Chatting with the Postmasters

I had the pleasure of speaking with Audrey and Lacy of The Postmasters Podcast about writing, running, and writers' workshops. Our conversation was a bit of a kick in my own pants to get back to my neglected novel. If you know me or read this blog, you know I've been in a state of transition lately. I'm so ready to dive back into my writing.

Subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, or check out their website. The episode featuring yours truly airs December 2. In the meantime, catch up on all the other episodes to date. You won't be disappointed!

30 what?

How do I feel about turning 30? I've always loved birthdays, and this one's no different. In fact, I had my big weird freak-out at 29 when I decided to run a marathon. Since I got that out of the way, I really loved turning 30. 

A few pieces to the puzzle of my life have come together in a way that leads me to be more optimistic about this decade:

And the real work begins

I officially have my MFA in creative writing, but when people ask me how it feels to be a graduate I can only stammer something like "pretty much the same as when I was a student."

I'm back to work and back to trying to find a daily writing routine, or asking myself if I even need a routine. I don't fancy the idea of routine... but is that just my laziness? Is it my personality? Would I thrive under self-imposed routine? Or dry up?

Sitting at my desk this morning, catching up on writerly to-dos like figuring out which literary journals and magazines to subscribe to. (Glimmer Train, Tin House, or Ploughshares? Poets & Writers or The Writer? AWP or Writers Digest?) I've got to check the local library to see which ones they get.

I've been gone for 10 days and my cats are especially affectionate. Despite the show they put on of being aloof and un-needy.

I have homework from my wonderful advisor A.J., who apparently isn't done with me yet. I'm not complaining! And my list of books to read now includes The Accidental Tourist and Train Dreams, per her recommendations.

And I want to set tangible goals: like reading x number of books per month, writing x number of new stories, submitting x stories to x journals. Anyone else working on submissions, I recommend registering on Duotrope.com. They have a lively resource of journals and markets, well categorized, and make tracking deadlines and themed issues a breeze.

So there's where my mind is--a flurry of ideas and questions, trying to figure out life post-MFA.

mfa thesis odyssey

Emerging from my adventures in thesis land. This is the beast I conquered...

And these are its innards...

It was a long road, especially trying to write the novella, "The Only Thing That Matters Is Being There." The longest story I ever wrote before this was 25 pages, back in my undergrad years. I'm most comfortable writing 5-10 page stories. This story/novella tips the scale at 33 pages. Despite my calling it a beast, I really love/am proud of my thesis.

There are a few things without which I couldn't have accomplished this:

• Google -- for everything from heart attack and stroke symptoms to 3D Earth views of hikes in Zion National Park.
• This Paris Review interview with Alice Munro -- literally a lifesaver. I almost find it hard to believe now, but I reached a point in my work these last few months when I doubted I had what it took to keep writing. The Great Alice saved me: "I have stacks of notebooks that contain this terribly clumsy writing, which is just getting anything down. I often wonder, when I look at these first drafts, if there was any point in doing this at all.... I don't grasp it very readily at all, the 'it' being whatever I'm trying to do.... I only seem to get a grasp on what I want to write about with the greatest difficulty. And barely."
• My advisor A.J. pushing me to go long
• My friends -- for being excited about my novella and eager to read it, which kept me from getting lazy, kept me thinking "I have to make this good--people actually want to read it."
• My husband! -- for cooking every day, doing dishes, cleaning, running errands, doing laundry, letting me cry all over him, so I could work through this thesis, and for reading it and giving me really good feedback. I think he's a keeper

the Quintessential short story

This coming January, as part of my graduating residency (!), I will present an elective seminar to other students on what length means for the structure and focus of a story (think flash fiction vs. short story vs. novella vs. novel). Anyway, I wanted to find an excellent short story to discuss--one which most people have probably already read. So, using the Internet in arguably one of its best contributions to this kind of research, I tweeted:

"INTERNET, name what u think is the 'quintessential' short story, one everyone's read or maybe seen a movie version of. GO!"

Here's a list of the titles friends and strangers sent me on Facebook and Twitter (thanks, everybody!):

• "What we talk about when we talk about love" by Raymond Carver
• "Where are you going, where have you been?" by Joyce Carol Oates
• "A good man is hard to find" by Flannery O'Connor
• "Stand by me" by Stephen King
• "Franny and Zooey" by J.D. Salinger (Franny is a short story; Zooey is a novella, technically)
• Any story from 9 Stories by J.D. Salinger
• "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" by Ernest Hemingway
• "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• "The Swimmer" by John Cheever
• "The Lady or the Tiger" by Frank Stockton
• "A Christmas Carol" by Dickens (frequently classified as a novella)
• "Of Mice and Men" by John Steinbeck (also frequently classified as a novella)
• "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving
• "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar A. Poe
• The Jungle Book, a collection of short stories by Rudyard Kipling
• "Cinderella" or any of Grimm's fairy tales
• Aesop's fables

But the one story that kept coming up again and again,

Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery"

This story stood out BY. FAR. And people recommending this title were the most enthusiastic about THIS being the story to stand for all stories--the one story most familiar and unforgettable.

But in addition to having a story I can now use in my seminar, I have a list of other stories to revisit. These hold a special place in the canon for many of us, whether we're writers or readers, or just human. So if you're a writer, a reader, or just human, go to your local library and read or re-read "The Lottery." Then visit the others again, or for the first time.

And, enjoy!

A map of the Story

A map of the United States came in the mail today from the Sierra Club. On one side are our states, our cities, our major highways, and the topography of our land. On the other side are regional environmental challenges: water pollution in New England, mountain top removal in Pennsylvania, deep sea oil drilling in every body of water that meets our shores.

I lost track of time studying the topographical map, the cities, the regions, the rivers. I'm supposed to be writing a novella. That's what I've been up to lately. It's my fourth and final semester of my MFA program, and I want to do the best work I'm capable of so far. I want to do better than the best I've been able to do, up till now.

I wish I had a map for my story. I want the topography of my characters. I want to see where their streams flow, where the headwaters bubble out of the ground. I want to see their capitals as well as their hidden gems. And on the flip side, I want to know where their conflicts are, what crisis do they need to face, and how do I march fearlessly toward it?

Writing takes trust, courage, and some kind of dim vision, I think. Most writers aren't lucky enough to get the bird's-eye view of their story before they set off down a road and find where it leads. Maybe a little like driving with a GPS.

On a recent weekend camping trip, our TomTom turned us off the state highway and led us down a narrow gravel road, no telling what we'd find along the way or where we'd come out of it. We topped out, in good parts, at 25 mph under dark forests, passing hidden driveways and no-trespassing signs, not a single other car on the road for miles. We were awake and alive to every detail around us. And then, we cleared through the trees and sailed onto blacktop, surprised and a little disappointed.

If I could write like driving down that road, that'd be just fine with me.

Lemonworld

It may seem odd, but the moment I step off the plane in Boston, ready to ride the Silver line, then the Red line to Lesley University every six months, I feel as though I've stepped into a separate container of time and space from the one in which I live. Time there is sweet and beautiful, every moment is precious. The world gives us magical gifts, like calm summer nights and blankets of snow. Most importantly, we, the students and faculty, are gathered for ten endless and fleeting days to share the most important things in our lives--our writing, our dreams, our love.

But what makes this time so brimful of meaning is the same thing that makes it heartache-sour. We cannot continue forever. After one more residency, and a truncated graduating residency, we will never again converge in this sacred space with these saints in our lives. 

A theme kept showing me its face today, peeking around corners at me, calling me to follow. It whispered in my ear, Loved, lost places--this idea that we leave a place and even if we come back, neither the place nor ourselves are the same; we can never return to that place, even if we are physically present there.

Maybe I've been listening to The National too much lately, but this kind of melancholy, I believe, allows us to appreciate even more deeply the transient, profound moments of our lives.

Essay

I was up till 3am this morning working on an essay for school. Today I mailed 10 pages of rough draft looking at representations of nature in fiction. I have read and re-read Ernest Hemingway's "The Last Good Country," Andrea Barrett's "Theories of Rain," Lydia Peelle's "Phantom Pain," and Wendell Berry's "The Boundary."

That last story, "The Boundary," makes me weep every time I read it. On our camping trip, I read it to Andrew, and I could barely get out the last zinger of a sentence. Even when you know it's coming, it knocks the air out of you. If I could write just one story in my life that had that effect on people.

Playing Literary Catch-Up: Or, Year 2011 Reading Resolution

Most of my life feels like "catching up." I don't know that I'm trying to catch up to anybody else. The feeling I have is of trying to catch up to where I should be had I known what I know now. Ie., had I had siblings my age, had I gone to a public school, had I started college as an English major, had I not been afraid to talk to boys in high school, had I been comfortable in my own skin at an earlier age.

I wouldn't wish away the path my life has taken, the particular timing of everything. But when I do discover something about myself or about the world, or about the fiction we make of the world, I feel this urgency to make up for lost time.

In regards to books, I feel I am racing to make up for approximately 16 years of ignorance. I feel like one of the least well-read students in my creative writing program. Not that I hadn't read a lot of books since the age of four, when I purportedly taught myself to read. But I grew up amidst a culture of poor taste in books, music, and movies. To be fair, I'm sure I was free to read wider, read better, but I just didn't know. I didn't have anybody around me to show me the way, to say "You should read Alice Munro" or J.D. Salinger, or Raymond Carver, or Sylvia Plath, or Grace Paley. Additionally, if they had, I probably would have discounted half of the suggestions after running them through my particularly Puritanical filter. Swearing? Any suggestion of sex? Dark and unwholesome themes? Forget it. Again, I don't remember anybody telling me these were the standards I should have, I just conglomerated these ideas through bits and pieces of overheard conversations and articles in Focus on the Family magazines.

Disclaimer and apology if I offend some of my friends here, but I'm gonna be honest. My idea of great fiction used to come from authors like Janette Oak, Francine Rivers, Lori Wick, Robin Jones Gunn, Lauraine Snelling. Feel-good Christian romances. Frank Peretti for the occasional suspense/thriller. Thank God I never could get into the Left Behind series. One author I don't regret spending time reading is C.S. Lewis: Till We Have Faces, Out of the Silent Planet, and a nostalgic favorite series of mine, The Chronicles of Narnia. He's kind of in a category with T.S. Eliot, J.R.R. Tolkien, etc.

Halfway through college, I realized that I was reading fluff for the most part. I started reading more world literature, more classic fiction. When I switched majors from biology to English, I dove headfirst into a world of great, mysteriously rich, heretofore unknown modern fiction. Raymond Carver, Sylvia Plath, Andrea Barrett, Louise Erdrich, Lorrie Moore. After college, I kept trying to play catch-up. But my pace slowed considerably. Till I started grad school--then the fun really began!

I read at least 29 books in 2010. Probably more. This list also includes poetry, non-fiction, and books on writing, but still, I don't think I've read as much since high school. Here's the list. Not all of these were required for school, either. I put an asterisk by the books that met me at a time when I particularly needed to read them. For whatever reason, they changed the way I thought about fiction and writing, about personal history, about the world.

*Adrienne Kennedy The People Who Led to My Plays
Norma Jean and Carole Darden Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine
Grace Paley The Collected Stories
William Zinsser On Writing Well
Mary Oliver Poetry Handbook
A.J. Verdelle The Good Negress
Laura Esquivel Like Water for Chocolate
Bonni Goldberg Room to Write
Dorothea Brande Becoming a Writer
*Lydia Davis The Collected Stories
*Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible
Amy Hepel The Collected Stories
Brenda Ueland If You Want to Write
Joyce Carol Oates Black Water
*Alice Munro Open Secrets
*Lorrie Moore Birds of America
J.D. Salinger Nine Stories
*Andrea Barrett Servants of the Map
Charles Baxter A Relative Stranger
Mary Gaitskill Don't Cry
Lorraine Lopez Homicide Survivor's Picnic
*Ernest Hemingway The Nick Adams Stories
*Willa Cather My Antonia
Eugene O'Neill The Iceman Cometh and *Long Day's Journey Into Night
Sam Shepard *Buried Child, True West, and Curse of the Starving Class
Natasha Trethewey Native Guard...

...Not to mention other books and stories I've read that I don't have a record of...

I plan to read even more in 2011. I've already started through the Collected Stories of Carson McCullers, which so far deserves an asterisk as well!

Now if I could just catch up on all the music I missed out on through the 90s and early 2000s when I was busy listening to oldies and christian rock. Any suggestions?

Random, Weird Things I Do Instead of Write

It's high time I finally posted a note here.

I was busy wrestling with a couple projects for school. A friend from my MFA program wrote a great post about the process of writing. How writing is what we want to do, but we are tempted to find anything and everything else to do but write. Don't be ashamed, Lindsey. I feel the same weakness, the same self-doubt. "Why am I doing this if I am so easily tempted to avoid it?" I don't have the answer, but I am comforted that I am not alone. I've heard many good writers admit to this.

I still have one author interview to complete before officially "finishing" the second semester of my MFA. But last Thursday, after fighting procrastination/distraction demons for weeks leading up to the deadline, I felt a lightness of spirit when I handed the manila envelope containing my story and annotations across the post office counter to a nice lady named Heather. I had proudly defeated many (but not all) potential distractions over the last few weeks (including the blog god reminding me condescendingly that I still had not posted after several weeks MIA). So on Friday morning, I let myself indulge in a few choice distractions in celebration of being "done."

Here are three random and possibly gross things I did that morning instead of writing my interview questions:

1. Dumped the contents of my purse and discovered a week-old rotting apple core partially wrapped in a napkin. I ate the apple at work and wanted to compost it, OK?
2. Watched and cried at a weather channel video about a girl rescuing a starving horse from the side of the road (near my hometown, no less!). 
3. Cleaned out my belly button.

Yes, it's true. These are the kinds of things I find to do instead of write.

And now the blog god can stop looming for a few days while I get my questions written.