I’ve been writing in my journal and on my computer and on my hand this: EVERYTHING IS MATERIAL. I want to believe that my writing, the polished kind, can hold everything I need it to hold. I have to believe that descending into Detroit on an airplane can be a poem, as can dogs, and even fertility, and even a bad cold. All of it somehow has to fit not just in a blog but in writing that is publishable. I have to believe that the drawings in my journals can turn into something, and all of this is of a piece.

EVERYTHING IS MATERIAL.

Which is perhaps why this morning, too heavy or not, I dragged my writing table down to the drawing part of my studio. Thump thump thump down each stair. The two can be more united. I like it down here. The light’s different. I’m staring at my drawings. I’m trying not to see them as aliens as I type. I’m seeing that all morning and for the past couple of days I’ve been working on a photo project on my computer, this computer where I usually type, and now here I am in the drawing space and it is all of a piece.

November 30th, 2009 | Category: studio | Leave a comment

It started after Thanksgiving dessert, so I don’t know if it was all the food combinations that lowered my immune system, or maybe too much sugar, or maybe I ate something that my body was slightly allergic to, or maybe it was just so much (fun) work to cook everything and I was left exhausted, but after the (homemade, even the crust, and with pie pumpkins from our garden) pumpkin pie I started to get a sore throat.

Steve grew up with a Christian Scientist stepfather, so when I say my throat’s starting to hurt he says to me, No it’s not. Which is sometimes helpful, because really the more I pity myself at a certain pivotal point is going to determine to some degree whether or not my body and mind coordinate and I get sick. But usually it makes me feel frustrated to hear that. And this time my throat really was hurting, and by morning it was difficult to swallow.

And maybe I’m a weakling, or maybe my immune system is dealing with enough right now so anything else on top of being in the last month of pregnancy is going to push me over the edge, but this cold I cannot take. It has inhabited my whole face and chest, for Friday and Saturday and Sunday and now Monday. Coughing hurts my pelvis. I feel vulnerable and helpless, unable to take anything to help the symptoms and unable to both sleep and breathe at the same time. Pregnant, I can’t even take Afrin, and my neti pot isn’t working.

So last night I felt my strength cave. I just felt so bloated in every way — too big to bend over to get anything on the ground, too swollen in my face to leave any room for my brain. I crawled into bed before 11pm after a night of whimpering. I’ve been so good for a whole year, I whimpered. No wine since December 2008, I whimpered. No chance for a hot toddy now. No peanut butter or chocolate in the house at all. No cheetos in the house, even. No Robitussin. I poured honey and lemon down my throat. I sipped my chamomile tea and Steve kindly rigged his computer to point silly television at me. The television was so imbecile, all this yelling, maybe that’s why the baby turned and kicked and kicked. I found some vanilla ice cream and swirled it with sunbutter. I found some stale pita chips from a few months ago and munched on those. How come there’s never any junk food in our house? Steve tucked me into bed where I read a book about all the terrible things that could happen to infants before I turned off the lights and twirled the sheets as I slept fitfully.

The piece of brightness: Steve was on the phone with Jack before he came over to our house on Saturday, and Steve mentioned that I was sick and Jack’s alarms went off. He knows that pregnant people aren’t supposed to get sick. This kid who appears to be on a different planet most of the time was suddenly having compassion for me and the baby. He asked a million questions, he wanted to make sure I didn’t have a fever. When he walked into our house it was the first thing he asked about, and later while we were swinging at the park he asked again, wanting to know how I thought I got sick and what I thought about the baby’s health. I had no idea he cared that much, or really that he even noticed that I’m going to have a baby at all.

November 30th, 2009 | Category: happening, the baby thing | Leave a comment

November 27th, 2009 | Category: house, photograph | Leave a comment

November 27th, 2009 | Category: photograph | Leave a comment

For the homeless writing workshop this week, I had two men attend and I gave the prompt of writing something that happened to them recently, but to write it in the third person.

I didn’t realize it would be so hard to explain this prompt. It’s so early in the morning and I was trying to explain how we usually talk about ourselves in the first person, I, but novels are usually in the third person (he/she). I wanted them to step outside of themselves and see themselves from a short distance away, to see what new details emerged. I explained it several times, offering lots of examples, and once we started writing one of the men seemed to give up and I felt sorry for offering too difficult a prompt, but he went back to it. I became worried that I might be dealing with people with multiple personality disorder, and that I might split these men in thirds accidentally with my assignment.

One of the men wrote something where he was in the third person, but there was also another character, I, who was looking at him. Which is essentially how I explained what third person means. This man works so hard to see how others see him already, the assignment actually fit his temperament.

Another of the men stepped outside of himself and wrote something without action, but essentially he evaluated his personal progress in life. He looked at himself critically from a distance.

And then when he spoke about what he learned, it was clear this idea of the third person was incredibly tangible to him, more tangible than any definition I could give. He spoke about the need to listen to people, to be able to step inside of their experience and feel what they’re going through, and to step outside of himself to really hear another person’s story. It was profound and strange. He said, If you want a friend, you’ve got to be a friend. You’ve got to be that third person. I’ve not thought about the third person that way, as a friend, an outsider capable of flitting in and out of others’ minds to aid them, like a ghost of us that can disobey borders.

I offered the exercise because most poetry has a character called I in it, if there is a character. I recently read a book of poems where the character was instead he even though it was pretty clearly the poet’s life. It really removed the poems from the realm of confessional poetry, even though they were pretty confessional. That one small pivot shifted a ton of details and emotions and the way I approached the poems.

(so I tried it in workshop, too)

She saw her house for the first time in a long time, and it looked clean. Light hit in the kitchen from the winter sun. It only happens in winter. In the summer, leaves obscure the sky and so she cooks her meals in shadows. She saw her plants–she had forgotten about green. The color lit by winter sun is a stained glass window of photosynthesis.

.

She remembered where the silerware was, but she didn’t know where her husband had put the spatula. She noticed the empty boxes in the pantry–empty cracker boxes and candy wrappers–from where the teenager had snuck food (someone might have heard her throw away the box so she left it empty, taking up hollow space). She noticed the empty refrigerator.

.

This house had gone on without her–the dogs lived and the plants grew and the leaves continued to fall–but the kitchen had suffered. It was the only part of the house that crumpled a little in her absence. She refolded the cloth napkins and recycled empty boxes and made lists of what was missing–eggs, butter, milk. There hadn’t been an absence of butter in this house for years. She felt strange without it. She fumbled on how to make pancakes, settling for canola oil where the butter should have gone and grumbling as she stirred.

.

She stirred and the dogs made pinwheels with their tails below her. When she bought butter she would give them some. She would carve it into wafers and drop it tenderly onto their tongues, sorry for having been gone so long. In the meantime, canola pancakes fell like leaves from her plate toward the floor, never hitting the floor.

November 25th, 2009 | Category: happening, house | Leave a comment

When the plane descended, the first thing on my list was a changing table. Is this what a nesting instinct is? It’s not about buying stuff, it’s about trying to imagine what it will be like to have a baby, and looking to other people with babies, and seeing their changing tables and feeling inadequate and terrified and totally unprepared. How do babies survive? Reading this book about babies and all the rules — what kind of laundry detergent so the baby’s skin doesn’t develop a terrible-terrible rash, where to put the crib so that a baby isn’t strangled by curtains and window blinds, whether or not to have a crib bumper lest the baby suffocate and die or conversely get caught in the rails and die, when to nurse and how long on each side so that the baby gets enough protein and carbohydrate and fat and how that changes depending on how long the baby’s nursed and how to tell if the baby is getting any milk at all lest the baby starve and die — it’s amazing so many babies live!

Babies live!

We were at the soul-crushing Babies-R-Us buying our changing table (there weren’t any good ones on craigslist for a price any cheaper than the one I found that I liked at the store), and Steve was kindly and dutifully pushing the cart behind me while I darted around trying to decide if we needed an additional changing pad (we didn’t, I have to return it), and what waterproof mat to put underneath the fitted sheet in the crib (I bought one and washed it and hate it and can’t return it), and suddenly I turned to Steve and asked him if he’d ever had a changing table.

Nope, he’d never had one. He wasn’t sure why we needed one, but he was happy to buy one if I felt I needed it so badly. Come to think of it, I’m not sure Rosie even had a crib. He looked handsome and obliging and there I was dizzy in one of those moments where I felt my world shift a little bit. It’s not that I’ve been spending a lot of money on baby stuff, I truly haven’t, though yikes it adds up. But something about preparing for a baby makes me look to models who aren’t me. And suddenly I pictured Steve, 21 years old with a new baby in a tiny apartment in a low-income apartment complex with his girlfriend and his brand new Rosie, and no changing table. And they didn’t love her any less, certainly. No one ever died by just changing a baby on the bed or the floor, slipping in a waterproof changing pad if it was messy. And Rosie didn’t have the Einstein playmat, nor the Jungle Jumparoo, nor the BOB Revolution stroller, and they were all fine.

It made me so grateful for this time, that Steve and I get to buy baby items that make our lives easier — certainly with dogs it will be safer to have a designated place for diaper changes that isn’t the floor. And it also made me realize that truly, truly, as I’ve heard a million times and could only know by living through this, the baby needs nothing but us.

November 23rd, 2009 | Category: the baby thing | Comments (1)

Coming down into Detroit, at first the sun was setting above this thick blanket of clouds that stretched indefinitely and it was gorgeous, it really looked like I was looking directly at a sheep, and everything was a little bluish but it was still bright out.

Then we descended through the clouds and it felt like we were submerged underwater and I kept trying to take a breath to reassure myself that I wasn’t really drowning. And then I suddenly saw a sliver of sunset and realized that I could see again and we were in between two cloud blankets — a field of clouds above us, a field of clouds below us, and we hovered in between with a hot pink sliver of sun.

Did you know that there can be two layers of clouds with space in between? It was surreal. And still bright because of the sunset.

And then we descended through this second cloud layer and I took lots of breaths again, unable to focus, my eyes filled with clouds.

And then very suddenly it was  dark outside and we were looking over Detroit with all its lights on.

______

Steve picked me up at the airport and we drove home, together again, home again. After spending two weeks without someone, having that surreal experience of knowing someone you love only by their voice, and then returning and finding that that voice is attached to a body, it’s a head-spinner.

We went in the house and I whispered hello to the cats, barely perciptible. The dogs were locked in our bedroom, and when Steve walked in the bedroom door you could hear Moby already moaning, moaning like a human bound with duct tape. I don’t know if he smelled me or just knew that I was home. He bounded out to meet me, desperately. He fell to my feet and rolled over and rolled back up and licked my face and moaned and fell down again, trying so hard not to jump on me and unable to fully obey Steve’s orders that he blared from above while we huddled below in a puddle of tongues. Joon pranced and licked, pranced and licked, pranced and licked, pranced and licked.

I’ve read that dogs don’t know time — you can be gone an hour or a week and they won’t know the difference. That’s not true.

Moby has been at my feet ever since, making up for lost time.

November 23rd, 2009 | Category: happening, house, pet | Leave a comment

Last night the resident visual artists opened their studio doors so we could all walk around from building to building, studio to studio, getting a quick sense of what they’ve been thinking about during their time here. When I first got here, I really wished I’d come for visual art — I wanted to be making something tangible, to see progress and visual questioning, and to get to think visually instead of trudging through all this language. I was envious of their big, beautiful studios and appetizing art supplies. I forgot that impulse once I got more deeply into my writing, and in the end I think I’m glad I came for writing. Still, walking around their studios last night, it made me eager to get back to my studio at home.

November 19th, 2009 | Category: drawing, happening | Leave a comment

I came to the Vermont Studio Center thinking I perhaps had a few poems that I liked. I am leaving tomorrow morning with 9 poem-draft-drafts, 4 poem-drafts, and 14 poems that I like enough to send out to journals. It’s not that I wrote them all here — I wrote two from scratch material here, and one poem-draft-draft here. It’s that I came here not sure if I was a writer, or if what I’d been writing all year was really material that the world needed. Now I see that everything in my life really is material, and these scraps of things I was writing all year I have been given the chance to turn whole. I didn’t know how to move anything past the draft stage for the past year and a half. I think I was too much in crisis mode to polish. I needed to write, but I couldn’t push it to the professional point — or I needed to write, but I didn’t know how to push it past the draft writing that only I needed into a piece that the world could also access.

I came here not sure what sort of artist I am. I’m leaving with a much better understanding of why I make what I make, why it matters to me, and how it can be pushed — and also with a lot more questions. I know that there’s something I love about poetry, and also something I love about creative nonfiction, and about drawing. I came here feeling like somewhat of a fraud, hovering between all these worlds without dipping my feet fully into any. But now I see that I can do all of it. It just takes doing it. And while I’ve been feeling like a fraud, I had about 20 poems hiding in my journals all year long. And while I’ve been feeling like a fraud, I have a creative nonfiction manuscript that is complete (or at least for now), has an agent, and will someday hopefully soon be published. Making work can feel like time is moving backwards sometimes, but stepping back like this, printing out all these papers and seeing the sum of it, it’s proof that work is getting done even when it doesn’t feel like it is. I can leave here tomorrow knowing that I write, that I should write, and that there are a lot of projects inside of me, and that I don’t need to limit myself to one genre. I’m also leaving with a series of poems that I have to accept as a gift and keep pushing into a larger manuscript. That means that I actually am working on my second manuscript–I’m leaving being able to say that.

I came here not knowing how to be a professional writer. Now I know more which journals might accept my work and that I should submit to journals much more often. I know more that I really do have connections to all these artists, and they value what I have to say. And that the writing world really isn’t that big, and there’s room for me in it. And I know now much more securely that what I do is valid. Seeing all these artists sitting at their desks each day, staring out the window until a word comes, or spending the day reading, waiting, or spending the day researching, all these things are valid and necessary. It’s been hard in my life to say I’m a writer and an artist when people ask me what I do. Because I don’t go to my studio everyday, sometimes I write from home, because I’m not ever sure exactly what I’m writing, because the whole process is so mysterious, and because my publications are few. And because life has been difficult. It’s easier to talk about what I do in verbs than nouns — to say that I just graduated and I’m working on a book while raising dogs and kids and waiting for a baby — never mind I graduated two years ago and I don’t work on that particular book each day anymore. Coming here, surrounded by all these fascinating people doing what I do, it helps me to feel legit.

I came here in a crisis mode, hunkered down, afraid of flying bricks. I am leaving here no longer in crisis mode. I went through a lot in the past year and a half, but I feel that that chapter is over. After I wrote recently that I wasn’t sure what I was getting out of this blog format, I went back through the blog and read every single entry. And I realized that, one, there’s a lot of material there, and, two, that I went through a lot. I went through a lot, and meanwhile I was punishing myself for not pushing my work to a new level, but I don’t know if I could have then. I went through a lot and it’s over now.

As a sidenote, I have to say that for some reason I love to write and put images in this space. Sometimes poetry for me, at least right now, isn’t capacious enough. In this space I have all these questions that I’m grappling with in real time, plus I can publish photographs, and drawings, and notes, thoughts, poem-drafts, quotes from the outside world, all these things. It’s all material, I’m seeing here that it’s all material for future projects, even if I don’t know how. And most likely it’s unprofessional to have an online journal, but I like having it. It’s energy-giving. So at least for now it’s working for me.

I came here feeling a bit skittish of people, and feeling isolated. I’m leaving tomorrow feeling very connected to this group. For all my bad feelings about artists coming in, here are a bunch of genuinely kind people. The writers were especially close, and I’ve never been so confident that I was safe. There’s no sense of underlying judgment or threat here. I walk back to my room alone in the dark and all I have to think about is the beauty of the sky. Once when we were crossing the street and a car came, two people grabbed me to make sure I made it fast enough, though I was fine. Then one grabbed my arm to make sure I didn’t trip over something. I couldn’t go on a hike, it was just going to be too long and too uphill, and one of them brought me back a piece of a pine tree. I rarely had to bus my own plate. I’ve already had several offers to help me carry my suitcase to the shuttle bus tomorrow. I’m not asking for this sort of attention, I swear I’m not, but people here are attentive to one another. For all the reasons that I can’t wait to go home tomorrow, I’m still sad to see this group separate. We’ll never all be together again, and there was a dynamic that helped us truly coalesce the way that only some groups do.

It’s hard to see how something has changed you sometimes until time has passed. Probably there will be other ways, but these are the ways I can see right now. Going into the next phase in my life, I have a much more solid sense of myself as an individual and as a writer.

Walking out of my bedroom in the morning, the ground frosted, this is what I’ll miss.

November 19th, 2009 | Category: happening | Comments (2)