You’re dead to me.

Please select one of the following reasons, so when Casey Geeletty finally notices you unfriended him, he’ll know why:

-        Time.

-        Distance.

-        Emotional distance.

-        Jealousy.

-        Resentment.

-        Instagram-fatigue.

-        We haven’t spoken in years.

-        It’s not you, it’s me.

-        If I passed you in a hall, I’d pretend not to see you.

-        We used to date. So, duh.

-        Your status updates make me bang my forehead against the kitchen table. Read more »

culture

Recently, I wrote a poem.

For many people, this is not a big deal. For me, it’s the first I’ve written in a long, long time. Seriously, it’s my first since I was writing poems about listening to Lisa Loeb while crying over boys. (I also wrote one about a thunderstorm when I was in high school, but it contained the line “antithesis of justice and peace.” Yeah, I was a cool seventeen-year-old.)

I named the poem “My first poem.” Obviously this is a working title.

I do not know what to do with this poem. I hear one submits poems in much the same way that one submits stories (i.e., research some publications, submit, wait, wait, wait, try not to cry over the rejections, resubmit, etc.), but poets also get to do different things, like submitting multiple poems at one time. Unfortunately, I don’t yet have a poem called “My second poem.” I’m averaging about one poem every ten years right now, so I figure I’ll have a submission packet ready in thirty to fifty years.

I’ve showed my poem to one person. She liked it, but said the structure was very fiction writer. I don’t know what that means. What I do know is that line breaks are hard. I also didn’t capitalize the beginning of every line. I think I should get some sort of fiction-writer bonus points for this.

I don’t know what I think of my poem. When I worked with Willow Springs, the poems I liked most were the ones that got rejected fastest. I don’t know much about poetry. Poets often tell me I need to stop trying to “get” it, but I’m not sure what the opposite of “getting” it would be. Not getting it?

I was too afraid to take a poetry class in grad school, but I’ve been reading it since I left. My favorite collection so far has been one by Jacek Gutorow. It had been translated from the original Polish, and each poem was presented in both languages. I admit to spending almost as much time trying to learn a few Polish words as I did actually reading the poems. The author had also taken the opportunity to perform a few more edits, and I also amused myself trying to identify what they were. Okay, so maybe I liked the puzzle aspect of that collection as much as the poetry. It was, however, hearing a poem read aloud that prompted me to write my own poem.

Since I wrote this poem, I have worked exclusively on my fiction. I don’t feel any different, except I do like seeing a Poems subfolder in my larger Writing folder on my computer. It’s like I’m a secret poet, like I’ve snuck into a club to which I don’t belong.

Uncategorized

If you’re looking for an incredible read, check out this New York Times Magazine profile of ultra-athlete Kilian Jornet Burgada, written by Christopher Solomon. It was brought to my attention last night by two writers I follow on Twitter, and I stopped paying attention to everyone/everything around me to read it, based on this first paragraph:

Kilian Jornet Burgada is the most dominating endurance athlete of his generation. In just eight years, Jornet has won more than 80 races, claimed some 16 titles and set at least a dozen speed records, many of them in distances that would require the rest of us to purchase an airplane ticket. He has run across entire landmasses­ (Corsica) and mountain ranges (the Pyrenees), nearly without pause. He regularly runs all day eating only wild berries and drinking only from streams. On summer mornings he will set off from his apartment door at the foot of Mont Blanc and run nearly two and a half vertical miles up to Europe’s roof — over cracked glaciers, past Gore-Tex’d climbers, into the thin air at 15,781 feet — and back home again in less than seven hours, a trip that mountaineers can spend days to complete. A few years ago Jornet ran the 165-mile Tahoe Rim Trail and stopped just twice to sleep on the ground for a total of about 90 minutes. In the middle of the night he took a wrong turn, which added perhaps six miles to his run. He still finished in 38 hours 32 minutes, beating the record of Tim Twietmeyer, a legend in the world of ultrarunning, by more than seven hours. When he reached the finish line, he looked as if he’d just won the local turkey trot.

It keeps getting better.

So what’s next when you’re 25 and every one of the races on the wish list you drew up as a youngster has been won and crossed out? You dream up a new challenge. Last year Jornet began what he calls the Summits of My Life project, a four-year effort to set speed records climbing and descending some of the world’s most well known peaks, from the Matterhorn this summer to Mount Everest in 2015. In doing so, he joins a cadre of alpinists like Ueli Steck from Switzerland and Chad Kellogg from the United States who are racing up peaks and redefining what’s possible. In a way, Jornet says, all of his racing has been preparation for greater trials. This month, he is in the Himalayas with a couple of veteran alpinists. They plan to climb and ski the south face of a peak that hasn’t been skied before in winter.

Seriously, go read the whole thing. Fascinating. Jornet’s memoir will be out in July, titled Run or Die.

Tags: Memoir, running

writers, writing

My Scribendi students had one of the best spring break feelings: they sent the magazine to the printing press. For the first half of this semester, they designed their master pages, copyedited and typeset, determined a mix, and copyedited so much more that they started to memorize the pieces.

There’s little else that is quite as relieving as putting a big project to bed. We’re lucky to have a local press willing to talk to students, and on Tuesday, our representative agreed to give us a tour.

Read more »

editing and publishing, journals/magazines

“Great Writers,” my mother says, “are vessels or conduits who are able to open themselves to stories and language outside of their own experience.” I believe this idea — that men can write truthfully and realistically about women, that a woman writer can capture the voice of a man, that any aspect of diversity can be accurately portrayed by a writer with empathy, sensitivity, and an eye for detail. I believe this, but I don’t want to be this kind of writer. I don’t want to be great.

Joyce Carol Oates is great. There is no denying her mastery of craft. In 2001, I picked up We Were the Mulvaney’s because it was still impressive to me when a book had Oprah’s book club seal on the front, and I was not disappointed. Even as a 16 year-old high school student, I could recognize a caliber of writing above most of the teen angst books I was reading at the time. And yet, I didn’t read another book by Oates again for years because every time I happened upon one, as I was drifting down the library aisle or reading reviews online, the overriding theme of tragedy in her books put me off. No, I don’t need a book with a happy ending – Kazou Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go has one of the saddest endings in a book I’ve read in a long time but I love it still. Nor am I opposed to a certain level of depravity, moral decay and perversity in writing, these are real facets of being human,  the reality of what often lies beneath the surface and must be represented — But do I have to read about it? Read more »

Tags: Daddy Love, Get Lit!, Joyce Carol Oates

books, Uncategorized, writing

If any of you were a fan of the first season of the TV show Girls, you may or may not still be a fan now that we’ve reached the end of Season 2.

This season turned weird.
It turned sad.
It turned upsetting.
Fractured.
And confusing in a way that was foreign to the fun-discomfort of the first season.

The first season made us uncomfortable, but in a way that made us smile. As in “yeah so true, awkward, been there hahaha what DO you do with your hands?”
The core four girls were all friends. They had the usual layer of neurosis present in most groups of girlfriends, but they were friends.  The core four girls appeared in scenes together, went on wacky adventures together, lamented their lives together, and made the audience feel a lot.

I’ve read some articles on why this season of Girls took such a turn. Some people applaud it, some people hate it, and others are just plain baffled.
A sample tweet from one of Lena Dunhams followers? “hope the next season is more like season 1. This season was too random and weird.”

She simply asked if he was her brother. Read more »

culture

Hey, y’all.

You’re damn right he hydrates.

Do you have a Bukowski-sized hangover today? Are you in the process of renouncing all of your Irish, or pretend Irish, heritage? Are you making promises to never drink again?

Let’s get real.

Here are some natural hangover cures because I care about you.

1. Drink water. While this may seem obvious, it’s wicked important. Try to avoid coffee. Even though it’ll make you feel more human and awake, it’ll make your hangover last even longer since coffee dehydrates you.

2. Drink Coconut Water. Coconut water is full of natural electrolytes, which will both hydrate you and keep you hydrated. Avoid the gatorade-like drinks because they’re full of dyes, chemicals, and toxins, that will make you retain water, which you probably don’t want. Nothing worse than being hungover and puffy. Read more »

Uncategorized

Goodbye Tsugumi by Banana Yoshimoto is a short novel about two cousins spending their last summer together in the easy, coastal town where they grew up. As you might expect, it’s a coming-of-age story focusing on Maria, the narrator, and Tsugumi, her cousin who is an invalid.

Tsugumi was born “ridiculously frail, with a whole slew of physical ailments and defects” and as such, her family catered to her every whim, succumbing to her temper-tantrums and her outbursts of insults. She was, as we learn from Maria in the first sentence “a very unpleasant young woman.”

But just as she can be unpleasant, Tsugumi is mysterious and charming. No one quite knows what is going on in her head, and her youth combined with her illness creates a kind of captivating character for the seaside town. She’s morally ambiguous, if not rather mean with the tricks she plays on her cousin Maria, but she’s destined to either die or become a heroine by the end of the story.

Tsugumi speaks like a character from film noir, using words like babe, kid, broad, old hag: “Listen, kid, I’m a hell of a lot closer to death than the rest of you assholes, so I can feel these things,” she said to Maria when they were in junior high. The language, coercion, and allure add up to make her a young femme fatale. Read more »

reading

                                                An interview with Blake Butler, from Willow Springs 71

I know a lot of people in revision will read their work out loud to see what it sounds like, but I never do. I think I like more the way sentences connect together. I mean, I like interesting sentences, but that’s a given. I’m more interested in how a sentence can reflect an image and then the next sentence comes from that sentence and slightly alters the image. There Is No Year came from one image. The book starts with the mother and father sitting next to each other on the sofa without touching, very close, and that was where the book came from. An image. And I describe the image the way it made sense to describe it, and then started another page, writing scene after scene, and the language was important the whole time and sound was important the whole time and rhythm is what makes me type, because I’m not thinking, you know, just kind of running through what comes to me, analyzing it as I go, you know, as a reader, writing it as a writer and a reader at the same time.

Tags: Blake Butler Interview

books, reading, writers, writing

I know how in hindsight it’s easy to say I saw the end coming, that I was anticipating it the whole time, that I wasn’t surprised at all, but when I say that I knew how Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl would end, I really mean it.

More surprising to me was despite my intuitive knowing, I was still deeply satisfied (though disturbed) when it was finished, like the final click confirming that indeed the door was locked. It’s over.

But I was bewildered by how uneasy I felt at the end of  Udall’s The Lonely Polygamist, a book that sets readers up for all kinds of wild imaginings, but ends quite practically, and it got me thinking about how books end. So I composed a short list of my favorite endings, the ones that make  me shake my head and say, “Oh you.” Read more »

Tags: A Visit from the Goon Squad, book endings, Gone Girl, The Lonely Polygamist

books