Writing About Me

My brother and his girlfriend are moving into my father's garage. My mother is moving next door to my father--with her boyfriend. My grandfather has lost control of his bowels and mows through adult diapers like there's no tomorrow. My best friend's boyfriend of five years left her suddenly. My boyfriend's birthday is tomorrow. The semester is officially done. A student recently told me I need to stop assigning readings about "cancer and dead babies and stuff."

These are some things that have been going on lately.

I know I haven't been here to tell you about them. I've been wondering why I stopped writing. I've been wondering that for a long time, actually. My reluctance to blog started shortly after I started up with The Lady-Killer. Why? Because The Lady-Killer and I spent most of the summer and fall of 2010 in bed, but we did not--contrary to Christine's opinion--develop bedsores. Also, living with someone takes up a lot of time. Seriously. There are days when I get in bed at night and think, "I wanted to do, like, eighty things all day, and yet I spent a good chunk of time lying on the couch reading a magazine and watching TLK play video games." The glorious thing about these thoughts though--and this is showing some real growth here, people--is that they generally do not bother me. The fact that I got almost no shit done would have driven me crazy, pre-TLK. But my world since TLK is like a whole new world, one where a psychiatrist prescribed me a whole mess of anti-anxiety meds. That's right. TLK is like a walking, talking anti-anxiety pill. Plus, he has a lip piercing that feels really good when you kiss him.

And here's another thing. I don't want to tell you some of these things. I mean, I do. I really do. I want to tell you about a million beautiful things about TLK--how he's so funny and charming, how he sometimes makes me giggle until I think I'm going to wet my pants, how he makes really good scrambled eggs because he puts cream cheese in them, how we sleep on the same pillow at night (a fact that, when I told my friends Emily and Christine, almost made them barf)--but I also don't want to tell you those things. I feel more private now. I want to hold some things close to the vest. (I mean, see that list of cute things about TLK up there? THAT IS NOTHING. TRUST ME.) But there's just something in me now that is saying Shhh.

I think it has something to do with me protecting TLK's privacy, and mine. I also think it has something to do with growing up. I mean, back in grad school, you could not shut me the fuck up. I wanted to talk about myself all day and night. And then after grad school, I wah-wah-wahed for months about how sad I was, about how rotten and dumb my life had become now that I had graduated and been forced out of the loving cocoon of the MFA program, where everyone is batshit crazy in really lovable (okay, mostly lovable) ways. I wah-wah-wahed over the Wily Republican, who I now, for days at a time, sometimes forget even exists (oh glorious, happy day that I never thought would come!). Then I wah-wah-wahed over having to take up waitressing when my adjunct gig was over for the summer. Oh my God, how did anyone stand me?

But now, I sort of don't want to talk about myself. And that's really startling to me, because I really love to talk, and I really love to talk about myself. (This, I think, has something to do with my family. Generally, during every phone call my mother and I have, we will spend 15 minutes detailing how stupid our relatives, our neighbors, our coworkers, or other people out in the world are. Then one of us will pause and say, "Well, you know, because we're obviously perfect." Sitting in judgment of others and thus illuminating our own awesomeness is one of our favorite pastimes, right up there with badminton and pierogi-eating.)

Anyway, sometimes I miss writing about myself, and sometimes I don't. Sometimes I think, holy crap! That thing TLK is doing right now is so funny (or weird! or crazy! or ill-advised!) I really should write about it! (I've said it before, but I'll say it again: TLK is a lot like my brother. He's lovable in the same way and for similar reasons that have made a lot of complete strangers who read this blog fall in love with my brother. Therefore, I think he makes a beautiful muse.)

Still, I have struggled to get it right when writing about TLK. It's easier to write about my brother than it is to write about TLK. A lot of what's funny between me and TLK has to do with the origin of our relationship, and that's one of those private things I'm not willing to share right now. I don't really care about exposing my brother's weird foibles. The kid is related to me, but it's like he's actually not. It's actually like he's some glorious, horrible space alien that took over the room in our house that had been previously reserved for my mother's typewriter. That kid--the one who took over the typewriter room, which I used to think was its own kind of heaven? That kid I'll expose all day long. TLK though? I'd rather not. That one's all mine.

So that's part of it. The other parts I'm really still trying to understand. But right now I have the inclination to be quiet, but who knows how that's going to go and how long that's going to stick around? After all, when I go home this summer, my mother will be convincing my grandfather that he can never again leave the nursing home and return to his house and that she, in fact, will be renovating the house and moving in. (Wait. Did I say "will be renovating?" I actually mean "totally already did it and has already had new furniture delivered. Surprise, Grandpa!)

In addition, my brother and his girlfriend are consolidating all the things they went to the trouble to dig up for their new apartment, which they've only been in for one year, and they will be moving those things into a small room off to the side of my father's garage. They'll be living there for God knows who long, which means they'll be there when I arrive at my father's house for my usual summer R&R. I think this year my stay at Dad's house will be less like a quiet spa vacation and more like a sitcom staring a boy who once frittered away his life savings at a Hooters.

So maybe I'll be back, but maybe I won't. Either way, I wanted you to know that everything is good--more than good--and that I'm just wrapped up in it, loving it, and being quiet about it for right now.

So's Your Face

I'm writing something new these days. It's set in a high school in small town Maine, and while I think I can do a good job supplying the characters with dialogue that is realistic for their age group, it has been an unexpected stroke of luck to be living with The Lady-Killer, a boy who's--let's face it--closer to his old high school experiences than me, the girl who, two summers ago, had her ten year reunion.

TLK has a really robust vocabulary--I've often heard him drop words that make his friends scrunch up their noses and say, "Dude, what the fuck does that mean?"--but that robust vocabulary doesn't follow him around everywhere.

He has, after all, been known to answer the question, "What do you want to eat?" with this: "Your butt."

In fact, "your butt" or "my butt" or simply "butt" is an oft-used response in this house.

"What's shakin?"

"My butt."

"What do you want to do tonight?"

"Your butt."

"What is that?"

"Butt!"

So is it any surprise that I occasionally channel him and some of the phrases I choose for my characters? After I wrote the following exchange I took a step back, looked at it, and realized that there he was, my boy, speaking back at me through my characters:

Joe Geiger, the football team's backup quarterback, leans through the mob crowded onto the large mat to narrow his eyes at Amy. "Don't even think about it," he says. "We have a strategy here. We're, you know, trying to win."

"It's a game, Geiger," Amy says. "It's stupid."

"So's your face," Joe says, then he is swallowed up again by the group of jocks around him.

~~~

It also occurs to me that this exchange would please my brother very, very much.

Literary Critic

The Wily Republican is really good for certain things.

This point would be contested by many people, including my friend Greg, who, just this week, told me he thought the Wily Republican is a total waste of flesh, that he has no capacity for empathy, that he exists on this earth only to cause misery and pain for other people.

I've never believed that, even on the days I hated him more than anything. The Wily Republican has some exceedingly good qualities even beyond what used to be his most impressive, which was looking really good in a towel.

The other day, as I was reading through my whole book, I came across a line that suddenly struck me as really filthy, really perverted. But I wasn't sure if I was just getting a little loopy--was it the (strong) mojito? was it the five hours I'd already spent reading and editing?--or maybe the line really was pretty gross and foul.

And I could've called a lot of people to run it by them, but that might've led to discussions that were a bit more in-depth than I thought the line needed. The quickest test would be to just call up the Wily Republican, read him the line, and listen to his reaction. The WR is, after all, a self-proclaimed pervert, well versed in filth and ick.

So I called him. "Listen," I said. "I'm just going to read you a paragraph. I'm not going to tell you what to listen for, but I do want you to listen carefully. And just have whatever reaction you're going to have. Don't censor."

"Okay," he said. He was just coming in from a day of military training, and he was more than happy to stop thinking about logistics and start thinking about writing. "I'm just going to get naked first, and then I can listen better," he said.

I'd clearly called the right person.

"Fine," I said and then read the paragraph to him. The last sentence ends with the phrase and she was sure she'd never be dry again. I read it, paused for a split second, and then the Wily started laughing.

"Ha," he said. "She was wet."

"I knew it!" I said. "I knew you'd think it was perverted!"

"Hey, hey," he said. "In my defense, you also had the phrase 'she was dripping' in that paragraph."

"THEY ARE IN THE RAIN," I said.

"Still," he said, laughing, "that'll set up the sick-minded readers. And you know that's why you called me. That's why you'll always call me."

"Yes."

"That's what I'm good for," he said.

"I know," I said, and later, after we hung up, I changed the line to something less dirty-sounding.

The First Readers

The word "manuscript" makes me feel like a jackass. I feel pompous when I say "my book." I know people are rolling their eyes at me if ever I use the words "my collection of short stories."

This is problematic.

We all know I have issues with control, that I wake up every morning thinking, How can I make people love me today? At all times, I am in some small corner of my brain considering how each of my actions will appear to the outside world. Therefore, I really do worry about how I sound when someone at school says to me, "What did you do last night?" and I reply, "I worked on my book."

Sometimes I shrug it off, play it real cool, pretend like it's no big deal. Why? Because I assume that person is already thinking, "Oh, please. She's writing a book. Yeah. Me too. Everyone's writing a book."

And I don't want to seem like one of those people I hated in grad school. In my experience, the really awful writers were the ones wandering the halls discussing their novels, their manuscripts, their collections without even having been prompted to do so. When they spoke, my brain conjured up an alternate picture of them: There they were in Armstrong Hall, wearing ascots and smoking pipes and looking so pensive their eyebrows fused into one straight line across their head. "My collection," they began, "is a set of interconnected stories that walks the fine line between desire and despair. Each section examines the terrible burden of humanity and what we can do to escape our chains."

By the time they reached the end of their sentence, everyone around them was fantasizing about putting a gun to their heads.

So I worry. I worry incessantly. I do not want to be one of those people, the ones we gave mean nicknames to. I don't want to be the False Writer, the girl who thinks she's good, who thinks she's got something real special when everyone knows she's a big fakey fake.

That's why sometimes I'm reluctant or even embarrassed to talk about my writing projects. I'm constantly wondering, Does he think I'm for real? Does he think I'm a writer like Kanye West is a writer?

Sometimes it's very tiring listening to everything that clacks through my head. And I need to learn how to get over those idiot thoughts that pop in there. Elizabeth Gilbert would tell me I need to acknowledge them, tell myself it's okay, that I love myself despite these silly thoughts, and there's no need for me to hang on to them any more. I'm supposed to say, Self, I love you, and I will always take care of you.

And that sounds nice. So nice. And I tried it last week. When I started fussing around about the book and how it was coming together and what I thought about it, when I started worrying that I'll never find a home for it, that no one will like it, that everything I write is dumb and ugly, I thought of E.G. in Eat, Pray, Love, and I gave it a whirl. I told myself it was okay, that I acknowledged those thoughts but I loved myself despite them. I told myself to let those thoughts go because they did me no service. I thought, Be gone, thoughts! And then I thought, I love you, self, even if you're a crazy obsessing freak. I will always take care of you.

And then my brain said, "How? Your book is never going to be taken."

Clearly I have a ways to go before I become enlightened.

But despite my weird hang-ups about writing--and those listed above are far from the only ones--I still managed to get everything done and arranged, and, early this week, I sent the whole thing--the whole manuscript--off to a select few readers, people I love pretty much more than anything, people who are tough and sweet, people who love me. This will be the easier round of feedback, I'm guessing, even though I know they're going to let me have it whenever I need it.

One of those people asked if I wanted him to send it off to some of his friends. "They're literary-types," he said. "Should I send it to them, too? Should we see what they think?"

And my first reaction, which was automatic, was this: Yes! That's great! A wider audience for feedback!

And then my second reaction, which was more authentic, was: Holy fuck! People I don't really know reading my work! Jesus!

Setting a whole manuscript in front of someone is different than getting a story published in a magazine. One story is one story. If someone doesn't like one story, well, okay. But what if he hates everything you've written, everything you love? Those kind of what ifs are deadly.

In the end, I told my friend sure, it'd be great if he sent the collection along to his friends, and I wanted him to know that I would suffer a few mini panic attacks just thinking about it, but I appreciated it anyway. I really, really did.

Celebrating

I finished the last story for the collection on Saturday night. On Sunday morning, I put the whole thing in the order I think makes most sense right now.

It's done.

Three stories from grad school have made it in, but one is almost entirely rewritten. Most everything else is new. Most everything else was written in Maine. Most everything was written to music. And if my book had a soundtrack, it would something like this:

Yes, I realize that mix gets a little crazy at times--Zevon and Redding? ABBA and The Beach Boys?--and it is a bit all over the place, but these are the songs I had on repeat as I wrote this book.


And here's something else for the celebration--a picture of shirtless Ryan Reynolds! Doesn't that just make you feel good?

Yeah. Me too.

How Many Times Can a Girl Use the Word "Dead" Anyway?

Not that long ago, I opened my mouth and this fell out: "I am going to have my manuscript done by the end of May."

Because of this public admission, I'm now suffering strange (but small) panic attacks. I can be baking cookies or watching American Idol or grading essays and suddenly there's a hand around my throat, and it's choking me, and I'm thinking, Jesus, I am an idiot. Why did I have to go and say that out loud?

I guess it doesn't really matter that I said it out loud. I'm the type of girl who doesn't have a problem doing something after she's promised herself she will, but putting an end-date on my short story collection and speaking that date out loud and to multiple people has put another layer of pressure on me.

But, thankfully, I'm still working despite that pressure. And as I work, I am starting to imagine the shape of the story collection. I'm thinking things like, What story should go after this one? What story shouldn't go after this one? Is there a strong enough theme that fits all these pieces together in one collection? How can I best order the stories to help that theme?

It's like a puzzle, and as I edit and edit and edit, as I read these stories out loud and listen to how they will sound following one another, I am beginning to see patterns, to see the various ways I could slide this puzzle into place.

I've noticed some surprising things along the way, too. For instance, if you would've asked me a few weeks ago whether or not the general tone of my collection was hopeful or not, I would've said without a doubt it was. Then I started thinking about ordering the stories and trying not to bog the reader down in too much sadness when I realized--oh my God--this thing might not be as hopeful as I thought.

When it all boils down to it, here's a basic sketch of plots: girl dying; high school terrorized by kid wearing bird head; baby dead, parents drinking and acting out; girl contemplating cheating; another girl dying; guy setting ex-girlfriend's stuff on fire; kids getting ringworm, mother realizing she doesn't like them; doctor encountering quirky patient; husband dead, wife losing her shit; rapist escaping; boyfriend not who he says he is; cousins getting married, having baby, baby born with severe defects; restaurant workers losing jobs, forming unlikely friendships; high school science teacher hating her job and life.

Of course, the stories can't be boiled down to those little tags just as easily as that. Each story is about a lot of stuff, not just its general plot. Still, there are some chunks of that list that seem a little... well, sad. But I promise you there are some surprises. Some of the stories that sound the most depressing end up being the sweetest, the most hopeful, the greatest love stories.

This is one of the best parts of the whole process: taking stock, looking at everything you have written, and trying to put it together in the way to make everything seem right. Just looking at that list of stories makes me feel like my head is going to snap clean off my neck because those stories--those stories right there--I love them so much, so, so much, and I can't wait to hold the final print-off of the collection in my hands.

Enter the Kid Wearing the Bird Head

There is one girl in my creative writing class who always rolls her eyes when we spend time writing in class. She complains that she has nothing to write about. "Oh my God!" she says. "I have nothing interesting to say!"

You know what she is? She's a big fat liar. Here's how I know that:

Two weeks ago, I opened class with a fairly simple prompt. "For five minutes," I told my class, "write about the strangest, weirdest, oddest person you've ever known. Don't censor yourself. Don't worry about grammar or mechanics. Just write."

So they did. Then I told them to tear those paragraphs out of their notebooks, fold them in half, and pass them down to me. They did. I shuffled. And then I handed the odd little paragraphs out at random so we all ended up with a character that wasn't our own.

I always write along with my students, so I'd filled a paragraph with details about a girl I went to high school with, a girl who went sort of crazy-crazy-nutso and kept this really weird journal with news clippings and drawings of martians and showed it off to a few people, and word eventually got to the principal, who then called everyone who'd seen it--including me and all my friends--into his office at separate times and asked us to describe in great detail everything we'd seen in there.

"Do you think she's dangerous?" he'd asked me.

I thought she was lonely. I thought she'd been picked on for most of our childhoods. I thought she was the daughter of a farmer and she smelled bad. I thought she tried too hard. I thought she had odd mannerisms and hair that needed washing. I thought all of this might have stemmed from those jeans she wore in fifth grade--they had little ducks embroidered on the back pockets, and fifth grade was way past the time anyone was wearing duckie-embroidered jeans.

I told our principal no, I didn't think she was dangerous. I thought she was strange. That was all.

Still, the administration feared the worst. All sorts of security measures were put into place for our graduation day. We heard there were undercover cops in the audience. We heard they were ready to spring into action at even the slightest unexpected rustle or move.

In the middle of the ceremony, after rain started pelting the roof of the auditorium, one of the seniors snuck off the bleachers on the stage and out the side door so he could shut his car windows he forget to put up before he came into school. When the auditorium door--heavy, steel--slammed shut behind him it sounded like a gun shot, and everyone jumped.

And that was the story I'd given away. I don't know who got it and I don't know if they were able to construct a story, an inner-life for that girl, but I hope so. I'm hopeful because from that prompt, I was able to do something good. Really good. And it's all because of the girl who rolls her eyes, the girl who complains she's got nothing to write about.

Her paragraph was about a boy she went to high school with. He smelled. He didn't shower. He wore clothes that didn't fit. And all of that was fine--sort of normal for high school boys, I suppose--but then the paragraph revealed the good stuff: one day he showed up to school wearing a bird head--something from a costume--over his own head. He refused to take it off, and he wore that thing to school every day.

I thought that was too good to be true. The first thing I saw in my head was a high school parking lot, that kid leaning against his car and taking a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket. He lit a cigarette and then reached up with his free hand to open his beak, so he could smoke the cigarette through the costume. So I wrote that. And then I wrote a paragraph in which a very pert, preppy girl named Alexis (said with an exclamation point after it--ALEXIS!--sort of like how they said it in the old Cheri Oteri/Will Ferrell cheerleader skits) comes into homeroom to announce that Jimmy Carbone was in the parking lot wearing a bird head and that she was pretty sure he had a gun and that he was going to kill every last one of them.

It was so fun and weird to write that I felt guilty for stealing my student's good character away from her, and I told her so.

"Are you kidding?" she said, surprised. "I would never write about him. He was just some weird kid from high school."

And I was thinking, My God, Girl, we're all just weird kids from high school. Is there anyone or anything better to write about?

A Change in Theme

When I was in grad school, I was accused of writing about sex. Sex, sex, sex. That's how the boys boiled it down. "When are you going to stop writing about sex," they would say, "and move on to something important?"

But what I was writing wasn't sex. I was writing about relationships and friendships. I was writing about the strange, impossible things that keep us linked even when we shouldn't be. Never once did anything I wrote contain a bodice-shredding scene you'd find in a romance novel. I never had to resort to generating cutesy names for the words penis or vagina. I never had to heed the advice given here.

In all the pages of my thesis, there are only two sex scenes, and they are so fleeting, so distanced, there is nothing romance novel-y about them. Here's the first:

He keeps kissing me. We kiss and kiss and kiss, and I try so hard to listen to myself, to listen and hear if I am saying rightrightrightright somewhere deep inside, some place so far down I haven't paid attention before.

"I love you," he says. He keeps saying it until I can no longer see anything but him. Around us the kitchen melts. Lights flare out. Things I know to be constant and real--toaster, breadbox--are figments of my imagination. He is the only thing there.

That's it. Two paragraphs of a sixteen page story.

And here's the second:

You let him bend you backward. You are a comma, a curve, an impossible mathematical equation. You push back against him and make him take it all back, take everything back, even if it's just for this moment, this second, this sigh. You touch his shoulders, taste the salt at the base of his neck and forgive him his faults, his impossibilities. You are ready to give you things you want, things you've always seen for yourself. He is jagged, irregular, ever-changing, uncontainable. He does not fit. He is not enough. He is too much. He is what you've always feared for yourself.

One paragraph in a twelve page story.

Still, the boys--never once a girl--kept asking, "When are you going to stop with all that nonsense?" One of my peers even stopped me outside workshop and asked me why I was so obsessed with boning.

But I wasn't obsessed with sex, with boning, with writing steamy Harlequin scenes. I was obsessed with relationships and love, with family, with illness. Two stories in my thesis are about cancer. One is about a mother whose children get a nasty case of ringworm. One is about a doctor who's lost his confidence and ability to diagnose.

In those stories, I was writing about relationships--tricky ones--and that's what made a few of the boys uncomfortable. I was writing about mothers and daughters, best friends, coworkers. I was writing about how relationships change when the people in them are faced with death.

Still, somehow I was Sex Girl, and I finally gave up fighting the label. If that's how they wanted to pigeon-hole me, fine. So be it. I'd take it and keep writing what I wanted to write.

But ever since I moved to Maine, there's been a very pronounced shift in my writing, in my theme, in my obsession. Whereas before I was obsessed with the broad idea of relationship and all the strange things that led us to them, kept us in them, and yanked us from them, now I was starting stories that kept asking this question: Why are we so cruel to each other?

I began to write more about the things we do to cut one another down, even when we love the people we are attacking, hurting, embarrassing. Why do a husband and wife tear at each other after the death of their child? Why does a mother say I told you so after her daughter gives birth to a child with severe birth defects? Why do we hurt our friends after all the years we've been close?

Why do we act like such fools?

The last few months have not been easy for me--and it seems like things keep getting harder and worse--and every day I wake up I am faced with that essential question again and again and again: why are we so cruel to each other? What good does it do? Why can't we stop it?

And I thought all the writing I've done and all the writing I've been trying to do lately would help me get closer to understanding it--at least form some sort of basic idea--but, really, that hasn't happened. What has happened is this: I understand it less and less. I have no idea why we act this way, why we have this desire to hurt the people who have loved us.

And maybe that is what has made me so sad lately, what has made me so tired and irritable. I can't find an answer. I can't find understanding. And that is the writer's job--to shed light, to make sense of the human condition, to say this is what it is like to live; this is what it means to be alive.

I wish I understood it. But I'm here to say that this theme, this new question, is going to be hanging over my head for a long, long time--possibly (probably) forever--and that I'm going to try, try, try to figure it out.

Ignoring

Still can't write. Sentences still come out sounding broken. They clunk-clunk-clunk across the page, all those serifs dragging their feet and refusing to come together, to make something pretty and smart and true.

When I can't write, I'm no fun to be around. I sulk and skulk. I sigh. I lie on the couch and watch marathons of America's Next Top Model. I watch shows titled The World's Best Beaches or The World's Best Hotels or The World's Best Vacation Spots. I watch a lot of M*A*S*H. I cry.

I waste a lot of time. I putter. I eat. I eat until I'm past full, until I'm sick, until I'm stuffed and groaning. I tap my fingers and toes. I get up, sit down, get up, sit down. I watch the clock and count the wasted minutes.

I bake cookies. I bake bread. I make a pork roast. I get down cookbooks and read them until I am starving. I map an entire week's worth of recipes. I wonder who will eat all the food I turn out.

I play with Abbey. I crawl on my hands and knees, toss mice. I toss ribbons and Q-Tips. I toss shredded paper, let it fall on our heads. I play hide-and-go-seek. I peek my head around the corner. I let her peek hers around another. I wait. I wait until she gives, until she comes tearing around the corner to hit my shoulder, tell me you're it! I do it again.

I look at myself in the mirror. I picture myself with black hair. With short hair. I purse my lips and wonder what people who aren't writers think about in all their empty minutes. I wonder if they feel like someone has one hand around their throats too.

Blocked

I have no pretty words right now. I feel useless.

Let's watch Abbey play fetch with a Q-Tip and marvel at how disgusting my voice sounds when I do the shrieky Talking-to-the-Kitten tones.

Conjunct This, Saturn.

You would never in a million years guess this by looking at him, but my office-mate is big into all things astrological. This is not something he likes to broadcast. It is not something he wants a lot of people to know. In fact, at last year's department Christmas party, when he promised me he'd show the birth chart that plots the planets at the exact moment of my birth, he made me go into a separate room so he could smooth my chart down on a coffee table and point to the different elements, explain them so I'd understand why I am the way I am. He kept his voice low. He kept one eye on the door, just in case anyone happened by.

Everything he told me was interesting and sickeningly accurate, and I was pretty amazed by the whole thing. And it wouldn't be the last time. This past week, my office-mate brought my chart back in and scooched his chair over to my side of the room. He had a thick book in his lap. "Okay," he said, "let's do this."

My office-mate knows I haven't been having the most stellar time lately. Although I've been having a perfectly lovely semester--seriously, it's been a pretty giant love-fest with my students these last few weeks--he knows my personal life has been glum and gangly. Just ugly. And there were days I would drag myself into school feeling guilty because I liked my students and I wanted to do right by them, but the last thing I wanted to do was stand at the front of a classroom for hour and a half chunks and try to teach them things about writing and literature. I would sit down at my computer and thunk my head to the desk and moan, "I can't do this. I don't know. I'm just so tiiiiiiiiired."

And my office-mate would lean back his chair, nod, and say, "Well, Jess, that's just Saturn."

He explained that people like me--people with their sun conjuncting Saturn--were in trouble for a while. He said Saturn was a planet that made things difficult, heavy, cumbersome. He said it was going to be rough going but then things would get better.

That didn't sound so bad, so I brightened and asked when exactly I could expect my life to feel less like it was a five hundred pound man rolling over on me in the middle of the night--and I fully expected my office-mate to say something like, "Oh, it should all be over by next week!"--but he shrugged and said, "Somewhere around August."

Needless to say, I needed more information. I wanted specifics. If my life was about to be total crap for a mess of months, I wanted to know why. So my office-mate brought in my chart and a stack of reference books.

He pointed things out on my chart and then cracked open one of the books. "Here," he said. "This is you. Read all of this."

"Have you read it?" I asked.

"Yes," he said.

"And is it horrible? Does it say I'm a horrible person who will have horrible things happen to her?"

He gave me a Look. "Read it," he said.

And I did. And it scared the living hell out of me.

Basically, it said that thirteen years ago something awful had happened in my life. It was a time of great upheaval, and that upheaval directly shaped the person I am today. In fact, the book said I'd gone so far as to make myself a promise thirteen years ago, and this year--this one right here--was the year that I was going to make good on that promise, that something was going to come of it. It also said that I couldn't make good on that promise with too many other things cluttering the way, so I was probably going to go through an awful dissolution of a relationship and that I better not try to start anything new either because that was going to be ugly, too.

(It's interesting to know that while I was reading this, I could not keep from conjuring up that part in The Wedding Singer where Adam Sandler and his movie-fiancee, who just stood him up on their wedding day, are discussing the reasons why the wedding didn't occur. His fiancee lists all sorts of things she doesn't like about Adam's character and he says, "Once again, these are things that COULD'VE BEEN BROUGHT TO MY ATTENTION YESTERDAY!!" I think I felt sort of like that. All like, Gee, thanks, Saturn. Fuck off.)

Anyway, I knew exactly what the book was telling me. I knew exactly what event it was referring to. I knew exactly what promise I'd made to myself. And I would've remembered it just fine on my own, but a few nights before, as I was unpacking one of those last straggling boxes from the move, I stumbled on my diary from my freshman year of high school (which was thirteen years ago), and I read through some of the most depressing entries a fourteen year old girl could ever carve out of a page.

My best friend and I had just gone through a very public and evil fight, and the end result was that she said she hated me, and I said I hated her, and she said she was going to get some of her upperclassmen friends to beat the shit out of me, and I said she should just go ahead and try it. Then for the next few months I was doubly sad: after all, I was vaguely terrified I was going to get my ass beat by that tall junior who was rumored to have been in jail, plus I no longer had my best friend in the whole world.

There was something important that corresponded to all of this. My family was taking a winter vacation down to Charlotte, North Carolina so we--a NASCAR-loving brood--could tour the raceteams' shops and get our pictures taken next to Jeff Gordon's championship trophy. I packed all my best turtlenecks and chunky shoes, and I sat in the backseat of the family car with my earphones capped tightly over my ears for the length of the nine hour drive. I seethed the whole time. I thought, I hate my best friend. I hate her. I hate her. I thought, How could she do this to me?

But my mood lightened in Charlotte. I loved Charlotte. And I realized there was a whole big world outside the small town where we went to school, where we lived. And I realized I was meant for bigger things than I could find in that town. And right there, in Charlotte, North Carolina, right outside the Charlotte Motor Speedway, I promised myself two things: that I was going to be the one to get out of our small town, and I was going to become a writer. I was going to become a really good writer. I was going to make something of myself. I thought those things would make my best friend miss me. I thought those things would make my best friend realize she had made a huge mistake. And that's what I wanted more than anything.

Now Saturn is telling me it's time to make good on that promise. And I'm listening. I know Saturn's game now. I'm clued in. I know it's going to be hell for a while and that I'm going to feel fairly awful about everything until this all blows over--just like I did back then, back when losing Tammy's friendship was all I could think about--but I'm ready, and I've been ready, and I'm trying. I'm really, really trying.

I Love My Creative Writing Class

And not just because every time we meet we end up discussing something really perverted, something that makes my cheeks burn red, something that makes the girls giggle, something that makes the guys wiggle their eyebrows at each other.

I love my creative writing class because this feels like the first creative writing class I've ever had where the students are honest to God interested in making something beautiful. They are not there because they think creative writing is going to be an easy grade. They are not there because they had a hole to fill in their schedule. They are not there because they are sleeping with someone else in class. They are just there to do their best, to learn a little something, and to give their classmates some encouragement along the way.

I also love my creative writing class for some of things they create. The first time we did a full workshop, I began class with a prompt that would loosen them up, get them talking, get them collaborating. I wanted everyone to go into workshop feeling pretty damn good about themselves. And so we wrote fantastic collaborative poems--and some of them turned out so great.

The rules were simple: write a line at the top of your paper. Pass it to the next person, and they will write a line that stems from the previous line. Then, after their line has been written, they fold the paper over so that the only line visible is their own. It goes on that way for a full circle until the poem gets back to the original author. At that point, the author writes the final line.

Here's the poem that sprang from the line I started with:

Falling in love is not
like eating sour candy;
it's like piercing my wanton taste buds,
like tiny needles piercing flesh.
It stings like sleet on the face,
a pain so raw and honest,
but who cares about them
and their silly games?
Why do they play them?
Is it the money or the fame?
Or was it just the texture,
the gritty feeling of mud in the mouth
which brought him quickly to his senses.
He thrust his right hand out and
that's when I saw the sun.

Sure, there might be problems with that, but I've got to hand it to them: a good portion of that poem somehow seemed to make sense, even if the students only saw the line before the one they crafted. I love the line about the mud. I love the poem. I love them.

On Heavy Rotation

Last summer when I was working at the diner, I was on a steady diet of music from the 50s and 60s. The jukebox played oldies, the CD player played oldies, even the radio behind the line played "oldies"--the Grease soundtrack was one of the cooks' favorites.

So when I set out to write my long love letter to the diner and all its bizarre inhabitants--including even these perverts--I knew I needed music to get me into the right mind frame. I tried to set up an appropriate station through Pandora, but it was never quite right. I had to start from scratch. I had to make my own mix-tape. It had to be loaded with all the right songs. It had to be heavy on Frankie Valli, Otis Redding, The Everly Brothers, Elvis, The Crystals. It had to be the kind of music the other waitresses and I swung our hips to in the hot summer months.

I'm sure when my neighbors walk by my door on their way upstairs to their own apartments, they are wondering just why I blare the oldies so, so often. I'm sure they think I'm actually much older than I am.

If She Knew I Was Writing About Her, She Might Say, "Why the Hell Would You Do A Stupid Thing Like That?"

Since I came back from Buffalo at the beginning of June, I have been doing a whole lot of nothing. This summers-off thing is pretty great, and I've been using my new free time to catch up on a lot of things: cleaning, recipe-testing, and reading. I've been going on long walks. I've been collecting seashells. I've been lying on the beach. I've been honing my freckles.

I've also started a new writing project. It started out as a single story, but then I realized what I was really gearing up to write was a long, long, long love letter to all the people I worked with last summer. It was especially a love letter to my favorite waitress at the diner, a girl whose boobs I have seen on numerous occasions after she has called my name so sweetly, only to get me to turn around and see her standing by the grill (or the back booth or the jukebox or the pie case), half nude.

When I started writing, I wanted to pay some sort of homage to her. It's not just that she's weird, crazy, and a little wild; it's that she's got a life that you would not believe. If, over the course of last summer, I had kept a diary of everything that happened to her in a month's time, people would have read it and said, "This can't be true. You made it all up."

But I swear on everything holy, I would've made none of it up. None of it. Here is a list of some of the things that make her more interesting than anyone else I've ever waitressed with:

1. Whenever her very sexually active fifteen year-old brother sleeps with someone new, he makes that girl leave behind the pair of panties she was wearing, and he tacks them up to his wall.
2. When she was pulled over for speeding, she got out of it because she had a box in the back of her car--a box the cop found suspicious and asked her to open--and that box was full of her collection of sex toys. The cop, flustered, sent her on her way.
3. Her mother washes her own vibrators in the dishwasher.
4. At all times, her mother has a trunk stocked with the following things: Avon merchandise and bizarre pornos: clown porn, midget porn, I-swear-I'm-eighteen porn.
5. Her brother has punched her.
6. Her brother has been arrested, suspended, and sent away to a special school for angry boys.
7. She has very seriously thought about driving over to the house of a waitress she hates just to shit on the hood of her car.

On their own, those things are just amusing anecdotes. You can't build a story based on amusing anecdotes (although I certainly tried that a whole bunch in grad school), but, luckily, this girl is made of more than just amusing anecdotes. There is something so sad, so pretty, so delicate about her, and it just begs to be written. I've seen her sitting on her couch and crying because she's so sore from having a layer of her skin stripped off because it's cancer again. I've seen her nervous about people seeing her new scars. I've seen her angry and heartbroken and glaring across the table at a boy who has, with a few clipped words, broken her heart for the fifth time that day--a cycle that will repeat for months and months and months and months.

And so I tried to write about her. I tried to do her justice. But as I started, I realized I couldn't do her justice without doing justice to everyone else who worked with me. There were five or six people at the diner who shocked me on a regular basis last summer, and they filled me with so much material that I'm just looking for the right place to put it. And I think I might have found it now. I think maybe what I'm doing is writing a collection of connected stories, although right now it feels more like a novel where each character gets a turn at narration. So even if I'm not exactly sure how it's being pieced together, the first part is done, and I'm moving on to the next narrator.

And I'd like to tell my favorite waitress just how fond I am of some of the things the character who resembles her says and does and thinks, but I know if I explain what I am doing and what I am writing, she will just scrunch up her face and say, "Why would anyone want to write about me?"

And I would tell her I've never before been asked a question with such an obvious answer.

Chief Pinski Is SO Calling Shotgun

Sometimes I really love students. Today I love one of my students for a revision he made in his argument paper.

In his original essay, this student--a snarky, sly, wise-crackin' guy who always, always, always showed up and did his work to the best of his ability--wrote the following sentence:

Police officers have two-way radios in their vehicles along with firefighters.

The first time I read that, I pictured a cop cracking open a box of donuts to share with a firefighter who was dressed in full gear and riding shotgun. It seemed downright cozy in that squad car. And it made me want a donut.

I scrawled the following words over that sentence: Policemen have firefighters in their cars? Please be conscious of your writing. Your intended meaning has been altered because of your wording.

Well, today I got this student's portfolio, which is supposed to showcase revised essays, and I scanned to see if he'd fixed that sentence. And he had. Just not all the way.

Police officers, he wrote, have two-way radios in their vehicles along with firefighters in their fire trucks.

Lucky policemen. They get two sweet rides, not to mention firemen who are always at their disposal.

Haikus for Spring and the End of the Semester

1.

Hand out eval forms,
pretty little Scantron sheets,
wave bye bye! bye bye!

2.

Rain for two days means
leaks in the bathroom ceiling,
a wet dot in tile.

3.

No sleep for days now.
My body think it's June, wants
to drink in 3 A.M.

4.

Friends send pictures of
my boyfriend and his thick beard.
I dream of razors.

5.

The river floods high,
closes roads and businesses.
I want to swim there.

6.

Bears snuffle from sleep
in May. We will drive inland,
watch from a window.

7.

I have been promised
moose in August, a whole camp
of sleepy bulls, calves.

8.

I am thinking of
prairies. I am thinking of
Midwestern sunsets.

9.

Phone calls from Ex-Keith
are all about road rage and
sweaty sex with M.I.L.F.s.

10.

Dear Simon Cowell,
Can we give David Cook the
title and be done?

11.

Goths outside my place
ask if I have a smoke. Bet
they hate my pink coat.

12.

The river, again:
don't want to be pulled in. I
want to be the pull.

13.

Ray Lamontagne was
born just over the river.
Where did he write Burn?

14.

Here, the sunset comes
down over abandoned mills,
other ancient things.

15.

Seven days 'til the
end of the semester. Eight-
teen 'til Mexico.

Start Spreading the News

Here's where I'll be tomorrow:

I'll be returning to the mother ship.

The first time I went to the AWP conference I was a first-year in my grad program. The conference was held in Chicago that year, and a bunch of us hopped into a caravan and drove off to our hotel, loaded down with the necessities: dozens of cookies, bottles of vodka, a case of Red Bull, and high-heeled boots.

Here's what I can tell you about AWP that year: I was drunk for most of it.

I was drunk at lunch. I was drunk at dinner. I was drunk at midnight. I went to bed drunk and giggling.

I ran across the city like a girl possessed. I wanted to see everything I could in the few days I was in Chicago. I wanted to eat a deep dish pizza whose crust was made with two sticks of butter. I wanted to walk the Miracle Mile and press my nose against all the windows keeping me from all the fabulous things I couldn't afford. I wanted to stand on the edge of the lake and look East. I wanted to wander through the aquarium, wide-eyed and blinking at all the glowing tentacles. I wanted to listen to writers talk about writing--especially my ultimate author crush. I wanted to read my own writing and have people listen. I wanted to be drunk.

I did all of those things. I did the last one--the getting drunk--for a pretty good reason. There was this boy, and I'd had a momentary crush on him when I first got to Minnesota. He found out about the crush and somehow thought I would wilt, I would wither, I would become a lumpy pool of girl on the floor after I realized he didn't like me back. So what did he do? He called me up, asked me to meet him for a drink, and then he told me--out loud, to my face, sitting mere inches from me--that he was sorry but he would never like me like that. He told me he liked someone else, he was going to pursue this other thing, and he really hoped we could continue to be friends. "Listen," he said, kindly, near the end of the already horrific conversation, "I'm sorry if I maybe gave you the wrong idea about things. And I'm sorry you made the decision to come to Minnesota because you thought something was going to happen between us."

At this point in the conversation my head almost fell off my neck. This boy had been an ambassador for the college when I rolled into town after getting my acceptance. I was there to look around, see what there was to see--which turned out to be, uhm, soybeans--and to find an apartment. I'd promised myself to the school. I'd promised myself as a teaching assistant. All of this made me nervous, and this boy was around to take some of that nervousness away. He did a good job. He also did a good job of being cute and charming and sweet. His was the first set of Midwestern blue eyes I ever encountered, and looking at them made me think, Sign me up.

But to think I'd come to Minnesota because of him was ridiculous. I'd already sent in my paperwork and started planning my schedule. I'd already spent precious hours meditating on my first day's outfit--and that day wouldn't happen for months. I was settled. I was devoted to Minnesota. Say what you will about me, but I've never been the kind of girl who stays or goes depending on a boy. You can say I'm frivolous, boy-crazy, and silly, but you can't say I don't have a good head on my shoulders.

So in the moment this boy revealed he was just so concerned about me, a little girl from Buffalo who had packed up all her things and driven West because he was just so irresistible, I wanted to vomit up all the vodka-cranberries I'd mainlined in time I'd been at the bar.

I sat up straight. I tried to look strong. "I did not," I said, "come to Minnesota because of you."

And he smiled at me and patted my hand, like, Whatever you need to tell yourself to make it through the day.

I wanted to run out the front door, screaming all the way down to the river, where I would promptly throw myself in and drown out of embarrassment.

Anyway, the embarrassment didn't last for long. I got over it pretty quick, in fact. I had lots of things to occupy me from that point on, and one of those things was the Wily Republican. He and I had taken up together a few months before AWP, so I didn't really care what that first boy thought anymore. I knew what I was thinking, and I was thinking, Thank God for the military and the way it develops boys with great abs. That first semester we ran around together, the WR still had his military-built body, and when he took his shirt off it was really a thing of beauty.

But when we got to AWP, suddenly I was face to face with the embarrassment once again. After all, there was that first boy with his girl--the one he'd been referring to when he took me out for a drink--and they were sitting on each other's laps, cooing into each other's ears, gazing into each other's eyes. And they were doing it right in front of me.

I knew the boy had told his girlfriend about what happened with me, and that made me feel so foolish--mostly because this girl was achingly beautiful, more beautiful than I could ever hope to be. I felt that whenever she looked at me, she did so with pitying eyes, eyes you use when looking at a beauty pageant contestant who has everything going for her--body, poise, brains--but a jacked-up face. It's a look that says, Oh, you were so close to being pretty, and then this whole face thing happened.

The girl probably wasn't thinking that, but I felt she was. I'd already suffered through the embarrassment brought about by her boyfriend, and I didn't want to suffer through any more. And so I drank a lot. And I ate a lot of cookies. And whenever I felt like I was going to vomit from the embarrassment of everyone knowing what happened, I would think about the Wily and his big bed and his good shoulders and eyes and arms and legs and everything. And that made me feel a little bit better. A lot better. So did the drinking.

But now I don't have any of those issues hanging over my head. Now I am a different girl. I am gainfully employed, boyfriended, stable. Which makes me wonder what this little trip is going to be like. Who will I see, what will I remember, how will I feel when I get to spend time with the people who picked me out, shaped me up, and set me singing?

I'm ready, ready, ready.

And Then I Drank a Giant Glass of Wine

I don't think it's any kind of secret that I haven't been having an easy time writing lately. Actually, it's been hell. Everything I put down on paper sounds ridiculous, and I'm still trying to figure out why. It could be that I'm out of practice. When I took up waitressing again this past summer, my life sort of revolved around the diner. It sucked both my time and will to write straight out of me. All the lofty goals I'd set down for the summer--finish this story! finish that story! put together manuscript!--dried up, scattered, got lost along the way.

It could also be that I'm happy. I hate to even say out loud because it gives the impression that to be a good writer a person has to be sad, depressed, all-the-time glum, and that's just not true. I've written well when happy, and I've written well when sad. But it's just that most of the writing I did during grad school--most of my thesis, for example--was written when I was in a bad and ugly place, when I was face down on my desk, crying over this or that thing the Wily Republican had done, hadn't done, had said, or hadn't said. And now, with the most recent developments in my life (a nice boy, a good job, a wisecracking group of students, a heap of achieved goals) have left me a little stunned, a little wide-eyed and blinking in disbelief. I don't know if I understand how to be this new girl with this new life just yet. I'm on unsteady legs here, but I'm learning.

It could also be that I'm busy. After all, I am teaching five classes--some of them brand-new to me--and there isn't a familiar textbook in sight. I'm starting from scratch. I don't mind starting from scratch, but doing so takes time and effort. My writing has sort of been pushed aside in favor of not drowning in backlogged work.

So, whatever it is--and it's probably a combination of all those things--continues, and I have been struggling to write things that don't sound like nails on a chalkboard. Most of the time I end up so frustrated by the things I write that I have to pick up notebooks or pads of sticky notes and throw them across the room just to hear the satisfying thwock of them falling to the ground.

And this probably accounts for why I had such a frustrating conversation with one of my composition students last week. The circumstances were these: this student had turned in a paper that was lifted directly from the internet. Word for word. He'd just placed his name on it and handed it in. Of course I'd realized this the moment I read the first line. Of course I did. The writing was crisp and, well, perfect. It had the sheen and polish of textbook-worthy prose. And so I googled, and there it was.

When I found it, I silently fumed the way I always do when I catch a plagiarizer. I thought about how nice it must be for him to have such a casual relationship with language and writing that he could care less if he borrowed someone else's words. It must be nice for him not to care about turning in something good, something beautiful, something worth reading.

When he showed up the next week to retrieve his paper, I told him I'd left it in my office. I told him he needed to follow me there to get it. He did. He slumped in the chair by my desk and blew out a long, bored breath.

"We need to talk about your paper," I said.

"How come?" he asked.

"You know why," I said. I always like to give students the chance to come clean about their cheating. For some reason, I'd respect them more if they threw up their hands and said, You know what? You caught me. Sorry about that. But most of them don't do that. They go in the exact opposite direction: they lie, lie, lie. The lies stack up on the original lie--their plagiarized paper--until they've constructed a shaky foundation of not-quite-truths they hope will stick.

"You mean how bad it was written?" the student asked me. "I know, I know. I'm a real bad writer."

I sighed. I wouldn't be salvaging even the smallest nip of respect for this student, that much was evident. "No, actually. See, the paper was nicely constructed. Really well written."

"Wow," the student said. A smile broke across his face.

"And that's how I knew something was wrong," I said. The speed with which that smile fell off his face was impressive. "I've read your writing," I continued. "I know what types of mistakes you make and how often you make them. When I read this and found no mistakes, I knew something was up."

"Well, it's all mine," the student said. "Every last word."

I handed him the paper. I had attached a print-off of the paper I'd found on the web. "Then how do you explain this?" I asked.

The student looked down at the paper for a good long time, and I didn't say anything. When I first started doing this--teaching, rooting out plagiarizers--I had tried to save students from this embarrassing moment, tried to talk for them, but a girl can only do that so many times without getting angry. I sat back in my chair and waited for him to get his next lie straight.

"Oh, that," he said.

"Yeah," I said. "That."

"Didn't I cite this?" he asked.

I told him it didn't matter if he'd cited or not (and he hadn't) because he'd taken the whole thing, word for word, and transferred it to his paper. That, I said, was not kosher. After all, how was that writing? How did that seem like learning?

"You mean I can't do that?" he asked. He opened his eyes wide, like some sort of cartoon character who was having the life squeezed out of him, and gave the best performance he could. "I mean, like, you can't borrow someone else's words and put them in your paper?"

"You can't take a whole paper that's not yours, erase the author's name, and put your name in its place," I said. "And I know you know that."

"No," he said, shaking his head, his eyes still bugging clear out of his head. "I didn't know you couldn't do that. I swear it. I've been doing it all my life. Wow." He kept shaking his head. "I mean, wow. I'm so glad you just taught me it's wrong because I've literally been doing that forever. My friend and I were going to turn in our final papers like that for another class. I'm so glad you caught me before I did that."

Oh, oh, oh. I wanted to yell or to tell him to get the hell out of my office, but I didn't. I took a deep breath--deeper than any breath I've taken before--and I looked out my window, up at the night sky and the stars that were shining above the college's brick buildings. I let the silence sit between us. It made me feel grounded. I imagine it made him feel uncomfortable.

"So, like, am I going to fail?" my student asked.

"College policy states any plagiarized assignments will receive an F," I said. "So, yeah, you failed this paper."

"Am I going to fail the class?" he asked.

"I guess that depends on what you decide to do with the rest of the class," I said.

He looked glum. "Well, I guess you should just fail me then," he said. "Go ahead. I mean, just flunk me for the whole class. This whole thing is a big waste of time for me."

I stared at him. I stared hard. "Excuse me?" I asked. "My class is a waste of time?"

He tried to back his statement up, but that didn't quite work. "Well, no, that's not what I mean," he said. "I mean college in general. College is the waste of time. The whole thing. I don't really need to be here."

"You don't?"

"Not really," he said. He shrugged. "I'm just in here to waste time. It was either this or get a job, and I don't really want to get a job right now. So you can flunk me."

"Well, you are definitely getting an F for this assignment," I said.

He looked a little sheepish. "And you might as well hand back that paper I just turned in today," he said. He slanted a half-grin my way. "You know..." he said and shrugged again.

"You stole that, too?" I asked.

"Parts of it, yeah," he said. "But like I said--I didn't know that was something you weren't supposed to do."

After I got home from school that night, I went straight into the kitchen and got down the bottle of Bella Rosa I had sitting on top of my fridge. I poured myself a big, big glass. I didn't know it yet, but later I would try to write, try to sit down and turn a phrase--just one, just one good phrase--and nothing would come. Not a single thing. I would sit there in the dark, my face lit by the blank computer screen, and nothing would happen. But I would still sit there all night. I would still try. I would still put my fingers to the keyboard with the best of intentions.