Crap month

Been a long time. When I started this blog, my intention was to write as honestly as I could, every day or two, about my experience with cancer, writing, mothering, wife-ing, etc. I especially thought that writing about cancer would help... someone... maybe me, maybe someone else. I was inspired by that friend of Ted Koppel's whose name I cannot recall*, who was sick and blogged and then died, just a day or two before I started this journal. Anyway, I figured if he could write something every day up until the end, maybe I could, too. 

Obviously, I can't. Things got so dicey this month that I went head-down. At one point, when I asked Dr. J if we could get more aggressive in treatment, he asked, "What do you want me to do?" To which I responded, in my head, "I want you to save my fucking life again, idiot."

I had my first treatment in a month yesterday. For various, hideous reasons, we had to postpone, and postpone. Today I feel better than I have in a good while, surely because I've psyched myself into thinking that the medicine will be a blockade if not a backhoe. 

Curiously, I got a lot of work done on the novel. And I got a lit paper written and turned in.

My friend Bloglily inspired the next post. Thanks, BL.

*Leroy Sievers is his name. Blogged on NPR.org.

About that novel

Obama in the Oval notwithstanding, it's been a shit month.

Just posted this to my novel workshop discussion board:

Dear Novelists,

Despite my best efforts, my novel insists on becoming a fucking bleak but spirited meditation on illness -- not at all what I wanted to write, the opposite, in fact.

Some of you know that my own health has been unsteady for many years, and has frankly tanked in the last few months. The smoky scrim affects the attitude, you see, darkening both the writer's world view (a.k.a. the H*** Doctrine) and the characters' moods, abilities, and personalities. Whereas a protagonist was sharply complex, occasionally witty, perhaps endearing if exasperating in Chapter 2, by Chapter 8 he comes off as caustic and cynical, and nothing if not self-involved. Another character, initially in possession of some semblance of humor, now finds herself altogether bereft of charm. Wit is eclipsed by a withering tongue; anything and anyone in her orbit is a black gnat to be swatted away efficiently, inelegantly. Nor can I seem to write minor characters who might elicit empathy or interest; even the children are hateful.

It sucks to be sick. It does. I wish I could write a novel about people rising to an impossible occasion, but the truth is that some people don't rise at all. The power of positive thinking is crap, I assure you. (I've lived twelve years in fear and loathing. Twelve years!) Yes, optimistic people beat odds all the time. So do cynics. And yes, sunny dispositions "lose long battles fought heroically," while many, many more frightened, confused, grim and hopeless souls slip without note into the great hereafter. It's an obscene fallacy that you can think and act your way out of cancer, and while it's my nature to appear upbeat -- some say naive -- I'm bone-tired of putting on the show.

Writing this novel was to be, for me, a way of spinning beauty of the transcendent sort out into the universe. Human heart conquering and all that. What I've learned is that the only beauty I have to offer is the godforsaken Keatsian kind: the truth as I know it at this moment, ugly and unvarnished, spare, splintered, seething and practically impossible to manage.

Writing the first sixty-five pages of "Control Theory" has been, aptly, not only a reflection of but an exercise in the theme of the novel itself: mustering the illusion of control in an uncontrollable circumstance. The prose is precious, careful, cold. It's pretty in places, but passionless. (Passion being the willful release of control.) Just look at how ridiculously crafted, how cloying, this first-draft synopsis is -- I wrote it in early December, before the most recent shitstorm shook me awake:

"Coco Fine and her family have lived next door to neighborhood eccentrics Victor and Anna Gibbles for four months, and they’ve never tried to be friendly. But when Anna collapses one rainy afternoon, her daughter appeals to Coco for help, initiating Coco’s reluctant involvement in the Gibbles’ lives.

Anna, a successful painter, is a diabetic and alcoholic whose declining health has gradually thrust Victor into the role of fulltime caregiver. As their relationship succumbs to the pressures of illnesss and Victor forges a friendship with Coco, Anna decides to end her life.

Hilarity ensues.

Not really. Coco and her husband Charles, rattled by the death of a neighbor they never took the time to know, resolve to assuage their guilt by “adopting” Victor—checking in on him, inviting him to holiday meals, having their young children, Eleanor and Gus, spend time with him. Each relationship deepens and differentiates, revealing the complexities of Victor’s and Anna’s marriage, the mutable dynamics of the younger Fine family, and the sacrifices people make for those they love."

...Really, aside from the aside, you can almost sing along with the jacket flap copy, can't you? HORK.

Screwing up my courage: where to go from here? Well, I think what I turn in next will necessarily be a hot mess. Coco a bad mother? Yes, indeed, I believe she is. Victor an acerbic old miscreant lusting after the neighbor as his wife -- herself a real peach -- lies dying upstairs? Absolutely, yes. Crap kids? Fuck yeah.

Will these people be likable? I doubt it. Despicable with a dash of funny, more likely. Will they be interesting? They interest me. Will their actions and motivations be true? Utterly.

Tired of being sick. Tired of writing what other people want to read, of saying what other people want to hear.

Gloves off.

***

So... I experienced the sudden onset of new symptoms on Friday afternoon, just after I got home from chemo. Awful, terrible mess. I'm to call Dr. J's office tomorrow to check in, and will go get checked out on Tuesday. Meanwhile, a ton of crap to do for school -- meetings, papers, so many pages to read. I like reading, of course, but feel overwhelmed and unable to concentrate. I've apparently dropped the ball on the novel award I administer for my teaching assistantship; got the faculty adviser, who is also my novel workshop instructor and my thesis adviser, a bit worked up. The worst. It'll be a stone miracle if I pull off finishing this semester.

Cheever, school, and teeth

     Have read several articles on and one interview with Cheever (Paris Review) in the last several days, as I turn around in my head the effects of his last, slim novel Oh What A Paradise It Seems. One tenet that consistently arises: keep moving forward, don't look back. He did not, for example, like to give interviews because he didn't like to discuss his work (looking back), and he found reading his own books as distasteful as "listening to a recording of my own conversations" -- he didn't do it. Sharklike; always thinking about the next thing. That's good advice for me to cotton to, considering my awful obsession with submitting (and collecting rejections for) my short fictions. If I could just concentrate on the novel to the exclusion of everything else... Publication is like love in that respect: happens when you least expect it, if it happens at all.

     Speaking of the novel, school starts tomorrow, and novel workshop has moved from Wednesdays to Monday evenings. I'll also be taking a lit class (Magical Realism) that meets twice a week, and thesis hours. The Program of Strengthening and Conditioning has worked well over the last week, and I think I will have enough stamina at least to get my ass to campus tomorrow evening. I have a chemo next Friday, and no class the following Monday (MLK Day), so it'll be a few weeks before I can discern whether treatment is going to impede me. In any case, I haven't driven a car in six weeks. Should work out well, I think.

     The Big Story around here is that A lost not one but TWO teeth (center, bottom) in the last two days. The Tooth Fairy came last night to our house for the first time, and back she'll come tonight. This morning, A pretended to believe with all her heart that a fairy had visited her, but her six-year-old cynicism kicked in this afternoon, and she announced she thought it was probably Mama and Papa who'd swiped the tooth and left the loot. 

     The teeth themselves are impossibly tiny, and I will keep them in a special box forever.

Little victories

     My campaign to regain stamina, now in its third day, progresses apace. It's as though I've broken the seal on Roo's Strengthening Medicine and am enjoying exponential results. Last week this time I had to follow a fifteen minute shower with an hour's nap; yesterday I did four loads of laundry. Urrah!

     I finished the last page of Revolutionary Road, closed the book, switched on the teevee, and saw Leo and Kate in a trailer for the upcoming film. Glad I didn't catch it while in the thick of the novel, 'cause that Hollywood set's not at all what I'd imagined the Wheelers' kitchen to look like. The novel now tops my list of favorites, and gives me all kinds of ideas about how to structure my own novel. I could gush for hours about the writing (really, I could; see "Strengthening Medicine" above) but the upshot is: I want to write like Richard Yates.

     I also want to write like John Cheever, whose last novel, Oh What A Paradise It Seems, I am reading this morning. It's slim, spare, and devastating, and has as much to teach about what to leave out as what to put on the page. Makes me want to take a weed whacker to my work.

     I read Chapter 1 of Ruby the Red Fairy to A last night. It felt great; she snuggled close. It's a Big Girl Chapter Book, you see, so intensely interesting. Tonight we discover if Rachel and her new friend Kirstey find anything cool in that black pot at one end of the rainbow.

     Second day in a row we've awoken to driving rain outside, and a pitch-black house. A is a trooper. It takes her a while to wake up, but once she does, she's laughing. What an agreeable little being. There is nothing I don't love about my child.

     Now: more Cheever, then a bit of fictioneering.

One week to build up strength

     After four weeks spent mostly in bed, I am suddenly feeling better -- feeling like being downstairs, looking forward to going someplace -- anyplace -- other than the hospital. Relieved that the advice the infusion nurse gave me (blame discomfort on the medication, not on the cancer) seems to be apt: the side effects of the last chemo I had, on Dec. 26, apparently are dissipating. It's not the fentanyl that's had me down, or even the tumor. Now that I have causality, I can plan around it and not worry (so much) about it. 

     What's different is hard to quantify. I am still terribly weak, from being in bed and not eating well. (Lost a couple more pounds in the last four weeks, which made Dr. J frown.) But my stomach does not feel knotted up and I can eat two scrambled eggs without a terrible gurgling, full sensation. Yesterday I ate breakfast; took a shower without feeling lightheaded; tidied up the front parlor; got dressed (including earrings and lipstick); hosted my lifelong friend KK and her sweetheart, who stopped through town on their way somewhere else; ate some salmon M had smoked; played with A; ate a normal amount of salad; had ice cream for dessert; watched a movie with M; and didn't go back upstairs until a reasonable adult time (11:00). In other words, if you discount the two-hour nap after breakfast, pretty fucking close to normal. 

     Classes start a week from tomorrow. My goals are to write fiction every day, and to build up my strength enough to get my ass to campus, park, walk, and be in class from 5:15 - 9:40 (two classes back-to-back on Mondays). 

     Me me me. Yawn. M just walked in sans A (who went to lunch at a friend's house) and with the Sunday NYT. There's a nice afternoon unfolding in front of us, and perhaps I'll have something to say about a subject besides my own damn self in the next post. 

     Here's to 2009.

Book, film, fentanyl, parent tricks!

     I'm reading Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. It made my wish list because of my writing workshop instructor's high recommendation (he characterized Yates as a major 20th C. post-war literary novelist who has gone largely unnoticed and unheralded). I'm about three-quarters through it, and I love it, both for what it does to me as a reader, and for me as a writer. The story is so compelling, yet not much really happens outside the characters' own heads. All about suburban ennui, middle class angst, the search for greater meaning in work and family life, means justifying ends, and traditional vs. progressive roles of men and women as viewed in the fifties. (If a woman doesn't want children, might she be insane?) Pretty bland stuff. But Yates does the trick of energizing a story that in lesser hands would be a yawnfest by infusing the characters with such specific motivations and actions and flaws that there's instant empathy and, therefore, interest. Even the summary narrative and quasi-scenes sing. Describing the worries of two young children who are, compared to the main characters, only roughly sketched in, Yates puts us in their heads just before they drift off to sleep, "as their toes reach for a cooler place in the sheets." Ah! What a great and telling detail (it's warm in the plain little tract house, they've been in bed long enough to be restless, their worries make them tense) -- a clearly human gesture, so commonplace that the mere expression of it is startling. Beautiful.

     Another point of admiration is pacing and structure. Each character has a rather complex backstory, but somehow Yates slips it in almost between the lines of the forward action. There's very little "flashback" -- a lot of it comes about as summary narrative in the form of in-the-moment thoughts. So tricky, so seamless. I can't express how much I love this book.

     Another inspiration that came my way via Hopie and Andy -- and Netflix -- is the film "Starting Out in the Evening." I hadn't read the novel, but there are many moments in the movie that I am certain come directly from the book, particularly some odd gestures like the graduate student suddenly kissing the old writer's hand; smearing honey on his face; the way they lie side by side, crosswise, on the bed, like corpses. These bits, strung together, pull the characters to life, but it's their motivations -- again, specific, particular, complicated -- that create understanding and empathy. And like Revolutionary Road, nearly all of the "action" is interior: what choices will each person make, and why? How will they respond to each other in light of new information? How will their relationships change? How will they change? 

     I'm a sucker for complicated characters in ordinary situations, and writing that elevates them to individual human status. I haven't written a lick in two weeks, but because of these two influences, the book and the film, I'm jazzed about picking up the next scene of my novel. Not bad.

     Saw Dr. J yesterday, who upped me to 50 mcg fentanyl patches and suggested we take off a couple of weeks before going back for another round of chemo. OK. 

     After five and a half years, I still feel very much a rookie at this parenting business. However, occasionally I stumble onto something that works and makes me feel like a genius. Therefore, I hereby present a Parent Trick:

     M took A to work with him this morning -- she is excited because she will get to sit in on two meetings, which makes her feel very grown up, since "meeting" is the euphemism M and I use when we go somewhere she is not invited. "Miss Amanda is coming over tonight to hang out with you." "Why?" "Mama and Papa have to go to a meeting." Worked for my parents, and so far, it's working for me and M.

     Off to read and, perhaps, write.

Bloglaw

     Well, after an exhaustive investigation, consisting of googling "blog comments libel" and clicking the first of a bazillion hits, I discovered at least one ruling that finds bloggers cannot be held liable for potentially defamatory comments by anonymous posters, even if the blog owners monitor or limit comments (and thus appear to exercise editorial discretion). The immunity is founded on the Communications Act.

     Here's the 2006 law.com article. 

     What it doesn't address is whether comments posted by identifiable individuals, rather than anonymous posters, might implicate the blog host. And the ruling's more than two years old. Maybe there's been an update. 

     I became intensely interested in this topic this morning, after an exchange with an author friend whose personal life and character have been savaged in the last few months by a handful of vicious but vocal blog commenters. (The overwhelming majority of Internet posts I've run across regarding this author are reasonable: polite if not extremely complimentary of the writer himself as well as his work.) One of the worst offenders, in my opinion, was a genius who linked to his own, personally identifiable -- as in picture of the guy on the homepage -- livejournal site. I'm all for free speech. I'm also all for manners, generosity, intelligent discourse, honest disagreement and common sense.

Novel crank

     Whew! Third and final submission for the semester to novel workshop: check! This thing is coming slowly for me. As much as I loved poetry workshop this fall, I should have followed the advice of my novel workshop instructor and committed single-mindedly to prose. It was too easy to take a break from the long form (which intimidated me to begin with) and dash off a poem or two instead. And polish. And revise. 

     Once I get cranking on the story, I love it -- but there's definitely a learning curve when I put it away for more than a couple of days. I reckon it is all about momentum at this point.

     Something else that's not working the way I'd envisioned it is this blog. The purpose was to blather about illness here so I could keep it out of my fiction, but you write what you know, I guess. Small wonder there's not one but two characters in the novel with life-threatening conditions, struggling to work out all the dynamics and deal with the pressures I'm slogging through in real life. Bleh. Maybe in revision one of them will turn into an organ grinder whose main conflict is lack of monkey.

     M fussed at me this morning for following my own judgment rather than doctor's orders, and saving some antibiotics that were prescribed a couple of weeks ago for now, when I actually do have a mild sore throat and fever. My thinking was that I didn't need them before, and good thing I have them now. M's argument was that the doctor said I needed them and I should have finished them as directed. He doesn't need an even sicker me to take care of. I understand that, but I feel it's my job to monitor my health, not his. If the tables were turned, we'd each be making the other's argument.

     A went off to school this morning proudly sporting brand new shiny black patent Mary Janes. The child could not be more fabulous.

My audience of one, or, "Brains can't save her now!"

     It's quite true that being smart, or generous or funny or happy, or pretty or wealthy, or devout or even centered and mature, holds no sway over cancer. Yes, studies show (apparently) that educated people with health insurance have better prognoses than underprivileged people; it sucks five ways from Sunday to be on the wrong side of middle class in this country. But I'm talking about the individual, cellular level here. Cancer doesn't care how well I did on my SATs.

     Which brings me around to that "audience of one" I've been thinking about for a week, since an anonymous commenter posted the provocative idea in response to my extended whine on writing. The connection whacked me in the head by way of a quiet email late last night, barely three days after I'd sent a small batch of poems to the Virginia Quarterly Review: rejection, of course, and not even the typical "though your work shows obvious merit" line they usually give me when they decline my fictions after stewing on them for over a hundred days; I heard the unmistakable sound of the door slam and the lock click on this one. My head spun.

     I like smart; I strive for smart. I want to be in that club so damn bad. Among the literary publications and magazines I submit to, I consider several to be whip-smart: VQR, Paris Review, The Atlantic, Harper's, Boston Review. Certainly there are others I'd love to get into -- Missouri Review, AGNI, Tin House, Ploughshares, actually there are lots of them -- but I am drawn to the first set due to what I perceive as their intellectual prowess. They are on the pulse, taking on the giant issues of the day, publishing thoughtful essays and critiques alongside accomplished fiction and poetry. Politics is more than a fictive theme in these publications; it's a driving force. They have that big-picture perspective that tags them as brainiacs, the ability not only to see societal patterns in individual acts, but to embrace existing in this most unforgiving space, willfully (rather than haphazardly) presenting a cumulative commentary on the world as it turns in the moment. They live outside their own precious heads.

     I suppose it would surprise no one to learn that my parents put a premium on smarts. Or that they were not just politically involved, but prescient, moving their young family from their hometown of Montgomery to Washington, DC in 1965, eschewing the mindset they'd grown up with and making a difficult, determined reach for change, for the future, years before it was even remotely acceptable. They had vision. The acted on it.

     I often wonder, if I'd been born in the Depression-era Deep South and come of age under Jim Crow, if I'd have had the vision and the will my parents demonstrated. I do not believe I would.

     My mother worked on Capitol Hill for Sen. Mike Mansfield's Democratic Policy Committee, got a law degree, and worked at Treasury. A young up-and-coming Washingtonian, everyone said, smart as a whip and ready to do great things. Her trajectory was abruptly reversed by illness; in 1983, she died of cancer. She was 48.

     My father ran an association on alcohol and drug policy, and became an international expert on the failure of prohibition, and an advocate for the disease theory of addiction. He was endlessly gracious and had impeccable manners, but privately, he made it understood that he did not suffer fools gladly. By the end of his life (he died in 2004), he refused to suffer them at all -- it seemed he had little tolerance for most people. I understand that to be a classic pattern of aging, where one becomes more oneself as the years go by.

     Anyway, hard acts to follow. 

     I've spent my life trying to live up to the level of smartitude so clearly valued in my family, and feeling out of my league. Trying to compensate, I stacked up achievements instead, as a kind of proof that I was worthy, that there were brains between those ears, even if, during family trips or holidays, I was the clown. I went to an academically middling but artistically competitive university and won every acting award they gave out. Afterwards, I wormed my way in the back door of a TV newsroom and got hired as a reporter, and scarcely three months later, was promoted to anchor and producer. (I was 22 years old.) Lookit, see me, interviewing the people who make the world go round? Telling other people what's news? I would repeat this pattern twice more, in advertising (copywriter to associate creative director within a year), and in the cradle of intellectualism itself, the University (adjunct to fulltime instructor, even lacking an advanced degree, in one year). 

     All the while, writing. And now, I'm doing what my own mother did, though in a manner decidedly less intellectually robust than law school/Capitol Hill/family: I'm back in school, for an MFA.

     It's pretty clear to me that I'm trying to get my father's ear. There's no way he'd be interested in this novel, but the act of completing a novel itself would impress him. My mother loved fiction and poetry, but I didn't get a chance to know her as a grownup, and so any speculation about what kind of novel she might admire feels fruitless. 

     The motivation behind my achievements thus far has been to prove that I'm smart. I choose smart friends, I married a smart man. I genuinely like smart. Maybe I can write a smart book. The lessons my parents instilled in me help make living artful and worthwhile, but they do not help with simple survival. Where can I go to learn how to fuck with cancer's plan?

     I've heard or read more than one writer say, in effect, that they write in order to save their lives -- in order to live. I like that, but I don't think it works that way. Cancer won't care when VQR comes calling. On the other hand, this weekend I recklessly submitted some stories (and a batch of poems) to a bunch of journals, many which are notoriously slow in responding. Six months is a lifetime; who knows if I'll be in any shape to accept an offer of publication? A small act of hope.

     Meantime, I'm still trying to envision my audience of one. 

A Kerouac kick in the pantaloons

     After all my boo-hooing about not feeling like a real writer (and using the feeling as an excuse to, um, not write), a very kind writer named Manuel sent me this classic Jack Kerouac quote (6/22/47)*:

"Another thought that helps a writer as he works along -- let him write his novel 'the way he'd like to see a novel written'. This helps a great deal freeing you from the fetters of self-doubt and the kind of self-mistrust that leads to over-revision, too much calculation, preoccupation with 'what others would think.' Look at your own work and say, 'This is a novel after my own heart!' Because that's what it is anyway, and that's the point -- it's worry that must be eliminated for the sake of individual force. In spite of all this insouciant advice, I myself advanced slowly today, but not poorly, working on the final draft of the chapter. I'm a little rusty. Oh and what a whole lot of bunk I could write this morning about my fear that I can't write, I'm ignorant and worst of all, I'm an idiot trying to achieve something I can't possibly do. It's in the will, in the heart! To hell with these rotten doubts. I defy them and spit on them. Merde!"

     Misery, meet company.

     And thanks to Manuel, who is working on a book he expects to finish at the end of this month. 

     Off now to work on mine. 'Cause did you know? I'm writing a novel.

* From Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947 - 1954

Writers, real writers

     I had chemo yesterday and I feel like poo, don't feel like thinking about it, so instead I'm thinking about people who inspire me.

     I had the pleasure and the pain, late Thanksgiving night, to run across the New York Times 100 Notable Books 2008 list. Pleasure because, obviously, it's a list of books I've either read and loved/admired or hated and possibly admired, or books I might love or hate. (I stop reading a book pretty quickly if I don't at least admire the writing.) Pain because it was late, I was exhausted, and couldn't stop following the links, googling the authors, and updating my wish list. Although I often disagree with the NYTBR, reading it is like having a discussion with other like-minded, book-obsessed people: always stimulating. I was heartened to discover that many of the books that made the 2008 fiction/poetry notable list were debuts. Maybe I'm mis-remembering years past (or, more likely, failing to remember at all), but it seems there is a bumper crop of first novels, story collections, and poetry books this year. Nam Le's The Boat has been on my list since it came out last spring. (Also, bonus, he's brainy and gorgeous.) 

     I could go on for days about books I hope to read, but the broader point of this post is to acknowledge the authors who manage to write at all. I am reminded constantly how hard it is to write, never mind to write well. I can come up with a thousand excuses to procrastinate; many a successful effort is cataloged in this blog. Drafting this novel of mine has proven to be more of a struggle than I'd expected. Not the actual writing so much, which I enjoy and comes easily, but the ass-in-the-chair aspect of it. I'm good at improvising, so I trust myself to follow the characters and come up with a compelling story. I'm good at writing (I think) on the sentence level, and even on the chapter level. But because I've never tried a novel before, I don't know if I'll be any good at the entirety, at finishing -- and I get lazy quick when I'm not certain I'll succeed. (See: Algebra I; high school; disaster.)

     I'm impressed with the other writers in my novel workshop. They are writing. They are not afraid of the mess. They are real writers.

     I admire my instructor, who has written a dozen novels and has an extraordinarily loyal readership. He is a real writer. 

     Likewise J. Robert Lennon and Rhian Ellis, both authors, both steeping in fiction (teaching, running a book store), both blogging about writing, reading, and publishing at the smart and thought-provoking Ward Six. They are real writers.

     Poet Seth Abramson, a current Iowa Writers' Workshop student, has recently won some high-profile accolades for his work, and his first book is coming out next spring. Seth is a real writer.

     I admire my friend Lily, whose first novel has won or been shortlisted for awards and fellowships, and is now being shopped around by an excellent agent. (Lily also started submitting short stories to journals just a few months ago, and already has met with success. Go, Lily!) Lily is a real writer.

     And just today, I read that my friend Valley just completed the first draft of her first novel. An Anne Lamott-style shitty first draft, according to the author. I seriously doubt it's shitty; I know it's thrilling for Valley. It thrills me, and I haven't read a lick of it. But Valley makes her living as a writer and book reviewer. Valley is a real writer.

     I've always made my living as a writer, too -- journalism, then (God help us) the more lucrative and much less substantial advertising. Still, while I think of myself as a writer, I don't consider myself the type of writer I want to be: a writer of fiction and poetry. A novelist. At the moment I feel like a tourist, a dabbler. It's not because publication eludes me; I know that publication doesn't amount to authenticity. It's that I don't have that ass-in-the-chair ethic yet, and I don't know that I'll ever have it. I write when it's fun for me (i.e. easy); I write when there's a deadline (i.e. out of fear). If left to my own devices, however -- I know my own propensity toward laziness -- no matter how much I want to say I have written a novel, I doubt I'd have the discipline to do it without prodding. Saying I am writing a novel is painful and embarrassing, because I feel like a poseur. It feels disrespectful, somehow, to make a claim on that sacred territory.

     I don't know what the fuck I'll do when I'm finished with my degree and have no one expecting twenty pages of me every couple of weeks.

     Meantime, cheers and great thanks to the real writers who help me, for the moment, keep the faith.

     

     

Did Bush bust my artistic ability?

     Blogging over at the excellent Ward Six, author J. Robert Lennon considers the positive effect of an Obama presidency on his own ability to write fiction. JRL's startling observation is that for the last eight years, Americans -- and American artists -- have toiled and ultimately faltered under the weight of a political ideology that displays roiling contempt for the very people it purportedly serves. 

     I've always been well aware how deliberately the Bush administration has run counter to my personal morality, and have indeed been steeping in an ugly brew of anger. I have considered the corrosive effect the Bush/Rove contempt has had on the constituency as a whole (the national mood). For some reason, I have never applied it to my personal psyche. I don't know that I feel as directly affected as JRL seems to feel, but I think he has a point: if there's been a collective impact, it has to have been borne by individuals. And it's going to show up in art, and perhaps in the creative impulse, or lack thereof.

     At the least, JRL has raised the possibility for me to blame any troubles I've had writing in the last few years squarely on the sloping shoulders of George W. Bush.

     Will writing fiction become less burdensome for me under Obama? I don't know; I guess it depends on whether I find greater motivation in repression or liberation. I think this blog proves I'm pretty damned motivated by my anger. The word "spew" springs to mind. And apart from the current whackjobs in the White House, I have plenty of things to fear and doubt. 

     Sure, I hope writing gets easier for me. If it doesn't, though, no matter; I'll take Obama's promise of hope and optimism and sure-footed leadership, for my little daughter's sake. For the first time since I became a mother five years ago, I feel I am no longer inadvertently imperiling my (Chinese-born) child by raising her in a careening, rudderless nation. That's worth all the stories I can write in a lifetime.

So over it

     I haven't written as regularly in the last week or so for several reasons. The Republicans have jumped the shark -- or, more precisely, continue to jump the shark, over and over again, day after day. Just when you think it cannot possibly get more shrill or ridiculous, out comes some random asshole suggesting Palin's big shopping accident is somehow eclipsed by Obama's use of his campaign plane to fly to Hawaii to visit one of the two most important women in his life, the grandmother who raised him, who is on the verge of death. And look, over there is Nancy Pfuckinpooter insisting that oh I can't even tell what evil she is trying to weave on MSNBC today, I'm too weary and disgusted to follow along with these desperate blowhards. Not to mention the candidates, one of whom (and she shall remain nameless) cannot define "preconditions" in the context of international relations or, shit, anything else, and who thinks elitist refers to "anybody who thinks they're better than anyone else." GAH. I am ready for the circular firing squad to commence. Please, God, let the Earth spin off its axis just long enough to create a 12-day rip in the time-space continuum; I'll gladly forfeit the next two weeks if it'll spare the nation this stinking nonsense. Really, am I the only one who could use a nice long nap? Not even my vast supply of nerve pills, generously dispensed, seems to be helping.

     The other thing is that I feel like crap most days, which is not conducive to writing about feeling like crap. I have a chemo scheduled for tomorrow, and I have to say -- bring it on. Very anxious about this week on, week off pattern. As in politics, two weeks is an eternity and the bastards may just have enough time to get the best of us. So, scared.

     We're throwing a birthday party for A on Sunday afternoon, for which I am trying to gather, or at least conserve, energy. For reasons unknown to me or M, she has taken to calling herself "Hip-hop," so the sheet cake we ordered (M usually makes the birthday cake, but we're going low-effort this year) will feature a festive pink Hello Kitty motif and the message, "Happy Birthday, Hip-hop!" I adore my almost-six-year-old girl.

On faith

     Predictably, stuff's coming out in my poetry (and my novel, now that I think of it) that illuminates what I didn't know I was thinking. This self-discovery is part of the narcissistic lure of writing, of course, and which writer was it who said she cannot be expected to know what she thinks until she writes it down?

     I write, therefore I am.

     Anyway, the process, coupled with the hyper-awareness of turmoil, both global and domestic, has really set my reptilian brain to percolating. The upshot is great confusion, an erosion of faith, perhaps, but at the very least there is a paring of what I believe not to be true. So, that's something.

     Regarding cancer: I have no faith in the theory that attitude has any bearing whatsoever on the biology of the disease, either its progression or its retreat. Attitude is inauthentic, by definition, largely because of the faith our culture has placed in this theory: there is enormous pressure for the patient to act heroically by minimizing ill effects (smiling through it); to keep the schedule; to appear brave. Show me a cancer fighter on the teevee, I'll show you a martyr. We so hope that acting tough will result in victory, we are unwilling to acknowledge that (what I suspect is) a great majority of cancer patients privately fall the fuck apart. The upside of this clarity, I suppose, is my faith in people's capacity to do what they have to do. Note that this is not the same thing as toughing it out, powering through, taking one's lumps. Rage is a coping mechanism; depression, a protective device. I have no use for bravery, or even goodness. Consider all the brave people with stellar attitudes who've succumbed to a "long battle with cancer," and the opposite -- those pitifuls with piss-poor manners who scream and kick and cry and endure many remissions, or perhaps are cured. Cancer is not who I am; my response to it is not representative of my character. Cancer is nothing more than a piece of my struggle, one of many. And everybody's got somethin'. 

     I have faith in healing efforts as they extend toward me from an authentic heart. That is to say, I have faith in the love of my doctors, my family, my friends, my colleagues. I have come to believe it doesn't much matter what they do, as long as they're accepting of my visceral responses. As M and I tell A, it's okay to feel sad/mad/bored. I have faith in my personal biology, and have become (I think) better at following my body's signals and needs. But really, it's like my hair caught fire twelve years ago and I'm still hopping around beating my head with a wet towel. There's nothing deliberate about my response to this disease. It's al-Qaeda in the caves, elusive and enigmatic, indistinct, and multiplying. What can you do, strategically, tactically, but cross your fingers and hope?

     What about maturity? The ability to control one's emotional response, to temper, to decide? A raving bunch of shit, in my experience. Yet we're expected to be able to control, or at least limit, the big scary emotions that accompany any misfortune -- grief, rage, sadness, we're supposed to move through them by stages; to get over them. (Thanks for that, Kubler-Ross.) 

     I have no faith that I can control my fear; I have great hope that I can come to peace. For now, I'm relying on love and nerve pills. 

     Note to self: faith in books, next time.

     This post is a bald, rambling mess. Feh. It's as close to true as I can make it tonight.

     

Palate-cleansing poetry post

     To get that icky Palin taste out of my mouth, I want to think about poetry for a second. Specifically, the self-revelatory nature of contemporary poetry. Some contemporary poetry. 

     OK, the poetry I've been writing.

     Truly, though, it's not my own personal bag (I don't think). There is a tendency as a reader to attribute facts, characteristics, situations, perceptions in a poem to the poet himself. Now, I know there are plenty of people who can't tell the difference between fiction and non-fiction, who assume that the fiction writer believes what his characters believe, has done what his characters do, misbehaves as his characters misbehave, etc. Those people are dolts. (Have I mentioned that one of the most delightfully solipsistic aspects of blogging is the ability to refer endlessly to one's own previous witticisms? Why, it's positively self-referential!) But poetry is understood generally to be self-referential; it is therefore revealing of the poet's deepest intimacies. 

     I've mentioned here (there I go again!) that I can't seem to write about anything but The Subject That Dare Not Speak Its Name. That's cancer to you. And yet, I'm in a poetry workshop with a bunch of strangers and an instructor so talented she makes my palms gooey (true, I have a bit of a girl-thang for her), and I'm supposed to let it all hang out? I don't think so. No. The reason I'm drawn to fiction is because I get to sidle up to the truth, crab-like, without having to spill the actual beans. And while there's more room on the page, perhaps, for a poem to be oblique (like, nearly indecipherable to a literalist like me) than there is for narrative prose, which demands clarity, there doesn't seem to be any way to fudge the intimate facts of my life in poetry.

     Maybe I just haven't found my metaphor yet. Or... could be I'm in so far over my head I'm coming out the other side. 

     At any rate, just want to go on the record here saying I feel uncomfortable turning in the pieces I've been writing, because they're all about... you know. My crush on Sarah Palin.

Saturday morning

     M and A have gone off on some adventure or other. I slept poorly last night, having watched the coverage of Ike slamming into Galveston, and I woke up and put the TV back on, then promptly fell asleep. I vaguely recall A whispering in my ear, "Mama, did you turn on the TV or was it fairies?" I think I said fairies. Anyway, the house is quiet. M has a car show tomorrow he's preparing for (he has a 1964 Series II Land Rover) and I'm sure he took A to the art supply store to get a gift for a friend whose fifth birthday celebration is this afternoon. I like to think about M and A tooling around town in that musty truck, she in her booster seat beside him, he wearing some kooky old hat. I love them.

     I am in the homestretch of a first chapter (if you consider homestretch to mean barely begun) for novel workshop; I'm due to turn in tomorrow for Wednesday night workshop. My problem is one of mental momentum: everything I see lately somehow will fit perfectly into this book. So, in it goes. Saw a crazy tease for baby footwear on CNN sometime overnight; it's going in. What this means, of course, is that I am still formulating the characters, still deciding what I want to write about, still procrastinating actually writing it. 

     I did not hear back from Dr. J's office so I choose to assume they didn't have a chance to mull over my predicament. In any case, it's unlikely I'll start chemotherapy this coming week, though they've waved me in pretty darn fast in the past. Trying not to worry about it. Trying.

     M and A are home -- A says she found evidence of fairies in the car. Gotta go!

I don't have a title for this one.

     Joanne called from Dr. J's office late yesterday afternoon, as I was leaving to fetch A from school. The plan is for Dr. J to consult with Dr. W on my chemo chart/history and get back to me. I hope getting back to me means an appointment in the infusion center, not some rhetorical conversation about limited options and pain relief. At least they're not talking about surgery -- that I know of. Hope I didn't jinx it just then.

     I went to workshop last night (novel) and we talked about favorite first lines in literature. The consensus seemed to be that lines that set the tone/voice or introduce relationships or settings are nice, but what really pulls a reader in is putting characters in play -- putting them in peril, giving them a sharply defined dilemma, conveying the whole world of the novel. Somehow.

     I favor lines that give a narrator (first or third person) a reason to be telling the story right then, right there. Kind of a, "Well it all began when..." sort of thing. For instance:

• "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude) 

     That's a famous example and for good reason. Does an awful lot of heavy lifting, and it's lyrical and beautifully rendered to boot. Another:

• "Fifteen minutes before happiness left him, Josh Goldin led his summer intern by the elbow to share in the hallelujah of a Friday afternoon." (Darin Strauss, More Than It Hurts You)

     Again we're looking backwards and forwards at the same time, and I love that hallelujah image. It's as though the narrator is taking the reader by the arm and saying, I'll get to why happiness left him in a minute, but first you need to know what came before. It all started when..." Here are two more that suck me in but good:

• "First, I had to get the body in the boat." (Rhian Ellis, After Life)
• "My name was Salman, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973." (Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones)

     WHAM! We're there. How can you not keep reading? Although with the Sebold, the first thirty pages or so were among the roughest I'd ever read; I nearly couldn't continue. Actually, I quoted the first two sentences here, but the first one does the work with the past tense, was, telegraphing that this is a narrator whose earthly existence is in question. The second line is the payoff.

     One of my favorite writers, whose work lately has been pejoratively labeled chicklit (lately, because the term and the notion didn't exist when her books hit U.S. markets), is Banana Yoshimoto. Youngest person ever to win the Japanese equivalent of the National Book Award when she was 22 or thereabouts. She was translated to English for the first time in the late eighties/early nineties, and a whisp of a novel that came out in Japan in 1991, Goodbye, Tsugumi, was released in the U.S. only in the last three or four years. (I don't have it in front of me.) Anyway, the first line is:

• "It's true: Tsugumi really was an unpleasant young woman."

     Here's what I love about it: It sets a chatty, conspiratorial tone. It establishes three brains: the narrator, the reader whom she is addressing, and this character named Tsugumi about whom we are eager, suddenly, to learn everything. Yoshimoto's sentences are just this simple and straightforward throughout her work, yet the cumulative effect is a deep reckoning with what makes people tick; their motivations. Their fears, needs, and desires. And how can they help each other thrive? It's subtle, gorgeous writing. 

     The first line of my novel is crap, but I'll make it better once I find out what the thing is about. The only way to do that is to (cough) write it. 

     I'll just be over here, writing, if anyone's looking for me.

Woopsie. It's about cancer.

     Well, shit. I thought I was writing a poem about my daughter. A simple little thing about tucking my child in. 

     Turns out it's another thing about illness. 

     Part of what bugs the shit out of me is that my filter seems forever altered; I apparently am unable to see anything through a lens other than the contorting lens of cancer. I want to rip these spectacles off my head and smash them for good, but I can't.

     Like my mother said, everyone has something. (My mother died from breast cancer in 1983.)

     The poets in my workshop are going to grow weary of this beaten subject, but fast. As long as it stays out of my fiction... 

An inventory of favorite poets

     The poetry workshop I'm taking this semester is being led by a Pulitzer prize winner. I have long admired her work, and as a guide she is fantastic. She asked students to "return to your old favorites" and let her know which poets we plan to read and pay attention to as we craft new poems in the next several weeks. Here's my list.

• Joseph Brodsky
• Stan Rice
• Frank O'Hara
• Sharon Olds
• Mark Strand
• Mary Oliver
• Rita Dove
• Wallace Stevens
• Raymond Carver
• Claudia Emerson
• W.H. Auden
• From my mother's volumes, read and recited in our house growing up: Leigh Hunt, Wordsworth, Byron, E.B. Browning, Cavafy, Yeats, Burns, Shakespeare

     I know nothing about poetic form; nothing about how to discuss poetry. I know what I like; sometimes I know why I like it. I hope to learn much more.

     Meantime, I also have a poem to finish for workshop. To my knowledge, it is not about cancer.

Is this good for me? This cannot be good for me.

     I know we go all gooey over a "vigorous debate" in this democracy of ours, but truly, the heights to which my blood pressure has climbed in the last three days have got to be unhealthy, at least on the cellular level. And it's on the cellular level that my little body is giving me lip, after all. Maybe I'd better knock off rubbernecking the Twin Cities trainwreck and get back to fiction. 

     Although I've not written any fiction so brazen as that Rovian fantasy Palin laid on us last night... Gasping, still gasping...

     Here I go, to work on the novel. See me go? Here I go.