Voices From the Moon

the real last post...

i think.

new blog: usinargentina.com.

take care.

goodbye to all of that

Here goes. My last real post here. The real last one, which will be not quite as real, will contain a link to a new blog. This one hosted by both me and the fiance. We'll talk about Argentina, where we're moving in just over a month, among other things I'm sure. 

I have no idea what I've been doing here. I'm somewhat embarrassed looking back at it. By the ways in which I've put myself out there, by the fact that you all know how seriously I take myself. That won't change on the new blog, though I am aiming to be less serious (warning: highly unlikely that it'll take). 

I'm saying goodbye to Boston, a thought which leaves me scrambling for another thought to replace it. Not so easy to go there. It's been good, this city. Somehow, in little ways that I think will stay with me, it's been partly mine. Good things have happened, adult things, though I'm not sure where the last three and a half years have gone. 

One day my parents are driving up to help me move in and then the next I'm engaged. It all flies by. I have my Masters. I have been teaching college writing for three semesters and am better for it. I still write, when I can. I've begun sending things out and I'm getting rejected left and right. It serves as a nice kick in the ass, to be honest. As my fiance says: if it happened the first time around, it'd be too good. He's right. I wouldn't trust it.

There has been a lot going on. Living, teaching, writing, planning a wedding, planning for Argentina, being with friends, being engaged. So much that saying goodbye to Boston seems small, almost like nothing. Yet the other day I was walking through the Common on a particularly beautiful fall day. I was on my way to teach, planning how our hour and fifteen minutes would go, when I was struck by the yellow of a tree by the pond and by the statue of George Washington and it seems cheesy, but also by all that this city represents. It's an old city, in more than just the obvious ways, and it's a place I've come to love. Very much. I felt tears coming and then I noticed a woman walking in front of me, a homeless woman carrying a few bags. She suddenly stopped walking, dropped her bags, as if she'd resigned herself to something, and then she put her head back and began crying. It was bizarre and raw but when it happened, oddly, I felt a wave of gratitude. She was feeling it all for me. The weight of leaving, some fear of what's to come, all the good that this place has brought into my life-- these friends and the places I frequent and the writers I work with-- all who have made it absolutely what it's been. I don't have time to throw my head back so I, selfishly, imagined that the woman was letting out the pain I hadn't yet let myself feel.

Soon I'll share the new link. Keep up with us, if you like.

cloudy friday

A feel-good video for the weekend.

i wish

It's a rainy weekend. The only thing saving it is a visit from a good friend who I haven't seen in far too long. If she weren't coming (and if I weren't in grad school), I'd wish I were doing this this weekend, staying here, eating here, and taking a day trip to Greenwood and talking myself into one more night here. 

Elizabeth Strout was amazing yesterday. She was funny, articulate, and had profound things to say about writing, as an art and a business. If you  haven't read Olive Kitteridge, a linked story collection that won the Pulitzer last year, you should immediately. The stories are beautiful with details that stay with you, and a protagonist who still feels real to me, who I expect to run into on the street the next time I visit a small town in Maine. The book is the product of an artist with an enviable ability to choose the right word out of so many, and to find the detail that in just a few words gives the essence of a life. One of the most memorable moments of the Q and A I attended before the reading was when Strout described her love of sentences, and how that's what keeps her going. She said there have been two times in her life when she's thought of giving up on writing, finding a job, and then from nowhere, or from somewhere unknown, a sentence arises and she thinks, yes, I should probably see if I can do something with that sentence. And she goes back to her desk.

And in a follow-up to yesterday's post, I received an email recommending a game of lacrosse before writing as a way to enter an extraordinary state on an ordinary morning. The email said that Native Americans played lacrosse before going into war. I liked that, thought I'd share. 

how set yourself spinning?

It's an ordinary morning here in Boston. I woke up with that thought in my head. My thesis is turned in, and my mind is relaxed after months of obsession with it. I sit before my thesis committee a week from today. It's called a defense at Emerson, but I think of it as a grand critique. I'm ready for it. There are things I need to catch up on, things that were forgotten in the last weeks of revision, but I have time to take care of those, nothing pressing. Walking to get a coffee first thing this morning, sun on my face, I was struck again by the ordinariness of the day. I was grateful for it. Back to normal. When I got back to my apartment though, I remembered the work that is ahead of me, that will never end. I don't get a break from my desk. Don't deserve one. So, I settled back into my routine, read from a book that I always read a paragraph from in the mornings before I write. I open it up and read from whatever page I find myself on, and this morning, this is what I opened to:

 "Remarkably material also is the writer's attempt to control his own energies so he can work. He must be sufficiently excited to rouse himself to the task at hand, and not so excited he cannot sit down to it. He must have faith sufficient to impel and renew the work, yet not so much faith he fancies he is writing well when he is not.

For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. If you were a Zulu warrior banging on your shield with your spear for a couple of hours along with a hundred other Zulu warriors, you might be able to prepare yourself to write. If you were an Aztec maiden who knew months in advance that on a certain morning the priests were going to throw  you into a hot volcano, and if you spent those months undergoing a series of purification rituals and drinking dubious liquids, you might, when the time came, be ready to write. But how, if you are neither Zulu warrior nor Aztec maiden, do you prepare yourself, all alone, to enter an extraordinary state on an ordinary morning?

How set yourself spinning? Where is an edge-- a dangerous edge-- and where is the trail to the edge and the strength to climb it?"

-Annie Dillard

So, I look around. My plants are dying and I really don't know why, I've taken good care of them. My mom sent me tulips and so I try to look more at those than the browning, sagging branches of my plants. I'm going to hear Elizabeth Strout read tonight (she wrote Olive Kitteridge, a book I've read three times in the past few months just to try to get some sense of how she does what she does). There's a yoga class I love in a couple of hours. All somewhat ordinary things. 

I'm still trying to figure out how to channel my inner Zulu warrior or Aztec maiden. Any ideas?

open eyes

"Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare. Pry. Listen. Eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long." –Walker Evans

(I wrote this a couple weeks ago.)

Today was a beautiful day. I spent most of it inside, writing, and when I finally got outside the sunlight was nearly gone and I was a bit disoriented from seeing only my computer screen for the past six hours. I went to the little convenience store a couple blocks away to buy milk, and when I got to the counter, the cashier was arguing with a boy in front of me, age sixteen or so. The cashier wouldn’t sell him a lighter because he didn’t have ID, and the boy didn’t think that was a law. The interaction started to escalate, and then suddenly the boy turned around to leave, holding his arms out to both sides and knocking products off of shelves—chips, newspapers, bottles of water—on his way out. The owner detained him and called for a coworker to call the police, sound the alarm, lock the doors to the store. It hit me that I hadn’t even brushed my teeth. The boy’s friends started yelling at him to run because they couldn’t get locked up; they were cursing each other, the boy, the owner. I looked at the boy again and it was clear that he was scared. The owner saw it too and I watched him loosen his grip as he told him that he needed to learn a thing or two about respect, that he’d be in jail before he was eighteen, and this would be his life, end of story. He told him he got to make choices and if he wanted to always make the wrong ones, he would be unwelcome in his store and every other place he went. He then unlocked the doors, let the boys go, and sold me my milk with an apology.

I might have missed this had I not wanted to get a bit of sunshine before the day was done. I sometimes forget that writing is all about looking at the world around you, knowing it, exploring it, staring at it. And the time at the desk is necessary, essential, but walking outside to buy milk is too and having my eyes open as I do that is the only way that anything will ever happen when I sit down at the desk.

(I was tempted to write 'clear eyes, full hearts' as the subject line in honor of another favorite television series, Friday Night Lights. Watch it.)

couple things

This is a long interview, but worth it if you're into writing, or want to know more about the MFA program and its value.

 I believe it's time now to cut myself off from most everything but my thesis. It's nearing the end and I'm facing the wall, where I work best. Let's hope it works this time as it always has.

I hear from those who know that I need to get better at promoting my own work. So, though it pains me to write this, I will be reading at Brookline Booksmith in the Breakwater Reading Series tomorrow (Friday) night at 7pm. (I feel very safe putting that on here as I feel sure that no one who reads this lives in Boston. But I can now say that I tried.)

poetry

I love reading poetry when I'm deep into my own writing. It's a whole new way of working with language and so I find it doesn't distract me from my work as reading fiction sometimes can. I really like this poem, and just found this video of the writer reading it. Now, back to work.

mediocrity

as Ira Glass puts it: 

"It's hard to make something that's interesting. It's really, really hard. ... Basically, anything that anyone makes. ... It's like a law of nature, a law of aerodynamics, that anything that's written or anything that's created wants to be mediocre. The natural state of all writing is mediocrity. It's all tending toward mediocrity in the same way that all atoms are sort of dissipating out toward the expanse of the universe. ... So what it takes to make anything more than mediocre is such an act of will. ..."

I think this is why I have a hard time with blog writing. It's quick and rooted in immediacy and there's so much left out. It's against my nature, not my style. But I'm trying.

the road

I have a thing for the road. Maybe it's because I grew up an hour from a movie theater or a photography store, and I had friends who left for college before I did and a sister in Dallas right after I got my driver's license. My parents were generous in letting me go where I wanted, and looking back, I'm most grateful for it.

The town where I grew up is a beautiful place with two red lights and three restaurants. Both sets of grandparents lived about a mile on either side of my childhood home and my mom's sister was a short four-wheeler ride down a turnrow away. My dad's sister-in-law taught me first grade and high school science. There were always people looking out for me, people who cared about me and wanted good things for me. In fact, there were very few places where I wasn't under someone's watch. Maybe that's the real reason behind my love for the road-- it gave me something new, and time to figure out who I was, who I wanted to be, outside of the place where everybody knew who I'd always been.

For the past three years, I've driven to New York City a couple times a month to visit my boyfriend. I know the drive now almost as well as I do the drive from my hometown to the city where I could see a movie, get film developed. My parents usually come by car (twenty-four hours) when they visit Boston, and as much as I tease them about a fear of flying, I get that it's also about knowing how you got from one place to the other, what kind of landscapes there are, what kind of people might live along the way, what kind of cars they drive, houses they build. For me, my drive to and from New York has become one filled with gratitude for what's at the end of it-- one way, time with my boyfriend, and the thrill of New York; the other way, the (comparative) quiet of Boston, my apartment, work and routine. That's all quickly coming to an end as we'll both soon be in Boston full-time, so after this past weekend in New York, it hit me on my way back just how lucky I've been, to spend time on these New England roads, to know what it looks like between here and there. 

For what it's worth, I now see the way I grew up as one of the great blessings of my life. I was reminded of that today. The people of my hometown are now rallying around a young man in the community who is seriously ill. He was a year below me in high school, and he made a life there after he was done; he has become a familiar and friendly fixture in the community. I've gotten emails about his unexpected illness, and on Facebook, pleas are coming from almost everyone I've ever known there for prayers and thoughts. They are all gathering to hold a vigil for him, hoping for and believing in a miracle. Most of them aren't his family or even his closest friends, but he's a part of their lives because of the place they live and work and raise their families, and so they go above and beyond for him. That's just the way it is there. There's little to say, beyond just that I'm thankful for it, amazed by it. And that I'm thinking about John, hoping for and believing in a miracle.