Slacking

Not slacking in real life--that has been a to-do list that never ends. I had to start typing my to-do lists at work because they were getting too messy.

But in terms of reading, not a lot of memoir recently. But I do have this, even though I have this feeling the form will change:

Your body is a rope I cannot undo.

Even in sleep, a battle: the cords of your neck,

hands in fists. I wait until your breath deepens

before I place the next needle, waiting to see

what your body will give up today. You tell me of dreams

where white teeth surround you, so I try

to let you rest for longer, knowing you rise

throughout the night, shaken from sleep

by anything.

Your pulse is weak.

Your body is trying to escape you.

Every week, the meridian of your body twisted

in some new way. I drain the heat from you again

and again. But still you wake at 3 am to eat bread

and keep down the anger. I needle the four gates,

hoping this time the channels will open.

I want you weightless and spinning,

floating over dunes, sand shaped like hips that never end.

I have tried more heat, sliding the fire cups over your shoulder

Gua sha: hot spoons scraping the skin of your neck. Wishing

I could excise out the knots like a surgeon, wishing for balance.

Let this go,

erase the ghost that stands on the periphery,

counting your mistakes.

Matching Authors to Their Books

I'm teaching Creative Non-Fiction again this semester, even though it is poorly named "Life Stories" by the humanities department. We just got done with Moveable Feast, and I have to say this group will definitely generate some good quotes for the semester.

My personal favorites so far: "I looked at pictures of Hemingway online, and he just didn't seem like the type to kill himself." This was quickly followed up with another student asking "It seemed like he really loved his wife, so why did he divorce her?"

They were questions I couldn't really answer--I referred to Hemingway's struggle with depression, his illnesses, earlier suicide attempts and two stays in hospitals. In terms of Hemingway's multiple marriages, the best I could offer was that he did love Hadley, but perhaps married too young, or simply was not 'husband material.' For me, I think part of the reason I enjoy memoir so much is because even as the author reveals aspects of him or herself, there are other parts left hidden, that subtext.

Since I'll be teaching On the Road directly after, I'm really excited to raise the ideas of how tone and construction are tied together. (And also the idea of self-editing for audience.) How will I write about the events of my life in 30 years differently than if I wrote about them tomorrow?

We'll see how it goes.

My Mom Was a Hippie

She had long hair (parted down the middle), did batik, and made us shop at the organic food store. I think we were one of 10 families that kept that store in business--for some reason, health food in a small Southern town in the early 80's was just about 20 years ahead of schedule.

She had an acoustic guitar and played a lot of James Taylor, John Denver, and some Joan Baez. We sang in the car, we sang while cooking, we picked blueberries from the backyard and made cobblers in the summer.

But this isn't really the point of this post. The point is this: I have had the song "Take Me Home, Country Roads" in my head for two days now. Songs usually last for about a week with me, so the cats will continue to hear me singing this for quite awhile. I didn't understand the appeal of John Denver when I was younger, but I think I get it now.

He sings without irony.

It's kind of beautiful.

Memoir and Trauma

When I was in grad school, I took a creative non-fiction class that my friend Laura has described as "Let's write about the most depressing thing that ever happened to us." And for the most part, that was a pretty apt description.

People wrote about struggles with depression and bipolar disorder, broken families, alcoholism. Even the most (dare I say) positive story was from a girl who wrote about her parent's divorce.
It was a great class because it taught me how to use a story arc and how to craft something other than a poem, which was the genre I chose when I was 14. But it wasn't an enjoyable task.

Last week, I read a new memoir entitled Without a Map. I originally read the first chapter of Without a Map as an essay called "Shunned" in an anthology called In Fact. The book continues where the essay began: the author's pregnancy at 16 in the 60s. Her mother sent her to live with her father (where she hid her pregnancy.) To me, the most interesting part of the memoir is not so much the author's pain at being shunned or how it affected her in the first five or six years after the event, but the 15 and 20 years later.

The second half of the book deals with the author's reunion with the son she gave up, and how the fable she comforted herself with, that her son had a 'better' life without her, was not necessarily true. The son grew up in poverty with an abusive father. The author, at the book's end, is still estranged from her father, and her mother has died without ever giving an apology or an explanation for her actions.

There is no real resolution. This will never be an Oprah book pick. But the book is beautiful--the prose is spare, the descriptions are vivid, and she shows how one conflict, one secret, ends up changing the shape of familial relationships irrevocably.

Perhaps we remember the bad events, the traumatic ones, most closely because these are the ones we remember. We play the events back in our head over and over, saying or doing a different thing. We remember trauma because these are the things we wish to fix but can't.

Getting Back to Work

It's been two years since I graduated with my MFA and I haven't done much on the writing front.
Granted, I've picked up some other useful skills in that time: how to deal with an invisible boss, how to hire 20 students in three weeks, how to move apartments, how to argue with an insurance company.

But since things have stabilized on the work and health front, it's time to get back to work. Armed with my city library card, I am giving up for the most part ordering books through the school's ILL (because their reservation system is a pain in the ass.) I'll keep using it for academic books, but for everything else, it's the Harold Washington Library, baby. The gargoyles on the top of it always make me thing of the beginning of Disney's Beauty and the Beast.

The blog will mostly be books I'm reading, or snippets of poems I'm working on. Mostly, it's a log for me, so that I can say at the end of the summer, or this time next year, that I did actually work on my craft, or at least read some good books.

Good memoirs I've read lately:

Without a Map (Meredith Hall)
Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction (David Sheff)
Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes it to the Streets (Sudhir Venkatesh)

I'll post on the memoirs later, either today or tomorrow.