I feel such a part of this community here. Most of the time I don’t even notice that I’m pregnant and then someone will bring it up. I let a visiting artist into the writing studios today and really I should recognize her, she was introduced to all of us and she’s special, she’s an established artist and seems wonderful, but I didn’t recognize her at all. I’ve see you around. You look like you’re about to give birth any minute, is what she said to me. I’m not used to being the one that people notice. It’s not good for my art even how much I’ve tried to stay invisible — small work, short poems, titles that don’t call too much attention to themselves. I can’t hide now, though. But still I feel like I’m part of this group. And then I was realizing today that there are so many ways that this experience is different because I’m pregnant. Ways that I was sort of denying. It’s not that while pregnant I think about my differences from my past self constantly, but when I tally them up I realize that there just happens to be a lot. But I just live with them and mostly I don’t notice. I like the contrast of my really feeling like my old self in comparison to the list of how I’m not.

i walk so slowly it’s as if i’m underwater. i love to walk, so i do, but i don’t make it very far. i notice that when people are behind me walking to the cafeteria, they catch up with me very quickly. if i try to match their pace, i have to walk at a speed that feels abnormally fast.

food going down in small fragments, so i burp and gurgle every so often. food that burns as if hot bread were stuck in my throat.

leaning way back to digest.

hair thicker, and somehow wavier.

eyes sunken.

pale. green, almost.

sitting up so straight, so positively straight, i must be leaning back, because of my back.

a back that aches while sitting so most of the time i’m stuffing a sweatshirt behind me so i’m sitting with a thick arch in my back, my stomach sticking way out. i always have to remember to bring an extra shirt with me wherever i go.

unable to sit perched sideways for long — my computer has to be directly in front of me as i type or everything starts to hurt.

sitting way back makes me look uninvolved, like i’m listening passively to people as they speak. as i type, i have to lean back, which makes me feel less invested in what i’m typing.

an always sort-of stuffy nose, so i am conscious of my nose for a lot of the day and sniff a lot.

sporadic sleep.

nightmares, nightmares. my brain does not fully belong to me and thoughts feel like toxins that stay with me through too much of the morning and then return to me when i enter my bed again.

i’m just thicker. thicker thighs and face and of course stomach.

i am more sensitive. and more cranky.

i am more forgetful. the world makes less sense to me. i don’t fully trust i’ve really looked both ways before i cross the street.

my energy goes up and down very quickly. and with it my moods.

i’m on the lookout for pain. any pulling or weird feeling in my stomach sends me into high alert. it’s not that pain hurts more than before the pregnancy, it’s that the pain might mean something awful so it suddenly is so much louder.

i get incredibly thirsty. if i’m thirsty and i can’t drink a whole lot of water then i feel truthfully like i might pass out.

i inspect all the food in the cafeteria too thoroughly. what cheese might not be pasteurized and if i don’t know then is it worth the risk. how much caffeine is in that earl gray tea and is it worth the risk. does the salad bar look fresh enough, do those olives look like they’re from a can. i eye longingly the soda machine but so far i’ve refrained.

there’s wine at most events. people get louder or quieter or an altered, less self-conscious, less-edited version of themselves. i become the watcher of their changes and not the participant.

how many times i’ve run to the bathroom in a day.

i feel stylish, i have layers and colors i love, i’m surrounded by people who are stylish and i see myself reflected in them. then i’ll catch a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror and realize that i look very undone, uncomposed, and swollen. pants fit funny, with my pelvis tilted back to make room for the baby. my body’s posture is more of an S than ever before. shirts don’t fit all the way over my belly. oh, i am not actually stylish. i just look tired. but the most stylish woman in the residency, wow, she’s pretty, she came over to tell me that i looked good and that she hopes she looks this good when she’s pregnant. here i was intimidated by her, for no reason. well, for how far along you are, i mean, she added. oh.

November 16th, 2009 | Category: happening, the baby thing | Leave a comment

Ordinarily, we look at something, and our gaze is like a fine wire or a taut thread with two supports — one being the eye and the other what it sees, and there’s some such great support structure for every second that passes; but at this particular second, on the contrary, it is rather as though something painfully sweet were pulling our eye-beams apart.

– Robert Musil, from The Man Without Qualities (the introductory quote to Matthea Harvey’s book Pity the Bathtub its Forced Embrace of the Human Form).

November 16th, 2009 | Category: overheard | Leave a comment

.

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(this is as close as i can get to my dog right now. a photocopy of a photograph i took of him re-photographed from the back. plus his spine, or a silk flag– the initial silk piece I found through the exhibit ‘Come Darkness’.)

November 14th, 2009 | Category: pet, photograph | Leave a comment

So we adapt. I don’t notice the shower-head is moldy anymore. I don’t mind the construction noise. I don’t feel bad for myself that I can’t drink organic milk here.

I felt humbled today: walking downtown with a pillow case full of laundry, heading over for my date with Suds ‘n’ Dry for the afternoon. We residents with our VSC mugs and artsy scarves stick out pretty badly in a relatively rural low-income town.

The lights from outside light up my room at night, so I shut both the blinds and the curtains, and I’ve loved the ritual now of waking up in darkness, amazed at what time it is if it’s really so dark, then buttoning back up the curtains and twisting open the blinds. The grounds are covered with frost, everything reflecting light.

Someone keeps slamming the door at 4:30 in the morning, so I put on ambient noise.

When we travel, I have moments of being afraid that I won’t have these details in my life that seem to hold my identity: the ritual of morning walks or a specific coffee or the exact right kind of tea. It makes me a little anxious to leave for a long time, especially when we’ve traveled to another country, because none of the things that are my comforts will be with me. But it’s never a problem. We always just make do.

It makes me realize that, for all the horror stories people like to arm me with for what it will be like when the baby comes, like anything else we’ll adapt.

(Though a woman here very kindly came over to me on my birthday and gave me her aluminum water bottle because she knew that I didn’t like to drink out of plastic. I was willing to adapt, but I love how she was helping me bring my values that I hold at home to this place. Wow, that’s nice. People are so warm sometimes. I barely know her and she gave me a present. I’ve been impressed with the people here and their humanity. My brother says that maybe we should walk around pretending that everyone is our best friend, but they just have amnesia so they’ve momentarily forgotten.)

November 13th, 2009 | Category: happening | Leave a comment

It’s interesting and strange that I am conspicuously different. Maybe everyone feels that. But people stare at me here. Introductory questions focus on my stomach.

No one can be mean to a pregnant lady. I am instantly read, I think, to be a good person, and a stare quickly becomes a hello. One man takes my plates for me when I’m done eating.

Part of me feels like this is a small gift I can give to this place, to show that a pregnant peer can do this thing, too–can make work, exist away from home, eat the food that’s doled out to us, sleep in a rickety twin bed, and oversocialize.

Steve said that I could rob a bank now and then go in hiding for a couple of months and re-emerge out when the baby’s born. He says I look that different and that I should capitalize on it somehow.

My sister said the same thing about people she met when they were pregnant: when she finally saw them not-pregnant, she could get a better sense of who they were, and their features returned to themselves. Oh, that’s what you really look like.

I see that my face is different since becoming pregnant. My eyes deeper-set, darker underneath, my face more swollen, my nose sort-of swollen, breathing out of my mouth, my skin much paler, my hair thicker. I’m not sure if these people would recognize me in a couple of months.

In the cafeteria when I’m walking by, people make way. They step way back or they scoot their chairs up as close to the dining table as possible, as if I were five feet wide.

I’ve felt less pregnant here, though, than previously in the pregnancy. I try to move like everyone else, as flexibly and as quickly. With a prop in front of my stomach like in the movies, I could seem not-pregnant.

The baby is getting bigger and this is how I know: when it moves, not only do I feel it but I can see it. I watch my stomach move around, become asymmetrical, cone-shaped sometimes and then something pokes up in the upper left quadrant. All this visual shifting. It’s subtle, but sometimes I wonder if anyone else is watching.

November 13th, 2009 | Category: happening, the baby thing | Leave a comment

I’m trying to figure out what to do with this blog space.

Poor Steve, I’m always griping about / searching for what my next path should be. Post-school-school-school, not wanting to teach art, sort-of wanting to teach writing, pregnant, post(?)-first-manuscript, and finally feeling the space in my brain and heart to go forward.

My energy goes into lots of little things, but no big thing. I love keeping a blog. I had started it up again last January because I was talking to Jennifer, my always-inspirational writing companion, about what to do next and where I feel my energy, and she felt that, aside from a book or a gallery show or anything, she felt it was enough, it was plenty, to catalogue all these moments in my day. Because that’s what we do each Friday, we recount our lives and talk too long and write some and it’s always enlightening and funny. So my initial intention was to do that, to make my blog a sort of place for recounting small things — the penny I found, the flower I scavenged, the funny thing someone said, the process of making or burning dinner. I thought it would be more like notes–not thinking about audience or sentence-structure. And though each entry wouldn’t have plot, time passes and so plot occurs naturally.

But over time I think it has become too much of a written journal. And definitely it’s something I need, and it’s something that gives me energy. I love trying to write a piece that feels whole about something that happened — pumpkin carving or a funny interaction with Rosie — and trying to see the ’so what’ inside that moment and create a sort of mini-essay out of the moments of my life. And I think no writing is for naught–that energy of crafting sentences, of noticing something and transcribing it to the page is always valuable. And plus this is a place of problem-solving: I come here with an issue or question and I work it out on the page, which is how I like to deal with things.

But I think it has moved away from more of an artful catalogue of a life, and maybe has become too self-conscious. I think part of that was slightly inevitable because a good chunk of this blog has been grappling with infertility and IVF and IVF again. That’s a lot of plot, and a lot of exhaustion, and I wasn’t in a space to talk a lot about pennies I found and flowers I had scavenged. I was in crisis mode.

Being here at the Vermont Studio Center has lifted me out of crisis mode: it has allowed me to step back and see less near-sightedly, to see what I want to do next. My hope is to get a project underway — that sounds very hopeful, maybe too hopeful, but I want to explore the threads of projects that I’ve begun these past few years and to see if they have the strength to weave themselves into a larger project. Sometimes when I think about what I want to do next, I see a collection of poems. Sometimes I see an interaction of poetry and imagery. Sometimes I see something more like what Anne Carson does, where the genre isn’t singular in one book, so there are essays and poems and imagery. But I had so much satisfaction in creating the last manuscript, which, also inspired a lot by Anne Carson, tried to push the form of the essay–usually beginning with what was originally a poem and forgetting about line breaks. The act of writing it was so rigorous to me, but what created the drive inside of me was the essay form’s marriage with the fact that I had powerful material, a subject matter that I felt really needed to be recorded. I had an urgency in writing the last manuscript–this feeling that it needed to be written, I could not die without having written it. I actually felt at moments, absurdly, like I was invincible, like I was so meant to write it that I surely would not die until it was done, and that would keep me safe as I was driving or crossing a street.

I want to find that feeling again, and truthfully I feel the seeds of it most these days when I’m writing in the blog: infertility, pregnancy, the minutia of a marriage and a family, photographs and text, I feel an urgency in describing and recounting this. But also I don’t feel creative when I’m recounting it, or I don’t feel like I’m breaking new ground. Books about IVF have been written before; blogs about a family are all over the internet. I’m not a journalist, and I can’t write a self-help book, and my creative writing does not pointedtly deal with infertility.

Instead, here at the Vermont Studio Center, the material that is most inspiring is not what I’ve written for the blog. I’ve had more luck so far working with drafts of poems I’d begun with another site I created and manage, a password-protected site where my friends and I post two poem-drafts a month. I’ve also had more luck working with drafts of stuff I’d begun for twosuchmaps, another site I created and manage. The parts of this blog, courtneymandryk.com, that have been most inspiring for me this week so far have been the photographs. When I mark a photograph with the date as its title then it’s part of a photograph series: I photograph something that to me feels like a drawing. I don’t know how to describe that yet, but I know it when I see it. That transcendence of form is what I seem to like to think about, and the photograph-to-drawing transcription has been exciting for me so far.

Which leaves me unsure where to go on this blog or in my next project. If I’m going to put my time and energy into the blog, I want it to be great and I want it to feed me. I like the medium of the online world — it’s a fantastic place to explore the transcendence of materials. And I also love cataloguing the moments of my life. It makes my life feel real to me, it keeps me in the moment, and it helps me see the artfulness in each day. But it isn’t enough so far, I don’t think, and I don’t know how it’s contributing to my next project. I want to get more out of this online space, and I don’t yet know how.

November 12th, 2009 | Category: inward | Comments (1)

November 11th, 2009 | Category: photograph | Leave a comment

Me and my brother turn 30 today.

November 11th, 2009 | Category: happening | Leave a comment

Some images of the world here.

The bridge connecting the vermont studio center to the town is currently under construction, so the images have an extra detail of bright orange plastic and a very tall crane. Bridges are serious business.

I am settling much more into this life. So far the days actually feel too short. I had feared the opposite. There are so many starts in my studio, all this hope, so much that I want to work on, I sometimes feel a shortness of breath, I want to get as much done as possible. There’s magic here, we’re all under a spell of creativity and productivity, I have to make the most of it, and figure out how to bring some of this magic home with me.

My bedroom in Pearl House:

Pearl House:

Construction at vsc:

The Maverick Writing Studios are in the background, that long gray building.

Maverick Writing Studios:

My studio:

November 10th, 2009 | Category: happening | Leave a comment