Writer’s block and the cat.

I haven’t written anything in the last week. Nothing. And it’s not like I haven’t tried. It’s just that everything I’ve tried to type has turned into an obituary for my cat, Copy, who was put to sleep last Tuesday evening. So – although I can understand how you all might not want to read a eulogy for my cat – I’m writing this now, in the hopes that once I’ve posted it, I can get back to work on my novel.

Writing without Copy might be extra difficult because she liked to spend time with me when I was writing. But probably it’s just been hard to write because I’ve been preoccupied with losing such a big part of my home life. I adopted Copy when I was just six months out of college. She was there through my first 10 years of real, honest-to-goodness adulthood: new jobs, new apartments, new boyfriends. Through shack-ups, break-ups, break-downs, break-ins – she was there for everything. Often, she was more of a roommate than a pet. She woke me up in the morning, hung out with me when I got dressed for work, met me at the door when I came home, sat on my lap when I wrote and always knew when I had a migraine.

It was a very satisfying friendship and I knew it couldn’t last forever, but it was a shock when the vet told me that Copy would have to be put to sleep.

Suffice to say, very little last week went as planned. We canceled our Thanksgiving trip to Texas because the cat – before we knew she would have to be put down – was too sick to stay in a kennel. And then there were several free days when I could have spent hours writing, but was unable to. Every blog post, every short story, every section of my novel I’ve tried to work on, has drifted toward the subject of cats in general and my cat specifically. So I decided to not write at all.

It’s nearly been a week now, and I have to start writing again. I’m hoping that this blog will get the ball rolling again. I think it might be working. I have an idea for a short story already, and there aren’t any cats in it.

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Pet owners like that are the only pet owners here.

 

I spent most of yesterday wandering through various veterinary facilities, husband in tow. We sat in waiting rooms and exam rooms, carrier in my lap, or worse, the carrier sitting on the floor, its occupant out, growling, firmly held down on a metal examination table.

It was more than 48 hours since she was able to eat or drink or move freely.

Last week I posted about my cat, Copy, and her vet fears. This week she’s in the veterinary hospital with a mysterious bacterial infection. What happened? No one knows. She was in magnificent form at the vet’s for her vaccinations  Friday. She hissed, she spat, she did her best Linda Blair impersonation. We apologized to the vet techs and murmured sweet nothings to the cat and brought her home for the bath she needed. And then she was bafflingly ill. Read more

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Big damn pet peeve: “But you’re a writer!”

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If you’re friends with someone who works in IT, or anyone who is really good with computers you’ve probably seen the “No, I will not fix your computer” tee shirt. I submit that there should be a similar tee shirt for writers. I don’t know how exactly I’d word it, but the gist would be the same.

I know what some of you are thinking: “You don’t know which words you’re going to put on your snarky tee-shirts for writers? But you’re a writer. You’re comfortable putting words together!”

This is a blog post about that. And by “that,” I mean the phrase “but you’re a writer.” Read more

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I didn’t go abroad so my parents could watch me on a webcam.

Me, in a borrowed dress, preparing for Sevilla's Feria in 1999.

UPDATE: The webcams appear to no longer be in use at my old study abroad program. At least, the feed from those cameras is no longer posted on the web page. I know that the friends I made in Spain read this blog, so I don’t want to spread misinformation.

Last night, overcome by a fit of nostalgia, I Googled my old study abroad program in Seville, Spain. I was appalled to discover that the program had installed webcams.

There is no explanation on their website for the cameras, but in September, National Public Radio did a segment about colleges installing webcams for parents who want to take a look at their kids eating in the dining hall, getting their mail or whatever. I’m assuming these Spain-cams are the same thing.

This bothers me. When I went to Spain in 1999, I was going abroad to get away.

The pretext was that I was going for my education. And I did go to school there, but the classes were a formality. My real education began on my second day, when I had to use my 10 years of in-class Spanish instruction to order a booklet of stamps, and no one was present to help me. I remember the impatient look of the stamp vendor, my own terror when I couldn’t remember the word for stamps (it’s sellos) and my elation when money changed hands and the stamps were in my pocket. I almost did a jig in the street. I had done it. I ordered the stamps myself, with no one to help me. It felt like the first thing I had ever done without help. I was, all of a sudden, capable of anything.

Now I will admit that the webcams’ view of the students is very limited. The cameras are mounted in inoffensive places (the halls, the front door, the courtyard) and are designed to capture students at their most angelic: On their way to class. Not much damaging footage can be captured in the narrow  halls of my old center.

What I’m protesting here is the point.

The four months I spent in Spain were some of the most important weeks of my life. Despite the fact that my room and board was paid for by my parents, I was far away and had to fend more or less for myself. And I learned several important lessons: I had to accept the fact that I didn’t have as much money to travel as some of the other students did. I had to be judicious with what money I did have, and accept the fact that I was simply not going to Ibiza for a weekend. A related lesson, which I learned on a surprisingly cold and rainy night in Madrid, was that money does, in fact, run out.

When I came back from my study abroad, I was 21, and I finally thought of myself as an adult. Whether my parents agreed with that was beside the point. I home a more confident person, knowing that I could exist in another country, speaking a language that is not my own.  I wonder if I would have felt as independent if my parents let me know that they were keeping tabs on my activities, watching me go to class (or not) via webcam.

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Writer Wednesday: Joan Didion

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For me, books can be like hard candy. You get a bag of Jolly Ranchers,  you rip it open and maybe you immediately eat one of your favorite flavors first, as a sort of opening-the-bag celebration.  But, then if you’re like me, you start eating all your least favorite flavors, so that what’s left in the bag – eventually – is a big pile of watermelon and sour apple. Heaven.

There are probably more moody black and white portraits of Joan Didion than of any other writer. If you print them all out and staple them together in a flip book, you can actually watch her age.

That’s how I’ve been treating the work of Joan Didion. I’ve loved Didion since a newspaper editor gave me The White Album as part of a newsroom Secret Santa gift exchange. I was 23, loved my job, and Didion’s essays sang to me. I’d never read prose like that before. I spent months on that book. I pored over each essay, reading each word twice, but I was stingy with myself, squirreling the essays away like sour apple Jolly Ranchers, and savoring that wonderful first-read feeling.

I have not read Slouching Toward Bethlehem yet. I know I will love it, so I am saving it for later.

Joan D.  is a two-edged sword, however. On the one hand, her work is heartbreakingly beautiful. On the other hand, it’s also just heartbreaking. I read Play it As it Lays this past spring and emerged from the novel feeling like I’d gotten drunk and then had a three-hour phone conversation with a friend who makes bad choices.

Below the page break is the craft essay I wrote about point of view in that novel.

Read more

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The bad cat owner.

She's hell on vets.

Today I broke a promise to the cat.

The promise, which I made about three and a half years ago, went like this: “I vow that unless you get really, really, horribly sick I will never bring you to the vet ever again. You may live out the rest of your life in peace, without a person in a white coat ever approaching you. That is my gift to you.”

That might sounds like irresponsible pet ownership, but give me a second to explain before the finger-wagging begins.

My cat is terrified of the vet. Not scared in the way most animals get when they go to the vet, because I’ve taken other animals to the doctor. My cat is a 12-pound ball of screaming, fighting, clawing, squirming rage. When we were going regularly, they used falconer’s gloves to hold her down. They asked me to drug her before I brought her in.

For a while, because my cat likes to maul her own tail, we were at the vet’s office all the time. The cat spent something like four to six months with her head in and out of a plastic cone. Four months of appointments hadn’t gotten her any more comfortable at the vet’s office, and I hated drugging her. So when we got the tail under control, I decided that I’d give her a break from the vet’s office, a permanent one.

Well. It lasted three years. The cat really needs a check-up and I can’t put it off any longer. This morning I called the vet and made an appointment. I took the guilt trip laid on me by the receptionist and then I looked over at the cat.

I’m out of tranquilizers. I won’t be able to sedate her for them this time. I hope they’re up to it.

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My First Page, or how I learned to stop sulking and love the bomb.

About a month ago, my MFA colleague Elizabeth Hilts blogged about her submission to writer and teacher Peter Selgin’s Your First Page, a blog on which he critiques – for free and with considerable knowledge – the first pages of in-progress fiction and memoir, emailed to him by hopeful writers.

I was impressed with Selgin’s comments on Hilts’ first page, so I sent in my own. I’ve been more or less a shut-in this fall, working furiously on this novel. Except for one brief reading in October, no one outside my house had seen or heard the thing. So I sent the first page of my novel off to Selgin and waited. On Friday evening, he posted his critique.

This is what I hoped he would say: “Good lord! You’re a literary genius! How come you’re not already required reading for high school English classes?”

What he actually said is here.

I’ll be honest with you. I sulked like a little girl for about an hour after I read it. Then my adult self re-emerged and took another look at Selgin’s comments. And I realized that he has a very good point: By starting my story in the way I do, I shortchange both my main character and my readers. So I’m playing around with ways to change the the opening page, and I think the novel will be stronger for it.

I’m not changing anything just yet, though. I will be interested to see what my fellow MFA master class workshoppers say about the piece when we discuss it after the holidays. I plan to print out Selgin’s critique and bring it to my residency so that I can use his comments as well as theirs.

At any rate, I encourage all writers who want an objective (and blunt) pair of eyes on their work to check out Selgin’s blog. Submit your own first pages – Your First Page is actually going to become a regular feature in The Writer Magazine, starting in January, so if you send in a first page, you never know who might pick up the magazine and read your work.

 

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Sister Transistor, or my overactive imagination.

It’s been a while since I blogged about anything embarrassing, so here we go.

I think I’ve mentioned that I have an overactive imagination and that I invent imaginary bands. That’s because I don’t believe that my inability to read music/write songs/play an instrument should keep me from feeling like a rock star. This system works well. I recruit other people who can’t play, and we have imaginary rehearsals, imaginary tours, with imaginary gigs at imaginary venues.

Does anybody else do this? Because I put a lot of mental energy into my longest-running project, Sister Transistor, an imaginary all-girl rock band.

Sister Transistor boasts a mixture of real and imaginary band members and a set list of covers which we pretend are original songs. We have lots of pretend drama: Our imaginary bass player, Pangaea is always threatening to quit and join the eco-terrorists who bomb Japanese whaling boats, while our pretend lead guitarist, Beth Hammerdown, recently attracted attention when she became a spokesperson for the Tea Party. It’s an imaginary public relations nightmare.

The whole band thing is an elaborate fantasy that’s been constructed, bit by bit, over the past three or four years. Until recently we were happy without an imaginary album, but since I was learning Photoshop this summer, I decided to use our debut album cover as my project.

Below are my top three album covers.

Album 3: I think scotch and cookies really captures the spirit of Sister Transistor.

Album 2: I recruited my husband as baker and photographer for this one. Pity the man.

Album 3: This might be my favorite. Sorry for eating with my mouth open.

UPDATE: I put my faux album cover on a tee shirt! And I will totally order it and wear it because no one will know who this band is, and that will make me the coolest kid on the block. I know. It takes a special kind of mental illness to make merch for an imaginary band. Actually, it takes a special kind of mental illness to make merch for a blog, but if the Bloggess can do it, so can I.

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Housing the brave in Bridgeport

As a child, I had a very rigid definition of what veterans were: Veterans were old men who fought in WWII. They hung out at the VFW in Oakville and only ever came out for parades. I thought of them, alternately, as nice old men and the walking counterparts of my history lessons.

I admit to having been an ignorant child (I didn’t even think of my two uncles, who served in the Navy, as vets because they weren’t geriatric) but veterans have changed a lot since 2001. Now most vets I meet are in their mid-20s. They are my friends, and my classmates, and my co-workers, and my students.  They are, in many cases, very young women who come home to their children and who need a place to live.

In Bridgeport, veteran housing group Homes for the Brave has been paying close attention to that last group of veterans: Female vets who need housing, both for themselves and their children. Homes for the Brave, which runs a 42-bed facility for male vets up the street from my house, has been trying for a year and a half to provide beds for homeless female veterans. This year, in August, the group obtained zoning approval for a 17-bed group home for female vets on Elmwood Ave in Bridgeport’s West End. This is huge.

When I wrote a story about this in 2009, only three of the state’s 106 beds for homeless veterans were set aside for women. Which is ridiculous, because something like a quarter of Connecticut’s soldiers serving abroad are female. Added to that, the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans says that female veterans are 3.6 more likely to become homeless than females who aren’t veterans. And they are two to four more likely to become homeless than males, according to a 2007 study by the National Alliance to End Homelessness Research Institute. Why? The study suggested that more females had experienced traumatic events before they joined the military (ie, joining the service to escape abuse) and after discharge are dealing with PTSD on multiple levels.

Whatever the reasons, the state needs more housing for female vets.  I’m thrilled to think that that the first shelter for female vets (and their children, up to age 2) will be in our city. It’s a really big step in the right direction.

 

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Writer Wednesday: Richard Russo

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Richard Russo thinks of himself as a comic writer.

I had the advantage of being able to interview Richard Russo for my newspaper’s entertainment section just as I was writing a craft essay about him for my MFA program.

Russo was coming to town this past June to discuss That Old Cape Magic. I had just finished reading Empire Falls, and I was very excited to speak with him.

During the interview, Russo surprised me by referring to himself as a comic writer. In fact, he compared himself to Mark Twain, with whom he appeared in Granta magazine this summer. That ran counter to my observations as a reader. Sure, there were moments of humor – pure slapstick humor, actually – within the 483 pages of Empire Falls. But the book was more of an American epic, not the work of a humorist.

I didn’t get it until Russo told me that he considers people to be funny.  Just watching people being people, he said, can be enormously funny. That made sense, because Empire Falls is a lot like sitting in your hometown, having coffee at the diner and watching everyone you know as they walk by, living their lives.

And he’s right – people are funny. We’re funny in the same way that our cousins in the monkey house at the zoo are funny. We have basically the same motivations, and our attempts to get what we’re after can be just as clumsy and brash. And that can be hilarious, or it can be horrible.

“I do gravitate toward folly,” said Russo. “Sometimes there are tragic consequences to human folly.”

For the full story, click this link. For the craft essay I wrote about Russo’s graceful management of multiple viewpoint characters, read on.

Read more

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