about absences a lot this month. I think that—if I have a kid someday—that means there’s an open space now where one day a new person will be. I think of the blank page, which I’m avoiding. I think about How To Do Nothing, which so far has me taking a step away from social media and a step towards cross-stitching aimlessly without watching enough tutorials. I’m working on a strawberry. I don’t think I’m making the X’s quite right.

Cancer, So Far by Elizabeth Crowell, is slowing me down:

“My wife and I spend more time alone together than we have in years. I tell her I am sorry about this, for what we had imagined about raising our children and growing old together. She says none of this is my fault. We have some version of this conversation every day, though each of us knows it makes no sense. We recognize that these words are just cover for the wordless scream searing through each of us as we consider what it means to lose a life—or lose a love; about what it means to have an absence—or be an absence.”

I guess slowing down is an act of resistance. I guess letting the air muddle around my ears, going outside in the morning and standing still enough to hear birds, not looking at the clock before bed, putting down the fork between bites, are all ways of slowing the fuck down.

Of creating space.

I guess that’s what ‘cesura’ is.

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Here are 6 different definitions of cesura:

1. A caesura is a strong pause within a line, usually alongside enjambment.

2. It refers to a break in a line of poetry, where the reader takes a pause, usually marked by some form of punctuation such as a period, comma, ellipsis, or dash.

3. A caesura is defined as a natural phrase end, especially when occurring in the middle of a line.

4. A caesura is a pause in a line that is formed by the rhythms of natural speech rather than meter.

5. A caesura will usually occur in the middle of a line of poetry but can occur at the beginning or the end of a line. 

6. A stop or pause in a metrical line, often marked by punctuation or by a grammatical boundary, such as a phrase or clause.

A pause. A break. An end. A stop. An occurrence.

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In Diana' Nguyen’s “Triptych,” she explores the white space created by her brother, who cut himself out of all the family photographs before dying of suicide. She explores a palpable, sharp-edged absence in these poems. There’s a sharp clipping where space is created—something like a cesura, something like a breaking, an ending, a pause—a new created space. A hurting one.

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So cesura.

So learning how to do nothing.

So finding space to pause, to break, to end.

So creating space—organically, rhythmically, or by design.

I think cesura is about listening.

About breath.

About hearing better—because of that silence—what’s next.

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

With a poet's precision, Ocean Vuong examines whether putting words to one's experience can bridge wounds that span generations, and whether it's ever possible to be truly heard by those we love most.”

--Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You andLittle Fires Everywhere

“Let me begin again” lets us know right away the shape of Ocean Vuong’s novel is malleable. That this novel is an attempt at entering a conversation--that before we are even witness to the novel, a telling has already happened. I get the sense after this opening line that a big breath has been taken, that this novel is a kind of patience--revision, reworking, slowly down, trying to tell a new way.

I love this description by Jennifer Huang from a Rumpus review of Vuong’s novel, which unpacks this opening line as:

“I am thinking of the word “beginning”—beginning as reopening, as a start, as an origin. Beginning, from Old English beginnan meaning “to attempt, undertake”; the word a compound of be and West Germanic ginnan, or “to open, open up.” Beginning as failing, as trying, as opening, as possibility and surprise. Beginning as a way out.”

I am thinking of beginning as a shape. Clay on the wheel. Wet hands. I’m thinking of beginning as--yes--“to open, open up”--but I’m also thinking of how tornadoes start, how it’s a conflict of proximity, that when certain forces come together they create instability--and how much that is like being a person, being this person, Little Dog, how his proximity to his mother, his grandmother, his country, Trevor, himself, all create this sort of swirling taking-in-spinning-out shape. A shapeless shape. A constantly growing, diminishing, moving, destroying, preserving, windful thing. A thing that leaves new shapes in its wake.

It’s a book that breaks rules about what books are supposed to do and be. Maybe that’s what makes it so beautiful.

*

Because ALSO yes, this is a book about beauty. About fragility and temporality.  How a whole generation of monarchs is lost with a single frost. How buffalo plummet one after another off a cliff.  How love--when we’re in it, made of it, hungry for it--devours us, even as it opens us beautifully up. On Earth we’re brief. We’re temporal. There’s a prettiness to it. Yes.

*

I immediately loaned my copy out after finishing it, so I’m writing this from memory. I’m writing this from memory and isn’t memory what Vuong’s novel dives in and out of, creating a hem between Little Dog and his mother, to whom he’s writing, for whom he’s doing so much remembering, a reader who cannot read this English text, isn’t memory unreadable, untranslatable, aren’t the memories we have the most difficulty unpacking almost packed-in by someone else, an outside force--a war, a trauma, poverty, racism, homophobia, the gender binary, etc?

I remember the flitting way the novel refused to be linear, how everything touched on everything, how at the end we’re at a place before Trevor ever died, how half-way through the novel, paragraphs become enjambed and the form is broken because our capacity to tell certain stories are too.

*

Let me begin again.

I was underlining sentences on every page.

Underlining as a way of keeping, preservation, of showing, yes, I stopped here, and I held you.

*

I loved that ending--how a herd of buffalo plummeting to their death transformed into a flock of monarchs.  How Little Dog races his soul out of his body, however briefly. How Lan gave herself a new name and so claimed some small beauty for herself.  

In Hannah Gadsby’s famous “Nanette,” she says, “We learn from the part of the story we focus on,” and in this novel, Vuong doesn’t focus on his mother’s monstrousness, or not in the way you would think. He focuses on her strength, the transformative and protective nature of love, the feebleness of it, how love can reside still even in an abused, monstrously-named thing.

That retelling is an act of reshaping.

That the act of telling is an act of love.

Every Poem, Story, & Flash Shared in 2018

A compendium.

---

January

The Totality of Selflessness, by Hilary Gan. A beautiful essay on the surreal-ness of pregnancy. “You do not yet have a name, or a voice, or even color. You are white on black, an image of sound in silence, a presence in the void.”

SNOW, by Shelley Jackson. A story written word by word in the snow. I can’t believe I forgot about this. It’s been a year. I love this s(n)o(w) much.

My Father on the Telephone, by W. Todd Kaneko. I read these poems under an orange tree and cried. “He doesn’t yet have a word/for cancer. Neither of us do.”

Chastity Belt, by Meghan Phillips. “All the girls in my class got chastity belts for Christmas except me.”

[the girls speak to each other via the common tongue]: Feather or a Rock, by Ellen Welcker. “you are not good/you are holding up though”

The Poem Climbs the Scaffold and Tells You What it Sees, by Natasha Oladokun. “despite yourself/ despite how many times you’ve killed the animal inside you only to meet it again in the morning"

Her Body and Other Parties, by Carmen Maria Machado. One of my favorite books of all time. “A new woman does not just slough off her old self; she tosses it aside with force."

Extreme Unction, by Melissa Goode. “I look at him. His gaze is on a group of women at another table, and I slow dive within myself, spiraling down, until I am in the pit of my stomach with nowhere else to go.”

Pavlov Was the Son of a Priest, by Paige Lewis. “Now, I demand a love that is stupid and beautiful, like a pilot turning off her engines mid-flight to listen for rain on wings”

For You I’ve Started Sleeping, by Kaveh Akbar. “The body / is a glass orchard or at least / yours is every part blooming /and breakable”

February

Suburban Legend #3, by Catherine Pierce. I love it when poets write prose. “The man had many things to say—jeweled things, delicate cobweb things—but he told himself it was a long way to DC; there was plenty of time.”

Calling a Wolf a Wolf, by Kaveh Akbar. “The lesson:/ it’s never too late to become/ a new thing, to rip the fur// from your face and dive/ dimplefirst into the strange.”

Pyramid Scheme, by Hera Lindsay Bird. “i used to think arguments were the same as honesty/i used to think screaming was the same as passion/i used to think pain was meaningful/i no longer think pain is meaningful”

Quiet, Please, by Leesa Cross-Smith. “I think often of escaping from noise. Wherever I am, I like to sit by windows, doors. I like knowing how to get away when I need to get away.” Yes. Yes. This.

PLOTS ARE FOR DEAD PEOPLE, by Jacqueline Doyle. Technically a craft essay, but SO GOOD. I love reading about flash almost as I love reading it. And writing it :) “I enjoy bending and compressing and dismembering plot, looking at its constituent elements like a puzzle or a mathematical equation.”

The Larger World, by Brandon Taylor. “He loved them because of inertia. He loved them because to stop loving them would destroy him and them.” Everything about this piece is brilliant.

March

Cheap Yellow, by by Shy Watson. One of my absolute favorites. “i don’t know how better to communicate it.// you are a sailboat/ & i am nothing at all.”

A Dripping Childhood Memory, by Noa Sivan, translated by Yardenne Greenspan. An excellent two-sentence story.

Something Mary Ruefle said at AWP: “Writing: to send out a word in the darkness and listen for what sound comes back.” She also said, "That is such a beautiful question -- I will not spoil it with an answer.”

Forfeiting My Mystique, by Kaveh Akbar. “To the extent I am/ necessary at all, I am/ necessary like a roadside deer —/  a thing to drive past, to catch/ the white of, something/ to make a person pause,/ say, look, a deer.”

---

April

Sunday Drives to See My Grandma, by Leonora Desar. Great opening line, can’t quit reading: “It’s like when I used to take Sunday drives with my parents. The car was going to crash and we were all going to die.”

Father, by Zach VandeZande.  God my heart hurts every time I start to read this. “I know the knife is going to enter my child when I feel time slow. I know there will be an accident.”

The ways we are taught to be a girl, by xTx. "After the things are done, you will feel like a bad person. These feelings will never go away. They enter the wet plaster of you and harden into the mold of you. The way you are taught to be a girl will become how you are as a woman."

Ron, by Joy Baglio. You know when you read something and instantly feel “OMG I have a new favorite writer?” That’s how I felt. And I was sad that she doesn’t have a book I can buy of hers yet.

We Lived Happily During the War, by Ilya Kaminsky. “In the sixth month/ of a disastrous reign in the house of money// in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,/ our great country of money, we (forgive us)// lived happily during the war.”

Touch Me, by Elizabeth Deanna Morris Lakes. “All my life, I have reached out and grabbed for all the hands I could hold.”

may

Five Micros, by Kathy Fish. The parentheticals in these micros are phenomenal. ”(The appearance of a comet is also known as an apparition.)”

y to z, by elahe zare. “You are a you in motion, there’s no stillness possible in their design, no cohesion, no finality.”

No Forgiveness Ode, by Dean Young. "Some piece of you/stays in me and I'll never give it back./ The heart hordes its thorns/ just as the rose profligates."

NOT THAT BAD, Claire Schwartz. "My language is so imprecise. I am thrashing in what I can't tell you."

The Mother, by Maggie Smith. “The mother is glass through which/ you see, in excruciating detail, yourself.// The mother is landscape.”

NOT THAT BAD, Brandon Taylor. “If I do not remember and do not hold people accountable for that boy's pain, then no one will remember it... If I forgive all of the things done to me, done to that boy that I was, then I will betray everything I promised that boy when we endured those things."

Naked in Death Valley, by Claire Vaye Watkins. “How rarely we let pleasure lead the way.”

ABCs of Flash Writing: Q is for Quiet, by Cathy Ulrich. "The best flash writers are the ones playing the rests, letting the readers fill in those moments of silence with their own music, their own story. Master those quiet moments, those unsaid things. Your writing will be stronger for it."

Natural People, by Anna Geary-Meyer. I love this story SO MUCH. Every time I read it, I love it. "I find a room in Van Nuys from a cousin’s friend-of-friend and whisper Craigslist three times into my bathroom mirror and thus appears my first job."

The Surviving Conjoined Twin Learns the Art of Kirigami, by Cathy Ulrich. "I clutch and clutch and clutch at mine.” Paralyzing -- stunning. Showing us how a title and a last line seal a story in, and spiral a story out.

June

The Fairground, by Stephanie Hutton. “In the hall of mirrors, he holds my waist as I see all versions of him: charming, snarling, violent, sorry. The band around my wrist cuts into flesh. But I have paid my fee, so I will stay.”

SAD MATH, by Sarah Freligh. “Whoever is infused with my blood will be drawn to me, a millimeter at a time. You must believe it can happen.”

A Boy Who Does Not Remember His Father, by Joy Baglio. "Magic tricks too. He knows how to make a flower bloom from a rock, a stone bird fly away; knows what card the border officer is holding behind his clipboard. A magician, that’s his father’s best costume.”

Yellow, by Anne Sexton. “When they turn the sun / on again I’ll plant children / under it”

Abstinence Only, by Meghan Phillips. “After the girls left, the school started to stink. The fug of boy bodies.” What a brilliant opening. What a perfect use of the (word?) ‘fug.’

THE BABYSITTER AT REST, by Jen George. “The nurse informs me that I miscarry early on each pregnancy. ‘Maybe that’s why I feel a great sense of loss at all times.’”

I’m Not Here to Play the Suffering Minority for White Readers, by Chen Chen. "I want to say, this poem starring a napping rhino is an Asian American poem; in fact, despite it not being about how hard it was to immigrate, it is the most Asian American poem I have ever written."

A Tiny Something, by Saraiya Kanning. God what a mantra. Also I learned what a verdin is! "There are emails to be written and clothes to be washed. But...make space for a single point in space and time. Lizard peering from a crevice. Verdin weaving a nest. Bee pollinating a nasturtium. I return to Earth, this tangible place."

Descending a Staircase, by Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi. “It’s just a habit of standing there, of existing for a moment in the verdant hopefulness before descending the staircase and becoming fractured by the day.” Oof.

---

July

They’re Cutting the Ovaries Out of Deer and Laying Them Out on Yoga Mats When They’re Done, by Franny Choi.

The Host, by Kathy Fish.  There’s always something terribly impressive about micro fiction.  This one’s about indigestion.

An Index of How Our Family Was Killed, by Matt Bell. This story always makes me want to experiment with form.  It reminds me that every choice we make as writers has an effect. "Do not forget that you are doomed, that your family carries doom like a fat bird around its neck, that it is something you will never be rid of."

Obit, by Victoria Chang.  Moving seamlessly from a laugh to a feel.  “My optimism covered the whole ball as if the fish had never died, had never been gutted and rolled into a humiliating shape. To acknowledge death is to acknowledge that we must take another shape.”

Continue: Y/N, by Kendra Fortmeyer. A phenomenal video-game and gamer tale. I love it from the start, where it begins: “She has one job, and it is to offer the hero a flower. She says, “Would you like to buy a flower?” and if he says yes, she says, “That’ll be 1 p,” and if he says no, then she says nothing.”

The Greatest Failure of All Time, by Christopher Boucher. “I even appeared on the Jimmy Kimmel show! ‘Let me give you a test,’ said Kimmel. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘What is the capital of California?’ I peed myself. ‘Wow,’ said Kimmel, and he stood up and clapped.”

Father, by Zach VandeZande.  A beautiful model of how when time contorts, it can underscore how helpless we are to stop things, how we want to stop things anyway. “I know the knife is going to enter my child when I feel time slow. I know there will be an accident.”

Now That the Circus Has Shut Down, the Human Cannonball Looks for Work, by Meghan Phillips.  One of the best titles ever.  Also a great example of titles and first lines cooperating nicely with one another.  And a beautiful, super short piece.

Bats of the Republic, by Zachary Thomas Dodson. “Some said the land was burning.  That there were folks outside, in the rot, setting fires. But nothing could be seen. Not even the flocks of birds Zeke had read about in old books. It was as dead and flat as a page of text.”

A Question, by Brandon Amico. "the flowers bide beneath the frost,/ in touch with their subconscious, waiting to be called back--and they will" <3

The Babysitter at Rest, by Jen George.  “I’m trying to have a baby.  I’d like to name her Ocean, but I fear the implications: the void, vast emptiness, the unknown, big whale shits, giant octopuses, or other possible hentai tentacle situations.”

August

I Wanna Be Adored, by Melissa Goode. “I sing my favorite song and you keep getting closer. I tell myself the mantra from my therapist—I have a feeling. I am not a feeling. You are so close now. Only two feet away. One foot.”

You Can Take Off   Your Sweater, I’ve Made Today Warm, by Paige Lewis. “When they were boys/ they were gentle. And smart. One could// tie string around a fly without cinching it/ in half.”

Desert Island Diet, by Megan Giddings. A spellbinding shipwreck of a poem. “[We] talk about which of the men we absolutely shouldn’t trust. I say none. She says just the Steves. All men are Steves to me, I say, and it’s become our one joke. The rain is being a real Steve today. Don’t Steve out on me. We can make it.”

Now You See Me, by Tiffany Quay Tyson. “Do you think of me? Do you imagine me folding clothes at the mall? Do you picture me walking alone through the dark parking garage at night? No. I don’t think you do. Maybe I don’t exist unless you are looking straight at me.” Heartwrencher.

Rockets Red Glare, by W. Todd Kaneko. “Once, we sang/ like wolves out in the snow, faces/; turned up at the constellations and hoping/ someone out there understands and howls back.”

2 AM AT THE CAT’S PAJAMAS, by Marie-Helene Bertino. “Sure, she’s back in her hometown teaching grade school and she can’t fill out the tops of most dresses, but she can tell stories, goddammit.”

Crafting Flash Fiction with Joy Baglio, by Joy Baglio.  Technically a YouTube immersion into flash, but SO good and brilliant.  “Just let your first draft happen. Try to remove all judgement during this part of the process.”

A Nearly Beautiful Thing, by Cathy Ulrich. Brilliant and ballerinas and bears!! “She doesn’t think of you, or, when she does, it is as an abstraction, the frigid wife. Your husband didn’t say frigid, but the ballerina thinks of wives as being cold things, thinks of ice and unyielding bodies.”

Lone wolf narrative, by Kristin Chang. DAMN this poem. “at school     the teachers teach him to shoot/ for the stars/ to constellate/ a body with bullets/ & baptize himself     white/ in the light.”

The Friend with the Knife in his Back, by Ben Loory. “So, in the end, we left the knife in.”

Mothers as Makers of Death, by Claudia Dey. “When I became a mom, no one ever said, ‘Hey, you made a death. You made your children’s deaths.’”

Safe as Houses, by Marie-Helene Bertino. “She is a woman who thinks a book can turn her into an oak tree, who has imagined a hole inside her so big it could vacuum up the table and chairs, the refrigerator magnets, the candlesticks, her two kids, and the husband.”

Poem with a Possible Unidentified Flying Object, by Kate Gaskin. “All this glittering city/  and yet we are still only/ animal and heat/ and the renewable resource/  of tears.” <3 <3

September

Madlib, by Kim Magowan.  An example of how form can be so informative, and also how impossible it is to communicate - how impossible it is not to communicate something.  “Ron said if I KNITTED you, he would FLY me, and besides, you would never WHISPER me.”

Us, by Leonora Desar.  The opening lines are just brilliant.  “My husband is cheating on me with me. It’s simple. It’s the younger me. The me when we first met.”

2100, by Andrew Payton. How humbling it is to live beside the river that may one day destroy us.

The Vulture & the Body, by Ada Limón. “What if, instead of carrying// a child, I am supposed to carry grief?”

Dead Stars, by Ada Limón.  “Look, we are not unspectacular things. / We’ve come this far, survived this much. What // would happen if we decided to survive more?”

Some interpersonal verbs, conjugated by gender, by Alexandra Petri. “She must think about his future; she must think about her future./ She must say nothing; she will say nothing; she says nothing; she said nothing.”

Bird, by Dorianne Laux. “What do I have that she could want enough/ to risk such failure, again and again?”

The Perfect Childhood, by Pia Ghosh-Roy. “This is their time, precious little time, to be blissfully ignorant of the neat and faulty boxes we adults have created for ourselves.”

When Naming Isn’t Enough, by Rebecca Hazelwood. “I’d begun to think of women as nothing but a collection of body parts to be examined and criticized and discarded. I wonder how my life would’ve been different if I hadn’t assumed all men thought like my father. If I hadn’t been as judgmental of women’s bodies as my father. If I’d believed it when anyone called me pretty.”

---

October

MEAN, by Myriam Gurba. “Somewhere on this planet, a man is touching a woman to death. Somewhere on this planet, a man is about to touch a woman to death.”

Five Similarities Between Writing and Falling Down 47 Flights of Stairs, by Todd Dillard. Which, why is 47 flights of stairs in particular so funny? But it’s SO funny! “It is harder to finish a piece if you start writing it, stop, and then start again. You have to keep up your momentum. The same is true about falling down 47 flights of stairs.”

I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party, by Chen Chen. “ I’m like the kid in Home Alone, pulling/ on the string that makes my cardboard mother// more motherly, except she is not cardboard, she is/ already, exceedingly my mother.” My heart.

Dead Bird, by Todd Dillard. “In the dark I listened to the chainsaw growl./ I imagined you holding it over your head./ I imagined you thinking: I am trying to be a good father,/ bringing the chainsaw down.”

Poem in which nothing bad ever happens to me, by Jameson Fitzpatrick. This poem breaks my heart a hundred ways. “Here it never happens, so I don’t have to tell you about it.”

Chew, by Dana Diehl. “Once, she finds a bone that looks so much like a human clavicle that I worry one day she’ll realize I am a body containing a skeleton.”

November

Segmented Moments, by Hannah Gordon. “She drags her fingers through my hair. It hurts, but I don’t tell her. I imagine her nails drawing blood from my scalp. I imagine her tearing me apart.”

My Therapist Wants to Know about My Relationship to Work, by Tiana Clark. A masterclass in the verb, a poem for imposter syndrome, “I balk. I lazy the bed. I wallow when I write./ I truth when I lie. I throw a book/ when a poem undoes me. I underline/ Clifton: today we are possible. I start/ from image.”

December

Ada Limon: While technically not a poem, she is talking poems, reciting poems, and being an orb of healing light.

An Arm or a Palm Frond or a Boot, by Michelle Ross. “But then he kissed her, like she was oxygen and he was asphyxiating. Other boys had only ever kissed her like she was helium.” I mean. All of her sentences are magic.

Crush, by Ada Limon. “dearest, can you/tell, I am trying/to love you less.”

Things Haunt, by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza. “California is a desert and I am a woman inside it./ The road ahead bends sideways and I lurch within myself.” <3

Heart Condition, by Jericho Brown. With just totally brilliant last lines: “Greetings, Earthlings./ My name is Slow And Stumbling. I come from planet/ Trouble. I am here to love you uncomfortable.”

Dead or Alive, by Kim Stoll. Whose narrative haunts me so long after I’ve left it. “I am in the room now but I can’t touch anything, I am years away from myself.”

When I Tell My Husband I Miss the Sun, He Knows, by Paige Lewis. The best kind of love poem. “We bring the shadow game home/ and (this is my favorite part) when we// stretch our shadows across the bed, we get so tangled/ my husband grips his own wrist,// certain it’s my wrist, and kisses it.”

The Spirit Neither Sorts Nor Separates, by Linda Gregg. “There is a flower. We call it God.”

MUSICA HUMANA, by Ilya Kaminsky. “Once or twice in his life, a man/ is peeled like apples.”

Some Say the Lark Makes Sweet Division, by Jennifer Chang. “I break your heart:// that is how a poem should begin, and then you break my heart/ because that is how a poem should end.”

Good Bones Motion Poem, by Maggie Smith (poet), by Anaïs La Rocca (filmaker). HOLY WOW.

Hapnophobia or the Fear of Being Touched, by torrin a. greathouse. I won’t spoil the last line :)

Heaven, by Blas Falconer. God. The power of just two sentences.

On Vulnerability and Telling the Truth

I write fiction because I feel profoundly uncomfortable with myself.  I feel like I'm combating a lot of not-truths, a lot of internalized misinformation, and so the easiest way to tell the truth has been to make things up.

Girls who turn to rabbits.

Who wake up suddenly made of sapphires.

Characters who speak only in first sentences, or who have crappy teaching gigs, or who are actual, literal monsters.

On the page, a story is never 'about me' and yet feels like the safest way to explore Why do I feel this way?  What would happen if...  Is there another ending than the one I'm afraid of?  And why am I afraid of?  It feels more honest, somehow--this is what it feels like.  It feels like I'm drowning in a pool, or teaching a classroom of bees, or at the actual end of the world.  I don't really know how to express what being a person is like without metaphoric language.  How else could it possibly make sense?

I'm reading Not That Bad, and it's humbling how invisible abuse can be - a violation, a survivability, a shattering, a voicelessness, some screaming, permanent thing.  I believe every word.  I wish I was able to write this way.  I appreciate how so many of the essays explore the limitations of what is true--if it's factual, feeling, if it's what you can remember, if it's what's been blacked out.

I'm grateful for every word I read.

CHEAP YELLOW

"Shy’s poems are abruptly smart, a little violent, devious and ongoing, legendary, mythic, not prosey though a little like the voice of god if god decided to speak more collectively for a while. Shy’s poems to me are so so worth it. And they are crafty – also like god."

—Eileen Myles

Published by Civil Coping Mechanisms

Shy Watson's Cheap Yellow is all sharp corners.  Like, the corners you knick hard with your leg and find later leave bruises.  I mean this in a good way.  I mean I knew I would like it right away when I read the short poem:

i don't know how to better communicate it

you are a sailboat
& i am nothing at all
 

It gave me the same bruising feeling I got from Atwood's short poem:

You fit into me
like a hook into an eye

a fish hook
an open eye

---

That feeling of being undermined is particular and memorable.  The floor falling out from under you.  That feeling that there was maybe kind of a trapdoor underneath you all along.  So many of Watson's poems make me feel exactly this way.  Pained and jumbled and aching in a perfectly honest kind of way.

There's building momentum in these turns -- an escalating -- a getting-in-your-face-ness -- a coming-to-terms-with.  Both of these moments have that intense attraction-repulsion energy to them.  As the speaker is being engaged with by another - someone worrying over scratching your bites, the intimacy of being "in me" - she pushes back: HARD.  How has Watson written lines that feel both strongly confessional and steely?  Armored and opening?  They leave me feeling like someone had told me the truth while shoving me hard in the stomach.

But that's not the only kind of energy present in this book.

Other times, it's gentler.

I mean, I drew a smiley and a heart.  I couldn't help it.  The energy is softer in these moments.  Cautious, appreciative.  Ironic and smiling.  Attentive.  This shift in dynamics helps complicate the persona driving these poems.  Like she's pulling over and taking in something scenic.  These moments are warm.  They're giving little looks.  One way this collection keeps reeling me in is because of all the angles: loving, being loved, being not-loved, being not-loving. 

---

At one point, I caught myself writing on the page what these poems were, if I were to categorize them, and what I wrote was:

Little heart-palpitation poems--

Jump scare poems--

Walk-off-a-cliff poems--

Why were the short ones zinging me the most?  I guess because I feel like it's SO MUCH HARDER to accomplish in one or two lines what it usually takes a whole poem to do.  They are a little like haikus in that way.  Thumb-tac poems.  Lightning-strike poems.  There's something unfathomable about the feeling I get from the so short ones.  Like:

if she's happy i'm happy

but what if she's not

---

In a lot of ways, this collection gives the mirror-in-a-mirror feeling.  In exploring the self, one has to confront who she thinks she is, who she actually is, who she wants to be, who she used to think she wanted to be.  Perception is inherently fallible.  Perception is constantly changing.  One of my favorite moments in the collection comes from the poem "4th of july," exploring exactly this:

Or a couple of poems later, in "phelps grove":

the world seems

permanent

y/n?

Or a poem from the middle, the little intrusions of "how great i can be if":

Her Body and Other Parties: To Cast Off (As the Skin of a Snake)

"Will I ever be done, transformed in the past tense, or will I always be transforming, better and better until I die?"

That weird liminal space between Christmas and New Year's I was completely entangled in Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties.  When I think back on this collection I keep coming back to the phrase "sloughing off," one Machado uses many times in different stories.  Slough: a swamp.  Slough: a situation characterized by lack of progress or activity.  Slough off: to cast off (as the skin of a snake).

Maybe that's something of an apt metaphor for the women in this collection.  Powerful, coiling, venomous, sexual.  Shedding some old self, and finding a new self underneath that is somehow more raw and taking up space.  In the story "Eight Bites," this sloughed off self is especially present.  It's winter and a woman in a Cape Code decides to undergo gastric bypass surgery.  Only after the surgery is over and she's her newer, smaller (happier?) self - the rest of her body comes back to haunt the house.

I can't not think of Roxane Gay's Hunger when I read this piece.  In her memoirs, Gay writes "we continued to delude ourselves that our bodies were our biggest problem."  Because the body is an easy target when the real hurt is harder (or more painful) to disseminate.  And the hurt for Machado's protagonist is three-pronged.

In part because of a pregnancy that "wrecked me, like [the child] was a heavy-metal rocker trashing a hotel room before departing," and in part because of shame, "looking into the mirror and grabbing the things that I hated and lifting them, clawing deep, and then letting them drop."  These two are connected - this body hate that comes from motherhood and, also, just having a body.  But it's deepened and worsened somehow because of this triage of now-thin sisters (and memory of an iron-willed mother) who had somehow mastered the art of restraint.  "Eight bites" is a TERRIFYING prescription.  How impossible!  How far behind the protagonist feels.  She chides herself for having no self-control and so decides to relinquish it - but how can you relinquish what you never had?

This story is confronting the mangled idea of 'self control,' which is usually coded self hate.  This feeling that to meet certain criteria (to be 'in control') is to earn love and a happy place in this world - that to take up less space is to somehow merit more love. 

I love that the protagonist's daughter is fighting so hard for her mother to confront NOT the body but the REAL THING underneath.  She calls and says, "You think you're going to be happy but this is not going to be happy," and "Mom, I just don't understand why you can't be happy with yourself.  You've never been--"

You've never been.   (My heart.)

Ah, but the best part is when her body comes back.  We get a little premonition of this during the protagonist's last meal, as she's devouring oysters and one fought back, "anchored to its shell, a stubborn hinge of flesh."  Later she calls it "mindless protein."  That's pretty much what comes back to haunt her: a person-shaped outline, a presence.  A boneless lump she confronts in the basement. 

There's something tentative about this meeting - the protagonist is curious, gentle, touches its shoulder, feels it eyelessly look at her.  Then she says, "You are unwanted."  Then she begins to destroy her.

Everything in this story feels mirrored and opposing: "all of [the people] were alone, even when they were with each other," "sometimes [you could hear] a muffled animal encounter in an alley: pleasure or fear, it was all the same noise," "I could not make eight bites work for my body and so I would make my body work for eight bites."  Mirrors are deeply weird that way: the self you see is not the self everyone else sees.  You are optically inverted.  You don't see yourself correctly.  This is why in photographs we are sometimes surprised by who we see.  This is why it is painful for people who love us to hear us say we hate ourselves.

This story is devastating because of that palpable self-hate.  Because of (what feels like) the victory of and inheritance of self-hate.  It was never the body's fault.  It was maybe never anybody's.  In this story Machado writes, "A new woman does not just slough off her old self; she tosses it aside with force."  These sentences sear into me - camouflaged as powerful, assertive.  But a snake sheds its skin because it is growing, not shrinking.  There is no violence in it.  No malevolence.  Carmen Maria Machado has her protagonist confront her truest, softest, warmest self, and shows the tragedy of that wreckage.  How mistaken we are to see our bodies as something conquerable, something separate.  How devastating to objectify and reconstruct oneself.  How difficult and wrenching it is to self-love.

It's Winter and I'm Writing

Madly, as if my skin will slough off.  As if there is a timer full of sand in my body, as if there is a boundary I'm about to smash against like a glass bottle, as if I'm dying of thirst and writing is water.  Diamond-clear and streaming. 

I don't always feel this way.

In fact, I almost NEVER do.

This is happening, furiously, I think, because it's winter break, it's winter break, there's this freedom (and urgency) in knowing I don't have to touch the real world I live in - the world of alarms and emails and planning, grading, vexing so hard my face breaks out - so I'm reading and writing like I'm starving.  I feel untethered and focused and lucid.  I feel happy.  I feel like I need to do this as much as I can until I can't.  Is this what running feels like?  Running downhill?  Furious and fast as a landslide?  Does this feeling sound familiar to anyone?

Usually, I'm guilty.  I'm not reading enough.  I'm reading too slowly.  I'm not writing because I'm tired, and there's laundry to do, and it's time to microwave leftover chicken.  I'm not writing, usually, because I'm drained, I'm crying or wanting to, I'm taking melatonin that dissolves into strawberry blossoms on my tongue, I'm stress-dreaming, I'm creaking awake before the sunrise, I'm not as on-point as I want to be.  Usually.  Why is this my usual life?

I don't know how other writers make peace with the moving components of their lives.  I feel turtlish compared to them.  I like quiet.  I like to read a story and hold it over my heart a few days before moving on.  I really loved Brandon Taylor's essay on the short story economy, and how to actually digest them.  I'm devouring Carmen Machado's Her Body And Other Parties this week - like 2 stories a day (there are 8), and I'm learning a lot.  I think, in part, because there's less traffic in my head.

There's much more quiet.

There's so much less stress I feel strange in my body.

Hunger

"I didn't know how to say no.  It never crossed my mind to say no.  This was the price I had to pay, I told myself, to be loved by him or, if I was honest with myself, to be tolerated by him."

Right now in Tucson it's monsooning. Every summer it happens. All the waterless days, the empty rivers, the uncrackable heat – cracks. The sky shakes with lightning. Thunder bodyslams, thunder so forceful it sets off car alarms in the parking lot. It pours loudly, perversely. There are no grates in the streets so they flood. If you're out walking, the monsoons sweep you into them, they pour out everything all at once, pushing over and through you, and then they vanish.  

The air hangs wet.

Mosquito eggs incubate.

These are times of year I forget Tucson is anything other than hard, white-hot.  Days the city surprises me.  Bursts of purple blooms from bushes.  A dusting of snow one New Year’s Eve.  The way the mountains, when they spiral, shoulder their way from desert life to forest in what feels like magic, like the are exiting one body and becoming another.

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Roxane Gay talks a lot about the before and the after in Hunger. Before and after the rape. Before and after pictures in the pamphlets about gastric bypass surgery. This book doesn't bypass, is uncompromising. Roxane Gay says this book is "not a story of triumph," that there won't be a cover picture of her standing inside one leg of her fat pants. This is a true story. Sometimes it reads like an apology – perhaps to that past-self she wants to warn and hold and speak to. There is even something of an apology in the parentheticals around 'my' as in "a memoir of (my) body." This memoir is, still, a before and after story - the two cleaved parts of it. Even though 'cleaves' sounds to me like it should mean coming together, clutching, a tightness – it means split. Cut up. A broken chemical bond.

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Roxane Gay calls it 'delusion,' as in, "we continued to delude ourselves that our bodies were our biggest problem."  One of the biggest problems is that our bodies are most visible. Our bodies are a catalogue. I think of my body as my house sometimes, and sometimes I trash my house, and sometimes I hate being stuck in it all the time, and often I think: I should take care of this, this is where I live.  But Roxane Gay reminds me that bodies are haunted, they are hoarders and buriers (barriers). Roxane writes, "I buried the girl I have been because she ran into all kinds of trouble...and perhaps I am writing my way back to her, trying to tell her everything she needs to hear."

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I had a therapist who told me to imagine myself (the self I am now) holding my younger self. I pictured 10-year-old self. Would I tell her she was worthless, ugly, stupid? Probably not. Sometimes when I would break down sobbing I would try to imagine it was 10-year-old-me crying. I was supposed to tell the younger-me it was okay. Saying it outloud to myself felt stupid. Wrapping my arms around my elbows felt stupid. It was not an exercise I was proficient in. It was easier to deflate myself to nothing, to stomp on that nothing. "I want to be able to hold the why in my hands," Roxane Gay writes. She writes, "I don't want them, or anyone, to think I am nothing more than the worst thing that has ever happened to me."

She writes, "I don't know if such understanding is possible."

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What's hard about reading Hunger is the rawness. It's not like reading a diary – it's like reading a mind. It's like being in a mindful body, a body mindful of how it's been addressed.  How Roxane Gay addresses her body is:

·         unruly body

·         the truth of my body

·         a body, one requiring repair

·         undisciplined body

·         destroyed

·         the problem of my body

·         more solid, stronger, safer

·         undesirable

·         the body I made

·         a fortress, impermeable

·         a cage

·         abundance

·         a crime scene

·         something gone horribly wrong 

·         mute 

·         a safe harbor 

·         girl body 

·         a shield 

·         a boundary 

·         invisible

·         ruined

·         a matter of public record

·         the subject of public discourse

·         the girl in the woods 

·         the trash I knew myself to be 

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"Smaller and therefore better." This is a way Roxane Gay describes her parents' hopes for her body.  It's also the way many of us (internally or externally) do – better, for women, often means lesser – less loud, loud pimply, less colorful, less intrusive, less needy. Spaciouslessness. Protestlessness. The prefix 'un'. Unabrasive. Unassuming. Unintelligible. Roxane Gay writes she had no reason to have such low self-esteem as a young girl.  She had no reason to be in love with a boy who would destroy her. Gay maps out what so many of us have felt in abusive relationships – that feeling that we should be grateful that they bothered to treat us terribly. That early hunger is weirdly untraceable. Where does that idea come from – that we're lucky to be maltreated, because at least we're treated? That we'll never be good enough – that this is the punishment for being (not enough).   

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Right now in Tucson it's still.  For a girl who grew in the Midwest – all buzzing and chirping and rustles – it can be disconcerting how quiet the desert gets.  I hear my heart in my ears.  I feel the heat rise from the sidewalks.  I hold still in this body I’m in.  In the shade, it is somehow even quieter. 

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The New York Times has a beautiful review of Roxane Gay's book: "At its simplest, it’s a memoir about being fat — Gay’s preferred term — in a hostile, fat-phobic world. At its most symphonic, it’s an intellectually rigorous and deeply moving exploration of the ways in which trauma, stories, desire, language and metaphor shape our experiences and construct our reality."  The Times notes Roxane Gay's structure, how "[t]he story burrows in on itself while expanding exponentially. She grapples with exposure, with the price of silence, with the fact that her story is horrifying yet banal."

Banal.  It means, ‘So lacking in originality as to be obvious and boring.’

Silence, then, as symptom.

Banality as symptom.

The horror is the unremarkableness. To be destroyed is almost a rite of passage. I remember reading an article a many years back, a woman narrating an assault, and how at the time she was thinking to herself, 'This is it. This is my rape. What day is it? How old am I?' I remember thinking that myself once. I remember other times not having the language at all. I keep thinking now how 'lucky that it was only...' 'lucky that at least he didn’t...'

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Gay writes, "I wrote story after story, mostly about women and their hurt because it was the only way I could think of to bleed out all the hurt I was feeling." Most of what I feel reading Hunger is that loud-quite I feel from the desert.  I feel myself nodding.  Yes. 

Shuffle Poems

A beautiful example by Naadeyah Haseeb, author of MANIC DEPRESSIVE DREAM GIRL.

Going through my old files from high-school and college, I found a sealed envelope labeled "for future Mel," which I guess is me, because I guess this is the future.

Inside I found cut-aparts of old college poems, poems so old I didn't really remember them, or their chopped-to-bits parts.

So I spread them on my desk.

Sorted them into vague "yes you are a poem" "no you are not" piles.

I further diced some fragments. Detached compound words. Stole articles. Threw more than 50% away. I can't help it when I see a puzzle in front of me. I want to build it, rearrange it, make it whole.

A found poem is certainly constricted by its source material. Maybe that's what I love most about it. It is bound to its bones. It is an exercise in trust and flexibility. Found text has a special sort of whitespace phenomenon - it's clear it's borrowed; it's clear it's a small part of something more.  It's beautiful the way closeups are. It's marred as burnt toast. It feels honest, even as it's withholding. Like it's wearing revealing clothes.

Going through my old poem scraps, shuffle-building, rearranging, I feel like a hoarder - I want to keep and keep even if it isn't in service of the best poem. I loved "fly bite after fly bite" - and I must have loved it when I wrote (it was underlined).  I kept the "empty aerosol can of a heart," even if maybe it's too jarring jumping from a dish of moon or sugar-crusted wheelbarrows - if it feels too metallic compared to the lush naturalness of the previous imagery. I wanted to have "you full of violets" even though the clause didn't have much to cling to. I think I love found poems because they are messes, because it's me untangling their hair.  

Advice from a Polar Bear

Yoko Tawada's Memoirs of a Polar Bear reminded me about some of the most rewarding and challenging parts of being a writer. Tawada blends absurdism and insight, philosophy and play, shapes this novel into both a story and a sort of tome to the act of writing and remembering and performance. I love what I learned from this book. Here's my take for the toolchest:

"A fly bumped against my forehead, or wait, not a fly, a sentence."
A writer is both receptive and perceptive. I start by engaging the senses - listening, smelling, tasting, feeling the world around me (and interiorly, in my body). A writer does this with language too, knows words have their own contours and tangs and textures. A writer treats everything inside the cavity of the imagination with the same care they treat a cracked geode. They feel it, when a sentence zings inside their head. 

"The unexpected is always the most interesting: this is a lesson I learned all over again."
I follow my sentences and not the other way around.  I ask what the story wants to be, make suggestions, am (trying) to be open when I sense a story shaking its head no.  I felt so much trust in Memoirs of a Polar Bear - the way Yoko Tawada would linger in the interior longer than maybe my characters would, the brave way she would twist in and out of 1st and 3rd person (at one point, the polar bear Knut has to learn what 'I' is, and the whole 3rd section shifts as the reader realizes Knut was speaking the whole time - he just didn't know the name for oneself). She didn't divide her book into chapters, but three long sections, each for one generation of bear. I think one of the most vulnerable parts about being a writer is not actually having that much control.  The idea of 'surprising, but inevitable' resounds to me.  The story needs support - that's where the writer comes in, giving her characters and setting and structure the durability they require to do what they need to do. The writer's job is stepping back enough to be surprised and to make that surprise is possible.

"The color green smelled green.  Everything red smelled red, it smelled of blood and red roses."
A writer is open to synesthesia - the overlapping of senses, where one sense (like seeing the color red) activates another (now 'red' has a smell). A writer does not have to use the technique to be open to it. I try allowing my mind beyond the boundaries of immediate logic. Allow sentences the freedom of a childhood, to let them play and experiment and break bones even.  And heal over.  And try again.  I am trying to be open to letting go of control. Being open to not understanding, and exploring that - following (instead of erasing) that sentence.  

"I didn't know of any animal called Stress. This must have been an imaginary animal the humans thought up, as if there weren't enough real animals."
Think of Stress as an animal - an imaginary animal - an animal that feeds on the imagination - that's a prowler and unproductive. I personally imagine a wolf pacing up and down outside my window. I used to dream of wolves when I was a kid in Minnesota, when my bedroom window was ground level, facing the woods. That's still how stress feels to me. It's awake and hungry when I'm trying to rest. It wants to edge its way into my mind and confiscate something from me, drains and devours. How do we tame such an animal?

Like most things, I think it begins with listening. Why is Stress clawing at the door? Write down what it says, what it wants. Usually Stress is afraid of something, is caring that's gone bad, turned poisonous. But when I write down what it wants, I can feed it something other than my attention and imagination. I can reassure the animal that we are not enemies, and care to his wounds so we can both relax, so Stress can go back into the woods, and I can go back to my desk.

"The main thing is that my heart stays warm."
Writing is like making fire.  It needs to be fed, is difficult to touch, feels good to be near.  We make fire to keep the blood in our bodies warm, when our bodies aren't warm enough.  It feels like another person, a little.  I love that the main thing is the heart.

Memoirs of a Polar Bear

"A fly bumped against my forehead, or wait, not a fly, a sentence."

The other day Amber Sparks asked the Facebook, "What subjects have you been told not to write about?"  A fantastic question, and the response was long: love, politics, family, animal death, sports, trauma, teenage girls, writers and writing.  In my mind, I think I've made my own private list - not necessarily that I should NOT write about them, but that they seemed easy pitfalls.  Too sentimental, melodramatic, touchy, too out-of-my-experience.  One of these has always been writing about writers.  It just seemed like a bad idea.  The only stories I'd read with writers in them were undergrad pieces about the drunkard trying to build up to writing his novel on his typewriter.  Oh, and this awesome 5th grade book about a squirrel writing poetry (but that one I didn't discover until about a year ago, to my intense delight).

Now I'm midway through Memoirs of a Polar Bear, where (in Part 1) we seem to be both reading the speaker's memoirs and dipping out of them.  Seeing the speaker writing.  Which includes (of course) the evasive parts: how she spills ink over her white belly, eats a fridge full of salmon, ducks into bookstores to learn German grammar, emigrates to Canada.  

The speaker is restless and romantic and prone to accepting advice even when she can smell the lies on someone.  She makes me smile because - I think she reminds me of how vulnerable writers can be.  Especially new writers.  She asks questions like, "How is an author to avoid repetition when one and the same scene keeps repeating itself in her life?" even though she already knows the answer, earlier in the novel: "My memories came and went like waves at the beach. [...] I had no choice but to portray the same scene several times, without being able to say which description was definitive."  She fears dying before she finishes writing her life.  She trades new installments of her memoir for bars of East German chocolate.  The Sea Lion editor seems greedy to read her work, but quick to dismiss her.  She is entranced by things she reads.  She is furious by others.  She realizes that writing an autobiography entails making up all the things she's forgotten, and wishes she could write the present instead of making up an "authentic-sounding past."

These are things I've felt -- fear and certainty and dismissal and feeling small and proud and over-my-head.  I think all writers have been because it's a humbling process, and an empowering one.  Near the end of this first section, our polar-bear narrator arrives in Canada and reads three books on the recommendation of her favorite bookstore clerk.  In the final book she pages through, she is so sucked in that I - reading Memoirs - cannot tell if I am reading what she is reading or if she is telling her future, or projecting it, or wishing for it - I kind of love that I can't tell, that my best hint is, "While I was copying out these passages from the book, I entered the story being told as its protagonist...down to the last punctuation mark."  I presumed she was reading and admiring, but as soon as Part 1 ends, what she's read has become prophetic - she has a daughter by the same name as the protagonist in the story she was reading.  If I'm reading it correctly.  If there's such a thing as correct.

Now I'm off for Part 2, where so far it's third person and her daughter's life.  

Big Lonesome

She imagines the most important place inside herself.  The place, she whispers, that's me.  The place that I mean when I feel or think "myself."

Joseph Scapellato is, I think, secretly a poet.  

His prose is tumbleweeds and fanfare, philosophic and prophetic and candid.  He is a master of the quite-short-story, and it was just as pleasurable plunging into the longer pieces.  Big Lonesome is concerned with lonesomeness, but also justice, and also jealousy, and also forgiveness, and also homeplace, and also death, and also love.  

His stories make me want to break apart their structure.  His sentences make me want to stand inside of canyons.  I love this book.  Here is a found poem from the text:

EVEN THOUGH HE DIDN’T KNOW WHAT LOVE WAS OR HOW IT WORKED, WHERE IT CAME FROM, WHEN IT LEFT YOU, HOW TO KNOW IF IT HAD STAYED

The land is answers,

apology-orbits,

legs that tighten with restraint.

It’s heavy,

brushed with blood and flour

cracking, struggling behind a headboard of clouds.

ON, he clicks, ON.  The eye stays OFF.

The kiss is bad.

The women who hadn’t moved with them

the living stillness

the sort of woman you felt in your throat

a crate in a cellar

a tongue of black shade

a cracked guitar

a puddle of sunset

a human person female girl.

The cowboy tried to point at himself

long and flat as a map.

He doesn’t kick-smash anything.

He doesn’t bellow.

Everything lurched and I lurched with it—

the vast black beach

like a hide he’d cut himself.

Beneath that you are a man, and beneath that you are

a place:

the door, a blade of light—

all man, all horse.

He just lay there, feeling the moon on his neck.

It bit me, it rattled,

it left.

There's So Much (MORE)

"I write everything down. Details are my inheritance."

I like writing about a book while I'm still in the middle of it - I'm halfway up the roller-coaster crest, or mid-way through a meal (still hungry).  Today I finished Michelle Ross' excellent There's So Much They Haven't Told You.  The end of reading makes me feel like some bell reverberates in me.  Or like there's a well in my stomach that's been filling, and someone's lugging the bucket up.  It's a strong feeling.  It's a feeling you get when you say goodbye.

And it's of course because of the tone of the last couple of stories.  These featured broken mothers with dogs, and the daughters looking in on them.  In one, the mother has cancer, and crossed 4 state lines to deposit her dog before going on a diamond-digging expedition. "[S]he places the dog into my arms as gently and carefully as if handing me an organ from her own body," Michelle writes, making me sea-sick with familiarity (when mothers give things to their daughters, the things daughters do not always want.)  In the final story, the mother needs rent money, wants it deposited in cash at the reception desk so her daughter doesn't have to see her (her hoarder's home, her enormous, Paul-Bunion-sized dog).  The daughter asks to use the bathroom in her mother's apartment as an excuse to see - survey - take in - memorize - because sometimes that's as close to connection as one can get.

In both of these closing stories, there is this repelling/attracting effect between characters. They are connected to one another, kind of against their will, kind of tangled up like snakes.  They don't always want to love one another - so guilt and grief substitute.  Michelle Ross compares it to a punch card, when the speaker packs her mother's suitcase: "I folded each piece as if each fold were a punch on my responsibilities-toward-my-dying-mother punch card, which, once filled, would earn me absolution from the nuisances of guilt and regret."  

I have a difficult relationship with my own mother, so these stories leave me feeling vulnerable, twisted up.  I know what the character means when she says she finally understands the impulse towards plastic surgery - erasing the details of one's mother out of one's face.  

This is a frequent feeling while reading Michelle's book.  The stories in this collection are scientific, pulsing, lyrically on-point.  The characters inside them push away and pull towards someone or something simultaneously - with all their might.  It's like they're all waiting for the Jenga house they live inside to collapse.  It's a feeling I have when I wonder how much like my mother I am, which is probably a feeling my mother has about her mother, and so on towards infinity.  We're all coiled snakes eating each other's tails.

I love this about Michelle's writing because she seems to embrace the sharp edges of characters as lovingly as their soft middles.  I love that in "Pam's head" there's this creepy post-apocalyptic gel-world where humans dig mindlessly, even going so far as to chunk apart a body into manageable pieces to get it out of the way.  I love that in "Rattlesnake Roundout" a widow wants to the pour the remains of her ex-husband down the throat of a snake.  I love the description of hoarders as "empty and clogged at once, full to the brim with what's useless," or the description of another mother-daughter pair: "We're like mollusks or clams or conchs.  We like being sucked up inside ourselves."

This book makes me less lonely.  This book breaks into homes and bodies full of dysfunction, and looks each character in the eye.  Maybe what's most moving about Michelle's stories is they are honest.  They don't flinch.  As one story puts it, "She values preserving the illusion of cleanliness.  But me, I'd prefer to be mucked up with the truth." Mid-way through the book I felt sometimes like I was falling through air at the end of her stories.  They land where they land.  They pull me into that orbit.