SkyMall Poetry

At 35,000 feet, en route between Washington, D.C. and Portland, I invented a new word game: SkyMall Poetry. 

Here are the rules: you get one page of the SkyMall catalog per poem. Each poem must use at least 10 words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) from the product descriptions on that page. No poem can be longer than 30 words total. Title optional.

Here are the five poems I came up with on my flight:

When the maple finishes with falling

I give myself the slip,

the easy luxury of turning away:

those branches, bones behind me,

blue-spun sky

and autumn on my lips.

***

New Orleans

there's midnight in my pocket

paprika in my soul

disaster in my mocha

and my latte and merlot –

so just depress the plunger

let me steep in my Creole

***

Name your roots. Single them.

Gather your earth –

crest, rim, bog, swale –

Nature is watching. Choose well.

***

Impending Bloom

Put your hands on my body;

Strip my facade with your teeth.

You: Peel me open:

Bloody fruit, ruby seed, ready heat.

***

Night makes a small showing.

One star clicks down center stage

in the full-moon glare, marking time

to secret songs and pacing off

her secret needs. 

So... I hereby throw down the gauntlet: next time you're on a plane, write a SkyMall poem and send it to me (or post it as a comment to this entry)! 

Memoir: A Great Way to Piss Off Your Friends and Alienate Your Family

I just finished reading Lidia Yuknavitch's memoir, The Chronology of Water. My 15-year-old son asked me what it was about, and I began with, “It's about this woman who was sexually abused by her father as a kid, and her mother was an alcoholic --” only to have him cut me off with a wave of the hand, “Yeah, yeah, they're all like that. And then the kid grows up to either become a drug addict, at least until they get religion and clean up their act, or they end up in a psychiatric hospital, or they become an artist or something.”

What could I say in response but, “Um, yeah, kind of all of the above – except, in this particular case, the bit about a religious conversion.”

I'm not sure there's a memoir out there that isn't a cliché. The bildungsroman follows familiar contours: there are only so many ways of growing up and becoming an adult, ya know? The best we can do is tell the same old story without telling it the same old way, which Yuknavitch certainly accomplishes, with beautiful, scrape-your-eyeballs aplomb.

It isn't easy to write the real stuff of our lives, though. No matter how many models are already out there, writing memoir feels like a leap in the dark. It's a scary undertaking.

I suspect that people who've gone through some kind of abuse or trauma or tragedy – and who therefore have a marketable story – often struggle with the feeling that they might be prostituting themselves, putting their pain on display for a profit. It's empowering to turn something negative into something positive, no doubt, but I'm guessing there's also something about turning that kind of trick that just feels...ick. Why do I think this? Because those of us without the skeleton of a cash cow in our closets feel this way – it's just that we're not likely to be paid as well for selling out.

The problem with writing memoir is that truth-telling, for those of us who have basically healthy relationships with the people in our lives, often feels like betrayal.

I wasn't abused as a child. My parents weren't alcoholics. I didn't have to deal with a debilitating illness. There were no natural disasters in my immediate environment. Nobody close to me died until I was in my 20's, with the exception of a kid I sort of knew in high school who shot himself, a kid who had as little to complain about as I did.

What do those of us who were lucky, are lucky, and hope to stay lucky have to write about?

Plenty, actually. And it's not always pretty.

Let me give you an example. In the last essay I wrote, I included a little description of a distant relative of mine – the brother of my step-great-grandmother, to be exact – that didn't exactly put him in the most flattering light. Judging by the way he dominated a conversation, he fancied himself a commentator on the History Channel or something, and he was (to paraphrase what I said in my essay) one of the least sexy men alive. A nice man and a fine person, to be sure, but I used to look at him and wonder how on earth he'd ever persuaded someone to marry him.

I had good reasons, artistically speaking, for including this unflattering portrait of a man who is mercifully no longer alive to feel slighted by what I said about him.

Sigh.

Sometimes I feel like I should wait until everyone I know is dead before assaying to write anything remotely memoir-ish. Reminds me of a joke I once heard, about a couple in their 90's who go to consult a lawyer about getting a divorce, and the astonished attorney asks them, “Why now, after all these years together?”, and they say, “We wanted to wait until the children were dead.”

A Low Point

My internal monologue/dialogue/decalogue over the past few days has gone something like this:

Me1: Time to get started on that third essay. Next up: my relationship to academic feminism, real-life differences between men and women, Dr. Seuss, you know, all that stuff.

Me2: That's not an essay. That's a book.

Me1: Aaaagh! You're right. That's the same thing I was doing with the first essay. It was too ambitious, and that's why it's not done.

Me2: And you'll never finish it. All that time you spent, wasted.

Me1: We can't make the same mistake again!

Me3: I know what, let's pick something more manageable, like how I quit teaching composition because I really wanted to teach people how to compose themselves.

Me1, Me2, Me3: Yes, yes, that's it, we'll do the essay on composition. Let's start with a freewrite.

Freewriting Me (excerpts): I've never gotten over the irony of being given a job teaching composition. I have no native skill with composition, unless maybe we're talking flower arranging.

So there I was in this ridiculous position of giving my students advice about the process of writing, and it was all a mystery to me. “Write an outline,” I'd tell them, but I myself never wrote outlines – or, when I did, I'd find that they were useless after a paragraph or two.

I didn't know what I was doing, but I knew how to fake it, and it seemed like teaching them to fake it was better than leaving them in their ignorance.

This is boring. It was boring then, and it's boring now. What is it I really want to say? It's something about being a fraud. Showing people how to do something you yourself don't believe in. Like being (I imagine) a preacher who rails against the sins you yourself are committing. Do as I say not as I do. There was an element of hypocrisy in it. And there was also the laughable matter of being an authority by virtue of... what? My product.

But then I was supposed to teach process. And I knew nothing about it.

Really, I hate process. I certainly did then, anyway.

Why was it I thought I wanted to write about this anyway? Maybe I don't care.

What makes a topic compelling? There has to be something there, something emotional. You have to have something at stake.

I'm not sure I want to do this essay at all. Maybe it's about explaining why I quit, tossed all those years of study down the drain. Terrifying: being right at the expense of having been wrong. Like gambling: you can just keep throwing money at it hoping you'll recoup your losses. It's already too late to quit while you're ahead.

My son, thinking about going to college, and I'm not sure there's any point. Why should he go to college? To learn what?

It is really weird doing all this editing for these immigrants and first generation college students who have so much faith in education, in developmental outcomes and academic success being one and the same. And I am not sure going to college is going to help my son. I am not opposed to his going, if that's what he wants to do, but it isn't a huge wish I have for him. And why not? Because it is a huge expense, and possibly a waste. I mean, if he doesn't know what he wants to do with it. Cogs in the machine...and the machine is almost kaputt.

Watching that video of the cop who pepper-sprayed the non-violent protesters at UC Davis, I was struck by the top comment on the YouTube channel, which went something like, “Leftist privileged college students, you know nothing about what it's like to work a low-paying job your whole life; if you want to make change, stop protesting, get your degree, make a lot of money, and give to the less fortunate.” But that is not a system that works any longer. There isn't money going to come at someone because they have a degree. They're just in debt, and what do they have to offer that someone else doesn't?

Trying to figure out marketable skills. Play the system. Get the right number in the lottery.

There are no jobs in the former sense of the term. We have to make up a reason for existing. We have to compose ourselves. No one is going to give us a prompt.

Me2: Great, just great. You still don't know what you're writing your essay on.

Me4: Who cares about stupid essays, anyway? Our educational system is toast, the economy sucks, and the world is going to hell in a handbasket.

Me1: This isn't helping us get anything done, and not getting anything done is just going to make us feel worse. So let's DO something.

Me3: Listen, maybe an essay on composition is not the thing. We keep coming back to Denmark; maybe we should just start with Denmark and see where we get to.

Me2: That is a dumb idea.

Me3: No, no, it could be good: maybe it is partly a political essay, about European socialism – remember when you got strep throat and you actually saw the doctor within an hour of calling the clinic? – and partly about being at loose ends, not sure where you were going next, and you can use the essay to work through all these confusing feelings you are having NOW. Like Denmark One, the real Denmark, and Denmark Two, the metaphorical Denmark you're in now.

Me4: It sucked then and it sucks now.

Me1: Maybe we need Happy Lights? Maybe this is Seasonal Affective Disorder talking?

Me5: Wow, a lot of resistance. Maybe I just need to write something. Eventually, I'll get into it, and then I'll feel better.

Me4: Yeah, you'll get all manic about your writing again, because maybe what you're really resisting is taking a good hard look at how pointless your entire life is. Writing is just a smokescreen.

Me2: Brilliant. You were a fraud when you taught composition, and you're going to be a fraud as a therapist, too.

Me3: Maybe we can write a blog entry about this: that'll give the negative stuff a place to go, and it will limber up the writing muscles, and then we'll see what we might want to write an essay on.

Me1: No – let's do something actually productive, like some editing. At least we'll get paid for that.

My Relationship to Process

(The following is an exercise from Nancy Slonim Aronie's Writing from the Heart: Tapping the Power of Your Inner Voice: Write about your relationship to process. Write about one thing you have [gotten better at] or would like to get better at. Make a contract with yourself: I ______ hereby agree to learn ______.)

It used to be that Process and I were hardly on speaking terms. I spent most of my time pining after the unattainable Perfect Product, with his designer shoes and his faux-diamond smile: it was as if I believed that if I just lay around hoping and moping long enough, he'd rescue me from my own insecurities about how to begin, and, once begun, how to continue.

At 13 or 14, I made myself a banner that read, “The Future depends on Today” – and, as I lay on my bed dreaming about everything I was going to accomplish, just as soon as I got up the oomph to get off my lazy butt and, say, start my homework, I would periodically glance at my banner and feel as though my future self were watching me and tsk-tsking. It wasn't until I was 19 or 20 that I finally figured out how the process of actually doing my schoolwork related to getting the grades I wanted.

I guess I'm a slow learner. Maybe it's not surprising that I'm still hashing out the process-product problem in the writing arena. It's only been very recently that I've shifted my attention from daydreaming about what it would be like to have written something worthwhile to actually doing some real writing.

I'm glad I'm no longer in the subjunctive with my writing process. I'm glad I have more of a handle on what it's like to Just Write.

However, writing anything more complicated than a blog entry continues to feel like a leap in the dark. My process is still largely a mystery to me. And I find it hard to “honor my process” when I'm not sure what it IS.

So far, I've been able to gather only that inspiration is available in many forms, most of which I am unable to access until I've done a certain amount of running around in circles.

What this means is that, as a writer, I'm just not going to be efficient. With more experience, I may be able to streamline the crazy contraption I'm currently using to get from Point A to Point B, but I suspect that trial and error are necessary components of any writer's process, mine included. I'm not real keen on error, so this is a real stretch for me. I just have to keep reminding myself that anything worth doing is worth doing badly – at least at first, at least some of the time.

So, here's the contract I'd like to make with myself: I, Tanya, agree to learn how to spend my writing time graciously and generously, without expecting that I will have “something to show” for my effort. I will learn to follow my intuition, even if that means changing my course and “throwing away” the time I already spent going in the wrong direction (if indeed there is such thing as a wrong direction – perhaps all wrong directions are really part of the right direction, necessary beginnings to an ending we wouldn't want to've reached any other way).

No Girls/Boys Allowed in My Book!

First off, I need to make an announcement: I am a very unwilling conscript in the Ongoing Gender War. I never read books like Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, and I don't intend to start now.

I have, however, read just about every book Dr. Seuss ever wrote – some of them hundreds of times – and I've noticed something a little odd about his oeuvre, which is that there are, like, NO GIRLS in those books.

(Okay, a few exceptions: the little sister in The Cat in the Hat and One Fish Two Fish; the snooty kangaroo mother in Horton Hears a Who; and Mayzie, the lazy bird mother in Horton Hatches the Egg. There's a spare sprinkling of girl birds/little sisters in some of his less popular stories, too – but that's about it.)

I first noticed this curious phenomenon a long time ago, back when I was reading Seuss to my son, who is now fifteen. Then I mostly forgot about it, until recently, when we started pulling out all Everest's dog-eared favorites to read to Ravenna.

You want to know how many girls there are in If I Ran the Circus? (Yes, I counted). Here are the data:

• 2 main characters, both male
• 18 other people/creatures/animals whose sex is assigned with a pronoun: every single one is a “he”
• other creatures are collectively referred to as “fellows”
• pictures depicting crowd scenes include many people that appear to be male (because they have a mustache, say, or are wearing a 3-piece suit and a bowler hat) and very few that appear to be female (because they're wearing a hat with flowers, say): the most gender-balanced crowd contains 7 female figures to 21 male figures (=3x more males); more typical is 2-3 females to 15-16 males (=5x to 8x more males).

I felt a little strange reading this book to my daughter. I have to wonder if maybe Dr. Seuss just didn't think much about (or, perhaps, of) girls.

Okay, so what?

Well, maybe nothing.

But I had another weird moment recently when I looked at the art credits in the back of Patti Digh's Creative Is a Verb and noticed that they were all women's names. We're talking well over 130 credits, for artwork supposedly sent in by “readers” – not “female readers” – of her blog, and only two names could possibly have belonged to men: there was one Tony and one T.J. The rest were all Beverlys and Kathys and Marys.

Seriously, 130 to 2?

I can only assume that either men don't read her blog (and I'm not sure why that would be – as far as I can tell, her topic is gender-neutral), or they do read the blog but didn't respond to her invitation to submit art, or they did submit their art but she didn't like it.

Something funny's going on here.

I think it's high time for some serious sleuthing, a la Nancy Drew & the Hardy Boys (I read both series as a child – equal opportunity all the way!).

Essay Number Three, here we come!

Two Drafts Down...

I finished the second of my four essays yesterday. Or maybe I should say I finished the first of four essays, since the first essay is still at first draft stage, but my GOAL was to complete DRAFTS of four essays, so I think actually FINISHING essay #2 was going above and beyond the call of duty.

What do I mean, “finished”?

I mean it's too late to fix it. I got to the point, yesterday, where I was happy with what I'd written, and it felt done, and I submitted it.

Then, AFTER I had already submitted it, I emailed it to a few writers I know, saying I'd be delighted to listen to any feedback they might care to give, now that it was too late to change anything.

This is the feedback I got (I'm giving approximations, here, not direct quotes):

Person 1: I think it's beautiful and perfect and I'm not just saying that because you can't change anything.

Person 2: I enjoyed your essay – I felt like I could have been you.

Person 3: I was worried I wasn't going to like it at first, but then, as it went on, I liked it more.

Person 4: You said everything you needed to say.

Person 5: Kudos on how you tied things together – I wasn't sure where that first story was going, but then you came back to it near the end, and that kind of resolution is pleasing to a reader.

This was all kind of weird to me, because, having already submitted the piece, I felt pleased and honored that my writing friends had taken the time to read my essay, but I was oddly detached from what they had to say about it. Not that I didn't care, just that there was nothing hinging on their approval, you know? I had already let it go.

I was connected just enough to what it WOULD have felt like to get that feedback on something I was thinking of as a draft to realize that I was REALLY GLAD I'd submitted it before soliciting people's opinions.

Overall, the responses were certainly positive, but I know myself: I would have seized on those two comments that implicated the beginning (“I was worried I wasn't going to like it at first” and “I wasn't sure where that first story was going”) and I would have decided I needed to scrap my beginning and start over some other way. Probably I would have futzed about with that first couple of pages for a couple of weeks, until they morphed into something that didn't fit the rest of the essay at all, and by that time, the whole project would have been down the tubes, the submission deadline would have passed, and I would have had yet another “almost done” essay gathering virtual dust in my documents folder on the computer.

I'm starting to see that I have been using other people's opinions as an excuse not to finish. I've been sabotaging myself, on a regular basis, by focusing on getting it right rather than getting it done.

What I realized yesterday was that getting it done WAS getting it right (meaning that it FELT right to me), and that getting it “right” had actually been code for getting it perfect.

I hope I will someday get to the point where I can use other people's opinions in the spirit I think they're usually offered: as a help and not a hindrance. Until then, I will respect my own limitations.

FUBAR Feedback (Part Two)

Years ago, in a graduate writing workshop at the University of Utah, a woman whose name I can't remember submitted a piece that had already been accepted for publication. She didn't tell us that, though.

I don't remember what anyone said about her piece – I barely remember the general topic of her essay – but I know it was the usual group-feedback feeding frenzy.

You probably have some idea of how these things go. Person A says something like, “I really liked that image at the beginning, but I'm left wondering...what does it have to do with the rest of the piece?” and Person B says, “Oh, I thought that image carried through beautifully! It's like, the crumpled tissue we see in the first paragraph, those papery folds disclose the, I don't know, the je ne sais quoi that just, you know, NAILS the emotional tone. BAM. The reader's crucified, right from the git-go. But in my opinion, that's the problem. We're bleeding, here – which means we can't pay attention to that – forgive me, but dull is the word I want – dinner scene on page 2.” Then the professor says, “So, I think this essay marks quite a departure from the other work we've seen from Gladys this semester. What do we, as a group, make of that?”

So anyway, this woman let us go through the whole constructive criticism charade from start to finish, and only when we slid our marked-up copies of her essay across the table at her did she finally announce that the piece we'd just workshopped was probably already in press. It was too late to change anything.

Some of us were annoyed. Why had she wasted our time?

It was an experiment, she said. She'd wondered whether a finished piece – something polished enough to've met a publisher's approval – would get the same reception as the drafts she usually submitted for critique, and now she had her answer. There was no difference. Context was everything. If we'd come across her essay in a lit mag, no doubt we would have approached it very differently.

Unless you are a critic, someone whose job it is to review other people's creations, you're not in “feedback” mode when you walk into a gallery or a bookstore. You evaluate, sure, but you don't come up with suggestions. You say, “Wow, I love the crazy color – but it would look awful in my living room,” not, “What if you layered an ocher wash over this neon blue?” You say, “Yeah, I know Ethan Frome is a classic, but it made me want to shoot myself,” not, “I'm not sure about the unremitting hopelessness – maybe you could change it up a bit, throw in a little spring imagery here and there?”

I'm beginning to wonder whether the whole CONCEPT of feedback is FUBAR.

Full disclosure: I am pretty sure that not a single one of my artistic creations has ever improved because I've taken someone else's suggestion about how to improve it. Post-feedback, either I tinker with the piece until I've sapped the life out of it, or (more commonly) I throw in the towel.

I know some people find feedback from others to be hugely beneficial in their creative process. And I have to admit that I have benefited from feedback in a general sort of way: all those writing workshops I took did teach me a lot about how to be a better writer. But when it comes to making that specific poem or painting better, feedback usually sends me straight into “fix-it” mode, and the results are often irreparable.

It may be that I don't trust my own voice enough. It may be that I don't work well with others. It may be that I give up too easily. It may be that I have unreasonable expectations of myself. It may be that I think I have to please everyone. In other words, it may be that the problem isn't feedback, per se, but my dysfunctional approach to it.

I keep thinking of a story I once heard. It's about an apprentice potter who works and works until he makes a pot he thinks is perfect. He proudly presents it to the master, who inspects it, nods approvingly, then throws it to the floor, shattering it to bits. “Make another one like this tomorrow,” he says, and leaves the room. A hundred “perfect” pots later, the apprentice potter finally makes one worth keeping.

Maybe it's time for an experiment. I think it's time for me to take a page from that woman in the writing workshop all those years ago. I've decided I'm not going to ask anyone for feedback on anything until I think it's as perfect as I can make it. I'm not going to ask for feedback on anything until it's too late to fix it. I'm guessing I'll end up with a lot of finished pots in pieces on the floor this way, but I'll probably be a lot more productive. It's time to stop spending all my time fussing over the “finishing touches” on lumps of clay that will never see the inside of a firing kiln.

FUBAR Feedback (Part One)

This morning I woke up thinking about a certain email exchange from March of 2004, when I wrote my friend Shannon Hale to share my impressions of her first published book, The Goose Girl, and she responded with a rebuke.

In a writing workshop, there's an etiquette to giving feedback: first, you tell the person what you liked about their story/poem/essay/play, then you talk about what, if anything, didn't work for you, followed (in some cases) by a constructive suggestion about what the writer might do to address the problem(s) you identified.

I stuck to this standard workshopping format in my email to Shannon.

First, I told her how much I had enjoyed the book, listed some of the reasons why, and predicted (correctly, it turns out) that she had found her calling as a writer.

Then (to quote directly from my email), I said, “If I had any criticism (and I share this only in the spirit of our old-time writing group critiques) it was that you went a little overboard on the similes, esp. ones about the sun. If I can use a make-up analogy I remember from some bizarre book my mother used to have, it was like saying, "oh what pretty eyeshadow she's wearing!" instead of "oh what pretty eyes she has" -- meaning that occasionally the simile called too much attention to the art involved in crafting it. On the other hand, you are so gifted at coming up with the unexpected comparison that I'd hate to take any of the fun out of it for you with this (unsolicited) observation (which is truly the only negative thing I thought while reading it, and it wasn't a big deal).”

Her response was chatty, and friendly enough, but reading it made me feel shamed, like she'd just slapped my hands with the ruler of writerly self-righteousness.

After going on a bit about how well everything was going with the reception of the book, she said (quoting her email directly), “I had to laugh at your proffered criticism of Goose. Once a book is published, there's not much one can do. It's sort of like giving someone feedback on something they can't change (e.g. 'Your hairstyle isn't quite right for your face shape' vs. 'I find the sound of your voice grating.') A writer simply cannot please everyone, and I wouldn't dream of trying. It is certainly the right of any reader to dislike any part of the story or the way I told it. Often, though, what one person dislikes is another's favorite aspect, e.g., many other readers and reviewers have cited the descriptive language (esp. of the natural world) as exemplary. Rest assured that I didn't take one word of my book lightly, every part went through 15-50 drafts, and I worked with 4 editors.”

I was struck by the “I had to laugh” followed by feedback on my feedback that seemed, to me, not all that ha-ha. Apparently, I had stepped on her ego (as a writer), and I therefore needed to be taken down a peg myself (as a reviewer). That laugh, I felt, was dismissive. Of course I realized that the book had already been published, and could not therefore be revised. I figured she had a long career ahead of her, and I gave her my honest opinion because I thought she might appreciate it. Apparently, however, she not only didn't appreciate it, she also thought I was an idiot for thinking she might.

So I had a complicated reaction when, a couple of weeks ago, Shannon's Facebook status update read something like, “Cutting similes from Princess Academy 2 – I overwrite them in the beginning so I can go back later and pick out the very best ones.”

On the one hand, I felt vindicated. Maybe I wasn't so dumb after all. Shannon may or may not remember what I said about the similes in her first book, but at some point, two or five or eight books later, she decided that some judicious simile-pruning ought to be part of her pre-publication process.

On the other hand, I felt humbled anew, because my comment, however “correct” it may have been, most likely had nothing to do with what she's learned about herself as a writer over the years.

Maybe other reviewers voiced criticisms similar to mine. Maybe her editors kept saying, “Hey, I love your similes, I'm a big fan, but let's not go bananas, okay?” Maybe, after hearing my comment echoed a time or two by people whose opinions meant more to her, she finally felt like listening.

However, I think it's more likely that, on some level, she knew her soft spot for similes was a potential weakness in her writing long before she laughed at my “proffered criticism” of her first novel. The only difference is that back then, she felt defensive, whereas now, she can make a matter-of-fact announcement: there were too many similes, and now it's time to get rid of some of them. She overwrites, and then she cuts. That's what works for her.

In other words, it was clear to me that Shannon has learned to trust her own voice. And I'm betting she learned that by writing, not by listening to what other people say about her writing.

All of which brings me to a question that's been much on my mind lately: when it comes to art (and by "art" I mean creative expression, whether we're talking writing or sculpting or quilting), is there such a thing as constructive criticism? If so, what does it look like? This is a big topic, a messy messy morass, and this post is merely our first foray into it. More to come....

I Am the 3%: A Highly Political Post from the Apolitical Hinterlands

Either no one should listen to anything I have to say about politics, or everyone should, because I have not been watching the news.

I am among the 3% of Americans who don't own a television, but I used to be among the 1%.

TV ownership is down in America. Why? According to the reliable-looking Internet source I just googled, it's the “persistently rocky economy,” which sounds about right.

The persistently rocky economy is not news to me.

No, I didn't lose my TV because of the big bank bailout. I haven't had access to a television in my home since 1992, which was the year I left my parents' house (unless you count the TV set relegated to the corner of the living room during the 4 months I lived in a furnished apartment in Copenhagen, but I didn't understand Danish, and I never watched it).

For most of my adult life, I could have afforded to buy a TV. A really good one, even, with a gazillion channels of cable and five different remote controls, but I chose not to, and as a result, I have been out of the media loop for almost 20 years.

I have never watched a single episode of Survivor or Lost or CSI or American Idol. It took me a full two and a half minutes to retrieve the words “American Idol” from my memory bank, actually: I was like, what's that show with Paula Abdul and someone else, the guy everyone thinks is snarky, and they judge these contestants whose songs sometimes end up on the radio?

But it's not just the fluff I've missed out on.

Know how many times I saw that endlessly-replayed footage of the planes crashing into the twin towers? Um...once, I think. I'm pretty sure there was a clip of it in Fahrenheit 9/11, which I watched in a packed Oakland theater the first week it came out.

I'm not bragging. Oh, okay, maybe I am a little smug about my American Idol virginity. But I'm not particularly proud of my political ignorance.

What's my excuse? Well, there's the whole disaffected-with-politics thing, that malaise that settled on those of us who voted for Al Gore, and were dismayed to learn that “majority vote” didn't mean what we thought it did.

I'm the whatever-percent who endured four years of Bush malapropisms (I'm an English teacher, not a math teacher, okay?) and who then, spurred on by something akin to panic, actually walked door-to-door canvassing for Kerry, even though he was kind of a douchebag, but still, not Bush, and therefore better, right?

I'm the whatever-percent who said, “What, you've got to be frickin' KIDDING me: four MORE years of W?” and promptly gave up.

Oh, and let's not forget the whole disaffected-with-the-media thing, because there was that time I was in that peace march in San Francisco, back when it seemed like maybe there was a chance of staying out of Iraq if enough people took to the streets, and then I made the mistake of reading the newspaper coverage of the event.

“A few thousand protesters took to the streets of San Francisco,” I read, and didn't know whether to laugh or cry, because it wasn't a few thousand protesters, it was backed up on BART for hours, it was everyone I knew plus their cousins from Boondock City, it was shoulder to shoulder marching for miles, no room in the square with the catalpa trees, biggest-public-event-ever, and I was thrilled, because there was NO WAY that kind of demonstration could go unnoticed.

Wrong. Apparently, our united voices did not matter. Not only that, but I was moving from California to Arizona, where the political climate was decidedly...wackier.

So, during Bush's second term, I dropped out of political discourse altogether.

I read the pamphlets issued by Pima County, the lists of pros and cons for various initiatives on the Arizona ballots, and I voted. I went over to a friend's house to watch the presidential debates, and I voted. That was just about the extent of it.

Meanwhile, I watched my neighbors lose their jobs, and then my husband lost his job, and then my children lost their health insurance, and then Arizona decided to cut funding to the program that would have provided them with health insurance, and, since we were starting up a small business, and knew we would therefore be poverty-stricken for at least a couple more years, we decided to move a state that had some kind of social services safety net.

Ergo, Oregon, where my children not only have medical care, should they ever need it (knock wood – Ravenna hasn't so much as had an ear infection, and she's almost four), but they get dental care, too. It's almost like being back in Denmark again.

Maybe that's why I'm starting to feel more hopeful, even though my family has never been poorer.

Maybe that's why, last night, cutting up carrots for dinner, I was suddenly seized by a desire to take that bag of carrots over to Occupy Portland's community kitchen, because, according to the Willamette Week, they need fresh vegetables over there.

Oh, I know that half the people living in those tents in the park blocks are homeless guys and street punks who don't know any more about politics than I do. I know that, if I donate carrots to Occupy Portland, half the people who eat them will be drunk or stoned or tweaking so hard they'll look like they've been dipped in Crisco.

When you start giving out free food, freeloaders come flocking.

But I think I have seen enough of what's going to happen to this country if we keep worrying about the freeloaders among the poor.

In case you missed it, what happens is rampant corporate freeloading, less and less trickle-down, rising rates of joblessness and homelessness, and a bunch of disenfranchised folks who are willing to sleep in tents in our public parks, even if it means dealing with the hordes of homeless who show up hoping for a free meal from the makeshift community kitchen.

Unless I've missed something (and I suppose that's possible!), we still live in the richest country in the world. There's still enough to go around. I, for one, would like to keep it that way – but not by pawning off our dirty work on other nations, or stealing their resources, or bankrupting all of our children and grandchildren by borrowing recklessly from their future to fund our present excess.

I'm beginning to think it might be possible. Maybe there's a will, and maybe there's a way.

Don't expect a lot of political commentary from me in the months and years to come. I've got a lot of other things on my mind – for example, how to feed my family, how to be a better friend, how to find fulfillment in the work I do, how to live each day with gratitude for what I have...you know, that kind of thing.

But this morning, I am jumping on the bandwagon to make an important announcement:

I am the 3%, and I am now paying attention.

Proper Reviews of Katherine Ramslund's Bliss and Nancy Slonim Aronie's Writing from the Heart

I'll lead with the confession: I was just kidding about that “proper review” thing. What is a proper review, anyway? I wouldn't know one if it left its dentures in my derrière.

I'm tired. I stayed up late last night, writing, and I woke up at 6 this morning to get some writing in before everyone else woke up.

I'm listening to Pink's Funhouse, which means I couldn't think straight even if I weren't tired, and no, I'm not going to turn it off, so we'll just have to deal with body distortions, assuming I ever get to the body of this entry.

Do I really have to write these reviews? I mean, I've already written entries about both of these books – Ramslund's in “Finding My Bliss Means...” and Aronie's in my last post, “Bloviation Encomium”.

Oh, okay, fine. I have now read both books in their entirety, and I have formed an opinion.

I feel kind of bad about saying this, but Nancy Aronie's book is better than Katherine Ramslund's book.

Reading Aronie's Writing from the Heart: Tapping the Power of Your Inner Voice was a more enjoyable experience than reading reading Katherine Ramlund's Bliss: Writing to Find Your True Self.

Someone else might have a different experience and come to a different conclusion, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I think most people would enjoy Aronie's book more than Ramslund's book.

Why? Because Aronie is funny, and Ramslund is not.

Don't get me wrong. Katherine Ramslund says a lot of interesting, insightful things. I underlined some of them. For example: “Just let go and have faith that, once we're on the track, things will happen to help us along. We need to believe that our true purpose is in our best interest.” Or how about, “When consciousness feels harmonious in the pursuit of some activity, people pursue that activity for its own sake rather than for some extrinsic reward.” Good stuff, but a bit fibrous for my taste.

Here, just for some contrast, is something I would have underlined in Aronie's book, if it weren't a library copy: “Culturally, we Westerners have a much harder time with change because we are raised to think everything should stay hunky-dory, and when it doesn't, we are convinced we are just the one unlucky slob that the fickle finger of dumpage has found.” Or, wait, how about this: “I would be the wrong one to diminish the role of ego, since it's been a helluva motivator for me. It didn't let me sleep until there was applause....I know myself. And I know it's only when my ego gets lodged between my heart and my work that it presents a problem. But if I acknowledge that ego has been the origin, the genesis, the instigator, then I thank the little maniac and move on.”

The fickle finger of dumpage. I thank the little maniac and move on. These are memorable lines, because Aronie's got a way of saying things. She's got a real voice.

No, I don't think you have to be a stand-up comic to have a voice. But if the subject of your book happens to be something like bliss, I think you might want to do what you can to help your readers experience a little bliss while they're finding out what you have to say about finding it.

The real problem I had with Ramslund's book was that it felt like a slog. It felt heavy. It felt like a lot of work. Maybe I would have gotten more out of it if I had done all the exercises (which she insists are CRUCIAL), but I couldn't make myself do more than the first few, because the vibe I kept getting was color-by-numbers. Ramslund has very definite ideas about how to do things. She doesn't just give writing prompts. She gives a detailed set of instructions, and you get the sense that you'd by-golly better follow them to the letter. Or number. But get it right, okay? Which makes me want to do just the opposite, of course. When I completed her “following my bliss means...” sentence, I didn't exactly follow her instructions, which may be why I actually got something out of that exercise.

Nancy Aronie also includes writing exercises in her book. They seem like they'd be great, but I haven't done a single one yet, so what do I know? I will say, though, that I want to do them – so, in view of my very limited time (I'm currently deep into Essay #2, and there are only so many writing hours in the day!), I have chosen five exercises that seem like they might be of particular benefit to me right now. I will probably post these as I complete them.

Now, time for another confession: it wasn't much fun writing this entry, because I really hated doing the whole comparison thing, and yet for some reason I felt compelled to go there. Yeah, if I had to choose between the two books, I'd definitely go with Aronie's. But I'm glad it wasn't about choosing. I'm glad both authors took the time to write what they wrote. So thank you, ladies – both of you.

It's later now, and I'm even more tired than I was before.

Pink Floyd has succeeded Pink, and wow, The Wall is so NOT Funhouse, you know? Apples and Oranges, people. Apples are better for making apple pie. Oranges are better for making orange-wedge smiles. Bananas are better for going bananas. And that's just about all the fruitcake wisdom I can dish out for tonight.

Bloviation Encomium (a.k.a., Why I Love Big Words)

“Readers don't need commentary. They don't need detached description. They don't need big words. They don't need imitation Alice Walker. They need you, with your language, your rhythms, your story. They need your heart.”

So says Nancy Slonim Aronie in her terrific book Writing from the Heart: Tapping the Power of Your Inner Voice, which I started reading yesterday on the recommendation of my friend Virginia (thank you, daaaarlink!) and which I shall review properly in another entry, very soon I hope.

This morning, however, I have to get something off my chest, which is that I had a huge reaction to that section I just quoted, particularly the one sentence I emphasized, the one about big words.

My knee-jerk reaction went something like this: You got a problem with big words? Then you got a problem with ME, lady.

I was on the defensive, ready for an offensive. I was in a bit of a tizzy.

Your nefarious plot will never succeed! Animadversion. Pyrrhic. Confabulation. Neener, neener, neener!

Why were my knickers in such a twist? The author didn't say, “Don't use big words.” She didn't say, “Big words are bad.” All she said was that readers don't NEED big words. Yes, there's the implication that commentary, description (if “detached”) and big words are not only unnecessary, but may even be undesirable, from a reader's point of view – but I'm guessing that's only true to the extent that these things interfere with “heart,” which is what Aronie thinks is most important.

Here's a little history, a sort of “Me & Big Words” romance, in three parts.

Part I: Little third-grader Tanya comes home from school and complains that the other kids always run away from her on the playground. (I had told everyone the myth about Medusa and the Gorgon sisters, claiming I could turn people to stone if they so much as looked at me, and the other kids responded – sensibly, I now think – by shrieking and running away. The problem was that I'd grown tired of this game, and the other kids hadn't.) My dad's solution? Vocabulary cards. He had a whole box of them. If I ever needed to tell someone off, he said, I'd be able to do it eloquently. A few weeks later, one of the girls in my class said something mean at recess, so I told her she was superfluous. This was a girl I was very much afraid of, and I don't think I'd have dared if I hadn't been standing on top of a huge pile of snow, ten feet above her head. Agatha squinted her eyes up at me and demanded, “What you call me, bitch?” I nervously backtracked: “Nothing.” Before I knew it, she had scrambled up that mountain of snow and was chasing me down its icy spine toward the school parking lot. I was terrified. She landed a good kick to my posterior, told me never to disrespect her again, and, to my relief, that was the end of that.

Part II: When I was sixteen, I wrote down a list of 200 big words, just off the top of my head, and told my high school boyfriend I'd give him a kiss for each one he could define correctly. No, I am not kidding. I actually did that, said that, was a complete snot like that. He cooperated with good grace, and seemed pleased enough with his eleven kisses.

Part III: A couple of years ago, I taught a class on memoir writing for my Stone Curves Cohousing neighbors. As part of the course, each of the participants, myself included, had a personal essay workshopped by the entire group. My friend Caroline responded to my essay in a way I'll never forget – except that I've forgotten every word she said. The gist of it, though, was this: It's been interesting to read this essay, since you're the teacher, and to watch you execute all the techniques you've talked about in class – but sometimes I find myself feeling like you're not letting us in, that it's all too seamless, too crafted, that's it's all about the words and not about the real you.

My take on the bloviation (bloviate: to speak pompously) situation is this: I'm all mixed up.

On the one hand, I love words. I love small words and big ones. I like their sounds and their meanings, their connotations and denotations, their rhythms, their personal associations – mine, and other people's – and the endlessly fascinating things that can be done with them. My love of words is as genuinely me as it gets. If the writing gods & gurus want to declare big words taboo, then I guess I'm just out of luck as a writer.

On the other hand, I keep getting the message – from readers, from the universe, whatever – that maybe I ought to think about the way in which I use my words to keep the world at bay. As is always the case when our defenses get questioned, there's a part of me that's dead set against change. As is always the case when our defenses get questioned, the last thing I want to do is put that defense down.

I've spent my whole life perfecting imperviousness. I've freakin' pluperfected it, as a matter of fact, and now I'm supposed to just let it go?

You want heart? Okay, here you go: a big ol' dollop of sentimental glop. MMMMmmm. Coagulation. Yummy.

Transformation: A Visual

 Painting I (after setting it on fire -- see previous entry for the story...)

Painting II (same canvas: yep, all that stuff is under the paint somewhere...)

**Flashy Title HERE!** (Or, A Temporal Ordering of Variables)

With my flashy (and boring) title out of the way, now all I need is an opening sentence, preferably one that contains a sweeping generalization, such as “since the beginning of time” or “throughout history”.

Next, we move on to the analogy. But which one?

I could talk about the mixed-media painting I have been working on – you know, the tried 'n' true ekphrastic thing, where I go on about a piece of visual art in order to make a point about art in general, even though what I'm really talking about is writing, cleverly covered over with collage and beeswax.

Or I could reference a deep moment in the Angelina Ballerina video I was sort of overhearing as I cleaned the bathroom yesterday. That way, I could borrow a moral, and no one could accuse me of naiveté because, hello, I got it from a talking mouse.

Option three would be to reference some ultra-exiting personal drama regarding scheduling issues, in order to make a connection between writing and REAL LIFE.

Of course, there's always “All of the above.” A bold move, yes, but worth the risk, because it's a formal solution to a problem of content. It will serve to demonstrate what I am trying to say, without my having to come right out and say it. (“Show, don't tell” – you've heard that one, right?)

Screw it. I'll just tell you. HERE'S THE THESIS: I'm not sure what to do next.

In this entry. In my painting. In my essay. In my life.

I guess, in order for you to see the similarities I see when I look at those four nouns I just put down, I'm going to have to produce at least two portraits with actual noses, you know? So get ready for some details.

I'm taking an art class on Thursday evenings at Portland Community College. Mixed media. I was initially attracted to the class because it was about “getting over inhibitions” and experimenting, not just with paint, but also with photographs and fabric and wax and found objects. A whole bunch of stuff going on all at once. Exactly my sort of thing, in other words.

Here's what I have done to my first “piece” so far: 1) secured three crushed up pieces of cellophane to the canvas with melted beeswax; 2) painted over said pieces of cellophane, and the rest of the canvas, with multiple colors of acrylic paint; 3) drizzled more wax over everything; 4) melted both wax and cellophane with this special blowdryer thing my art teacher showed us how to use; 5) glued pieces of paper on which I had written poetic things onto the white spaces around the cellophane balls that were produced when the plastic shrank from the heat gun, and brushed over that paper with melted wax....

Ok, I'll spare you numbers 6-29. You should just know that, after gluing on berries and bits of tree bark, I doused the whole thing with rubbing alcohol and set it on fire.

This was done out on the rain-soaked balcony, of course, since even at my most destructive I'm still a practical girl. And of course I also had moistened paper towels handy, to beat out the flames, which, what with all the beeswax and tree bark and paper I had going on, were still keeping steady long after all the alcohol had burned off.

You know what's funny? My painting looked a lot better afterward. Even the bits of paper towel that got stuck to the burning beeswax lent a sophisticated “wallpaper” kind of effect.

To sum up: I've been doing random things to this painting, hoping that if I just do enough different random things, it's all going to work out in the end. I'm enjoying the process, yes. But I'm not liking the product. You see, on the whole, the piece still has the same problem it's had from the beginning: a complete lack of composition.

End of Portrait One. Begin Portrait Two, preferably with a sentence alerting the reader to the “compare and contrast” structure here, which, while formulaic, is preferable to no structure at all.

My essay isn't suffering from a lack of composition. It's doing waaaay better in that regard than my painting, and even, I dare say, a fair bit better than this blog entry. (My essay even has a real, as opposed to merely place-holder, flashy title: My Life as a Mail-Order Bride.) However, there's a hell of a lot of stuff I'm trying to do with it, and I've had to invent a completely new form in order to get everything in. Nix on compare and contrast, although there are instances of it in there. Nix on a temporal ordering of variables, because I've got to jump not only into multiple different pasts, but also into hypothetical realms that have no time at all. Nix on placing the narrative somewhere solid, setting a scene and staying with it. Nix on a steady narrative voice to carry the reader through the disjunctions that inevitably ensue during so much travel through time and space, because the whole point of the essay has to do with a kind of Whitmanian proliferation of identity. You know, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

So. Moving from the workable rough draft to a final version that pleases me presents quite a challenge. My skills as a writer, while considerably more honed than my skills as a painter, may or may not be equal to the problem I've set for myself.

The biggest challenge with the essay is that I don't even have recourse to the kind of self-indulgent luxuries I allow myself in my blog. These entries are tutorials, in a way, even if what you take from them is, “Here's what NOT to do!” You get to see what's going on behind the curtain. In my essay, on the other hand, I've got to be all subtle about my technique. I've got to achieve my effects without calling undue attention to all the effort (process) that's gone into making the results (product) seem effortless. Thankfully, this is not an essay, so I can continue to hit you over the head with what we composition instructors like to call meta-discourse: that is, an overt discussion of what I'm doing while I'm doing it. 

Now, if this were a composition of the sort I used to assign to my students, this would be the time to move into some kind of satisfying conclusion. I would gather all those far-flung elements and wrap them up with a purple polka-dotted bow. Unfortunately, I don't think that's going to work with this entry. Once again, I have too much going on. My daughter saying, “Help me find my treasure box.” My son and my husband loudly discussing how to set up the internet connection on the new laptop. A weird twinge beginning in my left elbow, and an itch at the back of my scalp. Thoughts about some kind of snack, which lead me straight into thoughts about how I need to start dinner. Emotional residue from a conversation that didn't go well. Cold fingers. Nagging concerns about how the maintenance guys have been messing with the drain in my bathtub all afternoon and I don't know if they've fixed it or what, or whether they might be knocking at the door any minute with a longer socket wrench. The fact that my son has taken my computer mouse, and I'm having to hit the “up” and “down” arrow keys to navigate through my own convoluted prose every time I want to change something.

Enough already. I quit.