Truth ... And my given name

"As soon as a [writer] stops observing . . . he becomes an evangelist, a politician. A person with Opinions. . . . The [writer] must be on the side of life, willing to surrender his 'beliefs' even . . . When one believes he has the Truth, he is no longer an artist."



from this book by Joyce Carol Oates

*

Yesterday I got an email from Mom telling me that she almost forgot how to spell my name, Kathleen, the name she gave to me 45 years ago. She wrote, "I guess that's what to be expected, but that doesn't make it any easier!"

Given that Mom has mid-stage Alzheimer's, I'm continually amazed at how aware she is of what she's losing.

As one geriatric specialist said, Mom is a smart, accomplished woman. Some people who are at her stage might be more debiltated; she might be losing a lot, but she still has a lot to work with.

That said, I'm trying not to obsess over every detail of her disease. Instead, I'm trying to enjoy every moment we have together. Tomorrow we'll go to my sister's house, eat pizza, and watch Idol. My nieces and nephew will be running around, and we'll embrace all we have. And we do have a lot: love, the present moment, and each other.

Damn You Barak Obama

This is not only an example of great slam poetry by Darian Dauchan--it does a great job of expressing the complexity of feelings that many of us have about politics and Barak Obama. (Thanks, Ellen.)

JCO Quote #2

"Fiction that adds up, that suggests a 'logical consistency,' or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery."

from this book by Joyce Carol Oates

I like that. Art embraces and creates mystery, not explanation. It reminds me that as a writer (to paraphrase Foucault), I am freer than I think.

*

Oops, we forgot to turn out the lights last night. We were watching a movie and looked up and saw it was 8:50 p.m., only ten minutes left of Earth Hour.

Bad, bad earth stewards.

We are now off to atone with a hike in the redwoods. Of course we have to drive to get there.

Um. We put spiral flourescent lightbulbs in our lamps. Does that count?

Earth Hour

Are you going to do it? (Or, did you?)



Why or why not?

(Annie wants to, so I'm getting the candles ready. Will all the burning candles add more pollution to the atmosphere? Okay, I'll shut up and quit being cynical. I'll just enjoy the silence and the dancing candlelight.)

JCO Quote #1

For the next few entries I'll be posting some juicy quotes from Joyce Carol Oates' journal that I liked, ones that got me thinking about my own choices as a writer.


"'Keeing busy' is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed."


This speaks to me. I know when I have more writing and thinking time--when I don't allow myself to be pulled into so many different directions--I go deeper with my writing.

Them

I'm reading them, the National Award-winning early novel by Joyce Carol Oates. It's oddly melodramatic (get a load of the cornball paperback cover), yet it's also mesmerizing.

In style and substance, it has a naturalist quality like novels by Zola and Frank Norris.

Since reading Oates' journal, I decided to tackle more of her fiction. I'm going to read probably about six or seven of her novels in chronological order to get a sense of her growth as a writer.

Here's a clip of JCO talking about novel writing. I like what she says about characters--as well as about perseverance.

Pregnant Man Due in July

No, this is not a National Enquirer article.

It's all over the news now that the story appeared in The Advocate. (The pregnant man, Thomas Beatie, is transgendered.)

The Advocate's website is down right now, overloaded with visitors, I'm sure.

I wonder why this story is getting so much press when, apparently, Beatie's not the first man to give birth, at least according to ABC News:

"Beatie, who was born a woman named Tracy Lagondino, had reassignment surgery to appear as a man outwardly, but he never surgically altered his reproductive organs, he said in the article. He only had chest reconstruction and began taking testosterone, Beatie said, meaning he still has ovaries and a uterus.

Now Beatie, who said he was able to get pregnant using artificial insemination, is expecting a baby girl with his wife, Nancy. He said he was 22 weeks along. The baby is due July 3.

But Beatie's case, while uncommon, is not unique. Another transgender man has given birth before, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center obstetrician Dr. Lisa Masterson said on Good Morning America today.

'A transgender man can be pregnant because he has the same organs as a woman,' she said, adding that Beatie should have no problem having a baby."

I'm sure the religious right is going to have a big freak-out. But what's great about it is: they can't stop it. The combination of queer rights and science (combined with backlash) will, no doubt, be continuing to push the gender envelope in all kinds of ways.

Ideally, this means more freedom from gender straight-jackets. Of course in the meantime, it will unfortunately mean a conflagration of bigotry and fear.

Addendum: Joe.My.God's blog pointed me to this article about two transmen (one of whom is the well-known trans activist and writer Pat Califia) who had a baby. My favorite line is: "My boyfriend is the mother of my child."

Literary Errata

I'll be reading at a celebration of ZYZZYVA (which will publish my poem "I Have No" in its new issue):

Thursday April 17, 6:30 p.m., at the Book Bay Bookstore of the San Francisco Main Library (on Grove Street).

*

QUEER WRITERS TAKE NOTE:

Seven Kitchens Press announces the 2008 Robin Becker Chapbook Prize for an original, unpublished manuscript in English by a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual or Transgendered writer. For more information, click here.

I'm Baa-ck

Okay, I know I wasn't away long. But on Friday, Saturday and today I cranked on a writing project--ten-hour writing days. When I get like that, writing can be addicting.

I have four writerly pals who are going to read it and give me feedback.

I'm nervous about this project, but I want to know the truth. I want to make it the best it can be. I don't want an ounce of it to be sentimental, simplistic or unclear--because it's the most important thing I've ever written.

Now I can give myself some breathing space. Once I get feedback (probably within a month or so), I'll be able to revise with fresh eyes.

In the meantime, I'm going to dive into the research for my historical novel--and to take some time during this break to walk on the beach, have dinner with friends, and to hang out with Annie and my mom.

And I'm staying away from email for a whole week! At least that's the plan. Let's see if I can do it. If not, I might need an intervention.

Only Connect

Fortunately, we're not going anywhere this spring break. We'll just stay in our sweet little house, not breaking the bank by buying gas.

Isn't it funny how language changes? Just a few years ago, this could not have been a joke. The internet has influenced not only the way we speak and write, but they way we think: more in terms of connections and jumping around link-crazy. A kind of maniacal multi-tasking. Or perhaps nothing changes. Consider the fact that it was about 100 years ago that E.M. Forster implored us to "only connect."

I'm disconnecting right now, for a few days, from the internet, going to focus on non-virtual reality for a while, going to do things like take long beach walks walks, write and read for hours in the morning, and wander around with my dogs and Annie. I want time to slow down on Spring Break so I really feel it and experience it. I want to "only connect" to life.

Have a great holiday, everyone.

Spring and the Interior Year

I'm really enjoying my students this semester. So many of them are full of ideas and questions and opinions and energy. They are supportive of each other's writing, and they are gelling as a group.

I've taught classes in the past that I've dreaded attending (yes, students aren't the only ones who dread going to class sometimes)--but I don't feel that way at all this semester about either of my groups. I feel lucky.

*

Spring break is next week. Lots of writing time. I think it's possible I might be able to do a lot of work on a memoir piece I'm working on. The memoir is about the phenomenon of "caretaking" for ill and elderly people. I write about the long-term illness and death of my father, followed almost immediately by my mother's Alzheimer's diagnosis (as well as other "caretaking" stories, such as Annie's caring for her ill mother, and my mom's caring for her parents and my father).

My working title is: Seams of Our Interior Year: A Memoir of Caretaking.

The title comes from a line by Rilke's Duino Elegies:

We wasters of sorrows!
How we stare away into sad endurance beyond them
trying to force their end! Whereas they are nothing else
than our winter foliage, our sombre evergreen, one of the seams of our
interior year—not only season—they’re also place, settlement camp,
soil, dwelling.

Five Years of Inhumanity

"In a little over a month, the U.S. will have been occupying Iraq for 5 years. It's hard to believe. Even when looking at the awful numbers -- more than 1 million Iraqis and nearly 4,000 U.S. servicepeople killed, 2 million Iraqis living as refugees in other countries, with another 2.5 million displaced within Iraq, more than 1 trillion dollars spent -- I find it difficult to grasp what 5 years really means. What is the full sum of the destruction and suffering that has taken place? And what does it mean for the future of our country and our world?" - Leslie Cagan

Passings

"With the passing of its editor, Raymond J. Smith, Ontario Review itself will cease publication with the forthcoming Spring 2008 issue. Smith began Ontario Review in 1974 in Windsor, Ontario, with his wife Joyce Carol Oates as associate editor..."

*
Yesterday I talked to my students a little bit about my process of writing poetry. I read aloud a few of my poems and almost read one about my father, but I decided against it because I wasn't sure I could make it through since (as I wrote in the last entry) yesterday was the one-year mark of my his death.

So I'll post it here, in his memory. (This poem appears in Like All We Love.)

What My Father Gives

The doctors and nurses and respiratory therapists come in
with vials and clipboards and white or black shoes, pushing

buttons like astronauts, speaking words I don’t know. My father’s
lungs are failing, they’ve been failing a long time, twenty-five

years of failing, and I’ve lived my whole life as though I’m not dying.
They’ve asked my mom to take off his wedding band, to pull it off

his finger after forty-seven years, her own fingers white as bone,
his as red as the crushed velvet bedspread on my growing-up bed,

in the room of our new house where my dad built the redwood decks
around the oaks to save them, the house where we had rules like draw

the drapes when the sun shines in the living room so the carpet
won’t fade, like take off your shoes in the entry so you don’t

track in dirt, and when that didn’t work, walk only on the plastic
runners. Those runners had little rubber prongs that dug into the

carpet to stay put, and sometimes I’d turn them over and walk on the
prongs barefoot for a pleasing pinch of the feet. My sister and I

had our own rooms with big windows that looked out onto blue oak
and manzanita and ghost pine. One night I woke to an owl sitting

on a limb at my window. I turned on my light to see her better, but
of course the window turned opaque. Raccoons and possums

fell into the pool, and my dad fished them out with the leaf skimmer,
its handle curving with dead weight. When he started coughing,

I can see now, he was still young, not much older than I am now.
He drove my sister and me to school, one of us folded in the backseat

of his sports car that didn’t really have a backseat. As he shifted gears,
spots of coffee would jump out of his ceramic mug, and the cold morning

air made his cough worse. Around then, the time of the blue sports car,
he started hooking up to a machine in the morning and again at night,

then lying on a slant board for my mom to pound his back and chest
so he’d cough up the phlegm his lungs refused to clear by themselves.

He wears flannel shirts and Birkenstocks, has a full head of dark
hair, just a little gray, and a handlebar mustache they shaved in the

hospital so they could tape still the tubes. When they pulled the tape away,
when he unexpectedly lived, we saw they had shaved only above the lip

so his handlebars remained, unanchored. He has crystal blue eyes that turn
bloodshot when he coughs and coughs, and with my mom on a trip, I’m the one

who pounds him, and when we finish, cleans the machine. I throw out
the fluids still warm from his body, clean the machine with dish soap. Then

I make him breakfast, and he asks for more strawberries or hotter coffee,
and a glass of water in a short glass, not tall. He knocks over the tall ones.

My mother has taken a group trip to the other side of the continent. My father
insists on coming to the airport to pick her up, even though it’s cold and late.

When she comes through the gate, her small folded body, her hair cloud-white,
I think she can see that nothing has changed, that my father still wheels his

oxygen, and they kiss. On the trip she met an eighty-three year old woman
who still teaches second grade and who lives in a Manhattan apartment,

and my mom is astonished that some people live their whole lives unlike us,
no backyards or garages or leaf-strewn decks. Ten years ago I fell in love

with a woman, and it seemed an apocalypse, like an atomic blast cremated
the house, incinerated the formal dining room. I was stubborn. There was no

middle ground. My parents grasped at me like the string of a kite in a fierce wind.
My love and I married this February, when the mayor of San Francisco decided

to break the law, and afterward my parents took us to dinner, held up glasses
of wine, rubied in gold candlelight. When we thought he was going to die,

when his breath was like a crack in a sidewalk, my father told my love
that she is like a daughter to him. I saw him holding onto that bed, dying

in his living as he has for years. I have lived as though death belongs to him.
He has owned it for me. That is what he wants, I now see, my immortality.

One Year

My father died one year ago today. I was with him when he died at 3 a.m. The middle of the night and the beginning of spring are resonant with my memories of him--and likely always will be.

I know I was lucky to have such a loving, funny Dad. He cared about me, was invested in my life. He loved Annie "like a daughter" as he said several times. He was one of those rare men who, when he screwed up, would apologize. He lived big. He loved life and didn't want to leave it.

I began writing this blog last year in response, in great part, to the loss of my dad, as you can see in the first entry.

I will honor him today by breathing, by loving the blue sky and sun, by touching the shells I picked up at the beach yesterday (he taught me to love the ocean)--and by being kind to those around me, making sure to apologize when I screw up.

Beach and Teach

Took a long Santa Cruz beach walk today. Sure feels like spring...which, by the way, is just three days away.

Am re-reading Peter Nathaniel Malae's story collection Teach the Free Man, since I'm teaching it in my fiction writing class. Peter (who is currently a Steinbeck Fellow on campus)will be visiting my class to talk to my students about writing.

Peter's a force of nature. He's intense. He writes every day from midnight to 4 a.m., or something like that (I'll get the details when he comes to class, I'm sure). He's now working on his second novel, while the first is being seriously considered by a big publisher.

As I was re-reading the stories, I found myself getting tense, even though I'd read them before and knew what happens. He's excellent at building tension through crafting a creeping-up of external and internal conflict.

All of these stories center on California prison inmates or parolees. In the first story, "Turning Point" (which originally appeared in Cimarron Review), you can feel the painful contrast between the outside world and what's going on inside the main character's head. The whole thing simmers, and you're just waiting for the explosion. Fitting, given that violence is integral to prison life.

When Girls Will Be Boys

"Jordan Akerley (left), a senior at Wellesley College, eschews pronouns," according to a really good indepth article in today's New York Times about transmen who are in college.

The focus of the piece, in part, is women's colleges. What happens when a woman transitions to a man at a single-sex institution? Goes to show how institutions change so glacially that they never quite catch up to social changes.

The transmen quoted in the article are all so articulate and thoughtful about their queernesses. I love the way that Rey, for example, says: “Some transmen want to be seen as men — they want to be accepted as born men. I want to be accepted as a transman — my brain is not gendered. There’s this crazy gender binary that’s built into all of life, that there are just two genders that are acceptable. I don’t want to have to fit into that.”

"He Will Make Cheney Look Like Gandhi"

If you're voting for John McCain, here's what you're voting for:

And now a Quiz about McCain, aka "Senator Hothead":

Q: What did Richard Kimball, John McCain's opponent in his 1986 Senate race, do during a debate that got McCain so upset that, according to his aide Jay Smith, he "wanted to kill" Kimball?
A: He revealed that McCain was standing on a riser behind his podium.

Q: What prompted Jon Stewart, on "The Daily Show," to ask, "Has John McCain's Straight Talk Express been rereouted through Bullshit Town"?

A: McCain decided to speak at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University six years after calling Falwell and Pat Robertson "agents of intolerance."

Q: McCain told workers at a gun factory, "I will follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of Hell and I will shoot him with one of your products." How did he later clarify this declaration?

A: "I certainly didn't mean I would actually shoot him. I am certainly angry at him, but . . . I would not shoot him myself."

Q: True or False: When he was a boy, McCain liked to blow up frogs with firecrackers.

A: True.

Q: True or False: When Chelsea Clinton was eighteen, McCain told this joke: "Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because Janet Reno is her father."

A: False. (Just kidding, True.)

Q: What was McCain referring to when he told reporters, "It's up to you to find that out, kids?"

A: The financial connections between Cindy McCain and Charles Keating, the man behind the nation's biggest savings-and-loan collapse.

Q: Who said the following about McCain: "He will make Cheney look like Gandhi"?

A: Pat Buchanan.

(adapted from the 3/17/08 New York Times)

A Literary Couple

What a contrast: she writes poetry, and he writes about serial killers.

Kimiko Hahn and Harold Schechter are a fascinating, kind and generous literary couple who've been visiting us from New York for the past two days (they both teach at SUNY, Queens College).

Kimiko gave talks and readings on Wednesday and Harold last night.

Kimiko told me--kind of tongue-in-cheek--that it was necrophelia that brought them together. She had been teaching the book by Jeffery Dahmer's father in one of her frosh courses. When someone told Harold--the author of many historical books about psychopaths--what his colleague was up to, he just had to talk to her. (Kimiko was teaching the Dahmer book because she knew there were some frosh who'd never read a book the whole way through, and her goal was to find a book they wouldn't put down.)

Kimiko's poetry is fresh and intriguing. In her past two collections, she's been playing around with her own version of the zuihitsu, which she says is like a fungus: a fungus is its own species (neither plant nor animal) and a zuihitsu is also its own thing, not really poetry or prose. It's random thoughts woven around an organizing principle. It's miscellany, sort of stream-of-consciousness, and can contain lists and fragments. It's intuitive, illogical, spontaneous, ambiguous, contradictory and playful.

Harold is interested in the mythical creation of "monsters" in popular culture (including popular culture of the 19th century). He's written a whole series of books about murders that became famous in their day, exploring why certain crimes ignite the imagination (while others that may be even "more horrible" drop away from the headlines).

Harold wrote an episode of Law & Order about a (homosexual) murderer whose defense involves that he was influenced by television violence. (I

don't watch the show, but I figure someone out there who reads this may have.)

Being around both of them has been fun and inspiring. I'm now ready to attack my own writing today.

Things That Keep Me Writing

After doing a Things That Keep Me From Writing post, I figured I needed to do the positive spin on it.

So...

Things That Keep Me Writing

* Getting up early and in silence putting on my bathrobe, pouring a cup of coffee and sitting in front of my laptop on my couch.

* Writing on a laptop that doesn't connect to the internet.

* Going to readings; other writers tend to stimulate me to write.

* Reading.

* Blocking out writing time on my calendar.

* During not-writing time, consciously thinking of my writing projects (e.g., not allowing myself solely to obsess over whether or not I signed an invoice, what I plan to say to students about the haiku, if I need to make a dentist appointment, whether or not Ryan Seacrest is really gay, etc.)

And you?

Shall I Practice What I Preach?

I'm always talking to my students about opening their stories in a way that intrigues the reader. The opening needs to reflect something about the story's main conflict and issues--which means you'll probably need to revise your opening after you've written the story and discovered what it's about. One good way to do this is to drop us right into meaningful action.

And, ahem, that's the exact advice I received from an editor of a publisher who is interested in my novel Complementary Colors. The opening was too slow, too focused on setting things up--things that didn't necessarily resonate with the heart of the novel.

I revised the opening, thinking I'd fixed it. A participant in my manuscript group (there are four of us who exchange full manuscript edits, a kind of bartering system) said it still didn't start at the heart of the story. I looked at it again and realized there was still too much "throat clearing." And the first line was boring! It had nothing to do with the true struggles the narrator faces.

So I rewrote it again. The first sentence now has more depth. It carries multiple meanings. And there, on the first page, is a key action that plunges the reader right into the story's "trouble." The "trouble" that leads to transformation.

I've now sent it back to the editor. I'll let you know if she thinks I was successful.

Addicting

I finished reading both these books over the weekend in L.A. It was so interesting to read the same story from the point of view from a father and a son.

Interesting and harrowing. I couldn't put the books down, but I'm glad they're over. Addiction to meth is not a pretty thing.

In addition to being about addiction, both books, in essence, are California books, taking place mostly in the Bay Area. Not New York, imagine that.

And Next Week, Poet Kimiko Hahn

Next week Kimiko Hahn visits us at SJSU.

Her most recent collection, The Narrow Road to the Interior, is a surprising, intriguing mix of prose and lineated fragments that weave together, to my ear, in a surprisingly holistic way.

She draws on, "and even reinvents, classic forms and techniques used by women writers in Japan and China, including the zuihitsu, or pillow book, and nu shu, a nearly extinct script Chinese women used to correspond with one another."

Hahn was born in 1955 in Mt. Kisco, New York, the child of artists, a Japanese American mother from Hawaii and a German American father from Wisconsin.

She is a Distinguished Professor in the English department at Queens College/CUNY and has won a ton of awards.

But let's cut to the chase. Here are two of her poems:

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

The Razor

I want to return to the moment
father and I brought the canister of mother's ashes
to the temple in some odd shopping bag.
We then dropped off the remains
to leave for a couple slices down the block
but the reverend pulled a robe
over her jeans and blouse,
picked up prayer beads
and suggested which was not a question
we say a sutra. Which one was it?
I only recall I didn't have a tissue;
that the incense which I so dislike
felt sweet wafting into my sweater
and hair; that my whole body
shook without pause
though I did not make a sound
and tears and mucus covered my face and
sleeves because father did not know
I needed the handkerchief
mother had pressed a week earlier.
At times the loss felt like an organ
one could excise with a razor.


Wax
Initial Correspondence to L . . .

i.
I am looking for clues
on how to stay a woman, not
a middle-aged woman
who sings all those girl-group lyrics
over the dash
but a woman since
I've earned that title over years of (honey, you know — )
wicked repartees
among my girlfriends and boyfriends.
Here's the subtext:
the twenty-year-olds
at poetry readings
are so exquisite they might be
fashioned of wax, even
the blemishes. I realize now
how lithe I was when I thought
I was the ugly daughter — how
tremulous my beauty. I didn't know.
I just knew
I wanted to fuck my professor
(Chaucer 8:30 am M/W)
and boys from Chinese History
wearing blue caps. Nixon
was still President.
The war was nearly over.
And the young now listen
to fifty-year-old rockers.
No wonder they don't think
they invented sex. Fuckin-A
we did.
And what I want at some moment
in my forties
is not an affair —
that would rip my breast open —
I would like to wrap my arms around a guy
(I guess a guy)
for a lengthy kiss.
Standing up. In the dark.
Pulse at the boiling point
one recalls
from those irretrievable initial encounters.
L, send me advice quick.

ii.
waxing

iii.
I send these words to you
across the frozen continent,
through waning light
and steam rising off rivers.


(c) Kimiko Hahn. All rights reserved.

To Meditate on Over the Weekend...

Lives of Our Fathers

What if you found out after your father's death that he had a secret life?

What if that very father were also a famous religious man?

What if that secret life involved the fact that he had long-time male lovers?

This is the essence of a gorgeously-written memoir piece by poet Honor Moore in the most recent New Yorker (and available online here).

The piece is an excerpt from her forthcoming book-length memoir The Bishop's Daughter.

I can't wait to read the whole book. And I can only hope that my writing tells the truth so well, that it evokes such a strong sense of empathy.

Letters to the World

Got this in the mail today: a collection of poetry from 259 contributors in 19 countries. Red Hen Press is impressive. This is truly the most elegant book in which my poetry has ever appeared. (My poem "Middle Age," which originally appeared in Like All We Love, is included.)

Memoiristic

I find this intriguing--that a father and son both released memoirs about the son's addiction to meth. The books are: Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Meth Addiction by David Sheff (Houghton Mifflin) and Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines by Nic Sheff (Ginee Seo Books, imprint of Simon & Schuster).


Since I'm working on a memoir and an historical novel that relates to addiction, I think these are must-reads for me. Besides, I'm intrigued by the idea of reading two very different perspectives on the same family saga.

*

Other "memoir" news:
A best-selling Holocaust memoir has been revealed to be a fake. The author was never trapped in the Warsaw ghetto. Neither was she adopted by wolves who protected her from the Nazis, nor did she trek 1,900 miles across Europe in search of her deported parents or kill a German soldier in self-defense. She wasn’t even Jewish, The Associated Press reported. Misha Defonseca, 71, right, a Belgian writer living in Dudley, Mass., about 60 miles southwest of Boston, admitted through her lawyers last week that her book, “Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years,” translated into 18 language and adapted for the French feature film “Surviving With Wolves,” was a fantasy.

Gay Idol

My first exposure to Idol was Britian's version, called Pop Idol, when Annie and I were in England a few years ago. The winner was an out gay guy named Will Young.

I'd love it if we had an out gay/lesbian/queer Idol...and there are a number of possibilities this year.

Tonight's episode should be interesting given that the news recently broke that contestant David Hernandez--who had an outstanding performance last week--worked for years as a stripper at a gay club.

And whoa, Danny, I wish you'd wear this makeup and show this same attitude on TV! (But of course the internet is already being filled up with a bunch of homophobic rantings about these guys ... )

Things That Keep Me From Writing

* paper-grading
* lesson planning
* CLA minutae
* reading
* day-dreaming
* paying bills online
* shopping and cooking and vacuuming and cleaning out the cat box and other things I must attend to for daily living
* email, email, email
* aqua sky after weeks of clouds
* dogs under my feet, begging for a walk
* research for my historical novel (very easy to get lost in)
* insecurity about what I'm writing
* blogging (oh, I guess that means I should stop the list here)...


What keeps you from writing?
Collin tagged me to pick up the work of fiction closest to where I'm sitting right now that has 123 pages or more, turn to page 123, find the fifth sentence, then post it and the next three sentences.

Book: Norton Anthology of Short Fiction (1738 bible-thin pages)
Page 123: "Silver Water" by Amy Bloom
Three sentences:

"Nicely put," my mother said.
"Indeed," my father said.
"Fuckin' A," Rose said.

I tag anyone who will have fun with this.

Novelistic

A small press is showing interest in one of my novels. An editor has asked me for some revisions, which I've been working on all day--and last night since I couldn't fall asleep (for reasons to be discussed in another entry, once I can share them).

On the reading front, I've been luxuriating in Joyce Carol Oates' journal. Here's an excerpt written in March 1975:

"The novelist is an empiricist, an observer of facts . . . objective and subjective 'reality' . . . he must guard against the demonic idea of imagining that he possesses or even can possess ultimate truth. . . . The person who completes a novel is not the person who began it. Hence the joy of creation, the unpredictable changes, transformations, some minute and some major. As soon as the novelist stops observing, however, he becomes something else--an evangelist, a politician. . . . When one believes he has the Truth, he is no longer an artist."

She often mentions in the journal her husband, Raymond Smith, founder of the Ontario Review. I just googled him and was stunned to find out he died two weeks ago. They had been married more than 45 years.

Ellen Degeneres: We Are Not Second Class Citizens

The murder of Lawrence (Larry) King has now made it about as national as you can get. Thank you, Ellen. (and Joe.My.God.)