Writer/Author

"You really think you are an introvert?" My student looks skeptical. Compared to her, I spend so much more time interacting with others. She doesn't realize how much time I spend alone, at home, reading, writing, computing. How much time I spend meditating, all in order to restore myself for more social interactions.

As part of the Wisconsin Book Festival, I spent Thursday night out for dinner and drinks with a few other queer writers. We were needing to eat, yes, but also celebrating our successful event (Losing Gender at Room of One's Own) and getting to know one another a bit better. Quite a few of us are out, not just in terms of gender/sexuality, but also "out and about" - people on the town, well-known, etc. I was surprised to hear that one of the people at the table, easily the most public, is intensely introverted and has social anxiety about interactions in public.

Just So

(photo of Michael Amos Hall, 1960's, N. Ireland)

My father was distant, and then, he died.

Of course that is not the whole story. However, that is a big part of the story I have managed to overlook on one level or another for many years. When people ask me, especially if they have recently lost someone close to them, "Will this sadness ever end?" I gently try to say no, but it does lessen somewhat. On weeks like these, I remember what really happens: grief, like everything else, changes. That's all. Just when you think you've figured it out, it changes.

In working on my memoir, Bermuda Triangles, I have slowed down considerably, finely editing the draft to send out to a possible agent. A local friend, wonderful writer and fabulous editor, Lissa, pointed out while helping me to revise that the protagonist (me as a little girl) seems to adore her father and yet, there are no instances, nada, showing WHY. Nothing to make the reader understand why she loved her father so. She said this a few times, but I only got it myself when I began to edit parts about his sickness and death (when I was 12) - finally, it hit home, and even when it hit home, it took me a few weeks of lots of space and getting out of town to finally start to have some memories come back.

This week's class prompt is about "Reading and Writing" - favorite books, how reading relates to writing, etc. I knew it would come eventually - that I would write about reading the Just So Stories to my father when he was sick, and him correcting me repeatedly, without cease, whenever I got the slightest thing wrong.

Remember my post about him as Judge Hawthorne? Yep. So of course I knew this was a part of his personality, but as I explored those memories, I realized the only ones in which I actually think of him fondly, he is silent or speaking to someone else - a bookstore owner or musician. The negative memories? He's either not around or speaking to me - criticizing me, warning me or - yeah, not good.

There's a lot more remembering to do, and likely, some of it will be painful. But today, after writing about the Just So Stories, and then sharing it with my AM class (the first time I have ever cried throughout my whole reading of a piece during a class), I feel cleaner. Clearer. More honest. It never fails, though always feels awful getting there - knowing what is actually causing me pain is less painful than making up something else to hide it. For instance, for years I really hated my mom. Now, suddenly, on a newer level (again, I've known this before - sort of) I realize she gave me, expressed, far more love than my dad did. But I didn't want her love. I wanted his. And it was hard to get.

Without blame or shame, though with tremendous sadness, I softly explore the underbelly of the stories I have told myself for decades in order to survive. As the actual stories appear, they write themselves easily, unlike the parts in my memoir that Lissa noticed as absent, not as strong, lacking and seemingly contradictory. There was plenty that was contradictory in my childhood - my mom and I fighting for my dad's affection, at the top. But I don't need to fight myself anymore. That's a conflict I can relax. I hope. I can try, anyway.

Most Wonderful Time of the Year?

Christmas equals ambivalence for me, as I am sure it does for others.

And yet, this morning, I woke with the song "The Most Wonderful Time of the Year" in my head. In fact, it won't leave. And I have to say I don't mind it, strangely, though I am feeling somber today and a bit tuckered out from too many (even if good) social interactions over the weekend.

There is something about how this time brings people together. Like overloading with food, especially rich food, I am overloaded with guests and invitations and visitations. I am grateful that I am on break, so that the energy normally reserved for classes is spread out into my broader social life.

And yet, I also have to say that I am tired. Very tired. Tired of rich conversations, productive boundary setting, even silly jibber jabber about this and that. I want to sink back into Jane Eyre, which I began reading last week (as Natalie assigned Wide Sargasso Sea, a prequel of sorts, and I thought it was time for me to read the classic, too). I want to get lost in my own writing, my own past relationships and made up townships, and I keep popping up, numerous times a day, into reality.

I trust, I hope, that others of you out there can understand this - that it is not a lack of appreciation, but appreciation of all the wonderful people in my life mixed in with a writer's natural inclinations - those which require lots of time alone, lots of time reading and writing. In fact, I'd say that both are writer's inclinations - the need and desire to really listen to people and be with them intimately, which contrasts - though doesn't always conflict, except maybe at this time of year - with the need to be alone and processing it all through writing.

What a conflict! I guess in a way I am grateful that this should be my conflict. Of all the things I could be worrying about, struggling with or fretting over, this is it. I don't mean it is little - it doesn't feel that way at all - but it is special and a privileged conflict, in a sense. That I have so many I love in my life and who love me. That I have plenty of rich conversations - and food - to feel overfull on. That the one thing here I am not experiencing, at the turn of the darkest time of the year, is lack of any sort. I am grieving, of course, always am from before Thanksgiving until after New Years, but even that feels like a strange celebration - I had people to lose, which means having to begin with.

That produces its own wonder in me.
Definitely a wonder-full time of the year, even if not always easy.

A Poetic Aside

I've been really busy making a chapbook's worth of poems over at Poetic Asides this month.
I did their Poem A Day competition in April of this year, and helped to judge the preliminary results. This time it's the same idea, only with the "goal" of making an end book (ala NaNoWriMo).
The participants will spend December revising it, and in January we'll submit our final revisions that someone will win and get it published through Writer's Digest.

Check it out. You can start late! Or read along...

Behind/Ahead

I'm back from 4/5 weeks in Taos, spread apart over the course of a year. The trip has become "easy" now, my BFF from the intensive, Maryam, and I have decided. We are so used to the flights, the trip, that we were able to shake it up big time this time, take stops along the way, meet up in Santa Fe and do separate legs, coordinated through texting and my iPhone GPS system. Fun had by all before and after, and during, well, as I described to my students on retreat with me the weekend before I left for Taos for a week, Imagine 6 days of nothing but sitting, walking and writing in silence.

Everything drops away, all the surface everythings, and everything rises to the surface, all the underneath things. Out went work, students, paperwork, email (though I checked it to make sure nothing big was going down); up came my entire sexual life from age 12-28, and, well, this time, that was about it. 6 days of my sex life. That's a lot of sex and sexuality. I woke up writing about it, fell asleep writing about it. And it wasn't all sexy, let me tell you.

I come back to this life, this day-to-day classes and assignments, students and paychecks, and I feel behind. Not as behind as if I had left it all behind and not checked my email or phone at all, but there'll be a few hours of catch up for sure.

But I also come out ahead. The writing is still pouring out, as I joked in Taos, hemmoraging out of me, practically. With the acceptance of my second chapbook of poetry (Dreams of Movement) through Finishing Line Press (announced right before I left) and many more projects on the burner, I feel ahead of wherever I would want to be, not so that I need to stop now, but so that the balance is built in - I can relax on writing and pick up the work slack, while still writing, and neither will take over. this year has meant so much to me, still does, in making a true equinimity with teaching and also being a student. "Closing the gap," as Natalie Goldberg talks about to us in Taos, "Close the gap between what you think you are writing and what you are writing," and in my case "What you are teaching and what you are learning."

Behind on tasks, ahead on appreciation.
Behind on submissions, ahead on rough drafts.
Never behind on Love.

Rejection

Yes, I know the last entry was entitled "Inspiration."
No, I didn't remember that when I woke up this morning thinking about my most recent rejection letter.

Lately, I've been uncovering, discovering and trying to be honest with/about my deep, deep core under-beliefs. My secret beliefs, the beliefs that are not shaken by evidence, by logic, even by experience (unless any of those three contribute to the belief, but not if they prove the belief wrong). The kind of beliefs that are real trouble unless they get seriously called out and worked with, because they defy the surface level games of the mind.

For instance, Rejection (Letters):
Surface level: "The publisher said the kids' stories aren't defined in age and she doesn't see a market. This is the highest up we've gone with these and at least the artist gave good feedback! Go Miriam! You have gotten rejection before, and also been accepted, these weren't your first thing you wanted to get out there anyway. Just go back to work on the Family Matters chapbook and getting that out there. It's ok. The time will come."

Under belief: "You suck."

It's the sound of the critic, the sound of deep ego bruised by someone else's opinion. It's simple and dumb, it doesn't need sophisticated logic or understanding. It doesn't care - it just plain thinks I suck regardless of the evidence, it just keeps quiet until someone rejects me, then reflects that back, millionfold.

Yes, it does help to write that, to know that others will read it and relate. And yet, it's true, a part of me, underneath, even deeper now, still believes it:
"The stories got rejected because you aren't a good writer."

And even now, typing this, I see how absurd that is, how it flies in the face of other things I believe, truly believe, not just on the surface. Yet, it still holds power, swaying power like a snake in a charmer's basket.

It's not something to fix. I'm not going to "fix" it anytime soon. Just observing it feels like a big deal. A lot of the power goes out of its sails when I write about it, when I call it out, especially if I can do it with equanimity. For now, that's true. And today? I'll politely reply to the email, which has haunted my inbox for three days now, waiting for a wide open day like today to leap out at me and taunt me, and get back to the "drawing" board. In the end, the deep end, that's what it takes.