May in the Bay

What I read about when I read about expecting: part 1.

2012-01-16T20:05:00.000-08:00

I’ve read the Mayo Clinic Guide to pregnancy and the stupid What to Expect books back-to-back probably three times now, unintentionally—certain chapters just fall open, compliant under the thumb. In fact, I’ve read How to Survive the Loss of a Child: Filling The Emptiness and Rebuilding Your Life (Catherine Saunders), Making Babies: A Proven 3-Month Program for Maximum Fertility (Sami David and Jill Blakeway), A Child Is Born (Lennart Nilsson and Lars Hamberger); have constantly referred back to The 100 Healthiest Foods to Eat During Pregnancy (Johnny Bowden and Allison Tannis); perused Portraits of Pregnancy: The Birth of a Mother (Jennifer Loomis and Hugo Kugiya); cooked a smattering from Eating for Pregnancy: The Essential Nutrition Guide for Today’s Mothers-to-Be (Catherine Jones and Rose Ann Hudson); and I’ve had my eyes glaze over a truly embarrassing number of entries in the various baby name dictionaries and guides (thank god I didn’t start looking till I knew we were having a boy).

I’ve also e-mailed, like, every friend with a womb that has been filled or with a penis that has been in contact with a womb that ended up filled.

I’ve Googled endlessly, landing on opinion after opposite opinion, and yet many a large decision still looms on my list: now that we need to choose a new practitioner to handle my labor (more on that later), we’re back to square one. Midwife or OB? Hospital, birth center, or home? Lamaze or Bradley or hypnobirthing or ICEA? Doula who is a professional stranger or a friend? Circumcise or not? Immunizations—yes? no? And if yes, which ones, and if no, what precautions then become necessary? Not to mention the clusterfuck that is our incomplete registry and all the problems inherent: cloth vs. disposable diapers, what kind of bottles, which model of crib or co-sleeper or bassinet or moses basket or …, organic or not clothes and sheets and …, and … and …

Yeah. That’s what this brain looks like on pregnancy. What can I say? I really like to read. Also, my way of coping with paralysis caused by my own ignorance is to throw other people’s opinions at it and hope I can form my own opinion from the chorus/cacophony.

But it hasn’t been the birthing bibles that have cut through the fog as much as the stories. Like the one I am halfway through right now. It’s a book of essays of one man’s experience of his wife’s pregnancy: American Parent: My Strange and Surprising Adventures in Modern Babyland, by Sam Apple—my god! Who knew! This book’s been sitting on my bookshelf, unread, since 2009. But it's so helpful!

For the same reason that I reach out to friends who are young parents for advice, Apple’s vignettes bring me real comfort. Instead of the fifty ways to harm your helpless fetus by eating, drinking liquid, exercising, breathing, or having been born with a certain set of genetic code—also known as What to Expect When You’re Expecting—I want story. I want connection. I want intimate details you are surprised to find yourself sharing with me. I want an embarrassing catch in your throat and uncontrollable mirth in recounting your journey, and I want to see your eyes shine even if you have a spectrum of dark-hued bags under them.

Apple is a companion on an odyssey that transports you to a strange place where the natives debate the merits of increasingly specialized technologies of baby making, having, and raising and who worry over how best to grow a wee Einstein. This book is another friend, weary and wise, who cuts through the crap and tell you that cloth diapers may save the environment, but disposables will save your sanity. That Lamaze doesn’t work. That as sensitive and enlightened and profeminist as your partner may be, he doesn’t have boobs so you’re going to end up with the bulk of the early babycare. That there are a million ways to do all of this, and he only knows what he and his wife chose, and sometimes those choices were made for the most arbitrary of reasons. I can’t tell you how comforting it is to hear that last bit.

Here are some other books that have become friends during this fertility odyssey:

Increase (Lia Purpura)

The Room Lit By Roses: A Journal of Pregnancy and Birth (Carole Maso)

Room (Emma Donaghue)

Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace (Ayelet Waldman)

Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son (Michael Chabon)

Baby’s First Picture: Ultrasound and the Politics of Fetal Subjects (Lisa Mitchell)

The Bitch in the House: 26 Women Tell the Truth about Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood, and Marriage (Cathi Hanauer, ed.)

The Moon, Come to Earth (Philip Graham)

Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict (Irene Vilar)

Because I Love Her: 34 Women Writers Reflect on the Mother-Daughter Bond (Andrea N. Richesin, ed.)

Books I am looking forward to next (among others):

The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Memoir of Early Motherhood (Louise Erdrich)

Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year (Anne Lamott)

Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood (Michael Lewis)

Today is my husband's birthday ...

2012-01-13T13:33:00.001-08:00

and I just want to celebrate that while 2012 is bringing a lot of big changes our way, I am truly willing to go on any adventure to any place as long as it is with him. I cannot wait to bear witness to him stepping into all the new roles that await him in 2012--not least becoming a father. I have no idea how I got so lucky as to get to share my life with such a warmhearted, kind, generous person. I can't imagine loving him more, but then I do, and I will and will and will.

Actually, today is a very good day in general. I know five incredible people born today, including my husband's birthday twins, my favorite cousin Mimi and my darling friend C. Happy birthday, much love, and many blessings to you all!

Thank you!

2011-12-30T13:35:00.001-08:00

Thank you so much for voting for me in the Shameless Photography Letter to My Body essay contest. I won! I won! You like me, you *really* like me! In celebration of that win, I offer you the unedited letter that got me into the top ten finalists. More pretty bits, more flaws, more nakedness, and a lot more words.

Dear Body,

We weigh more now than we ever have by at least ten pounds, but I have never felt more beautiful. Every night I stare in the shower-fogged mirror at my image emerging and delight in my rounding curves and softening lines. I stand there long after I’ve oiled every inch of skin I can reach. I stand there grateful for you and everything of which you are capable. I stand there and am thankful to be standing there, thankful.

It’s not that I’ve hated you. At least not all the time. Parts of you I’ve even loved. I’ve enjoyed the fullness of my breasts, the long line of my legs, the curve of my ass—but for how they could be flaunted in the dip of neckline, length of hem, cling of fabric. I loved those parts of you for how they might contribute to the seductive push-pull of attraction, the covering up in order to reveal. But any pleasure taken was always countered by the scrutiny I gave your other parts. What of the hours I’ve spent wishing my mirror reflection would permanently suck in its stomach? What of the silent, internal debates about how many white hairs to pluck and when to give up and start dyeing? How much money have I spent trying to coax my pores to behave, trying to cover scars and irregularities, trying to shove wigglier bits into garments that could urge them in a more flattering direction, and trying to balance all of you up in the air on spindly-thin heels that, frankly, hobbled me like a geisha in kimono, taking tiny careful steps on skyhigh geta? What about being guilty of practicing smiles in the mirror—missing the point entirely that the beauty of a smile rests in its spontaneity? How many times have I stepped on a scale and gauged my self-worth on the number staring back at me?

And in 2009, when I learned I was pregnant, I had to begin wrapping my brain around the idea of you changing—even those parts that I liked. My mom gave me a toothbrush with a cow on it and gently teased me about whether I’d put on some baby weight, and I found myself sobbing on the bed. It terrified me that I had never managed to be as thin and gorgeous and fashionable as I had hoped to be—and that such a goal was fast-vanishing, as if in a rearview mirror.

But my grey-area feelings about you up till then paled in comparison to how much I loathed you after I miscarried that nine-week-old embryo. You had betrayed me, you were not to be trusted, you couldn’t even do this single, simple thing right. I only grew angrier as the months turned into a year, and becoming pregnant again became my sole focus, the thing around which I revolved and spun all possibility of happiness. But no matter how many vitamins and medicines and hormones I took, how much I changed my lifestyle in terms of exercise and diet and stress, no matter what fertility books or doodaws I bought, I could not get there. Something was wrong with me/you/us.

It’s too neat, annoyingly tied up with a shiny bow, to say that once I forgave you, I got pregnant again, and that once I got pregnant again, I came to finally really see and love you, but dear body, that’s exactly what happened.

You had worked through all the odds against you in making sperm and egg meet, fertilizing egg, egg journeying without getting lost along the way, and egg firmly implanting in the right spot. You were AMAZING! You could do ANYTHING! You were woman, hear you ROAR! Together we now had to become a matryoshka of bell jars—me shielding you so you could shield the growing babe. We weathered four months of fatigue, nausea, vomiting, food aversions, lack of appetite, weight loss, constipation, severe mood swings, and a depression that made the whole stretch of days feel like they’d been angrily scribbled over with a dark grey crayon. But nothing mattered as much as being kind to you. I napped four hours a day almost every day, missed deadlines at work, cancelled plans with friends at the last possible minute, and ate whatever I could keep down—even though for a while it was just soda crackers and judicious amounts of ice cream. Despite my fear of needles, I lay on an acupuncturist’s table while she inserted them toe to hairline, including one between my eyes. I was so afraid I had to keep my eyes shut the whole time. And before she left the room, she warned me that part of the treatment was that emotions would be released. I lay there, immobilized. I trembled. I worried about needles and fear and stress and release. I thought of how I was doing this for you, for me, for us, for the little him. I vibrated and felt electric and levitated and wept. I lay there and I forgave you and forgave you until I understood that there had never been anything to forgive.

Four weeks passed. Then nine—that magical milestone, wherein the last embryo had been lost, but this one stayed. Then the thirteen weeks of the first trimester were behind me, another marker reducing my risk of miscarriage. I could breathe. Fourteen weeks. Twenty (with all the exact perfectitude of the anatomy ultrasound, working organs and proper moveable parts and a heart that beats so furiously, with such determination). Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three—and here we are.

I think I’ll always remember 2011 as the year I got pregnant again, but I hope it also marks the year I came to finally see and embrace you. You are so much more than just the sum of your parts. And far more wonderful than how you look in a bikini is what you are capable of doing as well as what, with a little patience and kindness, you are capable of learning to do. Like making and carrying a baby. Or upgrading from two-mile hikes to five-milers. Or climbing a rock wall when afraid of heights and receiving acupuncture therapy when terrified of needles. Or each week making my tree pose a little less windy. Or breathing more deeply, forgiving more quickly, letting all the little things go more easily because they are usually so very little.

Besides I’m getting rather fond of your parts. Even the wiggly ones. The girth of my belly now holds my child. The white hairs have, these last few years, been earned. And, well, my boobs are still big, my legs still long, and my ass still firm, so let’s call it a win.

Love,

Mayumi

Help me win a photoshoot with Sophie of Shameless Photography!

2011-12-10T16:59:00.001-08:00

Click on the link (in Facebook) and "like" the photo of my letter to my body!

I need your votes by 9pm PST / 12am EST on December 23rd.

I would win the following with Shameless Photography...

A full retro makeover: professional hairstyling & makeup

Access to the Shameless wardrobe, full of gorgeous vintage dresses, lingerie, heels, hats, gloves, accessories and more!

A 3-hour photo shoot with Shameless lead photographer Sophie Spinelle

An online gallery of 60 proofs

Your choice of 5 final images fully retouched and finished

A 10x10, high quality bound hardcover photo book to showcase your final images

Your choice of ten high-quality 4x6 prints

P.S. Delete. Redact.

2011-11-23T14:17:00.000-08:00

You know what? I take back the word "irrationally" in my previous post. It still seems quite rational to me; just in the moment of writing, I doubted myself and felt empathy for all those parents I so resented.

Aboyaboyaboyaboy.

2011-11-23T13:37:00.001-08:00

I’ve thought long and hard about this, but there’s really no smooth or clever way to say you’re pregnant.

Posting an ultrasound or belly picture, crafting a sly hinting status update about not being able to drink or all the kicks to the ribs, sending out photo postcard announcements involving fruits or balloons, even just coming out and stating the obvious—nothing seems right. All seem too smug and assured, especially when you’ve been on the embittered receiving end of such news. After I miscarried, I took each baby announced or born so seriously, almost as a personal affront. This wasn’t a reflection on any of the parents to be or how or when they had chosen to share their news. This was me holding the measure of my life up to theirs and irrationally crying UNFAIR!!—as we are all wont to do sometime or another. If you’ve suffered a pregnancy loss, if you want to have a baby but have been unable to get pregnant, if you’re wading through the red tape of foster or adoption proceedings, if you want nothing to do with any of it at all, you might recognize this feeling of rage at being socially coerced to sugarcoat and coo. You might have embodied such temporary inability to separate your relative un/happiness from someone else's.

So to say anything felt wrong. To say nothing felt duplicitous.

And all of it felt too certain when the one thing I know I know is that nothing is certain. Egg plus sperm does not always a baby make. Neither does a baby bump or any time-based milestone. Drawing attention to my expanding self and sense of family in any way seemed foolhardy, and selfish, and incautious.

You see how unsmooth and not clever this was.

How dark and unfluffy and unbunnied. Nary a pink or blue. Sorry. I cannot not be myself. Despite how wide open I was about miscarriage, from the moment I knew I was pregnant—even before that $%&#%@*#(@ internet troll shit all over my blog and morning sickness banished me to offlineland—I’ve wanted to keep everything about him to myself.

But twenty weeks have gone by. I’ve called and e-mailed all the relatives and family friends. He is the little boy I always wanted to have, he has a strong thumping heart and beautifully operational organs and limbs. I am halfway through this pregnancy, and I am trying to breathe into it. Because there comes a time, too, when not embracing the fullness of this experience seems foolhardy, when staying mum seems selfish, when not letting the joy come to you is in its own way incautious.

It is Thanksgiving tomorrow. I am spending it with family, partially in a gorgeous snowy cabin in Tahoe. I want to breathe and increase and trust and invite joy. I want to celebrate the journey of it and to honor and not forget that, for some of us, it is not a straight, well-paved path. I want to stay honest, and share my stories, and through openness invite the stories of others to boomerang back to me.*

I want to be thankful for all of it, even the bitterness and overcaution, because of how sweet life can be in contrast to all that we fear.

---

* More about this to come. I am planning an anthology and will be casting about for submissions soon.

We, the Dysfunctional and Divine.

2011-11-19T09:32:00.001-08:00

I managed to do nothing productive yesterday. Just kind of lazed around in bed, reading most of (the rest of) Rabih Alameddine's I, the Divine: A Novel in First Chapters.

Alameddine's narrator, Sarah Nour El-Din, is writing her memoir; this is the novel's conceit. The attempt to capture a whole life. How to and where to begin. How any one chapter can shape and slant your whole life in such a way that it could be cast as The Defining Moment--the moment around which all of your stories are spun, around which your whole self comes to revolve. The way we all revise our own stories, retell them, recast them. The act of revision/re-vision. Life as collage. Life as the many possible points of view and points of entry.

It's a clever notion--but just plain clever would fade once the novelty/sheer freshness of invention wore off. But luckily, there is more. There is the stunning resolution of the last chapter of the novel (the last first chapter of the memoir, if you will), which does a beautiful job of finding an exit point for the narrative without closing it off--leaving it to resonate and echo. This, despite the fact that this chapter would not have made a very good start for the proposed memoir. That last first chapter changes everything about the read, gives it explicit meaning, reveals depth and focus to a tale that, at times, seemed horizontal and so wide as to be panoramic, impossible to fit into a single lens view.

And what the last chapter provides--and what it becomes clear many of the chapters in the second half of the novel are also, more slyly, doing--is shifting focus. Instead of I, the Divine, it is now We, the Dysfunctional and Divine. As Sarah revises, she keeps trying to write about herself, but the other characters in her life intrude. So she starts over, begins somewhere else. Finally she comes to see that she cannot tell her story without those other voices: "Who am I if not where I fit in the world, where I fit in the lives of the people dear to me" (308). Essentially, without the others, there is no self.

I read that and thought, YES! What are we but wholes made up of so many parts. We are, each of us, equations, and the only way to puzzle us out is to write it all out, longhand, on a chalkboard. Relationships are messy. They're complicated. They involve multiple variables and require strange and complex graphs and charts to reveal how--and, indeed, that--everything is connected. Sometimes they venture into invention and the imaginary. Sometimes things are more or less complicated than they first seem. Sometimes there are remainders and bits that don't fit. Sometimes you've been working at a problem for so long you fail to realize that you've forgotten a variable, a value, you've forgotten what you're solving for. Sometimes you have to start over again. And again. ... And again.

One last thing about the novel: two chapters are narrated completely in French.

Now the thing you need to know is that I can't understand a lick of the language beyond hello, goodbye, love, Eiffel Tower, and croissant, so on my first read of the novel, I was utterly roadblocked when I encountered that first French chapter. I was stumped. I could guess at--using six years of high school Latin--the meaning of a word here or there but could not comprehend the elegant string of them all together. They were veiled in mystery. Entire plot points and nuances lost to me, forever! I mourned. I became frustrated. I got angry. I even tried to Google my way toward an answer. I suppose, had I been determined enough, I could have painstakingly retyped the bits into Babelfish or some such program, but I gave up. I was utterly stumped, and mad, and disappointed, and excluded by the narrative.

So I stopped reading the novel.

I almost let the library book go overdue in my care.

Then for no good reason except a sense of loyalty and trust in Phil Graham's excellent literary tastes (he recommends the novel here), as well as no small amount of stubborn OCDness in finishing what's been started, I renewed and began to read the novel again.

When I encountered that first French chapter for the second time, I gave it a longing last glance, flipped the page, and continued, undaunted.

It struck me as ... somewhat wonderful this time around. Ballsy. The kind of bold choice only a confident writer makes. It took me back to my graduating lecture I gave at VCFA ("Jabberwocky and the Asshole: On the Aesthetic Viscosity of Vernacular in Fiction"); for wasn't I arguing for the exact same kind of license but doing so from the place of privilege? The place of possessing the knowledge and deciding what could and would be revealed to different readers? Wasn't I suggesting--and wasn't Alameddine in a way proving--that more important than 100% comprehension to all readers was the artistic integrity of the work itself (not its author, the work)?

By the time I reached the second chapter in French, I was unfazed. I was fascinated by what I was missing and yet utterly unconcerned by it. It seemed to me another elegant metaphor was being formed--something about the unintelligibility of parts of a life, that there's always the possibility that something will get omitted or lost in translation. For how true it is that it's near impossible to know every intimate nuance of someone else's life--even those closest to us; even, I might venture, I might whisper, even our own.

In closing, GOD how I loved this novel. I may have to buy it so that I can bear returning this copy to the library.

File under "Whew, I am not a freak" and "Mood Swings and Self, Justification of."

2011-10-05T14:30:00.000-07:00

"All changes are more or less tinged with melancholy, for what we are leaving behind is part of ourselves." --Amelia E. Barr

Revisiting Eucalyptus.

2011-09-27T19:06:00.000-07:00

Eucalyptus, by Murray Bail, was one of the first books I encountered as an “adult writer.” By adult writer, I mean a 17- or 18-year-old, newly arrived at a fancy-dancy liberal arts school to pursue writing. It struck me, like a bell in a tower, back then, and ever since I’ve taken many an opportunity to thrust it on other readers—some of whom returned the copy to me with lukewarm response. As it always goes with the books one loves, the lukewarmness is hard to understand. So, having recovered the book somewhat recently after it took a few year sojourn away from me on a different friend’s shelf, I decided to revisit Eucalyptus through thirteen-year-older eyes and see if I was unfairly preaching the novel’s merits through the haze of years and very fond memories of the class in which I read it.

But no, I was right. The novel still rang bell-like through my heart and mind. Foremost, it is because it is a love story. One maybe learns more and ultimately even is more moved by a non-love story (broken hearts, broken relationships, murder, mayhem, etc.), but when we’re talking simple pleasure, is there any better than reading a love story? Eucalyptus spins the same kind of bittersweet aching mood as did The Time Traveler's Wife. Second, the novel explores every acre of its rural outback place, showing reader and prospective writer how intimately it is possible to know a place, how valuable and worthy of attention down to the most minute detail that place is. Third, there is Murray Bail’s embrace of learning. Because no matter how Australian he is, no matter how long in the outback, no matter how much he likes trees, I simply do not believe that the breadth of knowledge he presents in the book was entirely intuitive. The book feels like exuberant proof that one can teach oneself to become an expert. There’s the experimental format, using trees and tree facts to brace the narrative, using the story-within-a-story loom to further weave the reader so thickly in. There’s the simplicity—this is just a courtship, just a love story, it’s not going to change the world or shake up your worldview necessarily. There’s the nod to Sherazade—the need to spin a web of words around another, as if life depended on it. I sort of love those last two points because they acknowledge that not every story needs or wants to be a game changer.

What the years have afforded me, though, is the objective distance to see, finally, how the novel might not affect everyone in the same way. Some might say it begins strangely or proceeds oddly. That the opening few chapters distance reader from the story in that they meditate on trees, nature, how to begin a story. That, even, those first few chapters are like the knotted fringe at the edge of a shawl or blanket when the reader longs from the start to be thickly knitted into story. That, for readers weaned on action movies and the quick pacing of J.K. Rowling, Dan Brown, Stephanie Meyer, etc., man, this has got to be one of the slowest paced books ever.

Sometimes a reader can read and wonder who this disembodied narrator is and why they know what they know; sometimes the experimental format will fray faster at the edges; sometimes a novel will have nothing to do with 9/11 or terrorism or war or the Middle East or modernity or technology or the distances between us. Sometimes—wonderful, wonderful times—nothing matters as much as the storytelling.

The trouble with finishing a coming-of-age novel, I think, is when do we ever.

2011-09-22T23:12:00.001-07:00

There’s something ashift lately, the air hums with it. It could be fall—or, where I am, Indian summer. It’s the kind of thing that prompts change. I will move to another city! I will finally admit this between us is over! I will go out and not come home until I have met someone I didn’t know before! I will apply to graduate school, apply to a new job, apply myself. I will start a novel, a road trip, the process of adopting children, tracking my ovulation, a diet, a retirement account.

Writes the anthropologist Carolyn Nordstrom (Johnston et al. forthcoming), “Like tomorrow, happiness never arrives—for the starting point of every story is that you are without it.”

For me, this restlessness has taken the shape variously of: I will move to a more urban part of the bay, something that feels more like a city than a suburb. I will move somewhere much, much cheaper. I will move into a house, one with multiple bedrooms and bathrooms, a washer/dryer and dishwasher, a yard, an outdoor fricken fireplace, while we’re at it. I will move into a space that will make me feel that it is home. I will think I should become a homeowner. I will check tiny apartment listings in the city and sprawling homes all over the bay and with conflicted longing all over the state of Hawai'i as well. I will have our credit check run for an absolutely ridiculous state-of-the-art, four-bedroom townhouse in the Oakland Hills; then another way out in Pittsburgh. So far, Pittsburgh will be the only one we can afford so I will pretend for a little while that I could do it… see myself walking the dog, someday pushing a stroller, walking in circles and circles around a subdivision in a pastel velour sweat suit like an outtake from Desperate Housewives. Like such isolation, such waiting for that honey-I’m-hooome even though holding while I wait a full-time job and thus a network of my own, such lack of independence and ability to explore multiple other worlds wouldn’t make me want to scratch off my own skin from the inside out.

Of course, what’s in the air has manifested in my desire for movement. What else would it do? It has been a year.

But the other way it manifested today, strangely, was that it made me want to uncover my novel-in-progress, dust off the accumulation of three years’ shelf time (well, thirteen total), and get back to work. At this point, I know those characters better than some of my family members. I understand their motivations. I’ve let them all talk, even the most minor of characters. The problem is, as it always has been, shape. I have two full drafts of the same novel—or perhaps I have two novels with the same characters?—but in any case one is from the 1^st person POV of a single character, and the other is a sprawling multivocal account. The former attempts to cover just twelve years; the latter reaches much further in time, both forward and back.

Curiously enough [INSERT HEAVY SARCASM], I began writing the 1^st-person,twelve-year one when I was about eighteen and couldn’t see much further than a few years in front of my face. I was in the midst of writing the second, multivocal account when I entered grad school at age 28, with college and spectacularly failed romances and friendships behind me, with a certain yearning to and resignation that I’d never move home, with those relationships that had endured and my lovely marriage tucked safely in my arms. The difference between the two full drafts and the draft I sense is ahead reveals not only how much the story has grown but, too, how much I have. It meant the characters cut along their own dotted lines and peeled themselves out of the molds into which I’d fit them and then forced me to see them in 3-D. It meant the novel grew stronger, for which I am grateful, but this brings me to my point: When does the madness STOP?!

I’m not asking how do you end a story or a novel. (I sometimes, erringly and without great consistency, have managed to do that.) I’m questioning how the writer of a coming-of-age novel—especially the kind that, in essence, has grown up with you, not that your stand-in is necessarily the narrator or even a main character but, rather, that every character contains pieces of you, like in the dream theory where everyone is you—how this writer manages to find the other end of the rainbow, locates the arc, understands how to be done when she herself is still growing.

I’ve come to two novel finishes, and I’ve come of many ages. But I’m under no illusion that the work is done. I am 31. I am a work-from-home editor and writer. On a good day, I reverse the order of those roles. My social network is made up more and more of the cords and cables that connect Internet to computer to fingers to heart and brain. Sometimes all week I hear only the sound of my dog’s bark, my husband’s voice, the murmur of neighbors’ voices in the courtyard, my mother on the phone for two hours on Sundays. Too often I spend hours online watching the lives of others scroll by—not exactly full of envy, or at least not always, but certainly curiosity. What is it like to be her or him? Living in an owned home with a lush yard on a small island, or that tiny rented apartment smack in the middle of that big city? What’s it like to be a real estate agent, a biologist, a teacher, an advertising exec, an engineer, a dancer, a model, a singer, a baker, a choral conductor? What’s it like to put on clothes and go to a Job every day? What’s it like to earn enough money? Is there ever enough, or does everyone feel some variation of the same panic I do? What’s it like to have dated more, married later or earlier, had kids much earlier, never left home, never moved back again any closer to home? What’s it like to be a mother or to have had a father? What’s it like to be anyone but me, not because being me is so miserable but because I am curious? And because what is that but the writer’s job in a nutshell: to keep trying to answer that question of a hundred not-yous? It is to start out with the idea of a person—even a caricature at times—and through the drafting come to know that person as one knows the self and to invariably endow them with bits of dialogue overheard, with loved ones’ quirks, with the intimacies of one’s own person such as stories behind scars, placement of moles, insecurities, irrational fears and irrational loves.

I ask over and again what is it like to be you because I don’t even know with any consistency what it is like to be me. I can’t always recall faithfully my past and I never have enough of an idea about my future.

So maybe I am asking how one ends a story after all.

Perhaps there is no secret. Perhaps you just put foot in front of foot, draft in front of draft, until a day when something’s ashift in the air again.

---

REFERENCE CITED

Johnston, Barbara Rose, Elizabeth Colson, Dean Falk, Graham St. John, John H. Bodley, Bonnie J. McCay, Alaka Wali, Carolyn Nordstrom, and Susan Slyomovics

Forthcoming/2012 Vital Topics Forum: On Happiness. American Anthropologist 114(1)/March 2012.

Drunken Boat #14 is live!

2011-09-20T11:47:00.000-07:00

I'm thrilled to share that "The Shape Love Takes" found a home with Drunken Boat in their second edition of the fantastic /slant/sex/ folio (issue #14). I am honored to be a part of such a great folio and among such incredible artists, which I am discovering one by one. I'll leave you with the words of one, Melissa Febos, who, in "Manginalogues," writes, "We just want to feel less alone in the world, and to make honest work. All of us. I have spent my life running towards all that was strange and scary and intoxicating, trying to prove my invincibility and finding my humanity instead." It's a wonderful sentiment that draws together the diversity of the folio and, indeed, the whole Drunken Boat issue.

It's also a reminder of why some of us write at all and an offering of my tiptoeing attempts to find reentry into this space. As Febos suggests, we write to feel less alone, to be honest, to tell truths. We often fight our own egos to do so: that desire to present a shiny and admirable surface to the world. And sometimes it is in our fumbling attempts to show the shiny that we are at our most flawed, our most human. So I spent the better part of two years very publicly flailing my way through miscarriage and fertility treatments. So an anonymous troll shined a diamond-hard light on this, providing a million reasons I should, in essence, get over myself. So I stopped writing publicly and drew inward. So I slowly came to see those hurtful and hard statements as what they were: proof of someone else's vulnerability as well as perhaps a glimmer of another truth--that as publicly as I had mourned, I was still carrying a lot of anger and anxiety around. Am I cured? No. Do I feel this to be my space as safely as I did before? No. But I am reminded that I don't write so I can sit alone, reading my own words and having my own thoughts, I do so to be in conversation with others. A wonderful reminder to be given, and another reason to be thankful to Drunken Boat.

((Sorry about that.))

2011-08-19T21:16:00.000-07:00

The same post just showed up in your feed like eight times because I was having some technical difficulties over here. Mea culpa!

Some words. Many not mine.

2011-08-19T21:14:00.000-07:00

I've gone long silent, I know. I keep coming here and waiting for the desire to write--and when that fails, waiting for words, any words, but the violation of what I thought was a safe space stays with me.

So, in lieu of words of my own, here are some of Emma Bolden's:

What Dylan’s writing goes far beyond that: he’s showing us his mind, and how his mind became his mind. He’s showing us how to live a life of the mind, how the most important thing may not be what we produce, but why we produce it: what we believe and know and think and feel inside.

Here she is talking about Bob Dylan's memoir, Chronicles, Volume I, in specific, but also just his process of writing/creating, in general. YES, I thought as I read what she wrote, that's it exactly. Not for everyone, certainly, but for some of us.

It is a rendering of process that I want to remember. When I fret about rejections. When I fret about tough critics, anonymous or not. And every single time I sit down to write.

Putting the emphasis and attention back where it belongs.

2011-08-01T22:41:00.000-07:00

I deleted the other posts. They didn't belong here, just as that Anonymous doesn't belong here.

These are the virtual hugs I received today. LOVE to you all. You help me remember why I write and how lucky I am to be surrounded by generous, positive people.

Suzanne wrote: You're right. This is your space, your party. And most of us come here to listen to you, engage with you, learn and connect. Someone shows up drunk and violent? Yeah, listening and connecting isn't really their m.o. Administrate them out. You can't change their minds (or, in the case of this commenter, their livers? Their spleens? I mean, what are they using to write?). As painful as it is, I'm happy you shared it with us. So you can get back to the business of feeling good about writing.

LVH wrote: Anonymous, YOU ARE VOTED OFF THE ISLAND! Go pick on someone your own size. I hereby revoke your rights to use the interwebs and rescind your invitations to all parties EVERYWHERE! By royal decree of the von Hottness, you are fired from life.

A DIFFERENT anonymous wrote: I LOVE YOU! (sent from an anonymous admirer)

Lynn wrote: Dear Anonymous,

From what I can tell by reading this post and Mayumi's response to you, I can't say I disagree with her. You should stand up behind your words instead of hiding behind them.

Whether you are a male or female, she is right you probably haven't gone through with a miscarriage or if you have then there a some deep feelings that you have yet to uncover and solve. Taking it out on other people isn't healthy and in a way what does that say about you?

Mayumi is also right about finding some place else to write your unwelcome comment/s on. There is a whole world of the internet out there, that people just like you write on people's blogs every day. My suggestion would be to pick another one. One that wouldn't mind having you disruptive comment on it.

Writing is a huge tool for many people so if Mayumi wants to blog about her miscarriage or any problems or accomplishments in her life then she can because its her blog. And in response to "getting therapy" she is also right the world of therapy is HUGE. There are many types that people practice today, writing included.

If you don't believe me then you should ask any person who is a writer or even a therapist. In fact one of then main points that therapist recommend to a person who can't or won't talk or express their feelings is to write about it.

Jeanne wrote: Anonymous is a fool with a nasty mouth. Mayumi, I can speak from personal experience about the grief of miscarriage. I had one miscarriage and two children die in infancy from prematurity brought on by pregnancy complications. I helped facilitate a grief support group for neonatal loss (including miscarriage) for four years. The death of a child (and a miscarriage is a death of a child) at any age is wrenching--both a physical and an emotional loss. Only cowards make anonymous snide comments on public blogs. If this creep shows up again, delete him/her. The jerk isn't worth your time.

It's not all writing and depressing shit about fertility here ... LOOK! sometimes there are PUPPIES!

2011-08-01T00:01:00.000-07:00

Emily Dickinson, being read way too literally in RedCity.

2011-07-29T11:57:00.000-07:00

Parting ~emily dickinson

My life closed twice before its close;

It yet remains to see

If Immortality unveil

A third event to me

So huge, so hopeless to conceive,

As these that twice befell.

Parting is all we know of heaven,

And all we need of hell.

Four gifts of this fertility quest so far.

2011-07-26T18:34:00.000-07:00

1. Loving Thy Self. For someone who used to have as a serious life goal to have a bikini model's body and to document this physical state with copious photos before I had kids, it's been a real shift of priorities. That's the best I can ask for from my body? To look pretty? I mean, REALLY? I want to slap my 20-something-year-old self. Now I look at myself in the mirror and I cradle my belly. I ask it to perfect science experiments that I myself would no doubt fail if it were me standing in a lab coat with test tubes bubbling over the Bunsen Burner. I ask it, nicely, to please make a baby and then to hold onto him or her very carefully.

2. Knowing Thy Self. I feel so much more connected to my body. I notice and remember symptoms and how they are interconnected, and I never would have before.

3. Always, Gratitude. I hear a man in the parking lot yelling at his little girl, watch him tug her arm violently in effort to get her to listen, follow, behave. I want to remind this man to be grateful. But I also know how naive this sounds--naive and bitter at the same time--because it's not like I think it could never be me, someday, at wit's end in a parking lot, trying to make the right decisions but also so frustrated that I could cry. But what I hope I never lose underlying the rest: always, gratitude. The linear sense of what it took to get to that parking lot. Of how much I want to begin a family, and love a child, and take on those challenges.

4. The Ever-Radness of People, Intimates and Strangers. When you are willing to put your business on the Internet, people are willing to open up to you, too. Any lingering shame I might once have felt about "airing my laundry" or whatever is utterly dissipated in the face of the support I've received and the honesty I've been privy to.

I've said it before but I'll say it again: I love "Tired & Stuck: Three Women on a Mission to Get Knocked Up."

2011-07-22T15:35:00.000-07:00

These ladies make me feel sane.

Writes Logical Libby on June 14:

I am going to be nice to myself. I am going to remember that I am not the sum of my reproductive parts.

Writes Christina on June 23:

I have a friend who doesn’t have children, and she and her husband don’t fully know why. It took me awhile to understand that she really doesn’t want to find out exactly what is going on, at least not right now. She would like nothing more than to be a mother (and she has been to doctors and tried various things). But on the flip side, really having answers might mean finding out she will never have children, and she just doesn’t want that information at this time. She’s told me if they found out for sure that children weren’t possible she and her husband would probably have to take a month off work to grieve and plan and refocus their lives. At this moment, for her, it’s better not to know.

Writes Erin on June 29:

So you're having timed intercourse? the doctor asked cheerfully.

Timed intercourse is the least of it, woman!!! Timed intercourse is for amateurs! I deserve an honorary doctorate from Stanford! is what I was feeling. "Yes," is what I said.

Well, you're healthy. You're 32. Sometimes these things just take longer for some people, she said.

Go sit in some woods at midnight, ululating with wolves.

2011-07-22T13:42:00.000-07:00

This photo comes by way of my friend Justin's brilliant photoshopping skills. That's my face, alright, but the rest of it (including those enviable abs) belongs to Angelina Jolie. But it was the perfect photo to kick off this post.

So, I tried belly dancing the other night. The all-women gym in town offers yoga and dance classes, and you can drop in for $10 a pop instead of committing to an actual membership, so I said why the hell not. Why the hell not because part of "maximizing fertility" is doing gentle exercise every day as well as focusing/meditating on the womb. I know, I know. It all sounds like hocus pocus. Anyway, I got there and was easily the youngest person there by a decade. Also, the most underdressed: the other ladies had shown up with long flowing skirts. The oldest woman student in there--probably in her sixties?--was wearing black harem pants with golden stripes as well as a tiny wrap around her waist bedecked in bells. As if that didn't make a statement enough, she was salsa dancing while also carrying on a conversation with another woman, who had wrapped her arms around her middle and caved her chest in awkwardly, as if protecting herself. I felt like I was wearing khaki and a safari helmet, peering around my jeep whilst deep in the savannah, clutching a telescopic lens and binoculars, and observing the wildlife. Look, the submissive females of the pack. How fortunate to spot the dominant lioness while she performs her dance of intimidation, just daring any of the others to think about usurping her position. How FASCINATING.

What I liked about the class was the positive focus on the body and "its hows," as e. e. cummings once put it. The class was pretty much the antithesis of all the women's magazines that tell us to: Fight the Flab! Burn that Belly! et cetera. The teacher didn't have washboard abs, she had a belly that was wonderfully feminine and moreover able. And as for the "hows" ... when the teacher broke it down enough, our bodies actually could do the same sinuous, undulating things hers could. 'Course once we had to worry about arms and abs, or god forbid do the movement four times as fast and/or to music, all bets were off. But my point is: our bodies are so much more able than we think they are. Than we give them credit for. Sometimes we just need a lot more patience and a little more faith.

Of course you know where I am going with this. Do I feel a little silly meditating on my womb in yoga class or taking belly dancing because of its positive focus on the same region? Do I pull up out of myself sometimes and float in the corner and question whether any of this is really making a difference: not having that cup of coffee I want so badly; drinking chlorophyll in my water to up my red blood cell count; beginning each day with a cup of hot water with lemon to support my liver function; taking seven pills a day; largely cutting out meat and ice cream and dairy; giving up running because the overaerobic quality of it could put me at risk for a repeated miscarriage; letting this go, and that go, and that, too, because it's better to not stress myself out; et cetera.

But I had to try something else. Peeing on strips every single day and worrying about whether or not I was going to ovulate and when and whether I'd miss the small window in which to conceive ... having a recipe of when and how to have sex ... putting up with the indignity of taking hormone supplements after having sex to "correct" my body, as if it didn't know how to do this most natural of things right ... remembering with uncanny mathematical certainty how long it's been since I miscarried (1 yr. 8 mos.), and thus how long we've been trying (1 yr. 6 mos.), and how long we've been really trying, with assistance (7 mos.) ... well, to put it mildly, it was kind of fucking with my happiness and self-worth. Instead, I did a little self-medication: I went to Hawai'i without my husband and thusly had zero sex, missed my ovulation window, drank coffee every morning and alcohol every night, had one hangover that took me back to my early twenties (ouch), and generally stopped thinking about any of this at all. It was healing. And when I came back, I didn't even wait a day before delving into Making Babies: A Proven 3-Month Program for Maximum Fertility, which had arrived from Amazon shortly before I left for Hawai'i.

So, here I am, opening myself to the wideness of possibility. You tell me that acupuncture can help? Then I will overcome my fear of needles. You say I need to drink a tea of a particular concoction of herbs once a day? I'll just add it to all the other shit I'm supposed to do. I'll do yoga and dance-worship my belly, and if you tell me it's been proven to work, I'll go sit in some woods at midnight, ululating with wolves. I am trying to keep my chin up and my heart anchored somewhere between steeling against disappointment and reaching, over and over again, for hope.

Death by Pufferfish finds a second home!

2011-07-13T14:26:00.000-07:00

When I sat down next to Jake Adelstein on a flight from D.C. back to SF in February, I had no idea what it would lead to. I'm rarely chatty on flights--in fact, I'm rarely even conscious on flights. But talking about the book I was reading (Hotel Honolulu by Paul Theroux) led to a conversation about what we both did for a living led to the realization that we were both writers and kept on being fascinating from there. Jake was extremely modest--it wasn't till I got home and Googled him that I realized I was sitting next to a Pretty Big Deal. He is the author of countless articles, a piece in Quakebook, and the book Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan, which I believe--according to his lively and oft-updated Twitter feed--may be getting optioned for a film(?). He has probably written a lot of other things that I don't know about from Google searching. And Jake is also the editor of the fantastic site, Japan Subculture Research Center, which "was founded in 2007 to expose the hidden side of Japan – its underground economy, its sex trade, and all the other intriguing and seedy aspects that keep the country running."

Many, many tweets later, Jake heard about Death by Pufferfish, read it at Hunger Mountain, and contacted me about featuring it on the Japan Subculture Research Center site. I jumped at the gift. This republication also features the artwork of Mari Kurisato, which includes all of the key elements in one elegant illustration and really captures the heart of the story.

Click here to read (or re-read) Death by Pufferfish at Japan Subculture Research Center.

(Also, if you missed it the first time, Hunger Mountain also did a really fun Author Visit with me about the story--another honor that totally THRILLED me!)

About Me, 2011: mayumi_msp_31_07.04.11.

2011-07-04T15:08:00.000-07:00

I am a writer, editor, wife, daughter, hanai sister, niece, hanai granddaughter, and friend.

What I want to be most is a mother.

What I want to be second most is more published and more prolific, less good at procrastinating, and less afraid.

I live in Redwood City, California—by way of (most recent to least) ClintonHill-BrooklynHeights-Burlingame-Pacifica-NewYorkCity-Astoria-Bronxville-LosAngeles-Honolulu-Sacramento. RedCity is thirty-odd minutes south of San Francisco, and I feel absolutely zero loyalty to it: it is simply the place my husband and I have landed on this round of the East-West ping-pong game we’ve been playing for years.

I began blogging in March 2006 via Friendster and a year later moved to Blogger and have been tinkering and figuring it out here ever since. As I wrote in my last About Me, “although I arrived in cyberspace years after the trendsetters deemed blogging to be rather passe, per usual I arrived on my own damn time: late, but I'd like to think fashionably so.”

It’s a strange time for blogging these days—days of so! much! information! all! the! fricken! time! We are a wordy bunch, and frankly we all have ADD. How could we not? If you log off Facebook or Twitter or Google Reader (or Flickr, MySpace, Google+, etc.) or ignore your phone’s texts inbox for half a day, you spend the other half trying to catch up, trying to connect, trying to be present for your 1,000 best and closest “friends” and not miss their engagements, publications, promotions, babies. Presence becomes all the more ironic when you consider how far-flung your heart is, in all its pieces. Blogging has gone from an activity that a geeky-cool, highly insidery and technologically able elite performed to one that anyone who is literate can do. I include myself in the latter, not the former. Blogs have evolved: they can be high concept, specialized, encyclopedic and well-researched; they are promotion tools for companies; they are conversations between famous people and fans, or industry folk and those trying to learn from them; they can be anything you can imagine them to be.

This is not one of those kinds of blogs. This is a blog inspired by and now in tribute to bloggers like le petit hiboux—a friend in “real life,” via Sarah Lawrence College, who wrote the first blog I ever read. She wrote what I deem more of a “life blog,” which held under its umbrella the wide wonder of the world through her eyes. She broke my heart on May 17, 2011, when she announced she would no longer be blogging (incidentally, this entry is a great history of blogging, both hers individually and more generally). Like her, I don’t think my life blog fits in among all these brands and profit margins; like her, I trail off and lose my way and don’t post for months, only to follow that up with a month of posting several times a day, almost every day. This is the only way I can do it, the only way I can not quit. I have absolutely no forethought when it comes to this blog, no plotting out what it will yield for me, no vision of it being the home of The Writer Mayumi Shimose Poe, no idea of structure or shape or craft. It is a snapshot of my brain and my life and therefore appropriately messy.

So why should you be here, in this mess, with me? Why spend part of your procrastination at work sifting through?

I don’t know, really.

Maybe you like me. Maybe you like something I said, or wrote, or did. Maybe you added me to your Google Reader back in the day and now are so overwhelmed by your Google Reader, you don’t have the heart to go through and delete those blogs that no longer hold your interest.

Or maybe you are also a writer. Maybe you are also an editor. Maybe you live in northern California or once lived in Hawai’i or Brooklyn and feel, like, deep and complex feelings about those places. Maybe you know, like me, that dogs are the most awesome creatures in the whole friggin’ universe (including people). Maybe you aren’t sickened by hearing about how happy love and marriage have made me. Maybe you like to cook, be cooked for, read books, know about other awesome blogs, listen to me expound upon the people I love so hard it hurts, want to analyze my horoscopes and dreams with me, or like being surprised by a random collection of whatever the hell is interesting to me right now.

Maybe you like a shitton of words being thrown at you from time to time. Maybe concision isn’t your thing, either.

You must like swearing. Or at least not mind it.

Or maybe you also want, badly, to be a parent and in solidarity are interested in my journey trying to get there. Maybe you, like me, yearn to find a place that feels uncomplicatedly like a home but find yourself pulled in opposite directions; maybe you are also learning that the zip code matters less than the people in it, that feeling at home in a place starts with feeling at home in your skin.

No matter why you are here, I thank you--YOU—deeply. I welcome your (preferably nonanonymous) comments* and your return visits.

---
* I do reserve the right to ignore any that are vicious in spirit or straight-up spam. In regard to “viciousness,” use this rule of thumb: speak your mind, but keep it kind.

I know that last post is almost unreadable because of white lettering on light-blue background

2011-06-17T15:14:00.000-07:00

... but what I don't know and am too lazy to figure out is how to fix it. Sorry!

MSP hearts HEE hilarity.

2011-06-17T15:06:00.001-07:00

I am really going to miss editing the SHIT out of each other's words. If only our Hawaii Women's Journal authors could have seen the bloody mess we rendered onto each other's words, I think they might have felt better about the process. LOL!

Hawaii Women's Journal

hawaiiwomensjournal.com

Last Updated: May 16, 2011 The Hawaii Women's Journal is a project of the Safe Zone Foundation 501(c)3 - Terms of Service

Yesterday at 7:30am · · · Share · See Friendship

- Jennifer Hee Oh Mayumi Shimose Poe, we will still make a bloody mess on the ongoing markup of each other's lives.
  29 minutes ago · · 1 person
- Mayumi Shimose Poe What draft of Jennifer Hee are you on? I am on Mayumi version 18.0 at LEAST. Probably more.
  25 minutes ago ·
- Mayumi Shimose Poe ‎;)
  25 minutes ago ·
- Jennifer Hee I'm on JMH_MSP_56782_06.17.11. My favorite comment to our future existence markup shall be: Does this change retain your meaning?
  5 minutes ago ·
- Jennifer Hee DOES THIS CHANGE RETAIN YOUR MEANING? Shit--I think I'm going to write a whole piece on that concept alone.
  4 minutes ago ·
- Mayumi Shimose Poe ahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
  3 minutes ago ·
- Mayumi Shimose Poe so true
  3 minutes ago ·
- Mayumi Shimose Poe Query 543: Does this change retain your meaning? Query 544: Is there something you're not telling me? Query 545: Do you want to maybe write me an e-mail about it? Query 546: Are my blanks still filled in with FUCKING rainbows, bitch? Query 547: I didn't mean "bitch" in a pejorative way. Query 548: Um, I love you as much as I love pork?
  about a minute ago ·
- Mayumi Shimose Poe Alternate Query 548: I love you as much as I love quinoa and flax.
  about a minute ago ·

Good morning!

2011-06-15T12:24:00.000-07:00

This is my second day in a row of involuntary morning pages. If it isn't my mom talking with her roommate out in the kitchen where I'm sure they don't know the sound gets sucked, osmosis-like, through the bedroom wall against which my head rests, it is the birds right outside my window, as insistent as cocks crowing or an alarm clock making its particularly bloody and stabbing noise. Another way to say it is if it isn't birdsong, it's mothersong. My airport-employee-grade earplugs seem to do nothing here.

Today it was the birds.

First, there was a soprano kind of bird, doing her trilling aria at top octave. I could nearly see this bird's braided blonde hair and viking helmet, her big bosom heaving.

Next up was a bird impersonating a frog with a low-pitched kind of croaking. But the croaking too was a song, and it did not apologize for its musical unconventionality or high volume.

The last was a warm rumble, like someone clearing his throat over and over again, but doing so while hitting actual spots on the musical scale.

It was interminable, insufferable. Mostly because my alarm was set for 7am, and the birds were going off at 5am. Maybe because I hadn't gotten to sleep till past midnight. Maybe because I am a total grump in the mornings.

It sounded more like cacophony than opera. A resented symphony. I was not charmed. I actually stood at the window, staring out into that gentle pale blue of dawn, hearing these individual voices, these soloists, as well as the twittering chorus backing them up, and tried: SHOOOOO! And when that didn't work, SHUTTHEFUCKUP!

The birds, though ... they were not moved.

"TRIBE." (copyrighted term, credit: Jennifer Meleana Hee)

2011-06-14T13:55:00.001-07:00

Nothing is more TRIBE than when you are settling into the deliciousness of chewing on your friend's words/thoughts and writing back right when she is serendipidously doing the same for you.

While I wrote "Boxes and windows and doors" in response to Suz's "When one box closes," she was writing her post "Death by Pufferfish" about my Hunger Mountain publication.

What TRIBE means is that often warmhearted hilarity ensues.

Boxes, windows, and doors.

2011-06-14T13:00:00.001-07:00

Yesterday, my dear friend Suz, over at Cat Fidelity, wrote elegantly of the doings of the head and heart during times when many things seem to be ending. She writes:

It's complex, and since I haven't yet worked it through in language, I can feel it all pulsing through body parts. For example, I just washed my hands, and rather than press the soap pump with only enough power necessary to get some soap out, I jammed it down so hard the liquid Method spurted pretty far, like, all over my hair and dress. While bent over the sink rinsing soap from clumps of hair, I recognized what was going on. But I still don't really know what to make of it.

Man, do I feel her right now.

Hawaii Women's Journal is inching closer toward its final issue, although of course it's been such a long mourning period for me that I feel, in some ways, that it is already over. But the final issue is coming out this month, and I am sure I only think I have celebrated and mourned and when I see the final issue online, I will feel it all over again.

Then I just got news yesterday that another gig on which I collaborate, the Hawaii Youth Opera Chorus newsletter, is having some staff-shifting, which seems to mean the end of the newsletter, at least in its current incarnation.

Add to all of this the fact that I am still home in Hawai'i, living this strange existence of being home but also being not-home at all. This is my home, I love it here, I breathe and write easier here. But my husband is not here, and my dog, and my books, and my things. Also, you know what else is not here? My solitude. It sounds spoiled and stuck-up to say I am overwhelmed by people, but there it is. There are just so many people. And I want to see them, and they want to see me, but I'm definitely rusty at it and have to sort of ramp up my courage, to try really hard not to let pauses sit awkwardly between us, and to not occasionally throw hissy-fits about not having the silence of real solitude, where no one is about to come home, you have no plans for days, and you can actually hear yourself think. Maybe the bad thing is not that I lack the solitude but that I've allowed myself to grow so rusty at being-with-people. I don't know. Everything is so confusing.

Because of course the other place my mind is going is that, yes, there are so many people and it's exhausting but also THERE ARE SO MANY PEOPLE and this is a lucky thing. I don't feel this yet about California. Everyone is exasperated when I say this, because it's only been eight months! I can't expect everything to align right when I say so. I can't expect to land and be surrounded by a community of like souls. I know, I know. It's OK to be exasperated with me, but then again you do know me and voluntarily come to this blog, so you must have known what you were in for. :)

But still, it's something to note that I allowed myself to forget: there are so many beloveds here. And the chance to meet or reconnect with so many more. For example: diaper-days reunion led to me seeing one friend I hadn't seen for years! We used to look like this:

But now we look like this:

And on another day, I met a brand-new friend--a friend of a friend--who wanted to pick my brain about editing. And it was one of those lucky instances where you are sitting with a stranger and they already feel like a friend. And it was such an honor to be asked to contribute my mana'o--albeit a little nerve-wracking to hope that I had something to offer. But boy, once she asked a few questions, she couldn't get me to shut up. I was filled with more tips about the editorial life than I even knew I knew. And it felt so right, it felt back to the best moments of HWJ, where I really felt the groove of right-place-right-time-right-everything.

Of course, I am always happy when something wonderful happens to me, like that unexpected gift of Hunger Mountain publishing "Death by Pufferfish," but I have to tell you what feels even better to me: feeling like I am contributing toward something else. As an astute hanai-sister of mine wrote recently about herself, as a child growing up in HYOC, I too was no soloist; I was happiest when being an integral member of the many necessary working parts of the chorus. And that's still the life I am trying to make for myself today. The dreams I had in my twenties of living in exciting cities of exotic countries far away have faded into the desire for connection, for roots, for real relationships with people with whom you can always share the truthiest truth about yourself ... and they don't run away. :) The dreams I had of fame and glamorous publication-cum-being-listed-at-Oprah's-Book-Club and making some top something under some age list has been replaced with the same desire for connection, for community. Not to be known for myself and my own accomplishments as much as to be known as a working part of projects toward which I contributed.

What all of this brings me to is windows and doors (or in Suz's parlance, boxes) and openings and closings. Although I do see the wisdom in getting paid for work, I also cannot help myself. For many reasons--the sanity of my head, the need of my heart, to avoid overfocusing/stressing about fertility bullshit--I need a different focus, reframing, projects, creativity, collaboration in my life--whether I am paid in dollars or just love.

So, close the HWJ door. And shut that HYOC newsletter window. I can promise you that despite all of that closing, my imagination will stay open, will find a way through.

File under "Published, YAYYY": my short story, "Death by Pufferfish," is now live at Hunger Mountain.

2011-06-13T13:56:00.000-07:00

Here is the link to the short story, "Death by Pufferfish."

Here is the link to the author visit (interview).

I have talked before about why the publication of this story in this journal is so particularly thrilling, but I will say it again: I. AM. THRILLED.

Not least because the editorial process at Hunger Mountain is the kind that as an author I enjoy as well as the kind that as an editor I want to create and be a part of for other writers.* Now some may balk or disagree, but I strongly believe that the editorial process should be a collaboration of equal partners. Thrusting aside egos as much as possible, the point should always be: What is this work doing and saying? What is best for this work, not this author or editor? Hunger Mountain's fantastic editorial staff absolutely collaborates and makes the whole process both enjoyable and instructive.

In my case, I owe a heartfelt thanks to Fiction Editor Barry Wightman and Managing Editor Miciah Bay Gault for fantastic line edits; The Writing Life Editor Claire Guyton for guiding me through my Author Visit; Assistant Fiction Editor Ross McMeekin for laying it out and getting the links live and making it all looks so pretty!; and definitely and deeply to all the fiction readers on staff who ushered me through the gates rather than closing them. (Read about these awesome staffers here.)

---

* This is especially poignant right now as Hawaii Women's Journal draws nearer to its final issue, which will be released later this month. Collaboration was absolutely the project on which HWJ editorial staff embarked, and it is sad to lose that chance to work with others toward their own greatest greatness.

Being home for a month is healing.

2011-06-08T17:53:00.001-07:00

It's a slow and steady reminder that what matters more than zip code is being at home in your own skin.

Hee + MSP 4-EVER.

2011-06-02T23:21:00.001-07:00

I love this smartprettyface more than I can explain with words.

((But knowing me, later I might try.))

"Why Don't I Live Here // Thank God I Don't."

2011-06-02T23:17:00.000-07:00

Wide spanses of gorgeous shore like this leave me very conflicted.

Mayumi, in Hawai'i, without the passport that is Dave.

2011-05-25T20:54:00.000-07:00

To be here, you need to belong or not care.

Lilikoi (passionfruit) flower.

2011-05-25T20:33:00.000-07:00

This is what you get when you come home. You get to walk down the 63 stairs and see that rampant lilikoi has taken root in the neighbors' yard since the last time you were home. You get to wake up at 5am to this certain bird your mother calls the wind-up bird, and there is not a better way to describe him. You get to lay there while the trades put just enough of a chill on your bare arms to keep you under light blankets. You get to contemplate the day before it's actually begun. You get to imagine living here again--which you can and cannot at all picture. You get to feel the hundreds of ways you have changed too much and not enough. You get to try, and try, and try to belong, like a missing piece trying to jigsaw back into the wrong puzzle. You get to realize that staying away for so long has been about holding yourself apart, about proving to yourself and others that you are bigger, better, tougher, smarter, prettier, more talented than people here let you believe. And then you get to be honest, for where are those "tormentors" now? And who really cares about them? Even they are no longer themselves. Just shades. You have spent all this time being bullied by memory, which has served to protect and cripple you both.

Welcome home.

2011-05-25T20:31:00.000-07:00

Beloved Books (including Mary Sutter).

2011-05-19T17:52:00.001-07:00

It's funny but sometimes the books you love the most are not the ones that necessarily continue to provoke thought the longest.

For example: Nicole Krauss's A History of Love. Adam Haslett's You Are Not a Stranger Here. Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad. And now, Robin Oliveira's My Name Is Mary Sutter.

These are all books that utterly transported me, that made me feel/live in another place and time, that even allowed me escape from my own life (though perhaps choosing a book that held at its core so much midwivery when depressed about another negative pregnancy test wasn't the wisest). They were books that spun a spell that allowed me to breathe them in, books that I wasn't dissecting to see how they worked as I read.

But they were also books to which my main response having finished reading them was: WOW. The most capitalized, boldfaced, large font WOW you can imagine. But also just WOW. Nothing more coherent than that. Nothing that I could add onto or digress about. Perhaps because they were books I couldn't imagine having written. I deeply admired the authors and envied their accomplishment but also saw their books as a finite experience for me. I read them, I experienced them, I was transported, but now I am back. This is not a detriment; this is not any failure of the book; this does not make me love any of them any less.

Maybe sometimes you learn more from the books that you don't love, the books that don't quite work?

All this is well and good, but I simply cannot let My Name Is Mary Sutter not be spoken about in more depth. Because it was that good, also because I adore Robin Oliveira, who I met via Vermont College of Fine Arts. My first summer there, she was a graduate assistant, and I was lucky enough to be one of the new students assigned to her for a private critique of some of my work. She continued to be such a presence on the VCFA campus, returning often to participate in the community making, and I will never forget, particularly, the sight of her beautiful smile and the time she wore this ruffly sort of pencil skirt in the dead of Vermont winter, and I was like, my god, she's wearing an outfit whereas I am wearing pajamas under my jeans under the giantest puffiest coat of the entire east coast and I am still cold, and yet there she stands, gorgeous and smiling like it's not zero degrees.

But I digress.

My Name Is Mary Sutter is a masterful novel, such an elegant conception of plot, beautifully written, and Robin Oliveira deeply and carefully researched but then managed to integrate her research in an organic way that never pointed out, "Hey, look, I really know my shit! I really did a lot of research!!"

(That said, do not miss Robin's wonderfully informative and humble Acknowledgments section, which will make you appreciate what she put into the making of this novel. I really love the Acknowledgments because they made me feel both daunted and inspired, simultaneously--I couldn't imagine undertaking that amount of research. But then I kind of could. Because Robin so loved her subject matter, she was incredibly thorough and careful. She made herself an expert, but she did not begin as one. That is so heartening for another writer to know. That the world of what you can write is so wide. That you can learn as you go along. That you can become the expert you need to be down the line to write the things that must be written.)

What I loved most about Mary Sutter, though, is that title character. Not since Jane Eyre have I fallen so in love with a female protagonist. She is strong, and plain, and sturdy, and willful, and driven, and soft, and carries a heart full of hurt. She is nothing short of amazing. And what's even better: she's a twin. I mean, there is practically no better literary trope, in my humble opinion, than that of the twin. It just sets up this wonderful question of how did these two people, with the same genes, of the same womb, born just minutes apart, turn out to be who they each are? Wonderful stuff.

So, read My Name Is Mary Sutter because it's a wonderful novel. Read it because, if you are a writer, you will be able to forget about writing and just enjoy reading. Read it because you love me, and I love Robin. Read it because this is my blog, and I'm bossy, and I say so.

A thought for today.

2011-05-18T13:44:00.000-07:00

“Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.” ~Elizabeth Stone

((from Tired & Stuck: Three women on a mission to get knocked up. I recommend this blog to those struggling to get pregnant. It makes you feel so human.))

I wrote this yesterday after I peed on a pregnancy test and then was very, very sad.

2011-05-18T13:30:00.000-07:00

This is fertility. Don't fucking look away. It's not all baby names and "knowing" which time you made love resulted in conception. This is fertility, I say, not infertility. This is fertility because it is not easy for everyone. Because you're not abnormal if it doesn't happen on the first try, or the fifth, or the twenty-fifth.

I often doubt myself about how much I share on the Internet. I fear that, especially in retrospect, I will regret having made private struggles so public.

But I also can't worry about hindsight. I can only think about now, about one foot in front of the other, and this road that feels long even though I am only 31 and this is supposed to give me hope.

Hope is the thing with feathers, said Emily Dickinson. Well. Either it's flown or is molting. I just feel bitter. Resigned. Trapped. I hate my current life. I hate trying. I hate testing. I hate waiting. I hate hoping.

I want to be one of those obnoxious people who goes off birth control and reveals pregnancy to be a lark rather than an odyssey. "We weren't trying, but we weren't not trying."

I hate how simple it is for some. Or maybe I hate how not simple it is for some. Not sure, it's a little confusing. But I definitely hate. I am filled with hate, and I am fucking telling it how it is because fertility is not all baby showers and fucking onesies with paws and bear ears on them.

It's just not.

Tigercubs and bearcubs.

2011-05-11T13:51:00.000-07:00

Wesley Yang's recent New York Magazine article is a meditation on being male, Asian, and trying to "succeed" in America. The article partially hooks onto the controversy stirred by Amy Chua and her now-infamous Chinese Mom parenting articles* and book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, asking, "What happens to all the Asian-American overachievers when the test-taking ends?"

I'm not sure that Wesley Yang and Amy Chua are really talking about the same kind of parenting. Wesley Yang seems to be referring to a more first-generation kind of "Asian parenting." If we can generalize such a thing, it might gloss as follows: cut out social life and extracurriculars (unless necessary for college applications), study hard, get the best grades, become a doctor or lawyer or otherwise respected and well-paid person. But Amy Chua seems very next generation: her parenting isn't just about test scores. It isn't just about getting into a good college and then a good career. Her parenting seems to be about how life itself is one big test. Or perhaps a stretch of near-daily pop quizzes. Her approach to parenting--while extreme and something I predict that one of her daughters will provoke a very dramatic fight about later in life--is a life-prepatory academy. If you want to succeed, you have it want it badly, do everything in your power to get it, and then be a little lucky.

But Yang has a point about the kind of parenting he discusses. How America is not a meritocracy. How even with a black man in the White House, we're still not "postracial"--and will we ever be? And would we want to be? What would that even look like? I want to be postdiscrimination but not postdiversity. The idea of a melting pot has always terrified me. I much prefer the metaphor of a tossed salad. I can see how growing up with "Asian" values about cramming, test-taking, keeping your head down and your nose clean, respecting elders, respecting others, respecting the group over the self, and remembering with an acute sense of shame that the nail that sticks out gets the hammer would affect one's career. Those values can get you down much of that factory belt: good grades, good college, good career. But then at a certain point, you hit what the media has decided to call "the bamboo ceiling."

"Success," depending on how it is defined, can seem to draw on a variant of W.E.B. DuBois's notion of "double-consciousness." Navigating life doubly, grounding in yourself the values with which you were raised as well as the exact opposite ones that will help you obtain success. Of being able to hold one's self at a remove, as if simultaneously sitting at your desk and floating in the ceiling's corner critiquing your slouch and the fact that you can see that Facebook has been open for three hours whilst others surely have been teaching/writing/ applying for jobs/grants/contests/opportunities. Constantly trying to see yourself as others see you--and then correcting the difference between yourself and others. Maybe that means that you need to overcome your inherent respect of elders and interrupt your boss during a meeting. Maybe it means that you should walk a certain way or approach women a certain way.**

Or maybe it means forging out on your own, becoming your own CEO or your own dark, angry artist/writer type. Maybe it means saying "Fuck filial piety. Fuck grade-grubbing. Fuck Ivy League mania. Fuck deference to authority. Fuck humility and hard work. Fuck harmonious relations. Fuck sacrificing for the future. Fuck earnest, striving middle-class servility," as does Yang.

What Yang seems certain of, though, is that this is an acquired knowledge--something you learn to negotiate, not something innate or taught by tiger moms (and dads). I think he's mostly right there.

But we can look to Amy Chua's own daughter, Sophia, for an alternative opinion on what the tiger-mom upbringing produces. Her elegant letter to The New York Post this January pretty much makes me feel like we all had our panties in a twist over nothing.

What does it really mean to live life to the fullest? Maybe striving to win a Nobel Prize and going skydiving are just two sides of the same coin. To me, it’s not about achievement or self-gratification. It’s about knowing that you’ve pushed yourself, body and mind, to the limits of your own potential. You feel it when you’re sprinting, and when the piano piece you’ve practiced for hours finally comes to life beneath your fingertips. You feel it when you encounter a life-changing idea, and when you do something on your own that you never thought you could. If I died tomorrow, I would die feeling I’ve lived my whole life at 110 percent.

Maybe the trick for you tigercubs out there is to suck it up for childhood and high school, and then pick and choose the values/lessons you want to still live with in your adult life. Like a values code-switching: having two bodies of knowledge from which to pick, and choosing the appropriate one based on situation. Like being at an Asian buffet with your Asian family and knowing better than to make the rookie mistake of going for the rice or the salad. Going straight for the crab and the lobster and the prime rib--the things that hold within them the most value.

Winding down here, let me add some final anecdotes to get this out of the way: I did not have a tiger mom. Or at least not in the way you're thinking.

She was Asian--but not Chinese; she was Japanese. And as a nisei born and raised shortly after my grandparents got out of WWII internment camps, she wasn't as Asian as first-generation immigrants or perhaps other Asians who had been born at a different time. Or perhaps it was that she was a different kind of Asian, not an Asian born as much as constructed. Living in the United States at a time when one's ethnicity could be seen as a crime, my grandparents were intent on conveying stalwart Americanness. By the time they got out of the camps, my grandfather had served in the U.S. Army and had assumed the nickname "Smokey" (to replace "Hideo"). They opened a diner in Sacramento called Kampus Kitchen--the kind of diner of which Johnny Rockets is a caricature. What would seem more quintessentially American to the Asian immigrant observing than a "greasy spoon" where if rice is on the menu it is the long-grain kind and served with a side of butter? My grandparents wanted to have, in my mother's words, "low-profile children"--quiet, excessively compliant, unchallenging of authority. She tried to tape her eyes to make an Aryan crease and bathe in lemon peels to attempt to bleach her skin whiter. Blending in worked for a while--that is, until my mother reached the rebellious stretch of her teen years, and in the face of the American her parents wanted her to be, my mother decided to be Japanese.

She would wear geta around her college campus, and kimonos to bed, and decided to study Japanese--to which my grandfather responded by "helping" her study, purposely feeding her incorrect answers. When she confronted him, he furiously told her that she was an American first. That she had no appreciation or understanding for what it had taken him to be American. That she should not shame him in this way. Ultimately, in some ways, her upbringing sounds very much like the upbringing of a "tiger cub"--and her "test-taking" being how to pull off being 100% American when American fails to tell the full story.

So she was Asian, and she was ferocious--but only in protection of me. Less like a tiger, more like a bear--which of course makes her pet name from me, "Mommabear," obvious. Did she spend money she didn't have to send me to a college-prepatory high school and my dream college? Yes. Did she want me to get good grades and embarrass me by calling the Assistant Headmaster and creating an enforced studyhall, wherein I had to go sit in his office and do my homework after school because I had gotten some Ds in math and science? Oh, hells yeah. But didn't she also allow me to sign me up for ballet lessons, halau, orchestra, color guard, and community choir? Didn't she practically frame every story or poem I ever wrote? Didn't she tell me a hundred times a day--in the teenaged years, oppressively so--how much she loved me, and believed in me, and thought me to be a creative, brilliant, amazing individual? Didn't she march me into that fancy high-school with all the people who could actually afford to be there and tell me I deserved this education as much as any of the rest of them, even if I was there by combination of financial aid, workstudy, extensive loans, a generous gift from her then-boyfriend, and the grace of God? And let me just add, not once, ever, did she suggest I become something more "practical" like a doctor, lawyer, or engineer.

So, my mom and I? We're Asian, sure, but don't count us in the tiger tribe. We're another animal altogether.

---

* Sorry, but this is a GEM, and one with which I totally agree: "What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences." Also: "Western parents try to respect their children's individuality, encouraging them to pursue their true passions, supporting their choices, and providing positive reinforcement and a nurturing environment. By contrast, the Chinese believe that the best way to protect their children is by preparing them for the future, letting them see what they're capable of, and arming them with skills, work habits and inner confidence that no one can ever take away."

** To be honest, though, the whole section on picking up women ICKED ME OUT. If a supposed "alpha male" came up into my space, turned me around by my shoulder, and then grinned widely and started talking to me, he'd get a pretty heated and negative response.

Awesomeness, CA: Booksmith in The Haight.

2011-05-09T21:06:00.001-07:00

Went to Booksmith for the Zyzzyva spring issue reading last week. It was so packed that I could only see the readers if I stood on my tippy-toes, glancing over this magazine rack:

Which proved to me verily that I was indeed smack in the Haight.

Probably my favorite thing about the reading was the bookstore itself. Filled with bestsellers, sure, but also quirkier books arranged in wonderful thematic shelves. This is clearly for zombie-philes.

Another thing that made the store so great is that they had staff descriptions of books, kind of like going to a fancy wine store and hearing about all those blackberries, smoke, and cacao nibs you're supposed to be tasting in such and such a bottle.

Instead, it's book tastings. Love this.

I suppose I should say something about the reading. I only heard two or three people read. I bought the issue. I'm excited to peruse it. But it was difficult for me to get a handle on their aesthetic from just those few readers.

Plus I was just pissed that SF's public transportation was doing me no favors. It was a comedy of errors after the Caltrain. Get on the MUNI metro platform, ask where to buy a ticket, get told you can buy it on board. Ask someone else can you buy the ticket on board, and they say they think so, and so ask does the machine take cash, and they say no. Scratch your head like WTF, it's San Francisco, doesn't everything take debit/credit? Go get cash. Wait again on the platform. Catch the right train in the right direction, only to learn that if paying cash you need to be in the first car. Get in the first car. Read the sign that says, exact change taken only. Realize you only have a twenty. Get off at the next stop. Wander aimlessly about, realizing there is only one thing you can do to break your bill, and that's go have a drink. Walk into an overpriced sports bar near the ballpark, order the cheapest glass of wine there is, and read Tiger, Tiger whilst slamming down the wine. Be the only person in the bar not hollering at the television, which is playing several different games of different sports. Catch the train again. Get all the way to Embarcadero station before you start feeling nervous about not having a ticket. Decide that this station looks like where you can buy a ticket. Find a ticket machine! Buy a ticket! Wait for another train! Take the wrong one, going back in the wrong direction. Get back off, wait for the right one headed in the right direction, have it be so damn packed that you can't breathe for the half-hour-plus it takes to get to The Haight. Get off in relief at your stop, which you only realize is your stop because you've put on your glasses, not because you know the map or because any kind of notification exists on board for what stop you are at or are headed to. Head down the street on your own two feet, wishing this city was more walkable, but at least it is sunny and beautiful and there is a literary reading ahead and you are buzzed. Realize as you silence your phone and dart into the bookstore that after all that F-ING drama, not one MUNI worker on any of those ill-fated trains ever asked for your ticket.

If I weren't already married to Laura von Holt, I would marry her again in a hot second.

2011-05-09T18:15:00.000-07:00

You already know about her bombchikabombness, but take another look: her brain is just as sexy. http://happydeadmomday.blogspot.com/2011/05/how-to-have-adult-relationship-with.html.

Margaux Fragoso's "Tiger, Tiger" burns bright.

2011-05-05T18:39:00.000-07:00

I devoured Margaux Fragoso's Tiger, Tiger in a greedy gulp, between yesterday afternoon and this morning.

It seems a strange compliment to give, though, and a stranger one still to admit aloud: that I was captivated, enthralled, thirsty for this memoir about her relationship as a child/young woman with a pedophile/sexual predator. I mean, can I write that? Can I admit that?

Well, I sure can, because I am far from the only or the first to sing the memoir's praises.

By the time I had finished the prologue, I had already promised myself that, even if five years down the line some talk show host is cussing out and denouncing her, I won't care because she utterly transported me (not, albeit, to a very nice place) and I can't see her sleight of hand.

Fragoso utterly immerses us into this fierce, wild kingdom wherein she as Margaux spent her childhood. We are shaken to be in this world where children are savage and bare, and all the corners have not been kiddy-proofed, and where danger does more than lurk--it walks down the street in broad daylight, holding Margaux's hand.

What I think I appreciated most about her book is that it is not tidy. By the end of the epilogue, by no means have all things been tied up. It's not episodic like an episode of Law & Order: SVU, you know, where we can neatly justify everything that has been done to a child as the perpetrator's own history of being abused, and that the child never spoke out, never ended things, and/or was completely brainwashed, etc. because of Stockholm syndrome. Some of those things are true, but in the same moment, paragraph, sentence, so are other, conflicting things. Peter worships Margaux as the idol of his own private religion; he also sometimes punches and slaps her. Peter only likes little girls; but later on there are allegations of sexual abuse from his stepson that are never resolved as being true or not. Margaux loves and wants to marry Peter and have his children from the time she is eight years old; she is also often repulsed by him. Peter likes little girls, yet he is still involved with Margaux right up until his death, when she is 22 and he 66. Did Peter molest his daughters or not--and did it make any difference in his pathology that Margaux was not his blood? Did Peter molest Karen, and the other female foster children he had, and what was up with Jill, anyway--just a crush? Did Peter molest Ricky or not? And how could Margaux's parents (esp. her mother) not think this thing was weird/off from the very start?

All valid questions that will linger because neither Fragoso nor her child persona-voice of Margaux can answer all those questions. And all I can say is thank GOD. Nothing tacks "-ifice" onto "art" like tying up all loose ends. Life is full of questions we'll never, ever answer. Ones that others think we should answer, but perhaps we are more interested in a different set of questions altogether.

Fragoso doesn't tiptoe around what happened to her, but neither is she graphically explicit in a sensationalist way. Margaux Fragoso isn't try to shock you, she's remembering. She's not trying to sob out the story of how her childhood was taken from her; instead she claims agency throughout this book, complicating the power dynamics incredibly and honestly. This extends to the framework of the prologue, which introduces the reader to Margaux the young adult, and the epilogue, which importantly extends the tale beyond its set parameters, to speed through time and introduce us to Fragoso the grown woman and author and mother of a small daughter. It is this epilogue, especially, that I think grounds us in the why of her writing: she was processing, remembering, grieving, healing, thinking, feeling, and so forth, and she still is, and still will be perhaps for her entire life. Instead of a pair of rose- vs. shit-colored glasses, which are inherently removable and changeable, Margaux Fragoso's had laser surgery and her childhood experiences will always be part of--though not all of--her worldview. She uses that epilogue to trace what it is to be the daughter of her mother (and father) as well as to be a mother to a daughter, and she uses it to think through what needs to change at a societal level to prevent other children from coming to harm.

It's a beautiful and important book.

"The Sweet Spot."

2011-05-05T12:56:00.001-07:00

My friend Robin (of Woodbird) suggested I watch this interview, and now I'm going to pay it forward and suggest you do, too. It's about finding "the sweet spot" in life, meaning that point where you know you are where you should be and are doing what you are meant to, where you wake up and feel lucky to be living your life.

The Desha Show - Episode One from Desha Peacock on Vimeo.

I LOVED this interview, took away a lot of gems about how to be more proactive at creating that sweet spot for myself, but I also had a single moment's pause. The interview subject, Suzanne Kingsbury, described how/why she came to create her own writer's salon:

If you want to receive something--I wanted to receive the feeling again of bliss--then give it, you know? And you will eventually ... receive what you want.

And it just made me pause a little because I wonder how much waiting do you do, even as it discourages you, before you can't wait any more? Suzanne Kingsbury also urges us against this feeling of a schedule, saying, "The Universe works on an interesting timeline." The way I look at it is that I tend to fling myself into situations, into projects, into/at people, and sometimes I am met halfway, sometimes more than that, and the times when I am standing there, fully flung and not met, it's awkward, you know? Uncomfortable. And I'm just in one of those periods right now where all my flinging feels like it's getting me nowhere. I can't stir up the same intensity of fling in the people around me.

Another friend last night cautioned me to not ... "lower" my expectations as much as to cultivate patience. Which is sort of the same advice of Suzanne gives above about the Universe and its timeline.

I want to be grateful for what actually is ("the now"), not just long for what I desire, but ... how can you not measure the distance between your dreams and reality? How do you lose that yardstick? And why is it not good for yourself and your self-respect to stop flinging where it isn't wanted?

Writers and their dogs.

2011-05-04T16:07:00.001-07:00

Loved this post.

Famous WIFEY.

2011-05-04T15:44:00.001-07:00

Comment to a stuck writer.

2011-05-04T15:35:00.001-07:00

It’s not that I don’t sympathize as much as I about about to play BAD COP. Don’t open a document, then, open a notebook. Or flip to the backside of a grocery list or an envelope or whatever intimidates less. Put on music; turn off music. Write outside, write inside, write in a loud public setting, or the quietest, most desolate corner you know. Read: blogs, newspapers, magazines, and books books books. Read, and journal privately, and blog publicly. Just BEGIN. Take the pressure off. Words are just words. Let them accumulate until you are back in the swing of things and don’t selfl-censor* or self-edit.

In short: Don’t hunt; GATHER. Don’t be frightened; FORGE ONWARD.

Do you know The Right to Write by Julia Cameron? It has helped many a stuck writer.

Sending love and tough-you-up vibes,
Mayumi

---

* How ironic is it that this editor just misspelled self-censor?! I itch to correct it, but I guess it'd be a bit hypocritical. Damn that trigger finger.

Mood of late being somewhat involved with this song.

2011-05-04T14:48:00.001-07:00

The first line of lyrics go, "Fuck California. You made me boring."

Uhm. No comment?

Trajectories.

2011-05-04T13:31:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I was cleaning out some old files, including one labeled "future interest/career stuffs." And what do I stumble upon but some wonderful old hand-drawn brainstorms/flowcharts about where I imagined life possibly taking me. These are circa 2003, I think.

Save obtaining my MFA (even then it was from nowhere I planned to attend, though I would argue that my MFA came from exactly where it was meant to), I went on to do almost none of these things.

I am not sure if that's amusing or depressing. Does it show, as they say, how life is what happens when you make other plans? Or does it show that I have been damn lazy or scared for the last nine years, too scared to move or change, despite all the other literal movement in my life? Or does it prove the wide-flung wonder of the self, how much more we always have to know about ourselves? How little I could predict my own destiny at age 23.

The answer to those questions depends on morning and mood.

The other thing I found was a manila folder labeled "job advice." What it held was printed-out e-mails to me over the years from my blood uncle and hanai family of aunties and uncles--especially from 2003 when I had written in distress about difficulties I was having then at American Anthropologist. I spent the afternoon yesterday reading through those wonderful e-mails again.

Who would think that in 2011, I'd have stuck it out with American Anthropologist and STILL be editing there? That I'd be living (again) in California? It certainly wasn't the advice I was given ... or was it? Many of my family told me to find the difference between earning a living and making a life. Obviously I'm still figuring that out, and the words hold as much weight as ever.

But it made me miss that sense of being always enveloped by family, a strong set of shoulders squared at the world but around the neck is many, many lei, and wherever those shoulders went, color and fragrance and presence would go, too.

It made me miss that sense of family woven because, over the years, with all the distance, much of that sense of family has faded. Friendships back home with my mom shifted. I stopped writing as often as I should have, I stopped telling them how much they meant and making it home a few times a year and going out running with them, and I hate the phone so I never called. And they stopped writing back.

Family isn't always born, sometimes it is made. But either way, it is not a given, it is something that must be worked at, constantly maintained.

These are the things I cannot get away from thinking about: family and place. I love California and my friends here, but I have a near-constant sense of dissatisfaction because moving here was supposed to be about that next chapter: family. And we're in the fertility trenches, for sure, with ovulation tests and schedules for having sex and a handful of vitamins and hormones and all kinds of goodies, but ... in the trenches we sit. We sit and wait for our lives to change enough to feel like they are moving forward. And meanwhile I train myself not to think of New York, where I have another family of friends and a known writing community, and I train myself not to think of Hawai'i, where I have another family of friends and my actual family (mom and the poes) and where I've always imagined returning, ultimately, to put down roots. Meanwhile the roots all are drying, and the wings overtired.

Last night I had a dream that I had gotten another tattoo. It was four words, on my right hand's middle and ring fingers. Seems a shame I cannot remember what the words were, because you can't get more metaphorical than that: words of indelible ink tied around my fingers. I'm pretty sure the first word was "trust" or "faith" and the second "in," but I don't remember the last word. That was the tattoo I intended to get, but there was some sort of conspiracy and the tattoo artist took it upon himself to add the word "social" before the last word. So:

TRUST IN SOCIAL __________.

FAITH IN SOCIAL ____________.

Really wish I could remember. Seems my subconscious wanted me to.

What the library yielded.

2011-05-04T12:53:00.000-07:00

Where to even begin!

How Nahe and I work from home together.

2011-04-15T18:07:00.001-07:00

Getting LOTS done. Yep. Lots and lots.

Crazy-vivid lately dreams.

2011-04-15T17:43:00.000-07:00

I dreamed I were at some sort of big church, but it was not Kawaiaha'o, and I was sitting in the audience with my friend Jenjen. Auntie N. and some of the other aunties were leading what must have been current HYOC members into different numbers, etc. After one song ended, Auntie N. took the microphone. She noted how many alumni/ae were in the audience and asked us to stand. And it was IMPRESSIVE. It was like every alumni/ae whose life she had ever touched was there. Fully 3/4 of the audience (which was huge) was made up of alums. We then all sat back down, and she got kind of emotional at the mike, seeing us all gathered there, like she hadn't realized quite how many had turned out. And then she started bringing alums up to perform the really, really old numbers, drawing on her intuitive knowledge of what each of us could do, what we were good at, and so forth. It was amazing, her recall of so many people's talents and affinities. I particularly remember her introducing a number (I didn't recognize it) by some of the most graceful dancers, and you introduced their names, and all of a sudden from the crowd rose Mahina, a visibly pregnant Joanna, Lorelle, a pregnant Laurie M., and Lisa U., and they moved so gracefully and positioned into a long-forgotten kind of tableau, positioning themselves to wait for the music to begin, some kneeling, all with arms held just so. It was amazing, like muscle memory, like bone memory, how all these women, who in my dream were living such different adult lives (as they are outside of dreamland, too) could instantly fall back into this knowledge of a piece they had known intimately for years and just remember its every nuance. Or Auntie N. would bring up some others who were known for their renditions of certain songs, Mahi'ai with Ka Wailele, you know, or Ann Y. for See the World.

I also dreamed that the service was partly a funeral for one of two twins, who I guess had been in HYOC? (I didn't recognize them, I don't think they were real people.) Anyway, somewhere in the middle of the performance, there was some kind of intermission, I guess, and Jenjen and I went to the bathroom, which you had to walk on this outdoor lanai kind of area to get to. On the way there, we saw the coffin out in a yard, under some plumeria trees, and there was a huge white Alaskan husky sitting directly on top of the coffin and just ... WAILING. We both were so sad for the dog, understanding instantly and implicitly that that dog was the dog of the person who had died. But what was weird was that we slowly realized it was a GHOST DOG. Did the dog die of grief when its owner did? I don't know. But anyway, we realized it because no one else could see the dog or hear it, but on and on it kept wailing. We felt really bad for the dog, and magically, for some reason, I had a ziplock of bacon in my pocket (never leave home without it, LOL), so I started feeding the ghost dog the real bacon, which really did vanish when he ate it and seemed to cheer him up a bit. Then he started whining and pacing like he needed to be walked, which was ridiculous. I mean, he's a ghost dog! he's not even chained up! shit, he's already in a yard! just go do your business! I tried to reason with the ghost dog, but just like real dogs in nondream life, I could not ... because he was a dog. So you and I went to go get one of our dog's leash and collar. To take a ghost dog for a walk. That was going to look really fucking ridiculous, an empty collar and leash held by us as we walked along, but .... we were going to do it anyway.

Also I dreamed I was Bones (from the tv show, the forensic anthropologist) about to FINALLY get it on with Booth, but Dave's hacking up his lung (in real life, he is sick right now) woke me up. Man was i PISSED to be distracted from that dream. Then, later, I was in a crazy huge awesome vintage store, and I bought a few things, but part of the crazy thing about that store was that when you bought stuff, you also had to help their ad campaign by modeling on other things they picked for you and getting your photo taken. It was crazy. I felt like a pin-up girl. It was hot. And the shoes I dreamed about ... man, I wish I could find them in real life. Then I dreamed I ran into my friend Khaliah on the street, and Jenjen, and they were giving me a shit for not going out to a boozy dinner, and I was trying to explain how broke I am (shit, even in my dreams, I am broke, this is fucked up, I should at least DREAM about being a gazillionaire), and you both told me I was lame.

Stumbling on the origins of story.

2011-04-07T13:24:00.001-07:00

I just spent two hours reorganizing a large pile of torn-out planner pages, post-its, and scrap paper--an accurate road map to the interiority of my brain, which, to my OCD's chagrin, is really not that organized after all.

Two HOURS, people.

Somewhere in there, I stumbled on this note, from March 31, 2009:

Short story @ PCC!
performing polynesianness (weird)
edit from Freaks?

What a GEM. Evidently, it was back in March 2009 that I began dreaming up "Circle Island." It began as nothing more than the cobbling together of an observation ("the Polynesian Cultural Center requires Mormon Polynesians to perform their Polynesianness, and I find this WEIRD") with the resurrection and rewriting of a draft of another story that had never quite worked ("Freaks," which meditated on what makes someone a "freak" and was set in Coney Island).

I am really relieved that I wrote "Circle Island" without waiting to find this note again, but nevertheless sometimes my disorganized mess makes me really, really happy. Such as on days like today, where the chaos yields proof of inspiration. How very bright, and yet tiny, inspiration can seem--like a flash of lightning, like the firing of a single synapse, so electric and quick. And yet if you give it the time and space to breathe, it takes on a life of its own.

From the Shameless, yet Selfless, Promotion Department: Vermont College of Fine Arts open house.

2011-03-31T13:14:00.000-07:00

Reposted in full from VCFA's recent mailing. I doubt I need to explain to you, dear readers, the impact of VCFA on my life--that is, writing life and otherwise--but here is a refrain. Despite the significant student loans I have coming due, there is no better gift I have ever given myself than this education. For all the long-winded reasons, see the post I wrote in response to a prospective VCFA writing student.

Do you know artists, writers, composers or graphic artists who would benefit from a Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA degree? If so, please tell them about our upcoming open house. We would love the chance to show them firsthand what happens here at VCFA. Details are below:

VCFA ALL COLLEGE OPEN HOUSE

Saturday, April 16, 2011

Come to Montpelier and meet Faculty, Program Directors, and Alumni from each of our MFA Programs.

Join us for all or part of the day to learn about our low-residency MFA programs. Attend readings, portfolio reviews, performances, and panel sessions designed to answer your questions.

Housing is available.

For more details or to RSVP click here.
or call toll-free 866-934-8232 or 802-828-8600
or register online.

One Story Magazine #147.

2011-03-23T12:37:00.000-07:00

I have a new favorite literary journal today: One Story magazine. I am in love. First, there's that K. L. Cook's "Filament" was a great way to first encounter the 'zine: really wonderful detail, a strong vernacular voice firmly rooted in a clear sense of place, and a fun and fluid POV that moves, omnisciently, through various members of a town to tell of a murder. I love the time slippage as well: how, in more than one part of the text, the author freezes present motion for a brief paragraph to reveal something that will happen years later. Not a new tactic (a great cinematic example of this is Run Lola Run) but one well executed here--with an important effect on the "what's-at-stake"-ness (to use VCFA prof. Laurie Alberts's term) of the story. In many ways the story feels like a classic whodunnit, but the time slippage allows the reader to know the who, the dunnit, and even the why--and yet it also complicates the why, especially in that Cook's concluding paragraphs manage to be simultaneously present time and past.

But, second, I really enjoy the way that the 'zine elevates the short story form. Each issue comprises a single short story, beautifully laid out, featuring a pleasantly plain cover, great style and good sizing on the font, and an author bio page and masthead following the issue's content.

A wonderful 'zine! I just wish they accepted stories longer than 8,000 words. My comfortable range is more around 9,000-10,000 words--or at least it used to be. I've recently found myself writing much, much shorter pieces, thanks to encouragement from my friend Keith Meatto, himself quite a master of the short form. But the story that I would lay at their feet and beg them to take is quite a bit longer: 9,685 words. Who thinks I can cut 1,685 unnecessary words? Is that even possible? I don't know, but I will tell you this: I'm at least going to try.

Mary Ruefle, VCFA professor, wins 2011 Williams Carlos Williams award!

2011-03-22T14:24:00.001-07:00

Her winning poem, "Glory," is just gorgeous. What a perfect way to describe the writer's undertaking: as a "glorifier" of "ordinary things." I feel so lucky to have studied with her, very briefly, last summer. Read Glory here.

The Sun, March 2011.

2011-03-22T13:18:00.000-07:00

Do you subscribe to The Sun? It's one of my favorite literary magazines--even though they stubbornly refuse to publish me. I think I've been rejected five times. Anyway, this morning I read Gregory Martin's "The Great Bewilderment: Reading 'Captin JJC the Feirce'" to my great enjoyment. What a fun, and clever, and nimble concept! The frame is this: a dream within a dream, employing footnotes, with the footnotes' author being a writer and father, and the text's author being a young writer and son. The true story is contained in the footnotes. This framework allows Gregory Martin to ruminate on and occasionally lightheartedly mock the writing process and literary criticism. It is a wonderful read.

[Of course, I can never read a piece of creative prose with endnotes or footnotes without thinking of Natasha/Natalia Sarkissian. I was lucky enough to overlap with her at VCFA and to be present for her fascinating lecture on the subject as well as fortunate to encounter her own skilled experimentations with the form in her novel-in-progress, A Visitor's Guide to Titti's Men, which I guarantee you will find on a bookstore shelf one of these days. I really wish that lecture was published somewhere [Natasha, get on it!].)

"Death by Pufferfish" finds a home.

2011-03-22T12:11:00.000-07:00

I just received the fantastic news that Hunger Mountain accepted "Death by Pufferfish" for publication in an forthcoming issue (I will link to it when it goes live, but it will probably be a while--yet I can't stop myself from writing about this now). I am thrilled because this story has long sought a home, because I was getting tired of revising it, but mostly because Hunger Mountain is where it will come to rest.

There is no more perfect home for this story than Hunger Mountain, because HM is the journal of Vermont College of Fine Arts.

I wrote the first drafts of that story in early 2008, just in time to apply to VCFA. It got me accepted to VCFA. It was my first submission, in the summer of 2008, to the workshop led by Xu Xi and Christopher Noel. It was with me when, via that workshop, I met Suzanne Farrell Smith and Caitlin Leffel Ostroy, who together became the backbone of my writing life in New York. The story went through no fewer than 18 revisions; grew from 4,000-ish words to 9,000+; picked up and then dropped subplots about terrorists and strippers and fucked-up father-son relationships before the story came to know what it was really about; allowed me to Google such strange things as "tetrodotoxin" and many Japanese words I didn't previously know; and let me finally understand and appreciate the job that Dave was doing at the time. A radically different draft of it went through each of my four advisors, and what I thought was the final draft ended up in my creative thesis. Xu Xi, who advised me for my last semester, even chose an excerpt from it to read aloud at graduation. It's been batted about throughout different literary magazine slush piles, rejected each time,though it did get a Glimmertrain nod for being in the top 25 submissions for their August 2010 Short Story Award for New Writers, and since then, it's sat waiting for consideration from five other potential homes.

The story taught me. Over and again. Draft through draft. I actually love this story. I feel fondness for it like it is a living, breathing thing--because, to me, it is a living, breathing, ever-changing thing.

And a beloved thing, one that is finally coming home.

Thank you, Hunger Mountain.

On Tinkers.

2011-03-21T13:47:00.000-07:00

Somnolent. Craquelure. Tintinnabulation. Imbrication. Ichthyic. Freshet. Crepuscule. Clepsydra. Pannicles. Scrieve. Ossuary. Scrimshaw. Clastic. Scruf. Vastation. Loosestrife.

My first impression of Paul Harding’s Tinkers is that it should be added to SAT prep courses for vocabulary alone (The Writing Resource had a similar impression). It is a book of words so wonderful that entire passages must be read aloud. Because of the sound of words, their music and pulse. Because Harding celebrates their electricity, takes it down to that bare level of noticing that literature is made of language and language is made of words and words are … well, words are pretty darn wonderful. You read Tinkers aloud because otherwise it is easy to get lost in handfuls of mini-clauses strung together into sentences that stretch on for the majority of pages.

You read for lyric, meditative gorgeousness. For a roof of heaven falling down onto a dying man. For “the wheeling and frozen stars, the soundproof lid of heaven” (p. 25). For “My goodness, I am made from planets and wood, diamonds and orange peels, now and then, here and there; the iron in my blood was once the blade of a Roman plow…” (p. 136). Harding’s style evokes the lushness of my absolutely favorite book of 2009: Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin. It has a similar kind of verbal gymnastics. Nimbleness.

It is a quiet book. It’s difficult to explain better than that. If you read it, I think you’ll agree. But a small, smooth arc, made of up many, many, tinier, interior arcs. This is a thinking book. It is not a beach read, not light entertainment. It is quiet, small, and will probably knock you on your ass.

One hesitation I had while reading was this: I’m not sure I understand the choices Harding made in his POV play: why the slippage between 3^rd person to 2^nd to 1^st? The man does not seem one who does anything unintentional, but I couldn’t puzzle out the pattern. Also couldn’t figure out why when he switches from 3^rd to 1^st abruptly, he sometimes italicizes and sometimes don’t. These are all such little things. But it is the little things that get me while I read, unable to ever turn off the inner editor.

But you read for downright poetic and intuitive descriptions of everything from death to epilepsy to the change from winter to spring. For a woman, young in age but weary in spirit, wondering how she had become so bitter; for that raw and fair and appreciated passage on what it is to be wife and mother. For the synapse fires and jumps that Harding’s brain can make, just the smartest metaphors and analogies. I am JEALOUS.

(… and written after I finished reading the book…)

I read the book in one fell swoop. Four hours on the couch, hardly blinking, and then I reach the last line of “goodbye” and have the wind and a sob knocked right out of me. It is, of course, time to walk the dog—as it seemingly always is. So I walk her and think about Tinkers. Harding can certainly write. And Tinkers cannot but inspire me. It can be helpful to read the books you’ll never write, the authors who write very differently from you, as woodbird suggests: “It is a blessed gift when we encounter art that challenges our notions of our own taste and style; when we read a book that makes us want to throw out everything we’ve ever written.”

It is just as helpful, in a different way, to read writers who remind you of yourself. I am not trying to be conceited, because obviously Harding is very very good, after all, they don’t just hand out Pulitzers as party favors. But the absolute flood of language, that is what reminds me of me—Phil Graham, while advising me, once commented that my drafts “go off on a bender of language.” To recognize yourself in another’s book, as an author (or even as a character!), can be … well, what else but revealing. For me, it was to inhale this book, be windless, recover my breath, and then spend a long while thinking about it. How does this style work and how does it not. I read and was enraptured mostly, but there were times I had to slow myself, read and reread and then finally sound his sentences aloud, and even then comprehension seemed viscous, like reading through molasses. I thought of Phil Graham and his simultaneous embrace of my flood of words and gentle nudging that sometimes the flood must be contained. That the first draft must be flood—and then I must go back in and reroute the water. (actually, I believe his metaphor had something to do with flowering and profusion and then pruning—but eh, close enough.)

And so I will say that, Pulitzer Prize winner or not, there were times in reading Tinkers that I itched to edit Harding. To reign him in. There were passages that felt overdone. Over “tinkered” with, if you will.

Truth, yo.

All this just teaches. Gets me closer to my own writing. Shows me what is possible and then what is preferable in my own prose. What works and what does not. Thinking of/through/with Lorrie Moore and her very different subject matter and style, Woodbird offered that “art leaves us standing naked amidst our own fictional dressings, able to see clearly and with new eyes what, up to this point, we have made. Able to see (at last!) our crusty habits and predictable tropes.” And that’s just what Tinkers did for me, in the opposite way. Tinkers holds up the mirror and shows me the kind of writing I am moved to write, prose that is not just content to move people through places and events, prose that reaches out and shakes the reader, prose that doesn’t let go. In some passages, it shows me the prose toward which I aspire; in others, it showed me the dangers of the style.

And for this I am grateful. A book can give no better gift to a reader than to move him. And for a fellow writer? I think a book can do no better than first to move and then to teach.

Today: Devoured Tinker by Paul Harding; gave up entirely on Island by Aldous Huxley.

2011-03-16T22:12:00.000-07:00

Admitting that second part is hard for me, but I just can't do it. Too much with the innocent naked natives, nobly and naively declaring how they've got it all figured out through therapeutic trance, "the yoga of love," and a drug that induced visions of beauty. Too much set up of how the noble savages have figured out peace and prosperity when you know it's all going to crash and burn 295 pages later. At 8-point font on faded yellow pages. Just cannot do it. I think my problem is that I can only hear about trances and yogic love and drug-induced beauty trips for so much before I want to see it myself. And I've seen nada by page 130, so I am guiltily peacing out.

More on Tinkers later.

All these polynesian boys.

2011-03-15T20:54:00.000-07:00

I had another crazy dream shortly before waking today. All that remains of it is walking across a parking lot with another handsome Polynesian boy.

The dreams of the last two nights are even stranger in light of what happened tonight. I stumbled across a photo of a boy I dated, very briefly, ages ago. The ever-elusive. One who had gotten away, one who my immature and dramatic mind had shaped into the other half of much more of a relationship than actually existed, one who had dumped me. One who—I kid you not, as embarrassing as this is to admit—I had thought of for probably the next five years every time I was home and certainly every time I was single. What did I think about when I thought about him during those five or so years? Looking sexy, of course. Vengeance and the recasting of the past, such that I would be rendered the one who had gotten away rather than vice versa.

And as it always goes, by the time I was no longer thinking of him, no longer trying to look hot and be awesome in case I ran into him, that’s when I ran into him. It was an utterly uneventful encounter, nothing like what I had drafted it to be. And incidentally, yes, in that moment I luckily had looked hot and felt awesome, because I looked hot and felt awesome in my skin and my life. Anyway, that was the last time I saw him.

Till now. The photo I saw was somewhat of a shock. He looked so different from the way he used to that I actually could not recognize him. I had a moment where I wondered if the photo was tagged wrong. But no, after clicking through a few more photos of him, I found one that hinted at his younger self, somewhere behind the eyes or at the corner of his smile. It was him. It was definitely him. Holy shit. I was not in love with what I saw.

I had the predictable moment of triumph. After all that moping, all that writing of secret letters I would never send, he had changed into someone who I not only couldn’t recognize but couldn’t see myself as attracted to. Furthermore, he was still living at home in Hawai'i, possibly having never left, and I saw the parallel life I could have but didn’t end up living. You know—had that “relationship” (I use the term loosely) that I had once imagined to be so serious actually been more serious.

Then I felt like a total bitch. And a hypocrite, because the you you are now can never say for certain what another life would have been like to live. That’s the whole point of it. You pick a path and that’s the only one you can truly know. You keep walking forward and you keep picking paths and there’s no point in regret because you cannot predict what that parallel present would be like. A different me who had had a different relationship with a different him could be happy right now. Maybe.

And then I just felt really weirded out. What does it say when you can barely recognize someone with whom you were once intimate? I mean, it’s SAD. It makes time’s passage so painfully literal. I mean, shit. You cannot think, how many years has it been, because the years are staring right at you from the girth of his gut, the receding of his hairline. You see the person that his boy self was just a dotted line of. And it is heartbreaking. I look at this man’s picture and I think: I don’t know you at all. In you, I see not even a glimmer of the boy I knew. And because I can’t see even a glimmer, it makes me wonder how well I even knew the boy. How well I ever knew you.

I guess we all know the answer to that question. Same song, earlier verses. See also: Every bad poem I wrote circa 1998-2005. Before I discovered with some certainty that I am not a poet.

Anyway, I was still weirded out, so I took the dog out for a walk. I walked and I felt good about myself. If he saw a picture of me now and held it up to the picture of me then, would it be a good thing to see? Yes, I think so. I am so much happier with my insides and even my outsides than I was then. At least mostly. And then I made a mental note to hit the gym, drink another gallon of water a day, cut the caffeine and up the intake of regular amounts of healthy food. Still, I thought. Not so bad, Self.

Then I thought about how all of this has an agreeable symmetry to it, a circularity, considering that “Circle Island” just got published at Drunken Boat and he was somewhat the inspiration for the Junior character. Well, I mean, he was and he wasn’t, because the story is fiction and in my fiction, at least, every character is a composite. That being the point, for me, of fiction as opposed to CNF: that you take the stuff and people you know, all the articles and stories and poems and interviews and strange hours of late-night television and et cetera, tear it all into little bits, throw it to the wind, then gather a piece here and there and string them together so that hopefully everyone is magically unrecognizable and no longer any self but the one who has now been invented. In this case, Junior was a composite of all the Polynesian boys I loved with all my heart but who I didn’t really know at all. Oh, how profoundly and incompletely I knew them...

Then I felt happiness. Eyes-crinkling, teeth-showing, cheeks-hurting kind of happiness. That everything had happened exactly as it had. That I had loved this boy to the full extent my young heart had been able, and that I gotten my heart broken so that I could leave Hawai'i, grow up, love others, get my heart broken some more, grow the fuck up even more, and end up married to the man I knew best of all: Dave. Who had heard me declare true love about this one, and this one, and that one. Who had patiently waited out all that LOVE and DRAMA and then demonstrated gently that I hadn’t even known what I was talking about. That I had but dipped a toe in love so far. Who immersed me in it and gave me the beautiful gift of himself.

And moreover, I found I was deeply happy for this boy-now-man. Because he looked settled into his life in a way he of course couldn’t have been back then, he looked in love with his lady, looked like he’d grown into a kinder man than he’d been as a boy.

I am grateful for and humbled by coincidence. This echo of two nights of dreams of Polynesian boys, this happenstance photo of this long-forgotten boy.

What a strange and satisfying—and circular—denouement.

A terribly lazy day.

2011-03-14T17:26:00.001-07:00

It’s a terribly lazy day, today. Above me hangs the promise I made to send an anthropologist her edited manuscript, but I just spent three hours unable to concentrate on it, instead reading blogs. The day began strangely, too. I slept till 1pm, past my three alarms, past Dave waking to walk the dog, past him eating breakfast and listening to the news and getting ready for work, saying goodbye, leaving, locking the door behind him. I know this in small hazy patches. I know I woke for each of these things, but they weren’t enough to keep me from slipping back into dreamland. And, oh, the dreams I had last night! I wish I could remember them all, but you know how it is: once you wake, you lose the dream exponentially the more you are awake. I’m not one of those who can decide to reenter a dream once it’s been exited. I wish I were. But the last dream I had, the one with a few wisps I still remember, went like this:

I was in California with my dog, my friend Jenjen, and her dog. We were hanging out at my apartment, and she needed to walk her dog. I was going to edit something while she was gone, because my dog didn’t need to go out. Which way should I go, she asked, and I tried to explain but found I couldn’t, found I didn’t know my neighborhood at all, couldn’t remember where the streets went, so I escorted her out the door. I left my keys, I left my dog, I locked myself out of the complex but forgot to lock the door, but I kept walking. We walked down the block and suddenly were in Brooklyn, in an area I don’t recognize but it was by water, and we rounded a bend to find ourselves heading into a park with a pair of sharply inclining steps. We headed up one set of stairs with the dog, and everyone was walking their dog, and it was an amazingly beautiful park like Fort Funston except in Brooklyn, and then someone told us we were going up the wrong set of stairs. Evidently there was one set for up, and another for down. We crossed over to the right side of stairs and got to the top and there was a lovely view. We paid for tickets and went into the subway, and then we found free tokens in our pockets, and were sad we had paid for metrocards. At some point I separated from my friend and her dog, or the dream skips in my memory like a record, but anyway the next thing I knew I was in a restaurant-bar, where suddenly a handsome young man was staring at me very intently. He was Polynesian, but displaced, now a city boy. I didn’t know him, but he kept insisting I had been in his dream. He nudged his female friend: Isn’t it uncanny? Doesn’t she look exactly the same as in my dream? I don’t know how his friend could possible know since it’s unlikely she had too been having the same dream of me, but the friend agreed. But then everything I did was scrutinized. I moved hair from my face exactly the way I had in his dream, or I laughed and he noted, perturbed, that I sounded different from his dream. At some point I ended up in a recording studio, where I was prepared to sing evidently but didn’t know the lyrics of the song I was assigned. I sung along for a bit, faking my way, remembering the basic melody and words here and there of the lyrics, but certainly not enough to carry the song as the solo singer, so I made the motion to cut the music. I went into the other room to tell the producer I needed to learn the lyrics first, and it was my friend A., and he had a four- or five-year-old boy sleeping in his lap. While he listened to me try to sing, he ate take-out pasta and held, evidently, his son. I bid A. goodnight, took sheets of lyrics, and told him I had to go: Dave would be home soon and I really needed to walk the dog.

Nothing surprised me in this dream. That I could walk from California to New York, that I could carry myself through both city and nature equally comfortable, that friends appeared and disappeared at whim, that I could be happy accompanied and alone, that I could live up to others’ expectations sometimes and disappoint them other times, that I suddenly had a voice others wanted to hear and a song to sing, even if I was still learning the lyrics. And that, at the end of the day, no matter how far I’d traveled, I had a place I ultimately belonged—a home composed of nothing more than the reality of a man who loved me and a dog who needed walking.

Repost: "Talking like a Sarah Lawrence Girl."

2011-03-14T16:20:00.000-07:00

FROM THE SARAH LAWRENCE GIRLS TUMBLR. "Talking like a Sarah Lawrence girl. From Teaching Working Class by Sherry Lee Linkon"
Oh man, I feel that last line in my gut. It's that awful paradox of wanting to go as far as you can from home, to experience the world and become another version of yourself, but to be able to return home and still belong as though you'd never left.

Which is, as far as I can tell, near impossible.

My own "letter to a young writer."

2011-03-14T15:18:00.000-07:00

The March 14, 2011 prompt for the online writing group I am in: Dear Writer. (Write your own “letter to a young writer.” Perhaps imagine this writer is you, at the beginning of realizing that writing is what you want to do more than anything. Or this writer can be approaching you now for advice about getting into writing. What would you tell them? Prompt written by Mayumi.)

Dear Writer (for that’s what you are, a Writer, as long as you scrawl or type more than just dream),

First, don’t just dream; write. It is no good to only think of how good you will look in a dim bar, with the smoke of cigars swirling, a tumbler of scotch on the ground next to your bar stool on the stage, while you read from your new novel to a standing-room-only crowd. Don’t only imagine interviews in the Paris Review or reviews in the New Yorker. And for chrissake, don’t only sketch out the beautiful cover of your debut novel, complete with a gold Pulitzer sticker or, just as golden, the elegant O sticker of Oprah’s book club. It is fine to do those things because if you’ve made it this far you know that dreaming is an important part of writing. Just don’t only do those things.

The second thing you must do is believe in your voice, that your words are vital, that you have something important to contribute to the conversation. This does not mean you will write perfect first drafts (or, indeed, perfect last drafts—because show me a published story and I will tell you it is merely the last moment that piece breathed before it became entombed in layout, before it became a photograph of its own life). It does not mean you won’t benefit from the feedback of respectful writerly peers or assistance from the sensitive, careful editor. Listen to those other voices, but having considered their words, be always able to trust, above all, your own. Believe in your voice after the first rejection and the twentieth, but do so not stubbornly—if twenty rejections have come in for the same draft of the same story, it may be worth considering revision. Or it may be worth gearing up to send to the next twenty literary journals.

Lastly, learn humility. A great way to do this is through service. Be part of not just the conversation but also the community. Care about others’ successes and disappointments as much as your own. When asked, read the work of others with your full attention, with an eye toward the true nature of the work itself, with a mind to the experience of the reader with the page, removing the egos of your inner writer (who would have written it This Better Way instead) and the author and His Pure Intent. Better than bequeathing answers is asking questions. What is the work saying or trying to say, most of all? You at times will bemoan how your own time for writing is reduced by such ventures, but you will secretly be pleased with the unforeseen ways that you are learning from others. To be a better reader, editor, writer. To be kinder. To give, you’re starting to see, is sometimes the same as to receive.

Perspective.

2011-03-12T16:51:00.000-08:00

I'm trying to keep it all in perspective. Earthquakes have roiled their way through concrete, water like hi-rises, like mountains, advanced into hi-rises and valleys of mountains. There has been devastation and death, and these are things far more important than the smaller loss in my smaller life.

But perspective is tricky, isn't it, because it's all about where you stand. I care about what has happened in Japan and New Zealand, of course I do because I'm not an asshole, but at the same time, thankfully everyone I love is safe, and I read the news and donate money and then go to bed next to my sweet husband and dog.

This week I have charted my way through grief. Stomped my way through indignant anger, tiptoed into something that was small and guilty and looked a lot like relief, then denied and bargained and wheedled with myself, wished I could undo or unsay and definitely unfeel my truth, mourned, felt afraid, felt glad, felt mad, felt so depressed I couldn't move off the bed, and felt temporarily, fleetingly, at peace. I said goodbye to Hawaii Women's Journal, I said hello to whatever wants to be next, and I said ohmygodself you are so self-involved to be thinking about all of this compared to what else is happening in the world.

This is my truth. I do not apologize for it. It is self-involved. I apologize a little for that. But this is grief. This is grief, looking forward. This is wondering and fearing whatever comes next. It's hard to not feel that my world has suddenly shrunk, that possible ties of which I wasn't even yet aware have been severed. I think that now I can give my own writing the precedence that for the last year I gave so many others ... and that I can read more, cook more, exercise more, take more yoga classes, run/meditate (for me, a very similar thing). I can improve my Self, work on the next draft of me. But I have a slinky kind of suspicion that self-improvement when willfully motivated is less successful than organic change that comes from experiencing new people, things, places. Sometimes there is such freedom in this large swath of time regained; other times I panic and wish someone would hire me for something else, quick, before I do something desperate.

Woodbird on Connectivity.

2011-03-12T16:23:00.001-08:00

Robin MacArthur of Woodbird grew up in rural Vermont, and I on a Hawaiian island, but I am fluent in the same language of (un)(be)longing and home. She explores the tangled and twined feelings about living down the road from the same house in which she was born, which my heart understands as much as it intuits the reasons I moved far, far away.

[It's] the kind of connectivity I want my daughter to know in her bones. She can go looking for all sorts of other kinds later, but this is the kind I want her to know beyond the terrain of doubt. Because I believe (hope) it will teach her about humility, and responsibility, and belonging, and the expansive world beyond the human ... I hope it will give my daughter such clear eyes and wakeful skin, teach her about quiet and sublimity and the true song of herself. And then she can go out into the world, and do what she will, and feel the electricity, and hear the noise. But still have this place, and this kind of knowing ... whether in body or in mind, for short periods or long, to return to.

Go read the whole post. And probably her entire blog. It is pure gorgeousness.

Thank you, Theresa!

2011-03-11T01:50:00.000-08:00

Read Hawaii Women's Journal author Theresa Falk, who wrote "The Balancing Act," on her thoughts about the end of the journal. And I quote:

... Having to sit down on a regular basis and compose a polished piece of my soul has made me remember who I am. The column allowed me to mourn and celebrate my mother, to honor the spirit that is yoga, and to reach out to world about my struggle to become a mother. These columns, collectively, reminded me of how far I have come and how far I have left to go. They have shown me how beautiful the road ahead really is.

Ramona Emerson on moving.

2011-03-10T23:56:00.000-08:00

You know how much I like to talk about moving and change. Ramona's meditation on the same--having just reversed my recent journey, gone CA to NY, a harder direction in which to move, I might add, having done it a few times--is pitch perfect.

So what does this mean for you and me? That life is a succession of breakups and relocations, until you stop breaking up and stay somewhere? Or that at some point you settle into the lonely so that no one can give it to you or take it away, and then no matter where you go there you are – finally, irrevocably, fantastically, alone. --Ramona Emerson

A moment of silence for Hawaii Women's Journal.

2011-03-10T19:04:00.000-08:00

I resigned because of a difference of opinion with the publisher. It was a fatal misunderstanding and misalignment of values and expectations. I won't get into details, because we were both saddened that resignation was what it came to, and it's either no one's or everyone's fault. But this is not about pointing fingers.

Unfortunately, I woke this morning to the news that the upcoming issue 5 will be our last issue. Evidently either there wasn't enough interest from the rest of the staff to keep going or the publisher made an executive call. I'm not sure which, but either way the news saddens me.

So, let's just not dwell, shall we?

Let's talk about what Hawaii Women's Journal meant to me in its glorious one year of life. It was an equal-opportunity publisher. It wanted to hear everyone's deepest story. It wanted to attract emerging writers (female and male) and take them by the hand and say that their words were beautiful and vital and necessary. It wanted to work with the gems, to work through the rough, to praise what was on the page and ask the hard questions, you know, the ones you curse even as you know they're necessary, the ones about what wasn't on the page and perhaps needed to be. It wanted to fight the good fight, to talk about all the ways that we can empower ourselves and one another and the wider world. It believed in the power of women, it fought for the equality of women, but it wanted to do so without having to remove men from the equation. It wanted you to love yourself just as you are, and it wanted to inspire you to always want to keep learning and evolving into the next draft of yourself. It wanted to fling itself to the widest corners of the world and gather like-hearted people and bring them all into one room: HWJ: Our Room Is the World. It wanted to create community, and to celebrate the lives and work of each member of that community. It was a family. It was a family. It was a family. I repeat that three times because it is so true. It was a family, and it was my family. I loved every single person in it, even the ones that got crabby at me. It was a family, and I am so incredibly heartbroken that it is no more.

I am humbled by and grateful to the entire HWJ staff for devoting so much of themselves to this endeavor. This goes out to you, Jenn Hee, Kathy Xian, Anna Harmon, Andrea Devon Bertoli, Noel Norcross, and Suzanne Farrell Smith. This goes out to the authors of our regular columns--Ms. deMeaners, Domestic Diva, Wellness Manifesto, Feminist Housewife, View from the Moon, Kitchen Medicine, Balancing Act, and reviewers for the Feminine Critique--as well as our less regular contributors, our feature writers, photographers, and everyone who contributed their gorgeous poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction. And this goes out to you, readers, who embraced us in all of our diversity of views, all of our varied interests, all of our wildly divergent points of view. You got us. You embraced us. You made us a part of your lives, and for that we can be nothing but grateful.

When I find myself in times of trouble, Astrobarry comes to me.

2011-03-08T11:26:00.000-08:00

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): The time for socially-minded manifestos, declarative utterances, or other 'official statements' on behalf of a group and/or intended to perpetuate dialogue in the community sphere is coming to an end this week, Taurus. If you haven't offered your final words on the matter by now, please do so by Tuesday (Mar 8)—then, let the issue be, even if your final words appear to spark startling fallout or chaos you'd like to try to contain. From here on out (for the next few weeks at least), you can't 'contain'; rather, you've got to release the controlling concern. On the level of rhetoric and belief, you ought to be moving into a more deliberately soft, open-minded(-and-hearted) zone of possibility… and your mind and/or others' may yet shift in their thinking, but due to a personally contemplative spaciousness rather than under any pressure. (In fact, the brewing Mercury-Pluto square makes a painful backfire likelier, should you push harder against perceived opponents. Your supposed 'rationale' will show itself to be far too emotionally reactive to win anyone over.) Meanwhile, the career/work zone looks quite favorable, with Venus in your 10th trining a 6th-house Saturn. Any extra energy should be spent on integrating new opportunities, improvements or advances into your routine regimen, to turn your day-to-day rhythms that much more productive… and not on ideological debates.

Gratitude comes in so many forms.

2011-03-07T13:57:00.001-08:00

This morning it takes the form of this thoughtful post from T., a wonderful woman and teacher I've known since high school, one who gifted me with my very first opportunity to teach, in the form of assisting her summer writing class, "Write Right," back in circa 1997 or so. Even though I never studied with her, I use the word "teacher" deliberately because she teaches by example how to craft a well-lived life as well as how to generously and inventively teach. And I am fortunate enough to continue working with her through her column at Hawaii Women's Journal, which is sometimes about teaching, sometimes about balancing, sometimes about mothering, and always about loving.

T., I so appreciate your words as well as the project of telling people that they matter. It's a beautiful gift you give.

On reading CMS's 16th edition.

2011-03-05T10:50:00.000-08:00

Today, for no readily apparent reason, I began a rather stupid undertaking: reading The Chicago Manual of Style's 16th edition, cover to cover. At 905 pages (excluding bibliographies and indices), this is no light little project.

If even I categorize this as "a rather stupid undertaking," you may ask well, then, why undertake it at all?

Because, in a decade of working as an editor, I've never done it. I've taken refresher courses on grammar for publishing professionals, substantive and copy editing, and proofreading. I own and have read no fewer than ten books on the fine art of editing and style. I've internalized the American Anthropological Association's in-house style rules (including updates). But mostly, I've trusted my brain and my gut.

My brain has filed away a lot. And my gut tells me when I know how to handle something and when I don't. With publishing moving as fast as it does, that's usually what you have time for: trusting what you know, looking up what you don't, and flagging the things you consistently forget (and every editor has these: rules you've looked up several times but that never stick in your brain).

But why now? Why did this come to a head so seemingly suddenly?

Well. I've been charged--ok, I'll be honest here and admit I dorked out and charged myself--with creating a house style guide for Hawaii Women's Journal. I drafted one up last year with rules that come up often in our pages, stylistic discrepancies between editors that needed a decisive ruling, spots where CMS allows you many choices but I wanted consistency in HWJ. And so forth. But I didn't consider the house style guide done because I wanted to make sure CMS's 16th wouldn't rule "void" some of my carefully noted guidelines.

And in figuring out where the 16th diverged from the 15th, I found myself wondering why I treated the manual as a reference rather than a book.

For a million reasons, of course. Because CMS is not exactly a page turner. Because a lot of it doesn't apply to me, at least in my current incarnations as editor at American Anthropologist and Hawaii Women's Journal. Because, remember, it's 905 pages not including the back matter (bibliographies, indices) that I deemed skippable. Because I'd be reading a lot of what I already know--either through other editing guides or common sense (definition and parts of a book and journal? I kind of have those covered, thanks) or years on the job.

But, I thought, what of the rules becoming faded or smudged under my hurried fingers as I flip past them onto rules I actively seek? What of the things I may never use but would delight to learn?

Thus, I embark on this rather stupid undertaking, which will likely take me many months of uneven reading. When I have the time, perhaps, I'll read a chapter, or a section, or a subsection, or a single rule. I'll let you know how it goes.

Don't try to talk me out of it, I'm already on page 15. Of 910.

New short story published: "Circle Island."

2011-03-05T09:55:00.000-08:00

What a happy start to my Saturday: Drunken Boat #13 went live, and in it, my short story "Circle Island." It's a great honor to appear on their site, and a big congratulations to them on pushing out their 13th issue!

Filler flowers no more.

2011-03-05T09:35:00.001-08:00

They call them filler flowers. They're meant to be woven into the bald spots of a bouquet; like a toupee, if they have been placed carefully, you don't see them at all as much as the fullness of the arrangement.

But look how beautiful baby's breath can be, all on its own, in a juice pitcher, in the kitchen, while cooking a meal.

Also, "baby's breath"? Frothily gathered together in armfulls, yet full of tiny and individual beautiful blooms, managing to exude youth, joy, an innocence. Well done, botanist or florist or whomever named the species. Yet another example of wonderful things hidden in plain view.

A small, stupid, irrational fear of invertebrates.

2011-03-02T19:30:00.000-08:00

THE BACKSTORY

You should have heard me last night. We got fancy organic kale from whole foods (mostly because safeways keeps not having any) and there was a SNAIL on the kale that dave had supposedly "washed." I made noises I have never made before, and they lasted for a good minute while i scrubbed my hands in the bathroom sink and thereafter refused to touch the kale. I made dave cut it, and wash it again, before I let him stick it in the cooking pot. I also made dave dispose of the snail in the trash and swear to take the trash out that night. And even though our dinner of whole-wheat spaghetti with garlic, kale, tomatoes, pecorino romano, and roasted almonds was quite delicious, the first time I bit into a slightly large almond piece, I spit the entire mouthful back into my bowl, worried that I had just crunched into a snail. While I probably couldn't crunch through a snail shell with such a casual bite, and while snails must taste like something undoubtably "other" than almond, this is not a place my brain can go right now. It's not logical; it's fear.

Seriously. Invertebrates. PHOBIC. MEH. It all stems from the time I got stuck in a plumeria tree shortly after it rained and was cornered by snails and my best friend's older brother had to come rescue me and I felt really uncool, AND the time my other childhood friend threw a sea slug at me. EWWWWWWWWWWWW, invertebrates. And yes, this extends to edible and supposedly delicious ones. Nuh uh. Ain't going there.

THE FRONT STORY: A MARRIAGE, IN TEXTS

March 2 at 7:26pm.

Mayumi: did u put the snail on side of trashcan to be funny ... ?!!!

March 2 at 7:28pm.

Dave: no. i threw it inside. i was supposed to take the trash out when i left 2day...sorry.

March 2 at 7:29pm.

Mayumi: he crawled out! i had 2 capture & free him outside! i am grossed out but feel buddhist & kind!

March 2 at 7:37pm.

Mayumi: also i feel like washing my hands again.

Where's my money at?

2011-02-22T19:58:00.001-08:00

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.

2011-02-18T14:31:00.000-08:00

[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."

2011-02-17T12:55:00.001-08:00

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.

2011-02-17T11:41:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-02-17T11:31:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-02-16T16:15:00.001-08:00

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.

2011-02-15T18:50:00.000-08:00

[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.

2011-02-15T16:01:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-02-15T14:27:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-02-15T13:31:00.000-08:00

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

A twin of me.

2011-02-10T00:10:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-02-10T00:07:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-02-08T17:14:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-02-08T16:59:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-02-08T15:55:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-02-07T18:39:00.000-08:00

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!

2011-02-07T16:55:00.000-08:00

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.

Quote of the Day: I will put this one in my pocket and carry it around with me everyday.

2011-01-24T04:37:00.000-08:00

"Finding yourself in a hole, at the bottom of a hole, in almost total solitude, and discovering that only writing can save you. TO be without the slightest subject for a book, the slightest idea for a book, is to find yourself, once again, before a book. A vast emptiness. A possible book. Before nothing. Before something like living, naked writing, like something terrible, terrible to overcome." --Marguerite Duras, Writing

Ahahahaha!

2011-01-21T12:10:00.001-08:00

I still do not know what impels anyone sound of mind to leave dry land and spend a lifetime describing people who do not exist. If it is child’s play, an extension of make believe—something one is frequently assured by people who write about writing—how to account for the overriding wish to do that, just that, only that, and consider it as rational an occupation as riding a bicycle over the Alps?” –Mavis Gallant, Preface, Selected Stories

Bees and the bathtub.

2011-01-21T10:04:00.001-08:00

Dreamed I was in a bathtub/shower with high sides, in clear water, alone. The water is tepid but comfortable. I am just sitting there, soaking, relaxing, when I see something flying around. At first I think it is a fly, but it is a bee. Being allergic to bees, I tense up immediately, slowly open one of the sliding doors to the tub, and gently encourage it to go out. When it flies out, I close the sliding door, and it lands on the other side of the glass and stays there, motionless. I feel much relief, until I look above my head, where a whole swarm of bees is circling. Quickly I pull my entire body underwater just before—one by one, and then en masse—each tiny bee starts to hurl itself at the surface of the water. Below, eyes wide open, I watch the ping and ripple of each body’s impact and I wonder how long I can hold my breath.

My To Do List has a sublist.

2011-01-19T15:31:00.000-08:00

This photo is item 2 on my To Do list today. Perhaps too ambitious?

"Hope is the thing with feathers."

2011-01-18T18:23:00.000-08:00

My doctor's appointment was a ladyparts appointment, and the good doctor gave me back my wings. After giving me a clean bill of netherland health, she went over my medical history, had me schedule a full battery of tests, and recommended some over-the-counters to get this babymaking on.

Hello again, hope.

Funders Bookstore.

2011-01-18T18:01:00.001-08:00

After my doctor's appointment today, I sat in the square in front of the History Museum (the old courthouse), the sun warm on my back, writing in what may prove to be a new favorite spot weather permitting. When I'd finished, I decided to finally stroll on into Funders Bookstore, which is located in the museum's basement.

And Ohhh. I'm in love. Here is one room where every book costs $1. ONE DOLLAR!!!

And in this room was children's books, cook books, historical books, self-help, stuff about the universe, and this "WEIRD SHELF."

Well. Who can resist a Weird Shelf?

Not I.

Here were my finds for today:

I am especially excited--beyond words, really--about that dream dictionary and the Taurus book.

All of this, unfortunately, before my morning coffee.

2011-01-14T13:02:00.000-08:00

Here’s how democracy works.

1. Take your dog for a morning walk. Go past the Redwood City branch of the post office, and come upon a table set up in red, white, and blue of two LaRouche volunteers asking for people to sign up to impeach Obama. When they ask you to sign up, say NO, THANK YOU very loudly and indignantly, and glare at the volunteers, and glare at the other people near the table, and move off with all the huff you can muster. A volunteer calls after you, “Impeach the president. We don’t like him here.” Continue onward in your huff. Think of twenty supersmart comebacks that you should have said. Wonder what he meant by that last statement. Wonder where you are living that a table that proclaims impeaching a man like Obama would actually draw a crowd. That and Bethlehem. “We don’t like him here.” Who is we? What is here? Where have you landed yourself this time? Resolve to go home and immediately Wikipedia your neighborhood to see if it’s red or blue. Start drafting how you will blog about this moment where you were confronted by politics at home, literally confronted. Think of how you will detail the nefarious character of the two volunteers; think of how you will cast yourself a hometown hero, refusing to be led to the trough, refusing to throw around words like “impeach” for any ole disgruntlement. Allow doubt to creep in, though. Realize you don’t have the full story. See that you really aren’t being fair. If you are going to disagree with them, don’t you first have to actually stop to listen? So, go back. Your heart pounds angrily with every step. Your blood pressure is high. Even your steps don’t want to take the steps, but your mind does and we all know who wears the pants in this body, so you go. As you draw nearer, rehearse what would be helpful vs. not helpful to say. You decide on: “I’m not interested in signing your petition, but I do want to try to understand why you would want to impeach a man like Obama.” When you get there and say this exact line, your voice wobbles a bit at the last four words, and the volunteer helpfully supplies, “Why we think Obama is like Hitler?” pointing to a sign of Obama with a Hitler mustache. Feel your blood pressure hit the outer atmosphere, but breathe, breathe, and deeply breathe. Say, “I don’t need the whole schpiel, because I won’t be signing up, but I would like the information to judge for myself.” Refuse to meet the man’s eyes, and know this is you being cowardly and childish, but know you can’t meet his eyes. Know you’re furious. You get some papers; you’re directed toward a website. You take the materials carefully, and head into the post office, where you lodge a complaint: Does the U.S. Post Office support this political demonstration, because they are by allowing them to set up shop on their ramp. The woman is flustered, suggests you take it up with the police. Wonder again where the fuck it is that you are living.

2. Go home and get informed. Redwood City is primarily working class on its eastern side, middle class through the rest. All of the representatives and government officials are Democrats. Feel a bit better. Then get serious. Call the police, lodge a complaint. Write your representative, lodge a complaint. Call the post office, lodge a complaint.
Today is January 14, 2011, and outside the Redwood City post office there are two volunteers set up with signs and a table calling for the impeachment of President Obama. I have a completely healthy respect for the first amendment right for freedom of speech, BUT I do not think it is appropriate for them to do so right in front of the post office, as if the post office were condoning and supporting these beliefs. I feel that you should be able to enter a government business without having politics thrown up in your face. I politely ask that, should their demonstrating continue, which I encourage them to do if they so wish, they be asked to do it NOT on government property.
3. Now take them seriously: read all the literature, go to their website, click the links. Read and read and read until you read the part where they call Obama “a sick psycho,” a man “becoming mentally unhinged,” and compare him to Hitler. And then don’t take them seriously. BULLSHIT ASSHOLES #$*&@(#@(%_(#%&*#%&.

4. Here is democracy to me: go ahead, protest, but don’t do it where I am forced to hear it. Your freedom of speech should always be paired with my freedom to walk the fuck away.

5. Here is democracy to me: when encountering a different point of view—especially one trying to get a virulent reaction out of you, either for or against—try not to swear in their faces. (It ain’t Brooklyn round here, honey.) Try not to swear in their faces, and try not to be a total bitch, and try your best to listen … or, if you can’t listen, at least take the literature and agree to give it your full attention and thought before go on with your disagreeing. Try, try, and when you fail, vow to try again.

6. Here is democracy to me: you do your research and vote in the person you think shares most of your values, your humanity, your mind. You vote for this person not to always do what you think they should do, not because you believe they will always be perfect—as a President, as a husband, as a human being—you vote for them because you believe that they will keep trying to do the best job that they are able to do.

So, dear LaRouche supporters of Redwood City, we disagree. I leave you to your impeaching while I stand by the man I voted for.

But I must register one nagging doubt: Are you the majority around here or am I? Which could translate to, do I need to move districts come October?

Remember this.

2011-01-12T15:48:00.001-08:00

It is not the critic who counts … The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming. –Theodore Roosevelt

Seaclouds.

2011-01-11T12:32:00.001-08:00

Saw these on our walk along the beach at Fort Funston, in San Francisco.

And now I'm kind of obsessed.

Don't they look exactly like clouds that wanted to live on land instead of in sky?

(Admittedly, less pretty when close up.)

Please don't anyone tell me that the sea doesn't actually do that and this prettiness is pollution or anything depressing like that. Kthanxbai.

To unknow winter.

2011-01-10T12:56:00.001-08:00

The January 9 prompt of my online writing group: Write an elegy for a season of your life.

Where wouldn’t you rewind to, given the chance? Unsleep with this man, unbreak that heart. Take firmer in grasp this baby and that one before him. Unmove, unmove, unmove, and unmove times five; or perhaps do just half of that; but be sure to land in the right place, if you can figure out where that is. Use your fingers to count if necessary. You’ll know you’ve landed wrong once it’s too late. Unlearn how to edit, as pruning seems a bad skill to use when it’s too early to know where to cut, and in fact, why not unlearn even words. To the question of how to begin again, who would your answer be? Unknow winter. Unrecognize summer and autumn too. Be spring again, be bud and blade, last frost before all color. Hold both ice and petal, balance them one in every hand.

Apertif.

2011-01-06T12:36:00.001-08:00

From my online writing group's prompt for January 1. LOBSTER: Describe in vivid detail one dish or hors d’ouevre you ate last night.

It was no trouble at all. I whipped it up at the last minute. Truly. We’d planned on popping the L’ambrusco alongside a homemade dinner of steak, sweet potato, and coconut-sauced kale, greeting the New Year sweetly in our pajamas, or on taking in the bright lights of our small town and toasting among strangers at the bar with $9 glasses of Californian champagne, but we both worked until no one wanted to cook or stroll. Yet the opening of something long bottled up seemed crucial. It was 11:59 and then the year was no more. It is 12:01 and we have popped nothing, and the TV is on, and I just finished editing another person’s words, always another’s, never my own. It is 12:01 of a new day of a new year and nothing has changed, and in another way nothing is the same, and that’s when I first get a whiff, citrus bright. We go to bed and I can hear the lull creeping into his breathing. Moments later, the whiff is a taste in my mouth, crisply touching my tongue, roof of mouth, even the backs of my teeth. It’s creamy now, doughy, rising, then it’s down my throat, a million fluttering bubbles, and then it’s just everywhere.*

Its essence is the fifth drink of the night, a dark downtown bar crammed shoulder to shoulder, the lips of my closest friends on my cheeks. It is sequins and glitter and red lipstick and the joy and bother of four-inch heels. It’s singing and swaying down a street and into the subway, the night young, the whole year like a gift yet to be unwrapped. It’s those beloved faces, missing, and the spooky way I’m the only one walking around past midnight, that there are too many Asians here and not enough African Americans. It’s the need for enough to change that this suburban life feels like a choice rather than a gun to my head that everyone, including myself, knows I should be happy about—the imperative to fill the imaginary stroller. It’s the way that all day I hear the trains go past, and I stay in the same place with this nameless longing. It’s realizing, finally and with finality, that there is only one way to be happy: make yourself. It’s honoring the whole complexity, but lingering more on the sweetness than the acidity or bitterness. It’s understanding that all wine is somewhere between juice and vinegar.

I cry and he wakes. Happy New Year, he says. I miss New York, I say. He says, I know, but. We both know we love each other, so we don’t say that part, though perhaps we should have. Might have left the right flavor on the palate.

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* Here ends what I actually posted (we have a word limit and I was already over it). But here is the rest.