37º ~ warming to 40º under white skies, the cloud cover solid but not gray ~ we await the snow predicted to fall this evening

While Karin Gottshall’s book, The River Won’t Hold You, is not necessarily a “project” book, the poems within it do follow something of a chronological trajectory. In the early poems, the speaker recalls moments of girlhood and adolescence, coming of age, the onset of menstruation, the first sexual encounters. Later, the poems transition to those of a young adult, a woman making her way into later, older poems, all the while with key moments from her formative years peeking through. If there are “project” themes in the book, they are the speaker’s parents, the desire for companionship at the deepest levels, and the presence of water, sometimes as a river, sometimes as rain or snow, in a few poems, the ocean. Overall, the book emits the weightiness of longing and loss, momentarily alleviated with joy. In other words: life.

The thing I most admire about Gottshall’s work is her ability to be straightforward, plainspoken, but to still make poetry that is alive with sound and image. For example, when introducing the father figure that will show up periodically through the book, Gottshall writes that he “was a kind of Noah–all resolve and solitude, / cabinetry and salt” (from “Forecast,” the first poem in the book). Listen to those ohs. First, the “oh” made soft by the “ah” in Noah; then, the mournful, repeated “ol” in resolve and solitude; and finally, the snapping consonants in cabinetry and salt. So the nature of the speaker’s relationship to her father is subtly conveyed to the attentive reader through sound. In image, the father is akin to Noah, a patriarchal savior associated with water; however, that image becomes much more nuanced later in the book.

The River Won’t Hold You is a book filled with the speaker’s longing, a longing caused in part by the false constructions of fairy tales and female myths. In “Eve,” Gottshall begins, “All I had was the doe’s rib bone– / … // but I talked to her like she was whole, / could hear. I was seventeen. It was a way I had / of praying, I think.” Following right on the heels of “Eve” is “Once.” It begins:

I won’t start with once
upon a time. Because that’s the whole

story isn’t it, lovely as she was
with her hair like honey? She bled

alone on the bed when he’d left
and the queen set her to work threading

needles in the dark.

Shakespeare’s female characters also make an appearance. In the poem “Pretty Stories,” Gottshall reimagines it this way: “Ophelia, in her flip-flops, writes her paramour’s name / against the dusk with the spitting tip of a sparkler wand.” As these images add up throughout the book, the reader understands the speaker as searching for a way to move through the world as a woman. That searching is deepened by explorations of grief. As the speaker struggles to understand what it is she wants out of the world, she must also deal with the facts of death, as we all must.

Yet, with these themes woven through every poem, The River Won’t Hold You is not a book that left me heavy with sadness. Rather, the poems take a matter of fact stance, often including brief snips of wry humor to offset the weight of opening oneself to the full human experience of love and loss. Even now, the poems are calling to me to revisit them for the hard-earned wisdom they contain.

59º ~ sweet sun, tiny breezes, a lull before an oncoming winter blast, everyone giddy with the chance of an ice day on Monday

Reader, I continue to try and practice my new mantra: “We schedule what we value.” In that vein, I’ve tried to make better use of my time, especially when I get home “after school” as we say around here, both of us being teachers. In the past, I’ve generally spent my later afternoons and early evenings grading, working on piddly emails, and sitting in my recliner with re-runs of Law & Order as background noise. For the most part, I’d get a few small things accomplished and convince myself my day was over. I’d make excuses for not heading back to the desk of the Kangaroo.

This week, in an attempt to break this pattern, and because my writing time on Tuesday and Thursday morning didn’t seem all that productive, I’ve refused the lure of my recliner and headed instead to my writing space. While I didn’t write, I am proud of what I did accomplish.

This week, I applied to two writing residencies for this summer. I think I’ve only ever applied to a residency one other time. Mostly, I’ve made excuses. They sound like this.

1. I don’t have time to do the applications since they are mostly due during hectic times of the academic year, and I have a 5/5 load with half of that as composition.  [Can’t you just hear the pity-party violins?!]

2. I don’t have kids so I can’t justify the expense of doing a residency when I have oodles and oodles of quiet time at home in the summer.

3. You have to “know someone” to get into a residency, and I don’t, so why bother.

4. My job doesn’t require this kind of “career building,” so why bother.

It may seem silly, but I had to convince myself that I still deserved the chance to steep myself in writing for a few weeks and shut out all my home responsibilities.

So, I took a deep breath and applied to two residencies, using my time in the late afternoons. I have to say that being able to apply electronically might be what finally tipped the scale. I was able to “finish” each application in an afternoon, although I didn’t submit in the first sitting. I went back to proof and polish before hitting “submit.”

And hitting “submit” was nerve-wracking. Teaching outside the “ivory tower” of MFA/PhD programs, or even at a 4-year with a strong BA/BFA in creative writing, I’m not “in the know” of what I’m supposed to say on these applications. I also don’t have connections with those “top-tier” poets whose name as a recommender might ensure my entrance (and here are my excuses, raising their ugly heads again). Without knowing the “hip” thing to say, I went with the truth, in plain Midwestern language, and that feels a bit unsettling.

Yes, I’ve fallen prey to the “it’s not what you do, it’s who you know” gremlin, along with its sibling, “there’s a secret handshake / code / clique and you don’t know it or belong to it.” I’m trying to shake those suckers loose and remind myself that each of my books was published without any “connection” setting it up for me (as is true for most poets), that my poems have mostly appeared in journals where I have no “connection” to the editors until after they’ve met my poems (as is true for most poets as well), and that I’ve accomplished quite a lot in my slow, plodding, perseverance.

Still, the uneasiness lingered through this morning’s drafting session, so I’ve got about 5 pages of lines/words that never congealed in my journal. Oh well, that will be fodder for the next session.

46º ~ gusting, sharp winds promising to bring a high in the mid-60s, the sun just now beating out the gray overcast and spilling in/over the desk

Dear reader, today, I drafted a poem. It may be a “shitty first draft” as Anne Lamott encourages us to allow in her book, Bird by Bird, but it’s a draft. I am finely feeling well enough to sit at the desk and do more than read and scratch at lines. For that I am thankful. I am also thankful for my poet-friend, Molly Spencer. Without her, I wouldn’t have the draft I have today.  (Here’s a link to Molly’s fine poem, “Aubade with Transverse Orientation,” which appeared in Heron Tree.)

To explain: Even in this time of non-writing, I’ve been gathering inspiration. One place I gather such is from Molly’s blog, The Stanza. On 16 January 2015, Molly wrote about her friend Deborah Keenan’s book, From Tiger to Prayer, a collection of writing prompts, and I followed the little lightning zap in my gut that said “get that book, now!” I’m so happy to have it, not only for the prompts but also for the discovery of Keenan as a collage artist as well.

Then, on 23 January 2015, Molly wrote about the use (and strength of) images to convey meaning. She used a poem from Catherine Barnett’s Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes are Pierced (Alice James, 2004) to illustrate. Again, I followed the zap in my gut and immediately requested a copy of Barnett’s book via the Interlibrary Loan program at my local public library. (Huzzah for public libraries and librarians!)

This morning, I read Barnett’s book and was blown away by the power of the images, just as Molly promised. After I finished, I did a quick word bank, flipping through the book haphazardly. Then, I started thumbing through From Tiger to Prayer, definitely skeptical that I would be able to get a poem drafted today. Skeptical, that is, until I came upon this prompt: “Write seven poems in a week. Each poem begins with the word ‘today.'”

And there I went, to the daunting blank page of my journal, the blank page following the word bank. From the corner of my eye I caught the word “clock” from the word bank, and truth be told, that’s the only word I needed to spark the draft. It begins:

Today, there is a clock
carving time into the branches
of the dead tree that threatens
to fall. By this I mean

…

We actually did have a huge dead tree threatening our house until last week when the tree cutters came to cut it down and feed it to the wood chipper. The tree (and the clock…yes, it’s a real, functioning clock in the poem) come to stand for the work of home ownership. Oh, and my recent, nagging, bronchial illness manages to assert itself in the poem as well.

So, there’s the messy, sausage- / law- / poem-making process for the day…and that’s not even the half of it. Later, if the poem survives its infancy, there will be heaps of revision. Wahoooza.

61º ~ yes, 61º on Jan. 19, you gotta love the mid-South, we’ll get back to our “normals” of around 50º for a high for the rest of the week, but we’re headed close to 70º today ~ while I know warming trends are not a good thing, I’m going to put this one in the short-term plus column

This semester, I asked my Creative Writing I students to email me any questions they have about writing. I did this to A) establish an email connection with each student and B) to help guide my prep for the semester. In general, I’ve gotten a lot of “How much do writers make?” “How long does it take to get a book published?” “What can I do with creative writing if I don’t want to teach?” and “What do I do about writer’s block?” type questions. Remember, these are first-time creative writing students, and community college students as well, meaning many of them won’t have been exposed to information about the writing life. All of these are the questions I expected and have a lot of experience covering in class.

However, one question sent me rocking back on my heels. A very enthusiastic student asked “Why do I get bored when I read?” and “What do I need to read to become a better writer?” Like many of my students, he has a great desire to write but has little background in reading. He sees this gap and is concerned, but as he’s tried to read in the past, he’s gotten “bored.” (This sets him apart from a lot of the other students who want to write but don’t enjoy reading…without an awareness of that lack of enjoyment.)

I’ve been mulling over this question, and I don’t have a definitive answer for this one student, because I don’t know him well enough yet, but I have one major guess.

Our 21st century, technology-based society does not cultivate the enjoyment of reading. When asked what they do in their spare time, over 60% of my class (males and females) report playing video games. The other 40% doesn’t have spare time because of family responsibilities, jobs, and school. Now, I’m not a rabid hater of video games. I think that some of them pull in the imagination in creative ways, and I do believe that we all need to have some things we simply do for “fun.” What I do see, however, is that gaming and surfing the net require the opposite of skills needed for enjoyable reading.

Reading fiction, poetry, or creative non-fiction requires flexible imagination muscles. It requires the ability to inhabit the life of another person and understand it (empathy), and the best writing lures us into that imaginative act and feeds a human need. Sadly, as our world has turned toward technology and speed of information, there are fewer and fewer vehicles for creating empathy through imagination. (As the student asking the question is a young man, closer to a traditional student than a non-traditional one, I also wonder if “teaching to the test” has caused some of this as well.)

My thoughts might not be completely clear, but I don’t think this student has taken the time with his reading to take it in and find pleasure from the experience of empathy. I say this because over the last decade of teaching, I have definitely noticed a decrease in the ability of my students to read something as simple as an assignment sheet and retain that information. They “read” by running their eyes over the words and comprehending them in that moment, but not by “taking in” the information communicated by the words.

All of this hits me at a time when I’ve taken up mindfulness training (in a non-formal way). I first learned of mindfulness when I was a college student in the late 1980s/early 1990s, and I was assigned  one of Thich Nhat Hahn’s books on mindfulness. This practice requires slowing down and actually being in the moment. There’s no way I can sum it up well here, but it is all about “the now.” Eckhart Tolle is a writer discussing this topic who many more may have heard of these days, thanks to Oprah.

In any case, I’ve been struck by how the practice of mindfulness, really being and seeing each moment “I am washing this dishes. This is how it feels to wash the dishes..etc.” correlates with the practice of reading. We have to give our whole attention to the words, body & mind, and when we don’t, we comprehend and retain less. This proves true in my own life. I have a bad habit of trying to multi-task while I read. I might be trying to eat while I read, which requires juggling silverware, dishes, food, etc. while reading. Every time I do this, I realize I’m less engaged with the text before me. When I do focus on the words and read with a pen in my hand, then I get the full experience of empathy, of enjoyment, of new thoughts, and/or of gaining self-knowledge. The reading fulfills me.

So, back to my student, if I, a woman in mid-life not brought up by computers, texting, and a “need for speed” in all things, struggle with mindfully engaging with reading, what a greater struggle people of my student’s generation might have.

Again, I don’t mean this to be a technology bashing post. I do think we need a greater balance with how we use technology and more awareness of how our minds are changed (how we interact with information) because of that technology.

In the meantime, one of my goals for my class will be to show students how to become fully immersed in a text and to not get bored…at least not all of the time.

27º ~ gradually warming up out of our first true “cold snap” ~ looking at 55º for the weekend ~ all here remains shrouded in gray

Dear reader, I was all about the forward movement in mid-December, and then there was Christmas, and in the aftermath of that holiday, the onset of “the central Arkansas death cold,” so named by a friend who suffered through it first.

I knew the holiday would shift my focus from writing, and I let it be. After all, for me, living a full life informs my writing. However, on December 27th I had the first inklings of a head cold. This would later spawn into a going-on three-week upper respiratory nightmare. I’ve spent a lot of the last few weeks “drinking lots of liquids and getting rest.” Oh, and spending a fortune on over-the-counter treatments for the symptoms. But this is not meant as a sob story, as so many others suffer much more difficult medical issues and I am on the mend.

Instead, this experience brought to mind a book on writing that I read a million years ago in the early 1990s, Starting from Scratch by Rita Mae Brown. In Starting from Scratch, Brown offers lots of great advice and support for people trying to figure out the writing life, but the thing that has always stuck with me is her discussion on a healthy lifestyle and writing. In the book, she talks about practicing healthy living as a way to support her writing. This went against all my young romantic ideals of the artist drinking wine or whiskey, smoking cigarettes or pot, and generally “running wild,” a la The Beats, and yet, over the course of my life, I’ve come to agree with Brown. I can’t write with a muddled brain, whether from “over-indulgences” or from the kind of fog brought on by a head cold.

After Christmas, while I had two open weeks of nothing but free time (with a moderate amount of prepping for the semester thrown in), once I came down with the severest symptoms, I couldn’t formulate an original thought to save my life. Now, I know that I didn’t ask to get this cold, and I didn’t live an unhealthy lifestyle to bring it on. However, I did make some unwise choices. The kind I seem to make repeatedly. On the first sign of the cold, instead of putting myself to bed and taking care of myself, I went all out in taking care of household chores, errands, and cleaning that had been put off during the end of the semester crazies and the holiday. I overworked myself and tried to deny that I was sick. It caught up with me in a big way.

And once again, I’m re-learning “the oxygen mask lesson.” In life, like so many other women, instead of reaching for my oxygen mask first (airline safety rules), I reach out to do for others OR to do the things that I believe I am supposed to do to make me a good wife, daughter, sister, friend, etc. I am lucky, no one in my life is making me think I have to do these things. Instead, I impose these ideas on myself until once again, life reminds me that if I don’t take care of myself first, then there is nothing left to give back to family, friends, writing, students, the community, &etc.

Somewhere in all of this, I read online (somewhere): “We schedule what we value.” This is my new mantra, and it is written out on a post-it that is stuck to my computer monitor, right where my eyes meet it first thing.

So, my wishes for the new year include: (short term) a return to health and (long term) a steady practice of scheduling time for myself, especially time to write.