Reflection

How to Attend a Writing Workshop in New England in the Summer:

Come unprepared,
because nothing that you could write
before you get there will make
you ready for what you’ll learn,
and nothing you can
imagine will tell you
what it will be like,
but for God’s sake,
bring a sweater.

Don’t imagine for a second
that you’re going to have
a decent shower,
so if a decent shower
is something you need
to be a writer,
(or a decent human being)
for God’s sake,
rent a hotel room.

You’ve got to be willing;
to eat brown food,
to trust that the strangers
on day one will be
respected peers
on day six, and
thank God,
that you aren’t
nearly as sucky
a writer
as you think you are.

Don’t ever
make it about the money
you paid,
or the hassle
of the train schedule,
or the brown food.
If you come at it right,
you’ll see that you
would have gotten a bargain
at twice the price,
that you got where you needed
to be in the end,
and that salad
thank God,
was always an option.

Open up.
Let go of the fact
that you think you always
write about,
dear God,
dead people
and ruined relationships.
That you write at all
is what really matters;
the rest, as they say,
is fussy details.

Finally,
for the love of God,
keep at it.
Do whatever you’ve got
to do,
call whoever you’ve got
to call,
run in the woods
or walk on the beach,
or hide in the library
or sit in your car,
just keep writing.

First Draft; The Phone Call

The first draft of a piece inspired by this prompt…

Filled with apprehension, he picked up the telephone and, with shaking fingers, he dialed…

Her number hadn’t changed in decades – he’d double-checked, again, just to be sure – and as he heard the clicking of the call connecting, he resisted the nearly overwhelming urge to hang up.  This was at least the sixth time he’d dialed this number – maybe it was more, he didn’t know – but this was the first time he actually let the call go through; in fact, more than once he’d left the last “3” off the sequence of seven and put the phone back in its cradle, lit another cigarette, and told himself that he was being an asshole.

There was nothing he had to say that she wanted to hear – he knew that and, more importantly, he finally understood why – but that wasn’t enough to keep him from coming back to the phone – what was it now?  Seven?  Maybe eight times – to dial the number he kept on a scrap of paper even though he knew it by heart.  As he tapped the ashes off the end of his Winston and waited to hear the first ring through the receiver, he looked at the number written on an old library book slip, the kind they used to keep in the backs of books to stamp the due date on before the whole system went electronic.  He hadn’t gone electronic, though – he had to go to the library to use the public computers to look up her number (did they even print phone books anymore?),  had written it on the card kept in a neat pile with its fellow castoffs on the desks next to stubby pencils so the patrons could jot down notes from their work at the old terminals.  He noticed, idly, that the last date stamped on his slip was June 3rd, 1999.  That’s about right, he thought ruefully; that was just about then that he’d last laid eyes on her.

She had been irredeemably angry then, strangely cool and resigned, but he didn’t know that then, hadn’t been able to see that through his own rage and indignation to really understand what was happening.  He sat there, on a green plastic chair at a green plastic picnic table, listening to her tell him that she was done.  SHE was done!  What the fuck did SHE know about being done?  What the fuck did she know about ANYTHING?  Everything in him raged at the nerve of the kid; what the hell makes you think that you can just tell me to fuck off and be done with it? For the longest time, he could remember nothing about that afternoon but the blinding rage, the look on her face, and the way the heat of the afternoon had made the green plastic chair leave his shirt sticking to his back in a lattice pattern as he walked away for the last time.

But the truth of the matter – the truth that he couldn’t see until it broke over him a week ago like a car crash – sudden and unexpected, completely unintended, wrenchingly violent and instantly, heartbreakingly clear – was that she had been right.  There was nothing that he was offering her then that she needed, and certainly nothing she wanted, though she had something he had wanted so badly that he wasn’t even able to even think about her for months after that afternoon.  He could easily have reached across that cheap, plastic table and strangled her that afternoon – or at least cracked her a good one -  and as he imagined her phone ringing in her kitchen, it occurred to him, for the first time, that that had to be one of the reasons why she had wanted nothing to do with him.  How could he begin to explain to her that he knew now; that he saw and understood and that he sometimes wanted to kill himself for being so pigheadedly fucking stupid?

In that moment, at the third ring, he realized couldn’t do this; he wasn’t ready; he understood, just as he heard the click of the call being answered, that he didn’t understand enough.  Shit; maybe he didn’t understand anything.

As he moved the phone away from his ear toward the hook, he caught his daughter’s voice, at the same time familiar and eerie, like a long-lost memory or a phantom that he wasn’t quite sure he heard; not “hello,” but the scripted outgoing message from her answering machine.  “We can’t come to the phone right now.  Please leave a message and we’ll get back to you.”  But there would be no getting back, and he knew that now.

First Draft; Daddy

This was inspired by Girl by Jamaica Kinkaid.

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Do you see that man there?  Of course you do, he has been a part of you like the air you breathe, like the warm blanket lending its comforting weight on your body on cold nights when the dark comes early and I’m not tired yet but you fall asleep almost immediately, anyway; this man who randomly bursts into song with disembodied lines from every musical he’s ever heard, who makes up lyrics when he doesn’t know the words, and who takes the entire song completely out of context, but still you understand it; this man who puts you to bed with a magic spell – go to bed with a 1, 2, 3 - and wakes you with a sing-song invitation to come to the faire; this man who needs only to crook his index finger to send you into peals of hysterical laughter and who lulls you into forgetting, while you’re watching that finger, that he’s got another one just like it circling around out of your vision to find the tickle spot just under your ribs; this man who turns compliant black cats into Russian ushankas and stiffly demands your papers; this quiet man who yells for those same cats from the back door at dusk in a voice that can be heard far beyond the neighborhood and that rattles the glasses in the cabinet, but that never fails to result in little black lawn lions emerging from the veld eager for their supper; this man who demands of you your very best work because that’s what he demands of himself; this man who allows you, even at your advanced ages, to sit on his lap or to sock-ski around the kitchen while hanging on, at both your peril, to the pockets of his jeans as he runs laps around the linoleum; this man who does not flinch at nail polish or tampons, and who is better at keeping your birthday parties running than your mother could ever be; this man who works at a job he doesn’t love because it gives him the freedom to be home in 7 minutes if that’s what’s required – or wanted – and which lets him sit in the bleachers for band concerts and climb on the bus to chaperone field trips; this man who does laundry and vacuums and changes sheets with the same kind of ease with which he wields a wrench in service to a fussy washing machine or swings a hammer to build a shed; this man who grills a killer steak and can whip a cheese soufflé that his girls almost beat one another with their spoons to get to first; this man who gives up his baseball game on ESPN for a couple of episodes of Phineas and Ferb on the Disney Channel; this man who carried you around like a tiny, wriggling footballs and perfected his interpretation of the baby burrito and bathed you every single night in a cloud of bubbles don’t poach the baby; this man who has taught you how to climb the stairs and ride a bike and tie a knot and who will teach you how to pack for school and pay your bills and work a clutch – though mom will cover parallel parking; this man who plans vacations that balance perfectly staid historical tours with noisy water parks; this man who teaches you what love looks like as he sweeps your mother into a music-less dance in the dining room or hands her a book after supper – go to bed; I’ll clean the kitchen; this man who has set the bar for your definition of manhood so impossibly high that your mother wonders whether he has ruined every boy in your futures because none of them could ever measure up, but you will love them, anyway.

Adding On

Here’s where I went with the rest stop prompt:

Two people meet at a rest stop…

She’s driving a dark blue Kawasaki Ninja, and he’s intrigued by the way she guides the thing, like a missile, into the narrow space he left between his rusting Toyota pickup and the Coke machine.  He watches, holding the end of Steinway’s leash, as she feeds five quarters into the machine and jabs with a closed fist the button for Diet, listens as the can makes its way through the chute and falls to the door.  She lifts the can, pops the top, and takes a sip before she notices him standing there.  She nods at him, a faint smile, and says “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a dog that big.”

“Steinway’s a handful,” he said.  “I’m not exactly sure how he happened, but I suspect that he’s a mix between a St. Bernard and Sasquatch.”

She snorted a little giggle, took another sip of her Coke, and put her helmet, sparkling the same dark blue as her bike, on the ground to ruffle Steinway’s ears.  Whether in sympathy for his owner or his own laziness, the enormous dog immediately flopped to the ground and rolled over, begging to have his belly rubbed.  “Not exactly a dangerous pooch, I see,” she said as she set the can next to the helmet to dig in with both hands.  Steinway’s left rear leg twitched as his enormous tail swept a wide arc in the grass beneath him.

“Nice bike,” he said.  “How fast have you managed to get it going?”

“Well, that depends,” she said, “if you’re a cop, my answer is ‘65, officer.’  If you’re an accountant or something, that number changes to 140.”

“I’m a teacher,” he said, “so you’re safe.  Where are you heading in such a hurry” he joked, though he could tell, as soon as the words were out, that it was the wrong thing to say.  She clouded over, stood up, and tried to shake Steinway fur from between her fingers.  “I’m not really going anywhere in particular,” she said.  “It’s a good afternoon for a ride on the highway, that’s all.”

“I’m coming back from visiting my parents,” he offered, a hint of awkward apology in his voice, though he had no idea what he was sorry for.  “They don’t  have grandkids, so I like to bring Steinway by every couple of months.  I’m pretty sure he has more fun than they do; Mom doesn’t complain much about the drool, but I see her wiping up when she thinks I’m not looking.  He loves it, though; he can’t get enough of riding in the car.”

“I’m surprised he fits,” she said, eyeing the little truck next to her bike.  “Though I suppose you have an easier time moving him around than I would.”

”I don’t know,” he said, glancing down at the still lounging mass of fur and slobber at his feet, “I’m not sure he wouldn’t try to go home with you if you asked him.”

She tipped back the last of the Coke, then crouched to give Steinway one last scritch before scooping up her helmet and turning back to the parking lot.  “It was great talking to you,” she said.  “Maybe I’ll see you again; it’s not like you’d be hard to miss with that traveling companion of yours.”  She tossed the can in the trash, donned the helmet, and swung her leg over the bike.  A quick kick and a rev of engine, and she was gone.  He waited until he couldn’t hear the whine of her bike anymore before he nudged Steinway back to his giant feet and led him to his seat in the truck.

Three Minute Prompts

This afternoon was spent with a pile of writing prompts we generated, and here’s what I came up with. I think there are a number of these I can work with (we were only given three minutes for each idea, after all).

Two people meet at a rest stop…

She’s driving a dark blue Kawasaki Ninja, and he’s intrigued by the way she guides the thing, like a missile, into the narrow space he left between his rusting Toyota pickup and the Coke machine. He watches, holding the end of Steinway’s leash, as she feeds five quarters into the machine and jabs with a closed fist the button for Diet, listens as the can makes its way through the chute, and falls to the door. She lifts the can, pops the top, and takes a sip before she notices him standing there.

Pick your favorite cartoon character and don the person:

(I came up with nothing for this one; I tried to write like Hobbes, and then I thought about trying to write like Mushu from Mulan, but I still came up with nothing…)

Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans…

Before they knew it, they’d been married 14 years. Of course, they’d planned that – they didn’t go into this exercise thinking it’d be a short-term thing – but it seemed like all of a sudden they looked up and had two teenage daughters and were nearly halfway through their mortgage. Not bad, when they stopped to think about it , which they almost never did. Neither of them longed for any other view out their window, in fact, they joked that their marriage had a fifteen year warranty and that they needed to renew that sucker next year. Oil change and tune up, they’d say, new spark plugs and tires.

This is where I want to go…

“Life isn’t the destination, it’s the journey,” they say. Yeah, whatever. After so many years of setting goals – finish high school, get into college, Master’s degree – after so many years of working toward something, it’s nice to, you know, finally BE here. I can appreciate that everything that happened before leads us to our places – whatever those places are – but I don’t get the people who can’t be happy. Why do we use the word “settle” like it’s a bad thing; “you get what you settle for.” Settling for what you want is kind of the point, isn’t it? If you can’t do that, you’re always waiting for the next thing, always hoping it will be better after the next milestone, always seeing greener grass. I like my lawn just fine, thank you very much.

Write about a fear….

I fear the monster that may or may not be in my closet. I fear whatever it is that sends my heart rate racing and my insides clenching at something stupid and trivial; something that doesn’t matter a bit in any scheme of things, grand or not. I fear the day when I go to the door, expecting a Girl Scout or the kid across the street, and come face to face with my biological mother, unprepared for whatever she comes bearing, olive branch or club. I fear that my words won’t be sufficient to convey the enormity of my feeling, that my message won’t get through, that I won’t be enough.

It was a cold fall, and the wind came down from the mountains…

As he pulled the cord that hauled the garage door closed, he saw the kitchen light turn off. She had finished the dishes while he cleaned up the leavings of the long overdue oil change, and as he walked in rubbing grease from his fingers on a rag that used to be his favorite shirt, she called to him from upstairs, “don’t forget to latch the screen door; it’s going to be a windy night.” The downstairs smelled faintly of smoke blown back through the stove pipe, the black hulk in the corner merrily radiating waves of comforting heat that were just intense enough to keep the cats at bay. One of them, the orange tiger, got up, stretched, and followed him as he left his coat on the hook by the door and made his way up the stairs.

Eating…

I don’t understand people who eat to live. I mean, sure; I get the idea of healthy diets and balanced meals, but it seems to me that the people who are most concerned about those things miss out on the sheer joy of eating. I remember the scene in Ratatouille where Remy is trying to explain to his brother what real eating is; the mixture of taste and texture, the subtlety of the perfect flavor, and I wonder how people can live on salad and energy bars. I wonder at my children in this way, too; glorious little gluttons, I’m often amazed that they can taste anything, and I’ve spent most of their whole lives trying to teach them the meaning of “savor.” I don’t waste the good chocolate on the kids; Hershey Kisses will do until they learn to really appreciate their food.

First Draft: Falling Apples

Driving to school this morning, I listened as a neuroscientist
told the world that he has the brain of a psychopath.
There are biological components
to how we behave, he explained, and he discovered that killer’s brains
make different patterns of light and color in the PET scanner
than those of people who keep their hands to themselves.

His mother, whatever her motives but with a knowing certainty,
spurred him to shake
his father’s family tree
to see what fell out.
Cousin Lizzie Borden, she of the famous Fall River Axe,
lurks among the branches,
along with no fewer than seven
other decidedly rotten apples.
Looking at the colorful map of his own brain,
our intrepid scientist learns that, but for the grace
of parents who loved him well as a child,
he could have been rotten, too.

In defense of our dreams, we are the kings and queens of promise.
Nature and nurture vie for supremacy
in a never ending push and pull of aspiration and desire,
and what wins out depends on an astonishingly delicate balance,
razor thin and just as sharp.

At what moment did our neuroscientist murder
the psychopath he has all the markers for being?

At what point did I brick off
the path that led,
with clear certainty,
to bitter desperation?

It is said that, until the moment of choice,
all possibilities exist in the same span
of time and space;
that it is not until the coin actually lands
heads up
that the tails becomes an impossibility.

The First Draft of the First Draft

We workshopped this afternoon, and I decided to present the first of the three drafts I posted in the entry below.

We were seven including me, and the deal was that we would read the piece we chose out loud while our workshop partners listened and read along.  That was the only talking the author was allowed to do; once the final word of the piece was spoken, the writer had to sit silent while the others conferenced about the work.

It was wonderful.  I am used to responding to questions that my readers have in real time, so it was a new and exciting experience to watch my colleagues talk amongst themselves about my writing (as we do in classes when we talk about the things we read; the authors aren’t there to tell us whether we’re on the right track).  I came away with some really interesting insights into how other people see my work, and some really great ideas about how to make my writing say what I really mean.

I’m going to do some more work on that first piece, trying to incorporate some of the suggestions that my peers made.  When I get a revision done, I’ll post it.

Three Drafts

Mrs. Chili is at a week-long, writing-intensive workshop at Prestigious Boarding School.  We began yesterday with a round-table discussion about who we are and why we’re here, and moved on to the reasons we write (or not, as the case may be) and how we translate our own experience with words into the methods we use to reach our students.

The theme for today’s writing is “inheritance.”  I’m sure that’s a complex concept for just about everyone, but I bring my own special brand of crazy to this party.

We have been reading excerpts of Andre Dubus’s collection titled Broken Vessels.  The voice in these pieces is tight and masculine; he speaks of love in oblique ways, which, in a way, makes the entire sense of the thing that much more powerful, and the enormity of information that is conveyed in a scant dozen paragraphs is enough to keep 16 geeky English teachers engaged in round-table discussions for more than an hour (“notice that he says was here instead of is…”  “He’s watching with his father as he dies, not just watching his father…”).

Our assignment was to go off to write, and I’ve found a corner on the top floor of the massive, square library to open my laptop and contemplate inheritance.  Here are the (very) first drafts of some things I was able to take away from my brain-dump exercise this morning.  As always, I appreciate any feedback – questions, suggestions, points for clarification – that you’re willing to take the time to offer.

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It is a very handsome ring.  Heavy and substantial, the square setting supports a large and nearly flawless diamond and four rows of deep, dark sapphires.  For all its heft, the ring attempts a modicum of lightness; delicate filigree work on the sides try to counter the sharp angles and corners of the setting, but the overall effect is one of presence and power.  Her third husband, the one who divorced her shortly before the diagnosis, found the ring in a pawn shop.  The original center topaz was replaced with a diamond, but the rest of the ring remained as it was.  I remember my mother wearing the ring, but even when she and her husband were happy together, it was never a constant.

My mother wanted me to have this ring.  She gave me a number of her possessions over the months of her decline, and wrote a list of things that she wanted me to have after she died, but she was most adamant about this ring.  As someone who believed that people can imprint their energy on physical things, she asked me to find the ring in her jewelry box so that she could wear it every day; she put it on not long after the social worker came to the house to assess her availability for assistance (because it wouldn’t do to cry poverty while wearing such an impressive piece of jewelry) and wore it until, as she lay moaning and unresponsive in the nursing home, my sister-in-law slipped it off her finger a few hours before she died.  After signing a property release at the nurses’ station, the ring became mine.

I have never worn it.  For all that it is lovely and reminds me of my mother, and despite the fact that it is comprised of diamonds and sapphires – the same stones in both my engagement ring and the ring my husband gave me to commemorate our tenth anniversary -  I do not like it.  The longest I’ve worn it was the few hours between when we took the ring from my mother’s finger and the time it took me to drive home after her heart stopped beating under my hand.  I’ve visited it in my jewelry box a few times, but it’s never gotten much farther than that.

A big part of me wants to reset the ring to something that I would wear; something I could have that both suits me and recalls my mother.  I imagine a band setting, something low and secure, in which the sapphires march in a gently curving row to the diamond in the center rather than boxing it in pointed corners and straight lines; or maybe a pendant shaped so the tiny blue stones cradle the diamond in a soft wave of color.

I haven’t brought the ring to a jeweler’s, though; I haven’t convinced myself that it’s really mine yet.

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As I sit at the top floor of a massive brick and concrete library, thinking about my impossibly complex relationship to the idea of “inheritance,” I look out the window and see, growing through the cracks in the between the bricks on the roof, a single maple sapling.  There is no earthly reason for this tree to be growing where it is; there is no soil beneath its roots, the place where it’s dug in is both walled and roofed, so its share of sunlight and rain must surely be limited, yet there it is, two full-grown and clearly defined leaves sprouting defiantly from a four-inch stalk poking from between a pair of dusky red bricks mortared nearly 85 feet in the air.

I see a bit of me in the audacity of this baby maple.  I, who have sawn myself off of my family tree, have managed to find a new and unlikely place to root.  Though I don’t contend with the harsh edges and straight lines of bricks – at least, not anymore – I never imagined that I would be able to settle in as fertile ground as I have.  With no example to follow, I have managed to create for myself a life of stability and joy that I never thought I deserved, much less could have accomplished.  Unlike this little tree growing alone in the sky, I have created for myself a forest of chosen family surrounding a grove of husband and children that is far more vibrant and healthy than I was given reason to believe I would ever see.

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I teach because I need to give back.

When a family fails, the best a child can hope for is that other grown-ups – parents of friends, coaches, neighbors, or teachers – will step in and stand up.  When school is the safest place a child can be, the people who populate that school – especially the people who make it run and give it its routine – become the most important people in the world.  The people who are there, every day, with a comforting reliability give a child a sense of safety that they may not otherwise have.  The people who make and maintain fair and constant rules help that child learn that the boundaries aren’t supposed to move on a whim, and that great things can be accomplished in stable environments. The people who tell that kid that he *can* when all the people who are supposed to be important tell him that he *can’t* become the world to that kid.  That kid starts dreading Fridays and the days before vacations begin, because he knows it’s going to be that long before he again feels like he belongs where he is.

I teach, in part, because good people did those things for me.  I want to make kids feel like someone believes in them and in what they can do the way I was encouraged.  While I love my kids – and make no effort to hide that – I am hard on them, too – I *expect* things from them and I hold them to tough but attainable standards – because, as Booker T. Washington is quoted as saying, “Few things help an individual more than to place responsibility upon him, and to let him know that you trust him.”  I learned to believe in myself because people I admired believed in me, and I want to send that energy – that powerful and profound energy – back into the Universe.

Credit Recovery

HELP!

I’m trying to put together an 8 week credit recovery program for the students who failed junior English this term, and I’m bumping up into a serious creative wall.

I want for the program to be largely self-directed; that is, I only want to meet with the kids once a week and have them do the rest of the work on their own.  I also want for it to be substantial; I’m resisting the urge to reign in the material because, well, if they couldn’t handle what I gave them in small doses every day for 15 weeks, what makes me think they can handle a lot on their own in 8, right?  The point is that they COULD handle the work, they just chose not to and besides, the point here is for them to prove that they’re ready for senior level English; one of the main themes of that class is moving toward independent, self-directed work.

I’ve got the first week knocked; they’re going to write a personal literacy narrative in which they relate how a literacy has helped to shape how they read, write, think, or behave.  It’s an assignment I do with pretty much every writing class I teach; what I want for the students to understand is that reading and writing are intimately connected and not, as so many of them think of the experiences, discrete activities.  I can point to any number of books that have been instrumental to shaping how I view myself and my place in the world, and I want for my students to be self-aware enough to understand where their influences come from.

After that, though?  I’m stumped.  I can’t decide if I want to continue the theme of social justice that we were working on over the semester (though I am leaning heavily in that direction) or if I want to branch into something completely different – adventure literature, say, or biography.  I can’t land on whether I want to teach one book in-depth, or work from a collection of short novels, stories, and film.  Further, I can’t decide if I should make the summer term all about critical analysis, or if I should make it a straight writing craft course (though, to be honest, I’m likely going to keep pushing the critical analysis, as that’s going to be the primary objective in senior English in September).

I’ve got a stack of potential books on my desk; A Long Way Gone; Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, Beloved by Toni Morrison (or possibly Song of Solomon), The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, and American Gods by Neil Gaiman are all in the running, as is The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman (because my plan is to work that book with juniors next year, and these students, if they complete the summer session successfully, will enter September as seniors, so they won’t have to work the book twice).  I’ve not read the Beah or Gaiman books yet, and it’s been a very long time since I’ve read Conrad or Morrison, so I will have to work those right along with the kids, but I’m not opposed to that.

What do you think?  How would YOU go about building a summer school term that had a heavy independent study feel to it?  Thoughts?  Suggestions?  Please?

Vignette

I’m working with my Writing Workshop students on vignette, tiny little snapshots in words that express much more than what’s on the page.  I gave them this gorgeous example (which I’ve been admiring since the day it was published), we talked about what vignette is and how it works, and then I asked them to write their own.

Since I’m fond of doing the assignments I give my students, I’m offering up the first draft of my vignette.  I’ll happily take suggestions and comments.

“It’s a process,” they told me.  “It’s going to take time, and no one can say how long it will take you, but when it happens, you’ll know.”

I got this advice a lot after my mother died; people trying to explain to me that this loss, this emptiness that I felt after she passed, would morph itself into something that I could better live with day after day.  I accepted their advice for what I thought it was – the kind words of people who didn’t know what else to say.

Then it happened; I knew the day I thought of “her” things as “my” things was the day I finally came to terms with her dying.