traipsing meridians

belated awp wrap-up

2010-04-19T08:58:00.000-07:00

A big thank you to all who attended my panel at AWP10. I was thrilled with the other essays presented (by Nicole Walker, Shannon Lakanen, and Desirae Matherly) and by the insightful questions and comments from the audience.

Ephemera from the conference:

In "Traces of Places: Finding Our Literary Identities Through Landscapes" (Michael Downs, Debra Marquart, Michael Steinberg, Barbara Hurd, Joe Mackall), Barbara Hurd talked about having two kinds of relationships with place: a storying one and a sensory one. I'm fairly sure she said "sensory" now, but at first I heard "censoring." Ever since, I've been caught in that misheard idea, what a censoring relationship with place would be--where we impose silence on landscape, where it imposes silence on us. The rest of her essay, which I'm almost sure I heard correctly, was also stimulating; I look forward to reading her work.

"Mock-Docs, Fakes, and Hoaxes" (David Lazar, Jeff Porter, Catherine Taylor, Mary Cappello, Patrick Madden) was the most intellectually rigorous and complex of the panels I attended. All of the presenters said something fresh and unique about this topic, giving fakery historical and cultural context. I was positively gleeful. I only wish they could repeat this panel on Oprah.

The key to any successful conference, though, is to have great roommates: a grateful shout-out to Jen Schomburg Kanke, Becca J.R. Lachman, and Carling Futvoye.

awp and opp

2010-03-10T13:32:00.000-08:00

You can see me at the panel I am heading at AWP in Denver. If you go to the Thursday conference schedule, search for "R201. Goodbye to All That: Coming of Age in the Personal Essay." The panel is April 8, 3-4:15pm, Room 201, Colorado Convention Center, Street Level.

The opp in the title of this post refers, of course, to other people's publications. I'm happy to (re)announce that Ali Stine, one of our presenters on the panel, will have a second book of poetry published with University of Wisconsin Press next year. The book won the The Brittingham Prize. Congratulations, Ali!

not another blog post about snow

2010-02-17T08:01:00.000-08:00

It doesn't seem fair to say I commute to work. I drive twenty minutes into town, but there is no traffic to speak of, save for getting behind a car driving 50 mph on the highway. It's a beautiful drive through hills and farmland, even if the two-lane highway does cut largely into it.

But I'll say it anyway: On my commute to work on Monday, visibility was low, probably three quarters of a mile. I love fog and snow around the hills; they lend an air of mystery to them, as if I weren't familiar with every bend in the road between my house and town. Stranger still, I didn't have my wipers on despite the heavy snow conditions. The snow fell rapidly, but in fine pellets that blew around the car. I traveled in a clear bubble through the blurry weather.

Swimming laps today, I felt that bubble again. The water pressing on me muffled the stresses of the day, the week, even a year. My head cleared. I thought about how much I love my husband.

Happy belated Valentine’s, Jamey.

stitching around a post

2010-01-06T12:01:00.000-08:00

In a semi-recent post, I mentioned that I learned to crochet a number of years ago. I hadn’t actually crocheted a stitch since my daughter was born (over two years ago), but decided to haul it out when they offered wine at a recent craft-night get together among my mom friends. Something took hold of me that night (and it was not the 1.5 glasses I had); I’ve been re-obsessed ever since. One of the reasons I haven’t posted since November is that I decided to crochet all my Christmas presents this year. Yes, I was that person, the one that gave my two-year-old mittens on a coat string.

I’ve been pondering why I've gone so crochetzy, as my friend and crochavatar Dewi would say. Part of it is the satisfaction of seeing something grow to completion. I used to crochet a row or two between grading papers, because at least I knew the stitches were adding up to something. Not just something, but something tactile, something useful. Now that I’ve branched out into more complicated patterns (pattern hunting has become my new Internet time-waster), I feel I could crochet anything if I wanted to. If the factories go belly up tomorrow, I can make myself socks. Can it be such a stretch to crochet abstract concepts like love, postmodernism?

Aside from that, I feel similar to when I swapped out my first hard drive as a computer technician (many lifetimes ago now). I felt the exhilaration of being initiated into a boys’ club (I was the second female employee at the company of 20 or so), capable of exceeding my own perceived limitations. (Of course, I subsequently took my bicycle apart to see how it worked and ended up mangling the gears. I got a lecture from the [male] bike repairman on the merits of specialization.) I now have additional ways I can provide for my family (ill-fitting mittens!). I’ve been further inducted into mom-hood, in which I have learned so many previously impossible things: teaching undergraduates on three hours of sleep, entertaining a toddler for nearly a three-hour plane trip with finger puppets, becoming an expert on my child’s development. Give me a G-hook, and I’ll crochet this blog.

If you’re a crochet aficionado and interested, here are some of the other things I made the past month or so:

mittens (because I made the ones above too big)
cap with brim
“beanie with brim” free download on www.ravelry.com (you need a free account to access it)

I’m currently making this hat with some swanky yarn that Dewi gave me as a present for graduating with the PhD. I loved the yarn, but I had no idea at the time how appropriate the gift was.

in which i am podcasted

2009-11-11T12:53:00.000-08:00

Hear me read my essay "In Which I Move Again," published in the October 2009 issue of The Collagist, in a podcast on their blog.

http://thecollagist.com/wordpress/?p=388

Can podcast be used as a verb?

lightning on a clear day

2009-11-09T12:57:00.000-08:00

This lightning bolt still has form, energy that winds its way through a living tree. Matter is impaled and grows more beautiful from it.

It is as if the tree visibly wears its central meridian.

Move your hand in the crevice and feel its heat.

embroidery

2009-11-02T15:49:00.000-08:00

On my recent trip to my folks' house, I took this photo of the flower arrangement in the guest bathroom. I made it when I was in about the second grade, probably in Pioneer Girls, which is like Girl Scouts, but with God. I learned to embroider and to make a makeshift stove out of a coffee can.

The flowers have probably shifted in all the moving my parents have done. Still, I look at the white and the purple and try to get back into my 8-year-old mind, thoughtfully choosing where each should go. A perfectionist even then, I inflicted order wherever I could. I liked most to arrange and rearrange the knickknacks on my dresser--shells from the vacations, rocks carefully chosen for texture or striation.

Messiness has since taken over the order, over my life. I've learned to relinquish many of my perfectionist tendencies. I often read to my two-year-old rather than do the dishes. Of course, I've also contained most of my perfectionism to writing; perhaps I'm just seeking order in (children's) literature since I know it will never happen in my kitchen.

I'm ambivalent now about my time at Pioneer Girls. I'm bemused that they thought embroidering was a useful skill to teach a girl in the early 80s. On the other hand, I have mostly good memories from the time I spent with the other girls and teachers, and I'm bashful that I don't know more traditionally womanly arts. It took a real woman to teach me crochet in my late twenties. (Thanks, Dewi!) But more on that another time.

uneven surfaces

2009-10-21T11:35:00.000-07:00

I finally got a shot of my favorite caution sign on my recent flight from Texas. I always say "wheee" when I pass this sign. Such a graceful fall/dance/leap. If only I could be that composed as I tumble.

I wrote about falling (among other things) in my essay recently published at The Collagist. A clumsy person, I'm often recovering from stumbles and untimely meetings with furniture. I feel just as clumsy in my writing--that I blunder into my next essay or paragraph--but these falls feel much more serendipitous than my physical ones. My writing feels more like this sign--uneven surfaces that I trip over sublimely.

day dark

2009-10-13T09:59:00.000-07:00

After moving to Ohio from Albuquerque in 2003, I had to relearn how to live under clouds. I bought a light box and generally scowled at the overcast days, the low ceiling--"day dark" as I've called it in an essay.

I think I've finally learned to appreciate the beauty of the gray. But ask me again in February.

against endings

2009-10-12T11:04:00.000-07:00

A lovely little box elder bug somehow made its way onto my table in the Catalyst Café. I glanced over from my laptop, and saw black and red against the blond wood. Hey, I told it, you’re my next blog post! It crawled over my cell phone. What a beautiful image of the natural juxtaposed with the technological, I thought.

Catalyst Café is one of my favorite places in Athens. The building is of green construction, with huge windows and motion sensor lights in the bathrooms. The patio outside its door has lush greenery and a pond complete with frogs—the breathing kind. I look out over the river as I sip great coffee and nosh a Georgian cheese pastry for lunch. The café is the best combination of outdoors and indoors.

I went back to the interview I’m working on for a while. When I picked up my coffee, I found my box elder friend swimming in it.

I took the cup outside and dumped the bug in the greenery, making sure I saw it crawl before going back inside.

So I have this blog, and I use it to keep me awake, to write regularly, and to interact more immediately with an audience. I like the brief essay and how it stretches me, but a brief essay also puts some pressure on the ending. I feel like I need to come up with pithy meanings at the end my posts, but I resist that. I guess I’m just finding my way around the form of the blog.

I think I’ll name the bug Mary.

defying entropy

2009-10-07T08:50:00.000-07:00

This morning my two-year-old daughter Imogen took all of the silverware out of the dishwasher basket, removed the contents of my hair styling drawer in the bathroom, and dumped a bowl of carrots on the floor. She is a wonder of entropy. My babysitter tells me that while the rest of the toddlers construct towers, Imogen waits and then knocks them all down. This behavior worries me slightly—that relatively-benign-yet-nagging feeling you get when your child isn’t quite up to the curve.

When I ask her about the crafts she makes at daycare, she says, “Devon made it.” Which is true in the way that an adult supervises toddler crafts. Does she not realize her creative potential, I wonder, her ability to put things together as well as take apart? I calm my fears by reminding myself she sits and listens to me read half of Giraffe and Pelly and Me by Roald Dahl; she has other talents.

While I was brushing my teeth, Imogen came into the bathroom and said, “Mama, come in living room and look!” She does this when she’s doing something she’s not supposed to. I braced myself, reminded myself that making messes was developmentally appropriate, not a plot to undermine my house cleaning.

She proudly pointed to three blocks stacked on top of one other. I raved.

I had a similar feeling once when I was in college, driving on my way to a volunteer job. I helped an instructor with English as a second language classes at a community center, though I should put helped in quotation marks. I mostly observed her technique and listened to the students’ incredible stories during the tutoring sessions I did after class. I wondered what I was doing there, especially on the half-hour drive to and from.

The route to the community center was dotted with small mercados and family restaurants. My favorite was a taco stand with a beleaguered sign that had eight small colored lights, only three of which were working. The bulbs looked sad and ridiculous, flashing like strobe lights, dwarfed by the text above them. When I passed them I thought, “I think I can, I think I can.”

One day when I passed the stand, I saw that the broken lights had been replaced, all eight flashing furiously. I let out an involuntary “YEAH!” and laughed the rest of the way to the community center. I was buoyed for the rest of the day, even when the incident lost something in translation when I tried explaining it to the ESL instructor.

Good fiction endings are supposed to be unexpected, yet inevitable. I think that’s because life is too.

explanation

2009-10-02T09:56:00.001-07:00

Meridians don’t care what they run through. If you look at a map, the same meridian runs through Turkey and Zimbabwe; two completely different countries with different people, histories, and customs are joined by an imaginary thread.

Meridians in Traditional Chinese Medicine are the conveyers of the body’s energy. Meridians run through the major organs for which they are named, but they run the length of the body. The bladder meridian traverses the eye and the back of the knee.

Meridians in and of themselves don’t tell stories. Their primary function is to locate and to connect—or to allow passage, transport.

As a writer, I connect. I assay, I try out. I follow the pulse. I invent my own meridians. I wander.

I revisit my title periodically to see what new meanings it turns up for me.

well

2009-10-01T09:50:00.001-07:00

a blog looks lonely without at least one post.