I posted a status update on Facebook yesterday noting I was at The Yardhouse Restaurant, and that “at least they have good beer.” Someone responded asking me if I like to drink (yes, I like certain alcoholic beverages), and I found myself defending the stereotype of the drinking, binging, self-destructive writer. I’ve certainly had my scenes of inebriation, but I am simply lucky not to carry the addiction gene. Beyond that I have an inherent impulse toward beauty—meaning I cannot stand the way I look and feel after any sort of binge. Chocolate, tequila, smoke or deep-fried hush puppies, I don't feel good when I look bad. And I’m OCD about hygiene, so I can’t embody the unwashed, sloppy over-doer (nor can I be an effective hippie, but that’s another blog post).

In one of those universal existential confluences, moments after I posted my “I’m not a tortured, sloshy-drunk, self-mutilating writer” response, I received a friend request from a wonderful writer, Jacqueline Doyle, who has a story in the latest issue of the Santa Fe Literary Review, and read my piece, Demonios Y Canciones Mi Padre (live link to follow) there. In perusing her wall I found this wonderful essay she published in The Writing Disorder that interrogates the notion that writers generally create best when toasted. I found this excerpt apt: “But since I've gotten sober, I've noticed a few things. Not all writers are drunks. My own productivity has increased tremendously. Before I often wrote in an alcoholic euphoria after a night out of drinking, or induced a kind of euphoria sipping wine by my computer, and it sometimes produced results, but there wasn't much follow-through.”

Talent--it's breathes all around us. People can be so extraordinary. Watching the latest episode of SYTYCD last night I was yet again gobsmacked by art—the gifts of our bodies and brains. Not just dance, either, but in as many media as one can imagine. Each day I read the stories written by people I know, or from people I don’t know and must “judge,” and marvel at the creative impulse, the genius that must be ubiquitous—so much abounds. Feeling uninspired? Drab? Walk Off the Earth’s clever little cover song, performed with such acumen and wit, surely makes you feel a smidge better about the human stain? We are sublime.

Still, we focus and aggrandize production and consumption in our lives; our admiration doled out most often to those that accumulate money and power and things of “status” that ultimately mean nothing. We call him "Mr. Trump," for nothing more than his self-proclaimed status.The venture to become top dog is privileged, protected and exalted, and our singular impulse to art is diminished, mocked, and too often wholly unsupported.

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story in your soul" -- Maya Angelou

She was one of our lifetime's very greatest. A woman whose poise and voice conveyed that she was a force for wisdom, for compassion. She asked to be heard and she was: A poet, a thinker, an activist. I read her work and bought her cards and pinned her to my board as one of my heroes. She was one of the most beautiful people--true beauty, the sort that makes you want to be better yourself. She was as important as James Baldwin, and today I learn she has passed. Her life was often difficult, her actions bore dire results (the beating death of the man who raped her), but she dove into reading and learning and carried on with a dignity that I can only aspire to. What a life she led. When I searched for an image, each one captured her signature smile, and a face so alive it almost burst forth. I even loved her name. I will miss knowing you are in this world, Ms. Maya Angelou.

 “Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.”—Norman MacLean




I relish a reason to blog (shame on me). I was tagged a little while back by the wondrous Linda Graziano Niehoff, a wildly talented writer and photographer I have come to know through the meandering channels of social media and gatherings of “emerging writers”. We have both been published in, and have a robust affinity for, Mike Joyce’s Literary Orphans.  Linda’s piece here, My piece here.

Linda writes extraordinary stories, her immense talent is palpable and varied. I feel a bond with Linda, our mournful observations and strange departures are thumb-tacked to unexpected map locales and demographics. Then she has the added threat component of this eye—an eye that sees the transcendent and evocative components of ordinary relics such as antique buildings, gas stations, silver water towers, Laundromats.  Check out her visions here. So thanks for the tag, Linda!

So, to the meat of this exercise.

I have just finished reading my former professor Jay Ponteri's essay, In Defense of Navel Gazing, published in a recent edition of Oregon Humanities magazine. This is a resonant piece for any of us who grapple with the stigma of memoir, an impulse to extract the writing we offer to others from within ourselves. Is memoir narcissistic? Poor writing? Amateurish, the dreaded navel gazing? In his essay, Jay Ponteri elegantly validates those of us who find the deepest satisfaction when writing about interior and private moments. When I’m writing a piece based on an experience, fiction or non-fiction, I have a mantra streaming through my consciousness—how am I connecting this to others? What aspect of this particular experience will resonate with an audience? How am I moving my particulars to universals that have meaning for others?

 Referencing Joan Didion's memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, Jay notes: "As a reader, I don’t question "whether Didion is indulging herself or exploiting her experience [] because I’m too busy feeling the contradictions in Didion’s heart. The prose transfers them from hers to mine." I feel this transfer, too, when I read a story like A Three Dog Life, or Jeanette Walls’ The Glass Castle, or a story like Amy Bloom’s Silver Water. These are the authors’ particular stories, but the pain of loss, the reverberating anxiety of chaos, the unresolvable aspects of madness and/or futility—these aren't singular moments. Most of us have lived one or all of these challenges, and empathy proverbially sets us apart from lizards. When they are artfully told, we hear others’ stories, and through their catharses or at least resolutions, we bond—nodding our heads, or wiping our tears, or jamming up the volume on that transgressive song we play when we’re in agony.

Hello again from the world’s worst blogger.

I’ve had a festering writer’s block this year, only finishing up two fiction pieces I started at the end of last year and pulling out an old memoir piece called Jagged Little Summer, which was one of the final works I completed in college. As all old work does, I had a palpable physical reaction upon revisiting it that was akin to a fight-or-flight adrenalin dump—intense aversion. I hated it and knew it was all wrong. This piece is a memoir, and there were places I didn’t want to go with it, things I resisted reveal.

So first I rehashed it vigorously. I worked it and reworked it for at least the past six weeks. I kept revisiting it and tweaking a word here, a phrase there. It slowly got leaner, then longer, then better, but still it needed some stitching up, it needed a little more flight. Finally, frustrated, I made myself leave it for a while. If I stared at it for more than about 15 minutes, I closed the document and did something else.