So Begins the Sleeplessness

I didn't do so well with keeping up on my residency experience this time around. I will use the fact that everyone including me got some form of illness or another. I will fill in the bulk of my experience later but, as is my tradition, I wanted to put up my residency summary. I will put more up later. Have a great day, everybody!

Residency Summary: Awake in the Depths

I am still amazed by how things come together at the residencies. This time, it feel into line with what my semester had begun to teach me—the idea of depth. This past semester, I started to understand how to let my poems and my imagination take me into things I didn’t think I knew. The farther I went, the more things made sense. This residency, several of the faculty members turned to depth in their craft talks in different ways. The most important, to me, was Claire Davis’ suggestion to turn to depth instead of trying to always move forward with story. Sometimes, when writing something and it isn’t going anywhere, I need to write vertically. Starting out small and distant, I need to zoom in and take in anything and everything that might be around me. For a poem, it might be geography, proper names of things, a deeper realization of the character I am presenting, thoughts, actions, spaces. I need to plumb the strata of the moment in order to discover more and present more in a poem, or a moment in a novel. Sometimes writing simply needs the writer to stop and open her eyes.

A similar topic came up in Ben Percy’s craft talk. He said to “notice what you notice” about things around us. When something is interesting, we tend to look at it longer. But what do we notice about it? Something common or uncommon, something we could show the reader that he may not have noticed before? His talk melded well with Debra Gwartney’s talk on specificity. When writing, it is not necessary to be specific about everything. The reader will think, at first, that something is important, and then realize that nothing is. The most important thing is to be aware of the character’s perception. When there is a moment when specifics are called for, then I need to be behind the character’s eyes, aware of his or her emotional state and surroundings. Human beings almost never notice things logically, and I have an opportunity to show the quirky or strange things I or my character would see when deep in thought, or thoroughly enmeshed in a moment.

How is this depth achieved? Marvin Bell and Cristina Garcia suggested a chaotic creative life is best for a writer. Shaking up my routine, reminding myself that I am not, and should not be predictable,  and “becoming peripatetic” as Jack Driscoll said are all ways to get beyond the conscious mind and sink deeply into the subconscious. When I sit down to write, I must start too early and write too long in order to allow the wonder and strangeness of my mind out onto the page. It is only then that the poem can truly get past the conscious mind and make connections of its own—connections I could never have predicted or attempted to make on my own.

The most effective way to call things from our mind, whether strange or obvious, is to think. Kwame admonished us as poets to spend time in thought. And not to think only about politics or the social structure of our world, though those things are important, but to think deeply about other common things: love, family, an encounter with a stranger. Poets are looked up to in many parts of the world as thinkers. We have opinions and ideas, but too many writers stay to the simpler, shallower end of the writing pool, afraid of what people may think of what they have to say. As writers, we can’t do this. We have a responsibility to come to the page, to ponder what we are putting on the page, and to offer these writings to those who are reading them without apology. “I have to think of what is urgent,” Kwame said. We don’t write to make people like us, we write to make people think; to deepen their awareness of the world and what surrounds them.

I have often been encouraged to dive deep into writing, and I thought I had been—spending as much time as I thought I could and writing anything and everything that came to my mind. I realize now I have to actively awaken my mind by reaching deeply into it. I have to be a writer every day by taking the time to think more deeply about the events going on around me, my emotions, my actions. I realize that I am responsible for what I write. I am an influence on those who will read my writing, and I want to wake those people up to the world whether I am showing them what the world is made of, or what it is becoming.

 

Back in the Saddle Again

Well, if the road to we all know where is paved with good intentions, I'm in a heap of trouble at the moment, since this didn't get put up yesterday. However, I spent some quality time on Sunday evening (which made my monday morning less than quality and more coffee) sketching in my travel stories I wanted to tell for the benefit of all of you back home.

For anyone who may have forgotten, I'm deep into my MFA studies at Pacific University. I'm beginning my fourth semester which will focus mostly on the compilation and revision of the thesis manuscript--so far as I know. I still don't know what goes in to the thesis semester. I suppose, like everything else, I'll figure it out as we go.

I left Kalispell around 7:45 on Saturday night. So, yes, this post is delayed. I like to keep this blog running while I'm away to keep everybody back home in the loop while I'm staying up too late, getting up too early, and hanging out with some of the most fantastic, most gracious, and most talented writers in the country. (Most of them fit in to all three categories.)

So then, the getting here.

I got to the Whitefish Amtrak Station at 8:20pm Saturday. Shaunna and Lexi dropped me off. We had a nice chat on some of our favorite book series along the way. I had Mary Helen Stefaniak's book, "The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia" in my backpack to read in the lobby while I waited for the train. I had planned to finish up the worksheeps for my workshop group on the train and then hopefully relax for a bit before we got to Portland. I went into the train station and the guy behind the counter let me know the train was running late, and would be in somewhere around ten p.m. So I sat down with my book and read while another person, then a mom and her two daughters, then four older people, then a group of five guys came in. Pretty soon the little train station was packed.
When the train finally pulled in, I headed for the last three cars of the train. (The Empire Builder Amtrak train stops in Spokane, gets split in half, three cars get put on a new engine to head toward Oregon, the rest of the train goes to Seattle). The conductor stopped me before I got to the doorway and told us all to form a line. The train was going to be full, so he was assigning seats. He called for families and people traveling together first, then those traveling alone. I was among the first of the 'loners', and he handed me a ticket for seat number thirty. I figured it was probably an aisle seat, but I was hoping for an aisle seat with some space to do my work.
I got on the train, stowed my suitcase and climbed the stairs. I looked up at the numbers just below the luggage rack to track down number thirty, and there it was, directly across from the stairs...with an older gentleman slumbering in the seat beside it. I stowed my backpack in the luggage rack after rescuing my book again, and set my bookbag on the floor gently. I sat down and leaned into the aisle a bit so I could read for a while, since I didn't want to reach over his head and turn on the reading light for fear that the motion or the light would wake him.
Fifteen minutes later, he woke up, stood, and asked me to excuse him. He left his backpack and his water and headed up toward the lounge car. They had just announced that the snack bar was closing in about ten minutes. I didn't unpack my homework. He'd been forced to step over me, and I had to pick up my book bag to let him by. So I turned on the light and waited until he came back to settle in with my worksheets.
After about an hour, I was checking the forward door every five minutes or so. No sign of him. After two hours, I tucked my book under my winter coat. I used the coat as a blanket and dozed, checking every ten minutes or so to see if he was coming back and I needed to move. By morning, there was still no sign of him, all his things still in my seat. Of course, all the most interesting and imaginative possibilities were coming to mind: He jumped off the train, he was thrown off the train, he got off for a smoke and we left without him, he had a heart attack in the lounge car and they offloaded him at some stop, he had a heart attack in the lounge car and was still down there...Or met a friend. Or sat down somewhere else. Or....there was....a bomb in his backpack?
Thoughts of all sorts crowding worksheets out of my mind, I scooted as far toward the aisle as I could get (not much further than I already was) and stared out the window willing PDX to appear. The guy behind me was sneezing, sighing, and snorting every two to five minutes like clockwork. The conductor came on the PA system to tell us we were a half hour out. Then fifteen minutes. Then ten. Five minutes to PDX (the train station), the gentleman appeared with a young girl who looked like she was his granddaughter, and asked if he could retrieve his things. The little girl was holding a cup of coffee and telling him the drink smelled like him. Then they walked off together. So much for getting homework done on the train.
I disembarked and headed into the train station, intent on finding my way to a Tri-met ticket station. Portland has a light rail train that goes all over the city. My cousin also calls it the MAX. Unkyl had me get on the train once to go and meet some family. I didn't remember much about it except it would prevent my family from driving clear into downtown Portland to take me from the train to the airport. So, I looked for an information desk to give me some directions. The itenerary I'd printed off the internet instructed me to walk out of Union Station and head south. Problem was, there were no indicators in the building to tell me which way south might be, and nothing on my directions to tell me right, left, ahead, or behind. Apparently, Union Station is not equipped with an information desk, and the man at the ticket counter looked quite surly. So I decided to act as if the Tri-Met map was on the north wall, since the map had an N in the corner and an arrow pointing up. (I can see my father, all the rangers, and all the FCFers shaking their heads in despair. Sorry, guys, I know my directions by the mountain ranges at home, the sun was behind the clouds, I had no analogue watch, and there are no trees with moss on them by the station.)
If the map was, in fact, on the north wall, it'd mean I needed to go 'round to the other side of the building. But when I tried that, there was a fence to the right a ways, and to the left was a high staircase and a skybridge with no indication of a light rail track. So, I decided I'd wander up ahead and see what happened. I came upon the greyhound station a few feet away and thought I'd go back to the train station to track someone down for directions, but the light to cross the street was red and I didn't want to wait for it. I turned back around and, lo and behold, a Tri-Met ticket station!
Now, when I say 'ticket station' I really mean vending-machine-like independend kiosk with no human attendant and, apparently, inadequate instructions. I pressed the button for an Adult 18-25 (or whatever the age range), a two hour ticket, and that I wanted to pay. I tried to put in $5, and nothing happened. I tried again. Nothing. I turned it around. Nothing. I flipped it over, nothing. I tried it the first way again. Nothing. By this time, there's a line behind me.
"Hey, what's going on? What are you doing?"
"Didn't you press the button?"
"Put your money in, come on"
That, and a rather intense guy giving me dirty looks.
That was the moment one of the trains pulled in and a guy got off to see what was happening. Apparently he worked for Tri-Met. He pressed all the buttons again and tried to insert my cash. Nothing. He looked at me, looked at the line, and said "tell you what." He opened his wallet, dug around, and pulled out a ticket. He had me validate it. "You look like an honest citizen, and you really tried hard to pay for it, so here you go." I was floored. I thanked him and two guys behind me asked if he was giving those out.
"No, she tried to pay for it and it didn't work. Just that one, sorry guys."
He started walking away, and the younger guy behind me whipped open his own wallet and pulled out a card.
"See this? It says Active Duty. I FOUGHT FOR YOU!"
His friend said "He doesn't care, man", and they walked away. I walked around to the front of the kiosk, thoroughly embarrased, and there was a nice older lady standing there who asked me what happened. I told her I was from Montana where my town just barely got a bus route. I confessed I had no idea what I was doing, so she told me to get on the train she was waiting for, then swap trains. I told her my directions said to get off at the Rose Quarter. She told me I should absolutely not do that, and to wait to get off until the convention center, which she considered safer. I deferred to her good judgement and we got to talking. She's from Tillamook. I asked her where she was from originally and she told me she was from California. She'd lived there with her first husband. Then she laughed and told me that always sounded dubious--she'd only been married twice.
She told me about her son--how he likes to travel, how he's a freelance/self-employed/sometimes contracted graphic designer, how he helped design an international Hershey bar wrapper for one of their bigger candy bars and it got an award. "He always puts that on his resume".
We chatted until it was time for me to swap trains. She told me "Get on this one, and don't get off it until they throw you off. The final stop is the airport."
I grabbed all my stuff and made a beeline for a seat. After I sat down, a rough voice asked me "You know where Target is?"
I turned to see this guy in a fluffy red coat and jeans who looked almost as rough as his voice. He looked like he had two black eyes, and I wasn't sure if he was like our transients back home, just came off a night shift, a bender, who knows. I told him I had no idea and he closed his eyes. After he fell asleep I glanced that way and realized he had the word "Bunk" tattoed on his left eyelid, and "Dope" tattooed on the right. Twenty minutes later, we pulled into the second to last stop. I looked up, and there was Target in all its overgrown red-and-khakhi splendor.
"Hey," I said, "there's Target".
He kept snoring. I left him alone.
I felt bad that he missed his stop, and I wondered if he would need another fare. I thought about the seat on the train I had all to myself, the great guy who gave me a ticket, and the lady who had showed up to be my traveling companion, and figured I ought to do something. So I fished out the $5 I was going to use to buy my MAX ticket, said a little prayer, and left it on the seat in front of him. My hope was that if he needed a fare, or if someone else was getting on who needed a little something, it'd make the difference like all the things that had happened for me.
I got off the train and made it into the airport as fast as I could. I found the check-in to catch the Pacific shuttle and told the lady my name, and that I was on the next shuttle.
"Oh. You're early".
"Yep, I know. I figured I might be."
"Well, we'll just put you on this shuttle. It's parked out there. Tell the driver not to leave until I call him".
So I ran outside, across the roadway, and made it to the shuttle! With catching that shuttle, I made it to the hotel two hours sooner than I thought I would.
On the drive, Phil, Mags and I chatted about Bigfoot, wine, seafood, bike riding, karaoke, my bank, Phil's farm, and how most Led Zeppelin songs are about the Lord of the Rings. When we pulled in to the hotel, Mary Helen turned around and told us we were better than listening to talk radio. I hadn't noticed that almost no one else in the bus was talking. Apparently everyone had been listening to us.
Chris and I met up and headed for our room. Cynthia showed up a couple of hours later, and the posse was complete!

So, there's my travel story. I'll get some school stuff up here, hopefully tomorrow, although it's the bonfire on the beach tomorrow night if it's not dumping rain. So, we'll see!

Have a great night all

~Mariquita

Putting it together...again.

It's a little hard to wrap my head around my homework today. My thoughts are with a friend who took his own life last week, and with his family and friends. Still, I spent a few hours and scraped together the last of my residency reviews. Hopefully they came together a little better than I think they did.

Same as last year, I'm putting up the short essay of what I came away with from this residency straight out of the residency reviews. I can hardly wait for January, to see everyone and to keep hearing from all of these amazing writers who keep changing my writing more than I ever imagined anyone could.

Without further ado, the essay: (Any grammar police, please forgive me...)

                   Residency Review: The Joy of Remaking

My last two semesters, I struggled a great deal with revision. I’ve been hearing writer after writer talking about how a poet can’t just copyedit a piece and call it good. We have to enter into a process of re-envisioning, working the poem over and over, expanding it more and more until it refuses to encompass any more. Then we can condense it and condense it until we squeeze out all the extra bits in, and only the essential pieces remain. It’s been a frustration for me, because even though I have had a few very successful revisions, most of them consist of moving a few lines around or taking out a word or an image to tighten a line and letting it be. Even though I feel I know infinitely more about revision than I ever did before I started this program, I still feel as if, when I approach my own work, there’s nothing more for me to open up.

This residency, it seems like the theme of revision kept coming up again and again. Claire Davis admitted her frustrations, and her dedication, by telling us she revised three hundred plus pages at least three times. And then she showed us where she finds small spaces to open up—spaces of abstraction which may or may not be good enough or right for the piece can be cracked open and spill over into pages and pages of new opportunity. Or, a character may become narrow and need to be squeezed out. Charles Johnson admitted to throwing out thousands of pages and trying on persona after persona until, finally, the voice and motivation came out right.

Then Aimee Nezukumatathil came out and dropped the haibun form right in front of me. That little prose poem, which usually makes me so nervous, with its accompanying haiku seemed, suddenly, to be the answer to a poem I’ve been struggling with for a year and a half. Ellen Bass warned us to watch out for moments in a poem when emotion is too easy, and to re-orient the speaker’s vision toward the things that triggered the speaker’s emotion, instead of writing down the feelings themselves. Joe Millar, with Dorianne and Ellen’s help, gave me new perspective on line breaks—showing me how to rethink and re-shape a poem with a simple syllabic exercise. Peter Sears, with the help of Richard Hugo, showed me that I can use perfect meter in a piece without it becoming obvious or monotonous by working it into the sentence structure instead of into the line.

Armed with these and other tools, such as Mary Helen Stefaniak’s declaration that eavesdropping is a perfectly acceptable form of research (which I’ve always employed, but will do so now without guilt) and Mike Myer’s admonition to always start in place in order to get the reader’s feet on the ground, I feel like I’m a little better prepared to re-envision my pieces. To give them a little more life, and, when they’re bursting with it, start to whittle them back down. Do I believe I’ve solved all my revision problems? Does a writer ever? But I do feel as if this residency and these writers have given me more confidence, a better understanding of the problems that will come up in my writing, and a few more things to toss into my toolbox to help along the way.

Thanks to all who follow these posts. I hope they're interesting for you.

~Hannah Mae

Notes notes notes, and more notes. And then, some more notes!

Yep, I'm done for. This morning, not only did I sleep in, despite my alarm going off and apparently being dismissed, (which I did not wake up for), but I got two text messages. One was from one of my friends about travel arrangements. The other was from one of my fellow MFAers, letting me know there was a problem with my novel. I spent 45 minutes fretting about how I was going to explain the problem with my novel, until I realized not only do I not have a novel, the text message about said novel never existed, and I had, in fact, dreamed the second text message AND the 45 minutes of fretting about it. ...I got up and went for coffee...

Coffee and blueberry muffin in hand (coffee from the bistro, muffin from Maggie's [priorities, y'know]), I headed off to Leslie Miller's craft talk about Agency in the poem. I really like Leslie's attention to the scientific in her poetry, and it translated into her talk. She explained how a story is appreciated by a reader. Literally how. She said that a story or a poem is almost like a computer program, and the language we use must be constructed in such a way that the program will run in the reader's mind without a 'glitch', if you will. In order to do this, we must make effective use of 'stealth words'--pronouns and other connective language--. Leslie quoted a study that said content vocabulary makes up 90% of our language, but connective language, words of relationship and/or power dynamic, is employed 55% of the time in speech and writing. She showed us examples where the 'agency', the delivery/point of view/perspective, moved throughout the poem and made it both complex and interesting. I felt like the talk was useful both for poetry and prose. In our workshop after, we agreed that we didn't like the idea of theory to explain something so complex and that, yes, it did seem mostly like it could be reduced to being called just point of view. But I feel that there's a difference of point of view and perspective. The story being told from a certain perspective, or a wandering perspective, gives a better chance for the direction and focus of the story to change, because we're standing behind the narrator's eye, looking at the subject through their eye as they see it (and by 'as they see it', I don't just mean we see it through their opinion, but we actually get to see it as it physically enters the narrator's 'vision', at the moment it does so). This was the idea that I came away with, anyway.

Today was also the last workshops of the residency :( We ran a little late, and a few of us stayed a little later than that, but the poems were good, the feedback and suggestions were great. I feel really blessed to have been in such an engaged, intelligent, and compassionate group. Not that nobody got their pieces taken apart, we all had at least one piece that got shredded, but it was a gentle shredding :) At least it was from where I was sitting. Now I just can't believe I will only have one more round of workshops here. Where in the heck does the time go? A year and a half ago I was sobbing over the impossibility of submitting my application, and thinking of how long two years would be.

After lunch, there was a talk about historical novels by Charles Johnson. While I thought it was going to be a how-to or advice, it wound up being more of a summary of his personal experience while writing his novels Middle Passage and Dreamer. It was a very engaging talk though. I enjoyed it. He seems to be a very gracious man. And, as I had just so happened to have Middle Passage on my bookshelf left over from an American Novel class at UM, I asked him to sign it. I discovered that (while it's only 20 years old) the book I bought from the Book Exchange in Zoo Town is a first edition, published from an imprint that no longer exists. Guess I'll hang on to the book, especially now that it's been autographed.

I had my meeting with Peter today to get the nuts and bolts of the study plan squared away. The way it sounds, I more or less have free reign over my study plan. He said I didn't even have to send any poems to him until the essay is done if I didn't want to. (I'm going to, but I still found it interesting). It was a fun meeting, though. He's only half serious all of the time, so a fair part of the meeting was spent observing and commenting on the activity going on the university center, like the conference services people who were hauling around these long metal poles, and turning around suddenly without looking so that they almost clocked a sum total of about 14 people who were innocently sitting or walking by. Thankfully, our meeting took place without incident.

I attended the graduate readings as well. One of the girls was the aforementioned MFAer who, it turns out, did not actually send me a text message. The presentation was absolutely incredible. I don't recall having been that engaged in any of the grad presentations I've attended for this program so far.

The faculty reading tonight was shorter than usual, but it was really fun. There were three teriffic writers, Mags, Peter, and Mary Helen Stefaniak. After we listened to the reading, my friend hung back to go pick up a book, so the other two of us headed back to the room. When she got back, I found out she'd bought Mary Helen's book for me, because she just really thinks I will like it. I swear, she is one of THE sweetest people I know.

I've been trying all night to revamp my study plan, but it's 12:30 again, it's not done, it's 1:30 at home, and judging by my inability to rise this morning, I'm thinking I won't be finishing tonight. Still, I'm a little closer. Maybe in the morning tomorrow or something, hey?

Ok, that's it for tonight from the Grove. Hope this finds you all healthy, wealthy, and wise! Or at least well-rested and cheerful.

Good night!

Slacker: an offensive term for a young educated person who is regarded as being disaffected or apathetic, and underachieving (slang)

Good Evening, World,

Here, where I sit on the fourth floor of the dorm room, it sounds like the crickets are singing. And if I try hard enough, I can convince myself that it really is crickets, and not the fluorescent light above my head buzzing like a ticked off horsefly...Thank goodness I never had to live in the dorms in Zoo Town. I would've gone postal.

Today was the day! For two big things, really. All of you out there who know me know that I can be ridiculously overcommitted, to the point of completely wearing myself out. ("No!" You say. "Not you!" ...right? :P ) So today I did not oversleep as much as I planned, and I almost did not miss the first craft talk of the day. Instead of making it my ambition to go to every single one of these things, I have made it my ambition to skip one each residency, on principle. Well, today I skipped the long form prose talk (which, afterward, my workshop leader said had incredible insights and was invaluable for poets as well as the prose writers. My only consolation was it didn't look like anyone else in my workshop had attended either), AND the Get a Job Teaching at the College Level talk. Two! I was so proud and terribly disappointed in me.
The other big thing to happen was (drumroll please):
Student and Advisor pairings!! *ta-da!*

The events I did attend were:
Workshop, which was wonderful, although we were running a skosh bit behind and wound up staying in our room a half hour late in order to get everyone's poems done. But we got them done, and it was a very good two hours.
Lunch, where I was seated with Craig Lesley, my roommate, and a couple of other poetry friends. Since we got in so late, my workshop mates and myself didn't even have to stand in line. We got right in, got food, got seats. Bam! done. That's the way to do it!
A conversation by the Quad, which involved a couple of friends and it was a very nice hour and a half long stretch of talking about things like faith and facing difficulty, which sounds like a strange thing to suddenly get in to discussing at a school residency, but I thought it was a very good discussion, and it was with some great people.
The Poetry Publishing Panel, (nice alliteration, hey?) The insights from the group were really great. There were four members of the panel, all at different phases of their writing and publishing careers. Some of the main points were: Don't start too early (which was never really clarified...I'm not sure when it's too early, and when it's not.). Remember that editors are people too, meaning a bunch of them have boxes of submissions sitting in their living room, and their personal lives may be affecting their choices. (If they've just had a fight, they're probably not going to appreciate a poem about how sweet marriage is). As always, be persistent. Beware of vanity presses that charge an arm and a leg to pop you right into print.
Leslie Miller, my advisor from last semester, dropped in a helpful breakdown of presses or places to find presses/journals/web-based publications, etc. for various ambitions. If you want to get a great resume, start ___________. If you want to just pad your resume with a bunch of publications regardless of prestige, start ___________. If you want to get in on meeting some other poets, or if you want to submit to theme publications, or if you want to get in to some new hip trendy publication, start _________. (If you want the actual info, message me and I can get you some of the stuff off the handout.)
Marvin Bell reminded us that publishing a poem is not a mark for or against it. And to remember to cherish rejection letters.
Everyone made sure to remind us to keep records of where the submissions are sent and when, to withdraw simultaneous submissions, to keep the best rejection letters, and so forth. They advised sending out to about 30 places at a time, just to have things out and keep yourself in the spirit, since it can be quite discouraging.
After the presentation, I dragged myself back to the room and just about fell asleep on the couch. A bunch of the poetry girls were going to head for dinner, but once I got the idea of the size of the crowd, and the thought of trying to pry my eyelids open to stay awake through dinner, I decided I'd stay in and rest a little bit. I do feel bad, and I think it would have been fun to go. Although, I heard the restaurant was not well suited to such a crowd, and so those who went were sort of relegated to conversations only with those immediately near them.
The reading was not the best I've ever been to tonight. Marvin Bell was, of course, Marvelous, but the other two readers didn't seem to have as much craft supporting their pieces as I had expected, and I was a little bit disappointed.
The Pacific literary Journal, Silk Road, had its release party tonight. I went along, had a cookie, and stood under a tree whilst people milled around in front of me. From that I managed a conversation with the assistant director of the program (who is SUCH a sweetheart and she's so amazing. They all are. I really admire them!), a first semester student who I've been running into everywhere, and the novelist Bonnie Jo Campbell who is also a real sweetheart, and quite fun to talk to.

I was (you'll never believe this) on the verge of trying about a half inch of white wine. It took me 45 minutes to decide to have some. I stepped out of the tree I kept finding myself standing deeper in, down to the girl who was serving the wine. I asked her if she had the tiniest bit of white, she said yes, but she needed to see my I.D. ...EVERY blasted event we've been to on this campus that has wine, I have left my ID in the room. EVERY time. *eyeroll* Ah well, I didn't need it anyways, right? It was still fun.
I came back with my roommates and we talked about the upcoming meetings with our advisors. None of us really knows what it is we're planning on doing. We all have ideas, but the farther we get, the harder they seem to be to explain. I'm going to have a lot of explaining to do about why I can't explain...

Ok, ok, I was trying to build a little tension there. I've been assigned Peter Sears :) He's such a wonderful fellow, and I've had him in workshop twice now. It will be interesting to see what a semester studying with him is like :)

And with that, I'm going to hit the hay, because it's 1:30 my time, and I'm planning on being at the a.m. craft talk. With coffee. And some form of food. Because this not eating thing, although it doesn't bother me at home, is not working in the mornings here (yes, I still eat lunch and something for dinner, please don't assume I'm not actually eating). So I shall see you all soon, possibly some of you tomorrow, and for you out there, stalking me, who wish you were here, cheers to you! I miss your weird ability to be standing in front of me wherever I go.

Coffee, Winery, Grand Theft Auto...

Good Evening to all five of my registered fans (who may or may not actually read this) and those of you who hover mysteriously in the shadows of the World Wide Web! ...I have got to stop writing this stuff at midnight.

Today was unique in several ways, not the least being that I actually got to have coffee and sat around for the first hour of the day with my earbuds in listening to (and taking notes on) a Write Question NPR interview from May 3rd with Barry Lopez that Sandra assigned us for workshop. Unique, because I never listen to my iPod in the morning, and I was taking notes on an interview that I have downloaded as a podcast and am retaining on my iDevice so that, in future, I can listen to it again. So, I asked my befogged brain, why notes? To which my befogged brain did not reply. So, todays date and my entire 'notes' section in the back of my day planner is filled with notes on the rather fascinating interview on the responsibility of a writer to the public. A link for the interview can be found here: http://www.mtpr.net/program_info/2012-05-03-541. There should be links for any and all parties who may find the interview interesting, and appeal to any level of computer savvy.

Christine Sneed was the 9 a.m. Craft talk. She spoke to us about the usefulness of the trip narrative. She noted that many students' writing sort of comes out like a half-compressed accordion--not enough air to really make it sound good, yet not enough pressure on the parts that really matter. She advised us to put our characters in motion. We don't need to plot out the characters' plans as carefully as a trip to Disneyland--no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader--but getting the characters out of their houses and into new territory can really open the story and sort of define where the story might go. A trip story gives a setting which draws the writer in, and gives up interesting details. Trip-based stories allow one to write stories about a place that has made an impression on the writer. She gave some examples: "Dry Rain" by Pete Fromm, "The Girl on a Plane" by Gaitskill, "Ice" by Lily Tuck, and "Issues I dealt with in Therapy" by Matthew Clam.
She told us to end on an image, not on an abstraction in order to keep interest down to the last sentence.
She also noted that the Greek word for infinity=their word for mess. I forget exactly what she further related that to, but the thought still seems poignant. I'm sure I'll remember it tomorrow.

Workshop was, again, amazing. This time, Sandra turned to me and said that, now that she's praised my poetry, she's going to really tear it apart. The piece I had up today got rather shredded, and I was encouraged to approach it from the standpoint of a meditation, instead of a narrative scene. She is going to look up examples of meditative poetry so I can sort of piece together a form out of it, and then rewrite the piece with better, more focused perspective. It was really nice to not get just "trim this, nice lines, etc". Not that that's not nice to get in workshop, but I liked that she wanted to pry it apart and find the real heart of it.

Lunch was followed by the talk my roommates dragged me to which was, yes, the talk on romantic scenes. And when I say romantic, I'm being G rated. You can go ahead and fill in the rest. To be fair, it was a mostly tasteful, humerous, and straightforward look at how to create those scenes carefully, and with consideration for the reader, the subject matter, the characters, and the overall storyline. If it's not necessary, don't do it! If it is absolutely necessary, don't shy away from it. If you're working on it, don't be cliche and disgusting about it. There are plenty of ways to write those sorts of scenes tastefully. I don't forsee using any of the information from the talk anytime soon, but it really was well done.

Peter Sears taught a class on whether or not to use meter in poetry, or free verse, or verse libre, or just using rhythm/cadence, etc. Most of the salient points can be found in the third chapter of 'Best Words, Best Order' by Stephen Dobyns. Still, it was nice to get a refresher. He also provided us with some writing prompts, and I got a strange but interesting first draft of a poem out of the mix. Afterward, when I sat down for one of the graduate readings and a couple of people said they had no idea what we had just talked about in class, I went through and tried to explain it. Hopefully I did all right. I don't have a lot of hope for my future as a teacher.

The graduate readings were, as usual, pretty amazing. I had been in workshop with one of the students twice, and I must say her reading astonished me, as the poems she presented were SO different from the ones I had seen. It reminded me how unpolished and open the work we turn in for workshop really is. Which is encouraging, since I still don't really know how to make the revisions I need to...

Tonight was the night for the winery trip, so we all packed on to bus # 579 and two others, and hi-yo'd off to Elk Cove Winery. There was a cloud front off on the horizon, but it didn't make it rain. Despite the wind, the scenery was just gorgeous. There was, of course, wine, and some snacks laid out--meat, crackers, fruit cheese, really yummy vegan (what th') mint chocolate chip cookies. They were sooooo good. As was the reading. Ann Hood and Craig Lesley got up and read two amazing pieces that managed to touch every emotion of 90 percent of people in the crowd. Ann Hood's piece was sad, but mingled with a lot of hope. Lesley's bit of memoir had us mostly in uproarious laughter. It was a great night. Afterward, a few of us went out to stand on the winery's deck and look out over the rows of vines near sunset. It was clouded over so we couldn't actually see the sunset, but even the cloud cover cast a nice ambiance over the scene, and it made the green seem so much more vibrant. Just gorgeous.

We came back to our room when we got home, and watched a couple monty python / Fry and Laurie pieces and settled in for some serious homework. And, a little while later, we heard an engine rev outside. LOUDly outside. I looked up at my roommate and we both looked toward the window right about the same moment as a siren kicked on. Then another one and another one, then two more, then another, (all these were dodge magnums), then the white crown vic arrived, and all these cars were surrounding a white truck with its four-ways on out in front of our dorm. We heard the cops yelling at another car farther up and out of sight to get the door open, for the driver to step out of the vehicle, to open the door, to drop her purse, to put her hands in the air, and the radio in the background rolling out details that the subject had been pulled over, that the subject wasn't complying, still wasn't complying. The three of us went out of our room down one of the halls to where we had a pristine view of them leading the handcuffed lady over to the grass and helping her take a seat. EMS pulled up then, the little fire truck. My roommates decided that would be a good time to go out and have a cigarette, so I followed them out onto the concrete in front of the dorms where a few other students were gathered and watching. By the time we got out there, the lady had been put in one of the squad cars, and a kid had hopped out of the white truck, received keys from the officers, got in the car, and left. Then the truck left. When we got outside, the ambulance arrived. We met up with a couple of other people farther down the sidewalk and watched them finishing up. Although we went back in before they left. Down on the sidewalk, one of the guys was daring his wife to go talk to one of the officers and kick off a Forest Grove spinoff of 'Castle'. For seven bucks, she wouldn't go for it. No harm in trying, right?

Sandra has the first talk tomorrow, so I had better go get some shut-eye so I'll be all bright-eyed and bushy tailed. ...Or at least less cranky and scattered. Have a great night, all!

The Slow and the Dead.

Hello, all! Happy Father's day. I hope you took the time to greet your father, father figure, or mentor and tell him thanks.

I had to wait for my daddy to get back from a camping trip and unpack before I could give him a call, but still, in this zone where cellular technology is rather frowned upon, I managed to sneak in a 10 minute conversation.

--The title of this post refers to the slow, which is me because I've been sleeping 5-6 hours and running or studying or workshopping or taking notes or walking between readings or (previous to all that) driving or taking the car to mechanics or making plans with the fam or....y'know. The dead refers to the flashlight my aunt gave me a couple of days ago, which I lent to my roommate to use as a reading light when we all go to bed, and which (having a bulb burn out, and then a second bulb burn out) was reduced to little more than being useful for testing whether or not an individual suffers from epilepsy. Not sure why two of the three bulbs burning out would cause it to strobe like that, but there you have it--

I had some issues getting up this morning. Not waking up, I woke right up the first time my alarm went off at 7. It was the hour it took to get my eyelids to remain in a raised and locked position. Hopefully I'll be in bed a bit earlier tonight. Of course, I predict that every single night at these residencies, and it hasn't happened yet...

Today kicked off with no coffee (because of the latency in the wake-up system) and Mary Helen Stefaniak's Craft talk on creating characters who are different from ourselves. Thankfully, she's nearly as stimulating as a nice, medium organic blend.
She gave us handouts of 8 snippets from novels (sans title or author), read some of them aloud, and had us guess from the clues in the language the gender, race, and other pertinent facts about the narrator. The point of this was to get us away from looking at the back of the book at the picture of the author, or reading the author's name and getting it ingrained in our brains that the individual doing the writing was the individual doing the speaking.
There have been questions raised as to whether or not it is ethical to pretend to be a different speaker. For instance, a caucasian (forgive me if that's not the politically correct term) who was not all that friendly toward African American folk, you might say, wrote a novel from the voice of an African American who lead a revolt. And took on the voice quite well. The novel was admired by African American readers until they realized who actually wrote it. They stripped away the credibility of the author and tore down the work. It wasn't until the 1990's that a rise of black scholarship looked at the book again in the light of 'authenticity'. They came to the conclusion that "any culture is accessible to a writer who is willing to understand, learn, and inhabit that culture". Of course, one must have an experience of the sort of character one might like to write about. But as long as a writer may approach his or her character with an authentic, open-minded view, it seems quite fair to say that we might inhabit anybody from anywhere and breathe them to life, no matter how different from ourselves that person may be.

After Mary Helen's talk, we all trotted off to workshop. My workshops this round are with Sandra Alcosser and Peter Sears. Both brilliant, both gracious, and both absolutely sweet, compassionate, and not afraid to tell you what's best for the work, even when you don't want to hear it. We did a couple of my favorite poems by some of my workshop mates, annnnnnd, then we got to mine. I knew there would be some problems with it, and it was about a subject you don't really see much. Me and my dang ladybugs, I chose to try doing a piece from the perspective of a freshly emerged ladybird beetle having just popped out of it's larval carapace. ...Some people weren't sure what carapace meant. It was also, just as I feared, confusing and abstract. Still, I got some nice ideas for revision, and the repetition I had packed in there went over incredibly well. I don't like it, but everyone else did, so I suppose that might as well stay ;)

At lunch, I sat with one of the graduating students and chatted with her. She is SUCH a sweetheart and she's so much fun! I'll miss her the next couple of residencies :( A few months ago, she told an interesting story about the overwhelming numbers of birds roosting in the trees around her yard, and I told her I'd write her a 'The Birds'-esque poem and read it for her at residency. So, at lunch, I read it to her. It was really fun :)

After lunch we listened to Dorianne Laux. Her talk was on 'Poems of Identity'. My friends and I assumed something more in the vein, perhaps, of confessional poetry or something along those lines. However, she read us some poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Pablo Neruda, Yusef Komunyaka, and a few others. The poems were written from the moment in time when the child around whom the poem is centered changes from being simply someone living in the world and observing it, to being a witness. One who sees and records. Elizabeth Bishop's 'In the Waiting Room', Komunyaka's 'Venus Fly Traps'--which I had never heard and cannot believe I had never heard before--showed us the narrator as a very young child having some small experience which put him or her in a position in which he or she was suddenly overhearing, watching, discovering that they are different from the other people in the world. That they are themselves, others are others, and (despite varied differences in the center of their transformation and therefore their motivation) that it falls to them to follow their particular curiosity in that moment, which leads them into a lifetime of poetic discourse. 

--Please remember that my brain is not firing on all cylinders, so if you are a current Pacific student and I'm getting all of this wrong, forgive me. For you non-um...Pacifists? Pacifins? Pacificians? If my sentences do not make sense, I also beg you to forgive me. Thank you--

Mike Magnuson (Mags) was the last to present. His presentation was called "The First Part of Speech", and he noted that nearly everything in our world is a noun. Hannah is a noun. Hannah Mae is a noun. Goldfish, Notebook, Laptop, jumpdrive, all nouns. It's really hard to write without nouns. He said he's been practicing stripping the 'connective tissue' from his writing in order to reduce it to its bare parts. Parataxis.
Mags brought up the quote "Good writers write with nouns and verbs". Do they? Most of the English language is made up of connective tissue. Not all writing absolutely requires a heavy use of nouns and verbs.
After the talk, I summarized the notes I had for another student, and she mentioned that she had read a piece (I forget the writer) about a man who had three stones in his pocket. Each of the three stones represented something to the man who carried them. She said the author wrote for pages and pages without a single use of a noun. She actually had to refer back a few pages when she forgot what his subject had originally been, but that the piece had functioned quite well without it. Something to think about.

I came back to the room after that and worked on my press edits, to get them finished up. None of the graduates in poetry were presenting today. Not that they have to be in my genre or be someone I knew in order to attend, but I have the presentations I was planning to go to mapped out, and they take up the better part of this next week. I hadn't realized I'd become acquainted with so many people! I'm a little disappointed though, because two readings I really want to go to are scheduled at the same time. Although, one presentation has two people, the other has three. If the guy I really want to hear goes last, (if I run fast) I might be able to go to all three that I wanted to. *crosses fingers*.

The reading tonight was, as usual, amazing. Joe Millar, Valerie Laken, and Leslie Adrienne Miller. Leslie was my advisor this last semester, and the poetry she read tonight was so much different to my ear than the poetry she read back in January. This reading helped me understand that our styles are more alike than I thought. Not that she wasn't a good fit for me and my work last semester. She positively floored me. I just thought her work was more scientific than down-to-earth and with some humor and wordplay. It was a nice discovery.

The student reading was also amazing. It seems to me that there are a lot of new students this time around. I've been hanging out sort of with two: the girl I was corresponding with before the semester (who read, and her reading was great!!) and a guy who I sat down next to when we met up with our correspondents at the dinner on the first night and we started chatting. A few new students and a residency only student (all of the residency benefits, none of the residency review requirements) all signed up to read. The res-only student signed my roommate up to read, who signed me up, so I signed up my other roommate. Because why not, right? But that was last night. Tonight I got to hear some students I hadn't heard before, we had some fiction writers experimenting with poetry, and some poets braving the group with their workshop pieces, which were pretty good! Everyone did quite well, and there were some really confident readers. I am rather jealous of their confidence.

And at the moment, I am jealous of my roommates, who have gone to bed. So, I do believe I shall follow their example. Good night, all, I'll talk to you soon.