Winter post

The sun is finally out, we have something like two feet of snow outside, and there are meter-long icicles hanging from our roof. The city of Bridgeport (which made a big fuss about us all moving our cars to let the snow plow through) has, in a time-honored tradition, not plowed our street.

The blizzard has left some of the U.B. students who live on our block dumbstruck. Most of our neighbors are international students, and some of them have never seen this much snow before. It’s pretty incredible to watch them emerge from their apartments and stand on sidewalk, just looking at the snow. Some of them ran around like kids. A couple of snowball fights broke out.

Since I have a lot of writing to do today, I’m not going to spend too much time writing this post.  But I thought I would post some winter pictures from this morning.

These guys aren't going anywhere for a while.

Ice on the bittersweet.

Very big icicles.

Feeding the birds.

Pigeons taking off.

Goober watches the birds.

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Things that are distracting me today.

Yesterday, I came home from brunch with a friend, printed out all 119 pages of my novel in progress, read and line-edited the whole thing, and prepared for the revisions scheduled to take place this afternoon. I researched magazines and fellowships, identified pieces to send out and cleaned my office. I made myself a to-do list for today. Not bad, huh? I figured I was on a roll.

I was wrong.

Below are just a few of the things that have distracted me from work this morning:

• My job.

• The fact that Boyfriend the stray cat has been on my porch for 45 minutes.

• The impending blizzard.

• The fact that Boyfriend the cat is sitting on my welcome mat while a blizzard impends.

• Facebook.

• Polite correspondence.

• Polite correspondence via Facebook.

• The fact that Boyfriend the cat will surely have to come indoors if he’s on my porch when the blizzard hits.

• Worries about the syllabus that will take me a half hour to complete.

• Clearly, if I keep Boyfriend the cat on the doorstep for another several hours, we’ll have no choice but to add him to this household.

• This blog.

• A mental inventory of groceries, so that we can eat during the impending blizzard.

• The sad fact that Boyfriend the cat is no longer on the porch.

 

It might be time for me to lock myself in my office, pull down the shades and turn off the Internet.

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Thoughts about poetry

On my first day of my grad school residency, about two weeks ago, one of my colleagues flagged me down.

“Why,” he asked, “do you write novels?”

This is a good question, and something I hadn’t really thought about.

Our grad school program is divided into three sections, or genres: Fiction, Non-fiction and Poetry. I think that sometimes we tend to get hung up on these labels. At our cores, we are all writers, and many of us – even if we don’t officially study cross-genre within our program – do write in other genres. You have only to attend a student reading to see fiction writers reading essays and non-fiction people reading poetry. I have yet to see a poet read fiction, but it’s sure to happen. We are all creative writers, and it would be silly to expect us to stick to one form.

So when my friend asked why I was writing fiction, and the novel in particular, I had to take a minute. My response was this: I write novels because I enjoy reading them, and because that’s what I read, I believe that the novel is the highest form the written word can take.

After a week and a half, I’m not quite satisfied with that answer.

My first love was poetry. I remember writing a poem at the age of seven. My mother tells me I was writing poetry earlier. I bought books of poetry in the fourth grade. I played with rhyme and meter all through high school and college. I’m a card-carrying member of the I-wrote-moody-poetry-in-high-school club. I was also a poetry slam groupie in high school. I fell deeply and indecently in love with Taylor Mali. (I got over that.) I wrote a collection of angsty poems in college. My first creative publication, in the now-defunct Citizen Culture Magazine, was a poem. I framed it. It hangs above my desk. Then, somehow, poetry took a backseat to fiction.

I don’t know why. I wrote fiction and poetry at the same time through high school in college. Like a kid who starts out left-handed, learns to use his right hand, becomes ambidextrous as a teenager and then grows into a right-handed adult, I switched to fiction. No reason. It just happened.

Except now, after the last residency, I’m considering a return to poetry. I took two poetry seminars, and went to a poetry graduate reading and it strikes me that I’m missing out on something I enjoy. I have no idea what the vocabulary of poetry is – I couldn’t identify a sonnet, for example. And I’m intimidated by the distilled emotion presented in poetry. I think I will have a go at it anyhow. I’m not planning to forsake fiction. It is possible that the novel is, for me, the highest form the written word can take. But that doesn’t mean that I have to neglect poetry.

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The MFA frenzy.

I’ve been back for a few days from my grad school residency on Enders Island, and I’m ready to blog again.

The gardens at Enders when it’s not extremely cold.

Before you all read this, I have to warn you: I have the MFA frenzy. It happens whenever I return from my creative writing MFA residency in Mystic, Conn. and it continues for about a month. During this time, I write like I’ve been taking uppers, talk incessantly about story arcs, character flaws,  scene vs summary, you get the idea. I apologize in advance.

For those who don’t know, let me explain where I’ve been. Enders Island, a religious retreat in Mystic, Conn.,  is the location for the Fairfield University Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing residency. (If you click on the link, I’m in the picture at the top of the page. You can just barely see my pink hat in the back row.) I’ve lived on Enders for 10 days every six months for the past two years. My cohort and I take all our classes there; we workshop our writing and take seminars and study with established authors. Every year when I come back home after my residency, someone always asks me if I’m sorry to leave the island.

My answer to that is no. It’s not easy to spend 10 days at a workshop with lots of other writers. Ask Chuck Palahniuk.

But, and this is a big but, I really need the residencies in order to be productive. And honestly, I’m not looking forward to graduating, because that means I’ll no longer have the creative kick in the pants that the residency provides.

Allow me to explain. In some ways, the MFA residency is run on the same principle as a boot camp. By the end of 10 days, I am physically ground down. I haven’t slept, I haven’t eaten that much, and I’ve been living in such close quarters with others that my personal space is all out of whack. I almost always leave the island with an ailment or a minor injury.  I  spend the final two days of every residency in a strange creative fog. I can’t pay attention to normal things, like conversation, or lunch, or tying my shoes, but a different part of my brain kicks in. I find myself thinking in poetry, and everything becomes a writing exercise. People become studies for character development. I start using active verbs, like “scrub” and “dive,” in small talk.  Nothing matters, by the end, except the work.

Once I get home and get some sleep, the writing begins, and does not stop for months. I’m not sure how I’m going to sustain that level of inspiration without the residency.

Another thing that’s amazing about the residency is that when I come home, I am always convinced that I will publish my novel. I’m utterly confident that my novel will be published, optioned, and translated, and that I will be able to eke out at least a modest living on my words. I write short fiction and poems and I send them out to literary magazines. They ignore me and reject me, and I don’t even care, because I am positive that someone will accept my work. It is bizarre. To hear me talk, when I come back from residency, you would think that I had already published a novel.

And, you know, I think that’s the way to be. Writing a novel (and getting it published) is my dream. If I were to allow myself to be discouraged by the cold hard facts of publishing, I wouldn’t even try to finish the manuscript. I certainly wouldn’t involve colleagues, professors, graduate programs and writing groups in a novel that I thought might fail. I wouldn’t want to disappoint the people I respect.  I wouldn’t want to waste their time. And at this point, I’ve involved at least 15 other people in my novel by asking them to workshop it, listen to it or talk with me about it.

So now there’s no room for failure. Especially now, because in the next few months I have to finish my novel in order to graduate.

 

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Not bad for my first full year of blogging.

I’m going to be honest: WordPress pretty much wrote this blog post for me. I’m currently at my grad school residency, a twice-a-year, 10-day program for creative writing on an island with limited Internet access, so I haven’t really been checking my blog. I didn’t count on blogging at all while here, but then WordPress emailed me this summary of my 2010 activity at The Garrett and I had to share, because I’m amazed at what people want to read.

Apparently, people want to read about my uterus. And to think, that was the post I almost didn’t share.

Bizarre, right? It has been weird to watch the hits come in this year. People search for the weirdest things. I get a lot of hits on the post I did about Harry Willson Watrous’s painting, The Drop Sinister. I get clusters of hits on that one,  and I suspect that those hits are the results of field trips to the Portland Museum of Art. It’s especially strange to be notified when someone I don’t know finds my site through a Google search for TC Boyle, or Denise Mina, and ends up reading one of the craft essays I wrote for this grad program.

I’m happy when people want to read anything I’ve written, however, so I’m grateful for all my hits in 2010. Thanks to all the readers; I will blog more in 2011.

Below is WordPress’s information about my blog.

Read more

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