On Hiatus

Perhaps after the residency I'll feel motivated to get back to the blog. Until then, here's something from the safari in December. I didn't realize that leopards spent so much time up in trees. They even take their kills up there to keep them away from other predators.

Happy Mother's Day

Adulthood has many perks, but none so precious as the great relationship I am now able to have with my mother. It's just something that you can't have when you're a kid, a teenager, or even in your twenties. But once you're beyond that, it get easier and easier. For me, ever since I let go of the idea of my mother as an authority figure and embraced the idea of her as someone to have in my life because she's an adventurer, a great cook, fun to shop with, easy to relax with, always good for a lengthy and meandering phone call, sure to make good book and film recommendations, easy going, humane, loves jazz, has a lot to teach me about gardening, and knows how to laugh, I've just come to appreciate her in new and different way. Just look at those happy, dancing feet in the socks that I knit for her seventieth birthday! And guess who taught me to knit?

In my twenties, I used to still kind of cringe when people said they could see my mother in me and me in my mother. How, I thought, could I possibly be so like someone that old for one thing, and that mean, for another? Now, I like it. Twenty years later, she is no longer old and I can't even remember her being especially mean. People say I do that same little thing with my eyes, and that just warms me through and through.

Among my mother's many admirable qualities is her great big, forgiving heart. She is so forgiving that I am sure she will accept my deepest apologies for (a) not sending an anniversary card last week and (b) not sending a mother's day card either.

I love you, Mum!

Withdrawal: It Isn't Pretty

I was just a basket case yesterday. Absolutely and positively out of my mind. By the end of the day, I figured it out. We were having our internet connection changed to a different company and a different kind of system (cable delivery instead of whatever it was before). All week I was worried that it wouldn't work properly and that we'd be stuck without a connection. Our house has "smart wiring" with a router, and the tech support people at the new company weren't sure it would work. And as the installation was under way, I was getting more and more agitated, as was my spouse. And the installer had to leave and it still wasn't working. We had a connection. It went right up to the router just as it was supposed to. But then it stopped. Oh no. We'd have to wait until our computer technician arrived (he was scheduled to come in the morning-is here as I write this). Meanwhile, I am always able to tap into several people's wireless connection from my laptop, but this is not an adequate longterm solution for a three computer household. I was offering my husband "fixes" as required. I had a menacing headache all day long that was not helping my mood. People were getting on my nerves. I missed an appointment. I cried during a panel discussion that I attended later that day.

By the end of the day I nailed the problem: My name is TI, and I am an internet/e-mail addict.

It's not how much I use, it's that I need to be able to connect. If I cannot connect, I feel agitated, I cannot think straight. I can sometimes go a few days without, for instance, when I am on vacation. But the craving sets in, viceral and fierce, as soon as I approach a computer with access.

Writing Personal Narrative

Vivian Gornick says that the writer of personal narrative needs to discover: "who is speaking, what is being said, and what is the relation between the two?" These questions, if asked persistently, will take you deeper into the work. I have been using this approach with the new essay for this submission, and it is helping me to focus. I am over the hump, that agonizing stage where I feel as if I am groping in the dark, going on faith in the process, struggling to discover what I am trying to say. And besides just logging the hours, which is really the only way to get anywhere, Gornick's questions have guided me. But they are scary questions, questions that demand self-disclosure.

As a writer of personal narrative, one of the things that I am fighting these days is the "who cares?" question. I mean, who cares about the experiences of my life? Why should I think that I have anything of significance to say? When I read some of the great essayists I've been reading lately--Loren Eiseley, C.S. Lewis, Patricia Hampl, James McConkey, Vivian Gornick, John Haines--I am in awe of the way that they manage to build a discussion with universal significance out of the details of their lives. Their lives weren't special, weren't significantly different from anyone else's (well, okay, Haines lived a homesteader's life in the Alaskan wilderness for 25 years, and not many people have done that). So how do they do it? How do they write something that people want to read? If Gornick is correct, it is by nailing the answers to those three questions. There is a clear narrative voice (a narrative persona, she calls it), the speaker has something unique to say, and this speaker is the only one who could have said it. I'm so used to impersonal, scholarly writing, where the main point is to present your work in a way that is as detached from the author as possible. Who I am, what I do, what life I have lived, where I stand in relation to the material...these are all considered to be irrelevant in the academic tradition. What I have been taught to consider irrelevant is suddenly the key to meaningful work.

Who am I? What do I have to say? And what is the relationship between who I am and what I have to say? These are my new questions.

LIke Clockwork

It's like clockwork -- the MFA brainfreeze. The deadline is upon me and that is the cue to come to a complete creative halt. The new writing is coming one slow and painful page at a time, and it feels completely flat and uninspired.

I am falling behind on the reading, not even done one of the books and without a single idea for the first annotation, let alone the second. And all the while, I have put everything else on hold because I feel as if every minute of every day should be spent writing. I know this to be a bad strategy. Tomorrow, I better factor in a few breaks. I'm putting the writing down for the evening and going to do a reading blast so that I can at least break free of one task -- an annotation.

There is something comforting in knowing that this is just the way it happens each month, and it is no indication of anything. It's just a little hump that I need to get over. So, so predictable. You could set your watch by it!

In the end, the reading gets done, the annotations get written, the new work gets completed, and usually I manage to knit a few rows in between. In a few days, I'll be ready to move on to the empathetic questioning to deepen the draft, and suddenly, ahhhhh!

One day I would love to edit a volume, filled with the work of all the writers I know, about why, oh why, we write.

Random Attack

I wasn't going to blog about this, but it has been eating away at me ever since it happened so I thought I'd unload it here. Recently, I was walking home through a busy area after a pleasant evening out, when I was attacked by a stranger. It wasn't a vicious attack, but it was definitely a violation. This enormous, drunk guy ran at me, grabbed me around the legs, and hauled me up in the air. His friends implored him to put me down, and kept telling me not to worry, he's just drunk. I, meanwhile, was pounding on his back, swearing, and demanding to be put down RIGHT NOW. I'm relieved to know that I have an angry and assertive reaction in these situations.

If that wasn't disturbing enough, the group of them (there were four) then staggered off, leaving me, in shock (but pretty much unhurt), standing on the street. On this busy street, not a single person came up to ask me if I was okay, if they could call someone for me, or if I needed anything. I myself completely forgot that I had a cell phone with me, and just walked the rest of the way home alone in a daze. By the time I got home, and even now, I could not remember exactly where on the block this had even happened.

Now, I'm fine. But it did make me aware of how randomly and suddenly a person who is minding her own business can be picked out of a crowd by a complete stranger. I am so fortunate that this guy had no knife, wasn't in the mood for a fight, and had friends who just wanted to get him out of there instead of joining in the "fun". Walking home alone at night has taken on a whole new frame for me, now that I have been the target of a random attack.

It has also made me want to take some kind of martial arts training.