The English Geek

Prized: A Book Note with a Little Annie Wilkes Tossed In

Last week at work, a patron asked me to help her. "I'm looking for that book. The one that's like The Giver. You know. A...topia? And all the kids are reading it?"

Ummmmmm. That's sort of hard, given that there are officially 1,297 new teen dystopian novels out right now that all the kids want to read. I finally figured out which series she was looking for --- The Hunger Games, which really isn't a whole bunch like The Giver anyway. (I think that Anthem is the dystopia most like The Giver but it's certainly not the book all the kids are reading.)

Really, the amount of dystopias right now is astounding. It's hard to keep up. And honestly, some are better than others. One of my favorites I read last year was Birthmarked. The society in the novel is set hundreds of years in our future, when Lake Superior has become an "unlake" due to climate change. The wealthy people live inside the Enclave, where there is electricity and running water. The poor people live outside, without those luxuries but with a little bit more freedom. The freedom, though, is tinged by one of the demands the Enclave makes: a quota of babies must be "advanced" to live inside the Enclave---essentially, the mothers are required to give up some of their babies. As in theory this means the babies live in prosperity instead of poverty, the mothers reluctantly agree.

Gaia Stone, the daughter of the midwife and an adept apprentice midwife herself, had two brothers who were advanced, but as she has a large scar on her face from a burn when she was small, she stayed at home with her birthparents. As events transpire, she experiences her first delivery, begins to question her society's rules, searches for her mother, and tries to uncover the truth. There was romance and adventure and menace and her bravery seemed exactly the right size to the threat. This was my favorite dystopia (I liked it better than Matched which I also read last year) because of the concepts of the society: the poor seeming to live in peace with their conditions, albeit an unpeaceful one. The government's ability to get entirely competent mothers to hand over their babies. The affects of environmental degradation upon the remnants of our world, and the way little bits of our technology and of our language still held sway. The minatory government.

I couldn't wait to read the sequel, Prized. Except, I had to wait until I could get to the top of the hold list. And then Haley wanted to read it first. And then I read Britt's review, and she didn't love it so I waited until I had negative three days to read it. (Translation: it was three days overdue when I cracked the cover. Sigh. Even working at the library I still stink at getting my books back in time.) But here's what happened when I did get started: I stayed up until 3:00 a.m. to finish it, even though I was already exhausted when I started. It's been a long time since a book has made me stay up until three in the morning. This sequel held, like the first book, adventure and romance. A controlling government. And problems with births and genetics.

Britt didn't love it because she felt like the characters didn't act the way the first book suggests they would. I think she's right, especially Gaia, who felt a little bit soft. But my main complaint with this sequel is that they government didn't feel menacing enough. As I read I kept thinking back to The Knife of Never Letting Go, which has similar themes but was sometimes almost unbearable for me to read because of the government's sinister qualities. In Prized, it just didn't feel harsh enough. Indeed it was nearly bucolic. Since Birthmarked was set in such an unforgiving society, it didn't hold true for me that Sylum, the society in Prized, was less intense. It felt...rushed, somehow, like there were details missing.

What I did like was the relationship between Gaia and Leon, who brought the romance in Birthmarked. I think his response to the situation he finds himself in—which I don't want to detail so as not to ruin the story for you—was entirely him. I mean: he's a complete ass. He says abusive and manipulative things to Gaia in an attempt to strike back at her for her mistakes. He's not nice. But his response is human and completely dead-on for his personality.

Someone else (and as I think about it more, perhaps it was Britt) said that they didn't like that the author put Gaia right into the inner workings of another dystopia. I didn't see it, really, as other. I think that Sylum is an extension of the Enclave in the fact that they are each different models for the way a group of people might act under extreme environmental duress. The same forces that shaped the Enclave shaped Sylum; details of the setting and location made the groups develop different coping mechanisms.

And, honestly: I would have been fine if the story had simply ended with Birthmarked. Dystopias aren't the only hip & happening YA trend. Trilogies are, too, which sometimes is a good thing. Sometimes the story starts to feel forced, however. In fact, the author says on her webpage that she had originally intended for Birthmarked to be a stand-alone book. She revised the ending when her publisher offered her a three-book deal. Perhaps this creates what I think of as the Annie Wilkes phenomena. Annie Wilkes is the main character in Stephen King's novel Misery; if you saw the movie it is Cathy Bates' character. She forces her captive, the writer Paul Sheldon, to write a novel he didn't want to write, a continuation of a series he'd already written the last book for. Annie isn't content with just any old solution to the death (and thus the end) of the main character. She wants a plausible, well-written story and makes sure that Paul writes it. He has a moment of realization, when he figures out how to reanimate the character, about just how good the book will actually be, despite Annie's insane methods of making sure he delivered it.

Sometimes a publisher pushing to have a stand-alone book made into a trilogy creates the Annie Wilkes phenomena: another book that is better than the author thought he or she could write. A more developed story and further, meaningful adventures for the characters we readers have grown to love. Sometimes it just feels forced. Prized was almost Annie-Wilkes worthy. Maybe Caragh O'Brien only needed to be hobbled a little bit to produce a sequel that wasn't mildly disappointing. But. I am still holding out for the conclusion!

on Snow

Unrelentingly dry and sunny winter days send me for a tailspin. To my mind they are the canary in the coal mine, the obvious death that should be a sign to us that disaster is imminent. The combination of feeling like I'm the only person in the world who thinks that and the dread of coming disaster make me anxious. I yearn and hope and pray for the snow to finally come, Snow, delicate snow,/that falls with such lightness/on the head,/on the feelings,/come and cover over the sadness/that lies always in my reason (Unamuno). For the clouds to roll in and blank out the too-large-for-January sky and for the world to act like it is supposed to.

When did this anxiety start for me? I'm not certain. With the dawn of adult consciousness, perhaps, or the ecology class I took as a college freshman. And all the snow that never falls is now/back home and mixed up with other piercing/memories of childhood days (McClatchy). The winter I was in fifth grade we had one of the largest snowfalls ever. In the summer all that snow melt caused the lake to rise and flood the freeway; now there are dykes in place that hold it back. I remember driving to gymnastics and watching the slurry walls of sludge and concrete being nudged into place. Even more clearly I remember the snow day, and my mom was at the doctor with Suzette so I had to walk home by myself—I don't remember at all where Becky was—which wasn't a long walk, but cold in my thin corduroy coat with a hole in its satin pocket. Remember the quiet of the large snowflakes and how you could nearly hear them piling up.

I don't love snow sports. I tried skiing a couple of times but never had any proper lessons so it was a disaster. (There is an echo of the conglomerate of people I tried to ski with behind that sentence, entire autobiographies I could start from my small snow skiing forays.) I don't like driving in it, either; I am tense and terrified. I don't especially love sledding. I don't know how to snowshoe or cross country ski, the two snow sports which do seem appealing; the not-knowing-how has kept me from doing either one.

What I love is the falling, the piling up, the deepening layers. The transformation of sharp, dry edges to rounded lumps. The contrast between the literal coldness and the metaphoric blanket the snow covers the ground with. That was the deepest/I ever went into the snow. Now I think of it/when I stare at paper or into silences/between human beings. (shihab nye) I love listening, still, to the stillness. Love the way it conveys peace without ever saying it; peace while holding the potential, in fact, for destruction and ruin. I love the coldness of the transformed world, which tries to say nothing but what it is; The trunks of tall birches/Revealing the rib cage of a whale/Stranded by a still stream;/And saw, through the motionless baleen of their branches,/As if through time,/Light that shone/On a landscape of ivory,/A harbor of bone (Smith), love the light---the tiny bits of moonlight that seep through the dense clouds like snowflakes themselves---that makes night's bitter darkness less menacing.

At last, this weekend, the dry, sharp brownness of my world lost itself in whiteness. Not enough; barely a skiff. But enough to make me take a breath. To make my parched soul drink deep. To let me listen to the relieved whispers of my trees. mustn’t what lies /behind the world be at least /as beautiful as the human voice? (doty) The voice of the snow is also what lies behind the world and when the snow falls I hear a whisper of eternity.

16 New Ones

Last week I made sixteen scrapbook layouts. Sixteen. In one week. This was all in service of my blogging week at Write. Click. Scrapbook, where I wrote about scrapping for your teens. (Which means that in that pile of sixteen layouts? None were for Kaleb. Which makes me feel guilty and think I need to catch him up.) (If you want to read and/or see what I did, you can click here and then navigate forward through the days.)

I imagine that for some scrapbookers, 16 layouts in five days is no big deal at all. But I am a slow scrapbooker. SLOW. Partly this is because I spend a lot of time on my journaling. Even if I already have a draft written, I still get a little bit obsessive over the editing. And the formatting. I get frustrated with my current font selection so I go in search of something different and then I get sucked into drooling over all the beautiful ones at myfont.com and wishing I had a "font-buying" category in my budget but really knowing that I don't need to spend $15 or $40 or $79.99 on a font. But still wishing I could.

(See how easily the font thing distracts me from my point?)

Partly the slowness comes from agonizing a bit over my design skills. I sometimes feel like the design part of scrapbooking is like a language I never learned to speak or read, so when I try to "speak" it on my layouts, I say weird things. And the people who can read it must, I imagine, shake their heads over my obvious mistakes.

Partly it comes from simply spending time with my photos, looking at them and remembering. I had a conversation with a friend the other day (a non-scrapbooking friend as nearly all of my skin friends are) about how, now that all her photos are digital, she feels like she has less of a relationship with them. Sure—they're there on her computer. But she doesn't look at them hardly ever. Not looking at photos is unimaginable to me. I do it all the time. Since this relationship with photos is nearly always in my thoughts, I also take a lot of photos. I can't imagine being any other way.

On Friday night, when I had wrapped up my blogging week, my stack of 16 layouts was still on my scrapping desk. (I had managed to finally clean up the enormous mess I'd made, but hadn't put the layouts away yet.) Haley saw them, and she sat down and read them all. She made a few corrections (dates I'd messed up). She pointed out a few little embellishment ideas that she liked. But then she said something I'm still thinking about. "These layouts seem like they have less stuff on them than usual. But I really like that."

I keep thinking about her comment because it fits in so well with what my intense week of scrapbooking taught me. I tend to look at other people's layouts and their successes in the scrapbooking world, then turn around and find my own fairly paltry and pathetic. I'm neither trendy nor trendsetting. My layouts are just...me. I wish, quite often, that I could find more success—that my classes drew more students and that my blog was super-popular. It's a little bit disheartening to know that committing myself to be who I am on my layouts hasn't helped to set me apart from anyone.

But I look at that pile of 16 layouts and I know: I was true to myself in every one of them. I did what I do, which is write a lot and obssess over writerly perfection even though I know it's useless to do so and then adjust the width of my journaling space 29 times before printing just to make sure I don't have any bad rag. I used lots of alphabet stickers and lots of patterned paper strips. I used type as my only embellishment. I used quotes that I love and a stamp that is older than Kaleb. I didn't do anything extraordinary with my supplies.

But I put my perfectly-aligned journaling into the same spot as my photographs. I said things I wouldn't have ever said outloud. I recorded details that would otherwise be lost, feelings that are hard to express, and little stories that are priceless to me. I remembered (again) how much I love my kids and how grateful I am to be their mom. I remembered (yet again) that scrapbooking makes me happy.

And I learned a little bit about my own style. All that scrapbooking in a small amount of time? Taught me to be better about not judging my design abilities. To just find a way to make it work and then move forward. That my simple, words-based approach is my thing, and if it doesn't bring me wide-scale scrapbooking popularity? It is OK. Who needs popularity when you compare it to your own sweet kid saying "Mom, I love these layouts!"?

So I am going to try harder. Try harder to keep that self-flagellating voice silent. To not compare myself to other people and wish I had their flair or their way of seeing things or their creativity. To love what I do for no other reason than I did it and now it is done and the story is down, not, now, to be lost.

God is in the Trees.

I read Mark Twain's The Diaries of Adam & Evewith my SDBBE girls. The cover is this one:

and we've discussed who's face that is in the tree. Since when the book opens, Eve has Adam up a tree—he's trying to get away from her because he thinks she talks too much—one of the suggestions was that it was Adam's face.

But the more I think about the story, the more I think it is God's face, watching Adam and Eve as they begin to figure out the world. I think His gaze is compassionate and, perhaps, he is also trying to keep his laughter hidden, because they are pretty funny.

Twain intended it to be a humorous book, but I confess: I don't always appreciate humor. This personality trait has occasioned more than one person to look sideways at me when I'm just sort of, you know, sitting through a funny movie, not really laughing much while said person is guffawing his head off. I've been accused of being a stick in the mud. I don't really know what is wrong with me—it's not that I don't like to laugh. Humor just isn't my favorite genre.

Despite that, I did enjoy this book and it did make me laugh, especially Eve's observations about language. Sometimes the humor made me roll my eyes. Sometimes it annoyed me. And as the end neared, I felt like the humor lessened the story somehow. I wanted to get deeper inside the characters than ridiculosity was allowing me. As the story progresses, Eve learns things, and she has a sort of wisdom born of her innocence, but she's still childlike.

Even though, when she and Adam eat the apple, they are cast out from the garden and death enters the world (the tigers, which were previously strawberry eaters, start eating the horses), Adam and Eve's knowledge doesn't come as a flood. They still learn slowly and by experiments they don't exactly understand. Eve especially loves figuring things out. She believes she was made "to search out the secrets of this wonderful world. . . . I think think there are many things to learn yet—I hope so; and by economizing and not hurrying too fast, I think they will last weeks and weeks." Despite her childlike innocence, she loves learning.

But when death enters their intimate part of the world—when Abel dies at Cain's hand—this is when she learns the bitter part of knowledge. Until Abel dies—until days after his death, when Eve finally realizes that this, this cold sleeping body that won't awaken is death—she is trying to gain knowledge. After she knows death, she has obtained knowledge, wisdom, and the sorrow that comes from both.

I think of her character in the story, explaining what she knows about a thing as basic as air:

By a series of experiments we had long ago arrived at the conclusion that atmospheric air consisted of water in invisible suspension; also that the components of water were hydrogen and oxygen, the proportion of two parts of the former to one of the latter and expressible by the symbol H₂O. My discovery revealed the fact that there was still another ingredient: milk. We enlarged the symbol to H₂OM.

(On the same page we are told that Adam has figured out that 6 times 9 are 27, and that cows make milk by condensing it from the air through their skin.)

They almost  have things figured out. They have the right pieces, hydrogen and oxygen, 6 and 9. They just don't know how to fit their pieces of knowledge together. They draw completely wrong assumptions from their experiences.

Contrast that to the Eve we meet after Abel's death. She doesn't say this, but I realized it: she didn't only lose Abel. She lost Cain, too. That wide variance of bitterness that knowledge brings us! This knowledge changes her; she is no longer innocent because her knowledge is no longer theoretical. It is personal.

And she cannot understand it.

She has these pieces of knowledge she has gained from her experiences. Death has entered the world. Her first son killed her second son. God does not stop bad things from happening. Sorrow doesn't go away. But she doesn't know how to understand the pieces, what they mean, how they fit together. What is being made.

They drove us from the garden with their swords of flame, the fierce cherubim. And what had we done? . . . We did not know right from wrong—how should we know? We could not, without the Moral Sense? . . . But to say to us poor ignorant children words which we could not understand and then punish us because we did not do as we were told—ah, how can that be justified? We knew no more then than this littlest child of mine knows now with its four years—oh, not so much, I think. Would I say to it, "If thou touchest this bread I will overwhelm thee with unimaginable disaster, even to the dissolution of thy corporeal elements," and when it took the bread and smiled up in my face, thinking no harm, not understanding those strange words, would I take advantage of its innocence and strike it down with the mother-hand it trusted? Whoso knoweth the mother-heart, let him judge if I would do that thing.

This is the Eve I wanted to know. I wanted to know her suffering, not because I want her to suffer but because everyone suffers. What do we do with the suffering? How do we put the pieces of our knowledge into a meaning we can grasp? Eve can't see the meaning within her sorrows. She questions God and His motivations, and this makes me feel better about my own questions, my own doubts and failures at understanding. Her conclusion, unspoken but suggested in her words, is that God is unfair to do what He did.

It is just the same as her conclusion about the milk in the atmosphere. She has knowledge but cannot see from God's perspective. She can only see from her own and so arriving at the real conclusion is difficult. Eve is not sitting with God in the tree. None of us are. We only have our pieces of knowledge gained from our experiences, and we stumble. We puzzle and recalculate and leave the box of pieces in dark corners when they seem impossible to assemble. We cannot always make sense of them.

This, I believe, is universal to all of us, not just Eve. This world, the one with death and sorrow and betrayal and unemployment and poverty and medical emergencies, tries to teach us. It gives us the pieces. But since we're all down on the ground, living our lives instead of looking at them, we can't always comprehend the knowledge we are gaining. It comes slowly. We don't always understand.

But neither did Eve. and I think God, looking down from his tree, was not offended by her questions. I think he knew she just didn't understand yet. At least, that is what I hope, both for Eve and for myself. Because it is so easy for me to make the wrong assumptions. To assume that my sorrows happen only as punishments, for example, and that if I were a better person I would have fewer. I don't quite have God's perspective yet. But, like Eve, I am doing what I can while I live to figure things out.

on Driving: along, past, through

Yesterday, Haley blogged about driving down by the lake. " didnt ask anyone, or even tell anyone i went. but it was just what my heart needed," she wrote. "i turned the radio off, and drove slow so i could just look at it. it was seriously what i needed right then. hopefully i don't get in trouble for going without asking. aaaand yeah. i hope i can make peace with all of my troubles."

Oh, my.

Those pervasive adolescent heartaches. I remember. I talk to her a little bit about my teenagehood but not all of the stories. I don't want to glorify the mistakes I made. I don't want it to seem wild and romantic and edgy. I don't want it to be tempting. Because I don't want her, or any of my kids, to feel what I felt. So I have worked hard to (hopefully) keep them away from the wild and romantic and edgy stuff.

But I can't keep them away from heartache. It finds you. All of your life, it is always a possibility. It's fairly intense when you're a teenager of course. It feels more magnified somehow. Maybe because you don't have the perspective yet of old sorrows and new ones.

That is not me downplaying how she feels. It is me acknowledging it, which I think is important for teenagers to know. The way you feel is the way you feel. Someone telling you to stop feeling it or, worse, that you don't deserve to feel that way, you haven't earned  your heartache, because it could be so much worse or he wasn't dating you then or it's not like you're my only friend or any of the other reasons people offer—all that does is make you doubt what you feel. You have to move through it to move past it. You can't just skip it.

And what she might not know is that while I would rather she just tell me where she's going, I understand it, too. She has a cell phone so I could still track her down, and being somewhere no one knows is part of it. Part of the way that just driving makes you feel better. She doesn't know that I wouldn't get upset because this is a story I don't think I ever told her.

When I was at my worst teenage phase, I would get up every morning. I would get ready for school and then leave in my car. I would actually drive to the high school. I would pull into the parking lot. And then I would just sit there. Getting out of my car and walking into that building? The thing I couldn't do. I couldn't sit at a desk with books spread open before me, learning stuff like geography or history or a squared + b squared = C squared or all the other stuff that seemed so completely useless because it wasn't teaching me what I really needed to know, which was what do I do with all of this? I couldn't sit there with all of them, pretending I was OK, and ignoring all the "that girl is weird" under-the-breath muttered comments, and managing to act normal like everyone else.

So I'd leave the parking lot. I'd go to 7-11 and with the change I'd scrounged up from my mother's purse or my sisters' pockets or maybe under the couch, buy a large coffee and put three Irish Creme creamers in it and five ice cubes to cool it down. I'd put five dollars of gas in the tank using the gas card I stole from my dad. And then I'd drive. I'd drive anywhere, aimless. Crying and singing along to the boom box on the seat next to me. (A.M. radio, remember?) I'd drive past the enormous houses of the wealthy on the east side. And I would always end up in the mountains.

No one knew where I was. My mom assumed I was at school. My teachers had forgotten I existed and my friends were busy justifying themselves or suffering in their own way. There was something to that—to knowing that no one knew where I was. It was like disappearing, somehow. And everything hurt less because I didn't really exist if no one knew where I was.

When it was time for school to be over, I'd drive home. I could manage (sort of) the pretending-to-be-normal thing when I was at home. I'd pretend to do homework when really I was writing poetry or angry diatribes. I'd answer the phone when the automated call from the high school came, keeping my mom from knowing I'd sluffed again.

And then I'd do the same thing the next day.

None of this was noble or good of me. Or good for me, maybe. Except—the driving. The aimless wandering. The movement towards the mountains, where I'd park and sit on my hood and feel, just for a minute, finally a white peace.

So no. I'm not upset. I totally understand. I understand the need to drive along peaceful landscapes in order to move through what is painful.

I get it.

Progressive Tense

My friend Britt does this thing on her blog each month, where she organizes her life-right-now details using the progressive tense (-ing verbs, in other words). Today Becky copied her. Which felt like permission for me to do it, too. So, here is my Currently list:

blogging at Write. Click. Scrapbook. all this week. The topic is teens but I'm also including some general scrapbooking take away ideas for those scrappers who don't have teens. If you aren't a scrapbooker but you want to just write more about your teenagers, the ideas will also work for that!

drinking way too much Pepsi. It's the throwback style, but still. Once I finally work my way through what's left of the six boxes we had at one point, I will personally not buy anymore. Kendell loves it, so he might buy some for himself, but me? I will not. For some reason, it's easier for me to not drink it if he bought it. That's weird.

failing at conquering the conjunctivitis my kids keep giving each other. I think that both Kaleb (who caught it from a kid at school) and Nathan both now have the secondary infection that the antibiotic drops sometimes cause. Which means a trip to the doctor for a different prescription. Jake's got it now and he looks like a zombie.

making Jake, who is staying home from school today due to said pink eye, clean and vaccuum the basement.

celebrating that Haley didn't catch the pink eye before her Preference dance on Saturday, that she found the perfect red shoes to go with her dress, and that the pictures I took of their group (all TWELVE COUPLES) turned out OK. I still need to Photoshop them and find somewhere to upload them so all those anxious teens can get their pics.

reading One Day and The Best American Poems 2011. Last night I finished Salvaging the Bones, which was lovely.

loving  blue cheese dressing. OK, I always love it, but recently I can't stop making meals wherein I can have some sort of carb-based item to dip in blue cheese. Or chicken is good to dip, too. Haley asked me why I don't just make more salad if I want to eat more blue cheese dressing. Because, honestly: I really don't love salad. Please don't revoke my Real Woman Card, OK?

scrapbooking lots of teen layouts for my week, and then I'm going to get all of Christmas scrapped.

writing an essay that is growing, sort of, out of this post.

mocking this race, the Outside the Ice Half Marathon. 13.1 miles on an indoor track? Seriously. That sounds like the most non-fun race I can imagine. It's "approximately" 47.75 laps. Sure. It's on the Olympic Oval, but still. Two hours of running in circles? With 250 people on the same track? REALLY? Is it just me or is this about as enticing as, say, meals of Top Ramen for the next six week? I think I'd pick the Top Ramen.

running hardly at all anyway.

going to the sculpting class at the gym on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I love it!

cooking meatloaf for dinner tomorrow night. My friend Julie's kids told me the other day that they don't like meatloaf. I think I need to share my recipe with her because, all modesty aside: I make a mean meatloaf!

wishing, hoping, praying and considering doing a snow dance for more snow. Or any snow. I hate cold, dry, brown winters. Please, please snow!

wanting to get better control of my sarcasm talent. As in...keep it to myself better.

wondering if my doctor is right and that my recent bout of brain fog can be attributed to my sleep talking. I have an appointment in a couple of weeks with a sleep disorders clinic. Hmmmmm.

wearing my favorite sweats. Wool socks. A long sleeved blue t-shirt.

needing to get busy on all the work I need to do today.

Happy -inging to you this day!

the power of powerlessness

Sometimes I feel like the Queen of the Socially Awkward Gaffe. Like I don't know when to just keep my mouth shut to stop the words in my head from coming out into the world, where they will make me blush and feel uncomfortable.

For instance, last week at work two other librarians were talking about a person who is coming to do a program at the library. He's an English professor at a nearby university, a published poet, and one of my least-favorite people. Instead of just keeping my thoughts in my head, though, I let a little annoyed groan out, and said something snarky like "why would you do __________ a favor?"

Keep in mind that these two librarians also went to the same university. They both have Master's degrees and have certainly taken classes from this professor. Maybe he was even one of their favorite  professors. Maybe they have become friends with this professor? I don't know. But once my gaffe escaped my lips, they wanted to know why I didn't like him, and instead of making a socially deft move—maybe an awkward change of subject such as, "Oh, you know. What did you think about Cat's Table?"—I barrelled ahead with the story.

When I was at college, I took a poetry writing class from this professor. He was young-ish then, late thirties, and walked with a sort of swaggering confidence into class on the first day. He put his obligatory university-professor brief case on the desk, took hold of the podium, and said "In my teaching career, I will be lucky to meet one real poet. If I am seriously, amazingly blessed I might meet two." And then he went on to describe the publishing world with severity. And to discuss how all English majors assume they each have a inner poet just waiting to be released, but they couldn't be more wrong; most of that is just conceit and a little bit of encouragement from their public high school English teacher, who probably also thought she  had a writing career just around the corner.

Part of me knows why he started the class this way. He's right, of course: real poets are  rare. The publishing world is  severe and cruel and nearly impossible to be successful in, especially in poetry which most people don't read. I'd even heard another professor (who was one of my favorites and who taught me much about the writing craft) say nearly the same thing to a writing class: just because you're an English major doesn't mean you automatically know how to write well. The difference was tone and intent. The writing teacher I loved said this with an intent to clear away self-aggrandizement and put real writing knowledge in its place. The poetry writing teacher I (still) can't stand did it to put us all in our places. I am the real poet here,  his words and attitude said, and the rest of you are foolish minions.

Perhaps he also did it to get rid of the easily-offended. It was always interesting to me, in college, to see how the make up of a class would change after the first day. I know lots of students would shop their classes, trying to find the easiest professors and the smallest workload. Maybe Mr. Poet just wanted to get rid of the lazy students right off the bat. And honestly: I really did  want to get up and walk out of class that first day. But I wasn't most students; I was married and had a child (and would be pregnant again at the end of that semester). My schedule was carefully planned around nap times, daycare, and when I could use the car. I couldn't just change it because I hated the professor.

So I stuck it out. I did the required readings and wrote the assigned poems and tried to learn everything I could. I did whatever I could to get an A in the class. (I got an A in the class.) I didn't know that professor was teaching me stuff about how not  to be a teacher. (Like: who becomes a poetry teacher because of that one real poet they will hopefully find?) I thought about his example quite often when I was teaching, especially my creative writing classes. Sure: not everyone who loves writing or even is really, really good at it will be successful at it. But writing wealth, fame, and wide-spread publication are hardly the point for a classful of English majors, or at least not the  point. The point is learning, and while I did  learn about poetry from this professor, I also learned that gender bias? Totally still alive and kicking in academia. I learned which types of poems I could hand it to him and get an A on, and they weren't anything that seemed "too feminine." I learned to never  volunteer an answer, especially not a supposition, or to work through my thought processes aloud in front of him, because he was so swift to point out errors.

I didn't tell all of this to my fellow librarians, just the bit about the first five minutes of class. I'm pretty sure they are  big fans of this professor anyway, which is fine. I shouldn't have told the story anyway. But my gaffe and that flood of memories have left me thinking. This happened 15 years ago. Fifteen! Yet I still remember the details as crisply as if it happened last week. It left an impression because it became my story I could tell whenever people compared awful university professors. But it remains crisp also because it is one of the experiences that make me doubt my writing abilities. Make me slightly ashamed of them, in fact, as if wanting to write—no, as if thinking I could  write well—was just one of those silly notions that vapid women like me get.

Yesterday I read something that counteracted, a little bit, that semester with that professor. This is from the book Unless It Moves the Human Heart: The Craft and Art of Writing  by Roger Rosenblatt:

Since 1975, the number of creative writing programs has increased 800 percent. It is amazing. The economy has tanked. Publishing favors nonfiction. young people seem to prefer the image to the word. Yet al over America, students ranging in age from their early twenties to their eighties hunker down at seminar tables . . . avid to join a profession that practically guarantees them rejection, poverty, and failure.

Which sounds an awfully lot like what my professor started that long-ago poetry-writing class with, right? But he continues:

They all want the world of writing so very much—not only to succeed in it, but to be a part of it, to stroll in it and feel it wrap around them. I admire their brash impracticality and wonder if, in some way, their reckless enthusiasm for art, conceived and nurtured in an increasingly money-driven age, represents their unconscious protest against the age. . . . something deliberate and stubborn lies behind their decision to make artists of themselves. They turn to the power of their powerlessness.

The power of powerlessness. That is it exactly. I might not write poems that professor would ever admire, and I know there are thousands of poetry editors in the world who think the exact way he did about poems like mine: centered in woman and so lacking in universality. The power comes in knowing. I know the publishing world is brutal. I know  real poets are rare things and I am probably not that rare. I know  my odds of succeeding are infinitesimal.

But, it is just like Mark Twain said: a person who doesn't write anyway is no different from a person who can't write at all. Pushing forward, continuing to try despite the very stacked odds, refusing to swallow that one professor's poisons—knowing he is right and I will more than likely fail but writing anyway: that is the only power I have. He might think that it is no power at all, because it hurts no one but myself. But it doesn't only hurt me, the failure. It reminds me that I did, I have, at least, tried. And the trying gives me courage to try again, despite the inevitable failure.

Whirlwind's Eye

 

One of my favorite songs lately is this one, "Shake it Out" by Florence + The Machine.

"I can never leave the past behind / I can see no way, I can see no way / I'm always dragging that horse around": recent past and old past, I do drag it around, and it is hard to dance with that devil on my back. And even though it might not seem like it I don't really blog about everything in my life—I do keep some things to myself.

And there've been a lot of those kept-to-myself things lately.

Sometimes it seems like all of life is just adding and adding to the past we drag around. Things I feel guilty for—both the real, useful sort of guilt and the useless, weighty kind that only has the power to damage. Things I feel hurt over. Disappointments. I try to keep it all, at least, behind me, so it isn't the only focus of my thoughts. But sometimes it overtakes me and I stumble around in a whirlwind of self doubt.

I was in that storm this morning.

But I also needed fabric softener. So I went to Target anyway, and while I was there I came across an old friend, Julie. We worked together twenty years ago, in the old WordPerfect days, and were immediate kindred spirits. But after we both got married, and life got busy in the way it does, and she moved to North Carolina for awhile, we lost touch except for Christmas cards. I've not seen her, except for a brief encounter in the men's department at JC Penney during the mad December shopping days, for years. But we stood and talked in front of the paper plates at Target for a half hour, like the pause in our friendship had just happened yesterday. She reminded me of a piece of myself I had forgotten, one who was infinitely more cheerful and faithful. I'd forgotten I could feel that until Julie reminded me this morning.

And then, when we wrapped it up and promised to call each other for lunch and I went down the laundry aisle, my friend Wendy called me, and we talked for another half hour while I finished shopping and checked out (even though I try not to talk on my cell when I'm checking out...today I needed it) and drove home and put my stuff away. She said some things I needed to hear to bolster my courage to take some steps I need to take.

Am I ready to suffer in a different way? Am I ready to hope? To bury the horse? The only thing stopping me is fear. Fear, and habit, because what if the changes I want to happen actually happened? The things that are dragging at my heels are at least familiar. At least my dark spaces are known. I can navigate them with my heart closed.

I don't know. I don't know if the steps lead up or down.

But today, in the midst of my whirlwind life gave me an eye. A peaceful moment. And that gives me courage that there will be other moments. That maybe I could be free of the devils.

on Scars

Last Saturday, a girl came up to the desk where I was working. She looked about 14, a little dowdy in that haven't-found-my-way-yet thing that girls her age have. "I'm working on a project," she said, a little nervous. "Can you tell me where the pregnancy books are?"

I walked her over to the section and showed her some of the newer ones, and tugged out a copy of What to Expect When You're Expecting because it seemed easiest to digest for a 14-year-old girl. "Good luck with your project!" I said, gave her an encouraging smile, and then went back to my desk.

Two hours later, she came back to the desk. She took a deep breath. And she said, "OK. If you thought you might be pregnant. How much do pregnancy tests cost? And when would you take the test?"

One of those projects.

So I explained pregnancy tests to her. And I told her to wait until she was at least a week late. "So if you were already, like, two weeks late, you'd just take it now? Like, today?" she asked in a quiet voice and I looked her right in the eye, hoping my gaze would be true and she would know that this complete random librarian had nothing but compassion for her. "Yes. You go to Target today, and get the store brand test, and take it in the morning. And then you tell someone who can help you, OK?"

**********************

Haley texted me today:

A boy in our school named Jeremy killed himself this morning.

And even though I've never met this boy in my life, I wanted to weep. For such sadness in the world. For a young person whose despair couldn't be overcome. For his parents—What they must be feeling is completely unimaginable to me.

**********************

There are so many wounding surfaces in the world. Some literal, some metaphorical. The metaphorical wounds take longest to heal, I believe. The combination of these two young people's experiences bumping against my life has reminded me of some of my own old scars. Of how sharp the world is and how sometimes you feel you are wandering alone in a landscape of shards, and sometimes a friendly face is the one softness you need.

Of how I hope I can be that softness whenever life presents me with the opportunity to do so.

**********************

"Scars"
       ~ William Stafford

The tell how it was, and how time
came along, and how it happened
again and again. They tell
the slant life takes when it turns
and slashes your face as a friend.

Any wound is real. In church
a woman lets the sun find
her cheek and we see the lesson:
there are years in that book; there are sorrows
a choir can’t reach when they sing.

Rows of children lift their faces of promise,
places where the scars will be.

2011 Books & Music

I put this list together for a project at work, but I thought I'd share it here, too. The list of my favorite 2011 releases, by genre:

My Favorite Released-in-2011 Grown-Up Fiction

1. The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman (which, OK: I haven't finished yet, but only because I am savoring it slowly)
2. Sister by Rosamund Lupton
3. I Think I Love You by Allison Pearson
4. To Be Sung Underwater by Tom McNeal
5. The Lover's Dictionary by David Levithan

(Side note: the 2011 new releases I want to read but haven't yet: State of Wonderby Ann Patchett; The Marriage Plotby Jeffrey Eugenides; The Stranger's Childby Alan Hollingshead; The Night Circusby Erin Morgenstern, The Cat's Tableby Michael Ondaatje, 11/22/63 by Stephen King, and 1q84by Haruki Murakami)

My Favorite Released-in-2011 Teen Fiction
(I am completely unsure as to why I didn't write about any teen fiction this year.)

1. A Monster Calls  by Patrick Ness. A combination of Siobbhan Dowd and Patrick Ness? With illustrations that powerfully capture the emotion in the story? Oh, my. I can't tell you how much I loved this book. Enough that I haven't brought myself to write about it yet.
2. Divergentby Veronica Roth. One of the better of the new crop of dystopian novels.
3. How to Save a Lifeby Sara Zarr. Told in alternating chapters, this is the story of two teenagers: on who's pregnant and might want to give her baby up for adoption, one who's trying to deal with the grief from her dad's death.
4. Chime by Frannie Billingsly. Another dystopian novel, this one is so well written it's like jewelry, somehow.
5. Between Shades of Greyby Ruta Sepetyas. A historical novel about Stalin's rule in Russia. I don't think this topic in history is very well known, and this isn't a happy book. But beautiful, still.

(The 2011 new teen releases that I'm still waiting to get to the top of the waiting list: Ashfall by Mike Mullin; The Scorpio Racesby Maggie Stiefvater; Blood Red Road by Moira Young; Legend by Marie Lu; The Unbecoming of Mara Dyerby Michelle Hodkin)

My Favorite Released-in-2011 Nonfiction

1. Just my Type by Simon Garfield. Have I ever blogged about my affection for fonts and typography? I don't believe I have. I should, one day. Suffice it to say: this book has an entire chapter about Comic Sans. No font nerd could resist it.
2. In Other Worlds: Science Fiction and the Human Imaginationby Margaret Atwood. Hello...my favorite writer. Her words about science fiction that began as a response to Ursula K. Le Guin's review of Year of the Flood. What isn't there to love for me?
3. A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet by Eavan Boland. Just her name, with its Irish connotations, gives me shivers. Even better, this is exactly the sort of book I love to read, with its mishmash of writing and the writing life and poetics and poems and thinking and discussing.
4. Blue Nightsby Joan Didion. I loved her The Year of Magical Thinking, which is about the year after her husband's death. Blue Nights, equally as powerful, details the time after her daughter died.
5. A Widow's Storyby Joyce Carol Oates. I'm not sure why the details of someone else's grief are compelling to me. But this one---the story of Oates' dealing with the death of her husband---just works for me.

 My Favorite Released-in-2011 CDs
(I only am listing three because I only discovered three. I'm trying to broaden my musical horizons but so far I'm not being very successful.)

1. 21 by Adele. Although I ran with these songs as company many times during my marathon training, they evoke for me the first long autumn run I did. "Turning Tables" is perhaps my favorite song on the album—nearly a soundtrack for some autumn moments—perhaps because of the lyric "next time I'll be braver, I'll be my own savior." I don't often manage, like I used to, to find exactly the wisdom I need in a song. But I needed that line. I still need it.
2. Ceremonials by Florence + the Machine. In real life, I think Florence might bug me a little bit—too dramatic. But in music, gah. I love her work. I am approaching this CD like I used to approach CDs: learning all the songs by heart.
3. Ahk-toong BAY-bi by a whole bunch of musicians. This is a CD that was released in England to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the U2 CD Achtung Baby. It's a cover album---lots of different musicians covering each song from the original. It's got Depeche Mode on it, singing "So Cruel," which is just about all I need, but, hello: The Fray singing "Trying to Throw your Arms Around the World"? and Patti Smith doing "Until the End of the World"? oh, and Damien Rice's version of "One"! and Snow Patrol on "Mysterious Ways"! This has been on nearly-non-stop rotation on my playlist. I love it. So. Much.

Did you have any 2011-new-release favorites?