Where's my money at?

WRITING GROUP PROMPT (2/23/11): CASH. You think some money is missing from your wallet. Who do you think took it? Why/what for?

The money was here; now it’s gone. And all the while the wallet remained in my hand. What a mystery! Surely I should be rendered in black and white while telling this tale, all pin curls and deep red lipstick, batting my dangerous lashes and puffing (attractively) on a cigarette holder. But of course I know exactly what had become of the money. There is a black hole in my wallet. It’s as simple and unfathomable as that. Though I am making an important scientific contribution to our understanding of cosmology, it seems painfully obvious to me now, and I wonder why no one’s thought of this before. Perhaps it seems strange to you that something as vast as a universe can be tucked into something as small as a wallet. That leather can constrain such gravitational pull! Well, I tell you, it’s true. I’ll leave the research and the glory to someone else, but I have never been more certain. In the Amazon, they’ve found monkeys no bigger than your finger. In the depths of the ocean, they’re finding stranger and stranger fishes—ones with no eyes, or ones with fangs, with spines, with flashlight-like attachments they use to attract and trap their prey! There is such wonder possible and such horror, such things we cannot, or won’t, or just haven’t yet imagined. And to me, that’s where the beauty’s at: knowing only that we will never know it all.

Inspiration is everywhere.

[From my online writing group's February 18th prompt: Get ready.]

This is how to write a novel, thought it may also help you write a short story, essay, or poem (good luck!).

Snooze your clock. Some of the most beautiful books in the world began with a dream. (All of them ended with one—the dream, that is, of ever reaching an end, of truly being done.) Sleep a little longer; your unconscious is creating the gems you will mine once you’re awake. Once you feel sufficiently filled, wake, pee, and head directly to the kitchen. Pour the dregs of yesterday’s coffee into the biggest mug that is clean—if only small mugs are available, use a bowl—and warm in the microwave for one minute and twelve seconds. Sit down at your desk, placing the coffee to your left (if you are left-handed, place it to your right—the idea is not to place it within striking range of your wild flailing inspired typing). Open a notebook, place in it a pen. Open a Word document, change it to the size and style of font you prefer, and save it because Mercury is in retrograde again. Begin with a title, because everyone knows this is the hardest part. Don’t feel bad if it takes a while, or all afternoon, because it’ll be all downhill from here. For inspiration, open a web browser. Google cacao beans, dragonflies, apartment composting, movie times, orchids. Check your Gmail (just so you know there are no emergencies, just so you can truly concentrate). Check your Twitter, for sometimes the haiku of other people’s voices flips the on-switch of your own—not today? It’s okay, move on. Check Facebook—just for images, mind you. There is the cold beauty of icicles on blood-red Minnesotan berries in your old college professor’s backyard! The unparalleled wonder that your newborn niece’s face, despite all its newshiny folds of fat, so closely resembles your grandmother’s, which is dotted with lines like a sky map with all the constellations drawn in. The exquisite landscapes (all 118 of them) of your ex-boyfriend’s trip to Oaxaca, on honeymoon with his new wife, though neither of them is even slightly Mexican, and therefore every picture looks like a conquest, whether it’s him charging at the waves in board shorts, skin burned a lobster red, or the two of them imperiously ordering another round of Patron from a weary bartender, or her shopping at the beachside marketplace in a bikini and flip-flops, like this is a normal thing to do, to shop in a bikini, like it’s not disrespectful, and anyway, she has back fat, and you hate the racist way she triumphantly flashes a few small bills in exchange for that gorgeously woven purse, which must have taken weeks to finish. See? Inspiration is everywhere. This seems profound, so share it on your Facebook, Twitter, Gmail status, and your blog. Other people deserve inspiration, too. Now, you’re ready to begin.

On "Patagonian Road."

Have I highlighted enough how delightful my friend Kate's blog, Patagonian Road, is? If you are at all looking for a new blog to follow, go to HERS. Scrolling across its top, an epigraph and meditation from Paul Theroux:

Travel is a vanishing act, a solitary trip down a pinched line of geography to oblivion.

And this is what Kate's blog is about. In her own words:

Starting in December 2010, I'll be traveling from Guatemala to Patagonia, trying my best to make the trip overland (largely by bus). I'm grateful for my funding provided by Wellesley College's Mary Elvira Stevens Traveling Fellowship, and to Doug Glover, who assigned me Paul Theroux's 'The Old Patagonian Express' and thus inspired this project. I'll be tracing Theroux's footprints through Central and South America, learning Spanish, teaching English, and writing along the way.

Her posts pile up in my Google Reader, because they are not posts to devour on the run. No, I let them pile up, and when I have an empty stretch of morning and a full cup of coffee, this is when I delve in, reading upwards of ten posts at a time. Digesting her gorgeous way of understanding the world, her sense of travel, her way of witness.

Kate, I am so grateful for your words and your eyes, and I feel so lucky that our paths have crossed.

Big empty zero.

Woke up, peed on a test, and started feeling sorry for myself because I just can't get a handle on biology. Dave is out of town a week starting tomorrow, and I haven't managed to ovulate according to the pee sticks of my predictor kit, which means February is a wash. Because I am super mature and want to move through feeling bad to feeling good again, I decided I would list how many friends of ours have had babies since I got baby fever.* (Because this would definitely help me feel better. Clearly.) In under five minutes, I could list 20. That was just off the top of my head. Those are just the people I know.

Then I had some horrible thoughts. Thoughts like maybe biology is onto something. Maybe babies are most easily made earlier, when we are at our youngest and most fertile, becuase this is also when we are at our most carefree, our most non-stressed, our most sexual. When we are our most invincible selves. Forget finances and careers, provision of toys and clothes and houses with room for a nursery. Perhaps biology wants only to know that we can live vigorously and measures this by the lushness of our lining, the youth of our ovum, the fierceness of the fuck.

Big empty zero, indeed. Thanks a lot, ovulation predictor kit.

---

* Baby fever began with meeting Mr. Cooper Wiley, circa August 2009.

** I was pregnant in this photo.

Got to use Robert Frost in casual exchange this am. That doesn't happen every day.

Written to a male friend this morning who was shit-stirring on the Internet about the equality of women and men and how he's sick of hearing about it:

When your posts raise my blood pressure, I will try to remember this Robert Frost quote: "I’m always glad of anybody that says anything awful. I can use it … You’ve got to learn to enjoy a lot of things you don’t like." Just remember you're friends with a writer, which means nothing is safe, everything can be used, and memory and life are long, buddy. LONG.

Is that threat or promise?

Yes.

This is what your brain looks like on babies.

OK. I am revising a short story about a miscarriage whilst wasting time rereading all of my posts about babies and then I stumble on this one, a two-year-old brainstorm on children-having:

... because doesn’t it seem like a child changes your entire life, and people who have done it, had kids, I mean, they seem to say that phrase “changes your entire life” like it’s a good thing, but sometimes you wonder if it can possibly be a good thing to always have to think about someone else first, to put their wants and needs and desires and dreams before your own, and you think you will be able to do it, when push comes to shove, but you also secretly think it’s a little fucked up, and that as a kid you sometimes wished your mom had put her own needs first and that your father had put his more second, but nothing is perfect, really, because look at the two of them, your mom lived her life mostly the way she wanted to putting you first, and your father went off chasing his dreams and yet he still hasn’t published that book or made that great album that would make him a star the way he wanted to be a star when he left you and your mother when you were just two because his dreams were more important to him than you were, so fuck him, anyway, yeah, fuck him, I said that, and if you can’t deal with my swearing, then oh well, but also does that make me unfit to be a mother, the fact that I swear almost unconsciously, that I reach for bad words like a security blanket when I am feeling threatened or mad or sad, will I have to stop swearing someday if I want to be a good mother, and if I stop swearing will I be less me, and if motherhood makes me stop editing anthropology and stop writing fiction and start changing diapers and letting infants latch onto me to feed and, well, you know all the stuff that falls under the umbrella of mothering, will that make me less me, or more a me I just haven’t met ...

This is why I write. This is why I blog. For witness, for record. To prove to myself how much I've changed. Two years ago, I wrote that. Just two years. Imperceptibly but completely I am different. Pose the same question to my brain now--whether changing your life is a good thing--and I would just look at you and swear that I am ready.

Declaring our erotic.

[This post is my response to my online writing group's prompt for February 10, "Declaring Our Erotic." To be clear, this is fiction. Fiction heavily influenced by watching a marathon of Animal Planet's "Fatal Attractions" over the last few nights.]

She lets herself into the pen. The others sleep, huddled close, but he is awake, just as she knew he’d be. He is still, there at the fence’s edge nearest the tree line, with the moon just visible above feathered pine tops. The moon is waxing, overripe and mottled like an old peach. Too orange. Too bright. His eyes, tilted up to its fleshy light then lowering to meet hers, gleam strangely, but she is not afraid. Her moccasin-clad feet pad a silent path toward him, just as the feet of her ancestors had for ages. They were both remembering something they once knew—she so outbred she is barely still Indian, he so inbred that he’s almost a wolf again. Almost, but not quite, for he was her wolf. Here may be the fangs, there the claws, and here again the smear of blood upon his jaw from the deer she’d brought the day before, of which nothing remained but the bones. But he was hers. She knew the way he shifted the pack with a single guttural sound to warn them off the meat until he’d made his selections. She knew his bristle and stalk when any of the others drew too close to her. And she could feel his ache down to the sinew, that longing for a home as wide as the reach of this moon, a home connected only by howl and hunt, an anti-home. But he was hers. The animals were reverting to the wild, undomesticating themselves. All she asked was not to be left behind.

Tayari Jones encourages and advises you on how to deal with revising your workshopped (or edited) work.

If you're stumped by a cadre of opposing opinions on how you should be revising, read her post.

And remember, no one's opinion matters more than your own. Really. You should seriously consider any serious workshopper or editor's comments--and by serious, I mean someone you respect and who is advising you in the best interests of the WORK itself, not simply rewriting your piece as he or she would have written it--but in the end your opinion is the one that matters. And if you don't know your own opinion, perhaps you need to step further away from the work before revising.

... And when it comes to publishing, do yourself a favor and know where you're submitting. Know what those editors like. Because you are, in a way, literally submitting--to their opinion. If they ask you for a bunch of edits with which you're not comfortable, which belie the integrity of the work, hey ... there are plenty of other journals out there. Find the best fit.

I just tried to write a short response to a young woman who has just been accepted to VCFA's MFA program. The short part didn't work.

Dear _________________,

Congratulations on your acceptance!

Even standing on the opposite side of the experience from you, about to be faced with those student loan payments coming due, I can say easily that attending VCFA was the best decision I could have made for my writing life ... and one of the nicest gifts I've ever given myself. Yes, yes, the faculty is incredible, the mixture of the inspiring and exhausting residencies AND the one-on-one semesters with advisors perfect, the things I learned about craft and experimentation and voice and how to critique/be better in a workshop myriad ... but if I had to pick the two things for which I am most grateful, they would be:

1. community
and

2. belief in myself as a writer.

I cannot emphasize the first enough. Honestly, one could really be happy at a number of programs that employ very good faculty and competitively run low-rez or full-rez programs. Is that terrible to say? But somehow, over just five 10-day residencies, you meet incredible people. Some are younger than you, some are older. Some are much, much older. And these people are what matters most! If you can walk away with peers who want to read your writing, encourage you to keep going, invite you into informal workshops and solicit your work for publication, meet you for a bottle of wine when you've received your fifth rejection in a row, etc., CALL IT A SUCCESS. I do. And what I found at VCFA is that it wasn't just the student peers, but also the faculty. There are VCFA faculty that I correspond with often who weren't even ever my advisors, two who weren't even my workshop leaders, but who have become part of my writing life, my writing community. I had no idea about any of this going into the MFA. I thought I was buying time to write. I thought I was buying the advice of published people. But I was buying the opportunity to meet these people and have them become utterly a part of my life. *That* was the gift I was buying myself.

As for the second--the belief in myself as a writer--this was also a surprise to me. You might be thinking this sounds stupid. I don't mean confidence in myself as a fiction writer, I mean a writer period. My MFA was in fiction, but even before I graduated, the opportunity to be in mixed workshops (mostly with CNF writers, but for one workshop, even with poets) changed the kind of reader I am and opened my sense of possibility of what kind of writer I could be. Becoming close friends with CNF writers and poets alike meant our conversations often led to what we were working on, and what an advisor had said, and what we felt, etc. We talked and talked with no idea that our brains were filing it all away for later. Because, I kid you not, my class graduated, and two of my closest girlfriends, who had written CNF, both started writing fiction, and I found myself writing CNF. Even though we didn't have MFAs in those areas, we felt emboldened enough to apply our skills to whatever wanted to be written, to listen to the work tell us what shape it wanted to take. That a program requiring us to specialize in a certain genre could STILL embolden us with that sense of freedom and possibility? Well. Can there be any higher praise?

The cost. Ahhh, yes, the cost.

I guess all I can do is remind you that it is an investment in yourself, in your writer. To me, even though I make very little money working for a nonprofit, it feels completely worth it. I think there are the occasional opportunity to work as a research assistant or the like, but those opportunities are not many. You should ask Louise for the contact information of my friend and classmate S., who did actually "win" one of those research assistantships. Work on Hunger Mountain, as far as I know, is a volunteer basis; S. might be able to tell you more on that as well.

What more do I think *you* should be asking? Not for me to judge, dear. I suppose you could ask me who I had as advisors, or what residency is really like, or what to pack for residency. But you don't need to ask those things. Any advisor currently at VCFA is going to be wonderful for you, if you open yourself to the opportunity to take what they offer. Residency is crazy and busy and exhausting--but it will feed you the six months until the next one. And as for what to pack? This question plagued me every single residency. The only conclusive answer I can offer is don't forget the corkscrew.

Feel free to drop me a line if you have other questions. I could talk about VCFA all day.

Cheers,
Mayumi

Nicole Krauss's The History of Love just knocked me on my ass.

Still reeling from reaching its end, I'm not sure I can manage anything more coherent or true than that.

A twin of me.

The Sunday before I headed home from D.C. and AWP, my friend told me about how her beautiful twins had actually been triplets, but that one of the three had died. The one who died was an identical twin to one of the ones who lived. She told this story over brunch, and it reminded me, with a suddenness, with a nonchalance, that I had been a twin.

Which I somehow manage to mostly forget.

What is it to live a life in which a fundamental thing about yourself is forgotten? What of that bond of twins, the uncanny connection, the empathy, the fluency, the secret and indecipherable language of relation?

Can you even imagine a world in which there was a twin of me? A male version of me? His name was going to be Kai. This was before my mother even thought to move to Hawai'i. In a language she didn't yet know, his name literally evokes the fluidity of sea.*

Is this why I am so good at being alone? Because I actually never am? Because existence itself is way more fluid than my brain can possibly grasp, and I am comfortable alone because the aloneness feels companionable. I can spend stretches of hours with no one else, but it never feels lonely, nor ever silent.

This is random, I know. But I just thought you should know it's not all babies and depression over here. As I wrote earlier this evening to a friend, "You know, the bad part about the Internet is that no one is ever passionately moved to write because they are so HAPPY. If they are HAPPY, they go on doing the thing that is making them so HAPPY, they don't go sit by themselves to brood and write about the happy."

Maybe I'll even try to summon the energy to resurrect the Eggs Benedict Chronicles or Creme Brulee obsession. Just to reprove to you that I'm more than a few trick pony.

---

* OK, WEIRD. I just learned that Kai means "sea" in both Hawaiian and Japanese--the latter being, no doubt, the source of her name choice.

Authors on Editors.

My friend K.--of Writes. Reads. Knits. and Hampden Writers' Workshop--has a thoughtful new post up about "Editors and Editing." Check it out!

Bigger.

I am the bigger person, and the bigger, and the bigger. I grow and grow and then grow tired of being so big. Every time I turn around, another friend is pregnant. Now, don't get me wrong, it's not about being covetous, it's not that I'm not happy for them--I am evolved enough to hold two conflicting feelings in my heart at the same time, I pull myself together and say the things I am supposed to say, send congratulatory cards and buy shower presents. I feel genuine joy and look forward to meeting their children and watching those friends grow into parents--a truly beautiful thing when the friends are dear, watching them figure it out, seeing them assert values and demonstrate the play of learning, bearing witness to the wonder of meeting a new life, someone who has never before existed, someone different from anyone to ever exist before or after!

But every revelation is like taking a beating.

Here is the truth: Had I lived life differently, I would right now have a five-year-old and one-year-old. Instead, I have no year-olds, and my peak fertility was in my early twenties, and I am one of those people who unfortunately is still too enamored with the fairy tale of loving the man I love so much and for so long that the only natural culmination of this equation to me is still--stupidly, simply, embarrassingly--a baby with his eyes and my mouth, hopefully his self-confidence and my sense of humor.

On the one hand, I wish I could think wider, understand in my heart what I know in my head, that family and love can take so many more shapes than noncreative, literal-minded biology thinks it can. I intuit that biological clocks and womb aches are somewhat socioculturally constructed, partially nature, partially nurture. Raised to think that the natural apex of a woman's lifecurve is pregnancy/child birth/motherhood, why are we surprised to feel literal pangs? But if we are raised--or raise ourselves--into alternate ways of thinking through the world, if we can see need other than our own, if we can weigh consequences wider than those that directly affect our single selves, then perhaps we don't feel the pangs, or at least understand the pangs to be partially constructs. I'm talking, too obliquely, about adoption.

On the other hand, I hope that I can someday learn that lesson not because I am forced to, but because I want to. I have always wanted to adopt children--a sweet hangover from childhood, the fact that my best friend was adopted and I thought it was so cool the way her family was both created and the most "natural" thing in the world, even if she looked nothing like her folks. I found it so cool, in fact, that one day I went home insisting to my mother to tell the truth, that I too had been adopted, and it was okay, she could just tell me. I made my poor, sweet mother cry. I learned that I was biological, and was a little crushed, and let's just say that the interest in the ways we create family has always stayed with me--think of the friends you choose for yourself, the way you create a "family" that reflects your self and values often much better than your blood relatives do. But I can't say I'm one of those evolved souls that wanted to adopt in the place of biological children. Nope. As with many things in my life, I didn't want to choose. I wanted it all.

And so, what if none of this works? What if this game is two strikes and you're out? What if this obsession is the only thing growing, and ohhh, how it grows, as do most obsessions? What is most important to me, to us: MAKING a baby or BECOMING parents?

And, then, on the flipside, what if I will laugh about this, call it melodrama in a few years, with children spilling off my lap?

Two last things occur to me:

1. I cannot believe the things I have become accustomed to sharing on the Internet.

2. But, on the other hand, thank god for the sharing. Thank god for the sharing, and the reading, and the writing, and the talking, and the hand-holding, and the wombs together aching. If I didn't have my friends, I would be nowhere, and no one, and nothing. They shore up my soul. Thank you to them, to you for reading and not judging, to anyone who shares the things we think we shouldn't. I find it a wonderful surprise how good it feels to be more bare, yes, but also less alone.

Nature Made.

I guess I should be feeling excited and encouraged after this most recent visit to the ladyparts doctor, but mostly I feel tired, apprehensive, and anxious. What becomes more and more evident is how little I understand my own body. I have a fibroid on my uterus "but we're not worried about that," tears in my cervix "but we're not worried about that," and a cyst on my ovary "but we're not worried about that." If "we" is supposed to mean me and the doctor, let's settle for HALF of us aren't worried about that. The other half of us is completely overwhelmed by how little I know and how the sum of these unknowns can be something that seriously impacts my health.

The doctor says let's keep things as natural as possible for as long as we can, and to this I offer hearty agreement. But then she gives me a battery of tests and a laundry list of instructions to follow and a handful of drugs to be taking. There are vitamins and supplements and even "suppositories" (which feels really embarrassing to be talking about, but there you have it--this blog leaves little room for blushing). Later, if none of that works, there will be shots, too. Good god.

To think--and this is the low point toward which I am constantly led--some people just have sex to make babies. Instead, we are marooned in a sea of strange acronyms. I had hoped the doctor would say good job on taking those vitamins, your ovaries and uterus look plump and fertile, so go forth and procreate!

Instead, I now feel like a test tube, a science experiment.

I'm trying to remember that this is all the continuing answer to the question she first asked me a month ago: How serious am I? Do I want to be pregnant, like right now, because if so, she would get me there, but I need to be sure that I am ready. In many ways, I am not 100% ready: financially, emotionally, career-wise, I still have a million worries and questions left pending. But I am ready to thrust myself into the unknown, to figure it out, to refocus my life around the someone who keeps knocking but doesn't seem to know how or when to enter our life. We're ready, and we're waiting, and I guess if I have to take a handful of pills every day to prove it, I will.

"Reason being, you're a mainland howlie": Why Hotel Honolulu was a partial, though epic, fail, in my humble opinion.

On my trip east and back again for the recent AWP 2011 conference, I tucked myself into Paul Theroux's Hotel Honolulu (2001). Having never read Theroux but recognizing the name as one I'm "supposed" to have read, this novel--which I obtained, free, on a stoop in Fort Greene while I still lived there--seemed as a good a place as any to make entry into his considerable body of work.

Perhaps an ill-fated choice.

I wish to GOD that amongst the dozen reviews listed on the book's back cover and inside first pages, a single one had come from a local. Might have saved me time and aggravation.

Hotel Honolulu itself is a fast read, even at 424 pages, plenty of sex and sexiness and booze and intriguing little anecdotes--one reviewer likened it aptly to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales--to keep the pages turning. The white characters--mainlanders who had come to make Honolulu home--rang true, if as assholes, and the seedy side of Waikiki--well, that ain't fiction, folks.

What I can't figure out is how Theroux so holds me in his hand such that I kept flipping pages despite the fact that every third page managed to offend me.

Trolling the Internet for a local person's thoughts on the subject, I came up with nada, but there was plenty of talk about the book. those who weren't wowed by the book mostly focused on the sexual depravity and "ugly intimacies" as one reader put it.

That actually didn't bother me. The world is ugly. Sex is awkward. People aren't nice. Welcome to the world.

But Theroux's use of pidgin and Hawaiian in the book downright made me see red. The choices he made in spelling the language, the way he unnecessarily at times threw around terms and then pedantically defined them, the imprecise ways he employed pidgin, especially. Ohhhhh! $%*&#@(#*@))#@(! It was as if he'd not read any local authors' books in consideration of how to render the language on the page; instead, he just ... winged it.

Also, and it must be said, the depiction of the locals--as a generalized category, as if all people born there were born to the same slow song, the same VOG clouding their brains--well, as a former local myself, I really didn't appreciate it. Even filtered through an ostensible narrator, I couldn't help but wonder if those views were held by Theroux himself, and I will tell you why--it's because his narrator seems meant to be a stand-in for himself, a well-known writer experiencing an entire chunk of years of writer's block. Hawai'i is rendered in Theroux's narrator's eyes as a place where burnouts and dropouts and the lazy, broken, depraved, drunk, and damaged come to rest--a final stop for losers.

Portraying Hawai'i as paradise lost instead of paradise itself is fine. Good, even--better to try for realism than to naively portray the impossible. Not exactly new--see the entire basis of Lois-Ann Yamanaka's career--but fine. But even at Yamanaka's roughest, she rendered not only the backward and broken-down qualities of the place and people, but also their raw humanity. In Theroux's hands, I feel the people and place have been rendered exotic, but worse, exotic in a seedy way--a sideways glance at the people, as if they are up to something on the cover of his book that makes you want to cover it in brown paper before you take it on the subway, as if saying "I will pray for them" while staring agog at a particularly bloody and gutsy car accident or not changing the channel very fast when you see a late-night TV investigation about a Russian club where women have sex with bears. That strange, unadmittable pull of simultaneous repulsion and attraction.

Maybe I'm just having the gut instinct, the defensiveness kick in: Not every local person is like that! Portray a full range of people! If people are like this in Hawaii, so are they the world over! Where do you come from? I will show you the slow-minded and assholy people there, too! Be fair! et cetera. I am who I am and I read what I read, so says the literary Popeye. I can't help what offends me, even if perhaps it isn't certain that the author meant to offend. That said, I also think that when writing about others, especially as a white male, I wish he'd taken greater care not to exoticize or offend.

On the other hand, Theroux's musings via his narrator (thinly veiled, really himself) about writing and writer's and block and so forth read like a craft book. Those parts were probably my favorites, along with the structure and pacing--all of which I count as successes on his part.

A few months back, I made some firm resolution to not review books for which I couldn't give a pleasant review. To refocus my energies and attention on those who deserved attention rather than talk shit about books or authors that I felt had failed.

That didn't last very long, did it?

So, whatever. Take these words or leave them. I definitely don't pretend to speak for anyone but myself. This is not "the local view" or anything like that. It is one person's thoughts, one person's review, based on a history of where I was born, where I grew, what I read, who I met, how I lived, that I write, and the unfortunate confluence of events that led me--the me that is OBSESSED with how pidgin and really any dialect/vernacular gets treated in literature--to find myself reading Hotel Honolulu.

So now re-entry into the Internet feels like an embrace.

As if Kristel's post wasn't enough, now I find SuzieQ's.* She so elegantly and gently reminds me of how lucky we all are to be these women.

---

* I am one of the few people in the world permitted to call her this.

But Kristel, editors *love* fangirls!

Just back from AWP and a visit to the ladyparts/pregnancy doctor. Variously overwhelmed, exhausted, and hopeful. Trying to catch up on the exploded bits far flung across the Internet: that is, what happens when you go offline for five days and then have to try to catch up. That is, ughh.

And so by way of one exploded part leading me to another and another, found my way to Kristel Yoneda's blog and this post, wonderfully and brimmingly full of accomplishment and hope and humility and self-respect. In particular this excerpt moved me:

So what will 2011 be like? I think it will continue to be a year of transition for me as I’m becoming the person I’ve set out to be. Reading old (like 2005, old) livejournal entries, it’s crazy to see my dreams are slowly coming to fruition now. I have a Creative Non-Fiction piece coming out in the Hawaii Women’s Journal anniversary issue in March that touches upon some of the dark and twisty feelings I have about Hawaii and growing up. At the risk of sounding like a gushing fangirl, the editors at the Hawaii Women’s Journal are amazing. They let my piece take shape (which didn’t happen immediately, trust me) and pushed me to examine my real reasons for moving. Writing might be a solitary activity, but editing is a collaborative effort. These editors not only saw something in my piece, but also in me.

The excerpt was moving for obvious reasons, and for others reasons said and then deleted on this blog--which is that my confident inner editor was taking a beating this January and it made me question small things like my philosophies on editing and big things like what the fuck right do I have or does any editor have and so forth. Her words made me feel complimented, definitely, but also just plain inspired. So, Kristel, thank you for restoring my faith in myself as editor/thinker via the experience of working with you on your piece, and for your continued kind words about the process, and for reminding me why we write. We write for more reasons than we even know, but a big one is to learn about ourselves and others. Life is a big why, and writing helps us draft out possible answers.