Does Obama deserve the Nobel Peace Prize?

Obama Derangement Syndrome...

Sex is fun with strangers

Just read a provocative interview with Collin Kelley in SubtleTea. Here's an excerpt:
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Question: Martin (in Kelley's novel Conquering Venus) has genuine affection for David. I can see him settling down and staying true to the relationship. However, though seediness lurks in the darker side of any sexual camp, I've heard many queer folks admit a frustrating popular culture of wantonness. In one of many exchanges about sexuality, Martin tells David that he tries "not to be a whore." David replies that he "thought gay guys fucked everything that moved." Martin tells him that this is "a myth." A line in "The List", a poem by your fellow Atlantan, Dustin Brookshire, cries out for romantic exclusivity: "I want a man/who'll know that monogamy isn't a type of wood." Is it difficult for a guy to find a "decent guy" these days? In your experience, do many gays aspire to the everything-that-moves myth, which fulfills it and fans the flames of self-righteous bashers?
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Collin Kelley: I do believe gay men are more promiscuous, but painting the gay community with a big whore brush is stereotyping. Trust me, I know straight guys who have been with hundreds of women: banging them in nightclubs, back seats or wherever else they could find a dark corner. I think it's a man thing more than a gay thing. I went through my own whore phase in my late 20s and early 30s, hooking up with two or three different guys a week when I wasn't in a relationship. I don't feel ashamed or have any regrets. Sex is fun and sex with strangers (with protection) can be very exciting.
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I haven't been in a relationship in about eight years. I date, but finding a guy to settle down with is difficult. The older you get, the tougher it is to find someone you can share your life with - and I think that goes for hetero couples, too. Back in the day, you found someone, married them and had kids. It was expected by society. Today, people aren't willing to settle just to say they've settled. I wasted a lot of time on guys who I was madly in love who just weren't that into me (to coin a phrase), and I'm at a point in my life where I get more happiness out of my art and friends than making compromises for a relationship.
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Read the rest of the interview here.

Teaching in these times

I'm in the midst of living an upside down life, I'm finding teaching to be extra rich and rewarding--even on the days I'd rather walk on the beach or curl up in bed, trying to speed my healing.

Perhaps it's because I look out into the classroom and remind my tender, raw self that each person there has a whole world. A world of love, connection, pain, loss. I'm being re-reminded that teaching, for me, is about connecting with people, really listening to one another, and providing students opportunities to express themselves, to cultivate curiosity, and to explore words and worlds.

In my Queer Film class, we are watching Milk this week. As students watch it, I ask them to jot down questions. The last few minutes of class, we discuss their questions, and I ask them to look them up and bring what they find to class. They are looking up everything from "Who's Cleve Jones?" to "Where is gay marriage legal in the world?"

I'm also teaching a section of English 1B (second semester Frosh Comp). Students are reading memoirs in groups and developing questions out of them that will lead to research questions. For instance, one group is reading Colby Buzzell's My War, and one research question coming out of that book is: How does post-traumatic stress affect veterans? Another group is reading Jennifer Finney Boylan's She's Not There, and a research question coming out of that book is: When do most transgendered people begin to feel they are in the "wrong body"--and what are the possible options for what to do about it?

One young woman who is reading Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is developing a fascinating question related to whether or not religion is, as she put it, the opiate of the African-American community. Another group who is reading Andrew Pham's Catfish and Mandala--the story of a young Vietnamese-American guy who rides his bike across Vietnam--is developing questions related to bicycling infrastructure.

I'm trying to teach them that asking questions as they read helps them understand how books connect to the world.

Also this semester I'm teaching a Fiction Writing workshop. It's fun to read several student stories a week, to see what their minds have created. And I'm teaching Introduction to Creative Writing. We just finished our memoir unit, and now we're moving on to fiction, with a focus on flash fiction.

On Tuesday the 13th, Mary Roach is coming to speak on campus, then later this month we have Kim Addonizio and next month, Denis Johnson. In spite of furloughs, a 10 percent pay cut (yep, we all got them) and all the weirdness that is our horrible state budget (and is my divorce), I'm trying to remind myself that I'm lucky to get to work in a world where books, words and people matter.

Kate comes out as a writer who ekes out words

The wonderful Kimberly Becker interviewed me for the latest issue of Poemeleon. If you want to read the whole thing, click below...

A poetry writing workshop is one of the settings in Complementary Colors. A character says, “I felt there was something elemental, crucial, tangible about the making of a painting or a poem that seemed—what?—sacred?” Does the poet have a vatic role that is above or beyond gender?

That’s kind of cool to think so, but I really don’t know. I do think words are magic. So maybe poets are sorcerers. That line from my novel is spoken by the narrator, Gwen, when she is just opening up to the world in a new way. It’s a transformative time—and poetry plays a big part in her transformation. But it’s not like someone waves a magic wand or one poem does the trick. She’s ready, she’s open to seeing the world in new ways, which is why it’s suddenly possible for her to write poetry and to fall in love with a woman for the first time. So perhaps that’s what’s beyond gender: when you are in a transformative state where supposedly common-sense boundaries begin to morph. Certainly poetry does have the potential to help us see something in a completely new way. That sounds akin to a spiritual experience.

New Poem

On What Was Once Love

The Al Gore of your soul is alarmed. Line
of your heart: you thought hate had disintegrated,

ecofriendly. Hulking polar bears, uninitiated,
can't get a foothold. A few fringe lovers

declare conspiracy. A miles-wide tangle
of synthetics in the sea appropriates

the mounting waters. You create
greenhouse gasses, neglect to separate

your recyclables. You haphazardly debate
the cavities, the virtues, of belief and disbelief.

Your car gets horrible mileage. In the park you retrieve
a plastic bottle from the garbage like the homeless.

Where are the landfills? What feels more formless
than an inconvenient truth? Which is the best bitter pill

they make? Of the chemicals interred in your soil,
which will nourish, which poison? We forget what is most

biodegradable is the body, eyeballs to bones.
Embalming chemicals are meant to sustain

a façade of self. Steel coffin, we try to retain
the unsalvageable. Dropped deep in dirt, it’s dark.

We pretend all will keep, even worm and hook
in that cool murky world of enough, and time.

It's a launch

Look what's available for pre-order here!

Book Love

Look what came in the mail today: Collin's novel! It's been a joy to watch this novel go from manuscript to galleys to an absolutely gorgeous Vanilla Heart production.


Here's what one famous writer has to say about the novel:


Unflinching and mysterious, Conquering Venus is that rare combination of poetic and page-turner. Collin Kelley who refreshingly faces taboos head-on has packed his cinematic debut novel with compelling characters, meaty plot twists and satisfying surprises. This novel is freshly contemporary as well as, in its own fashion, a love letter to Paris.


Oops, that's not a famous writer, that's moi. But still, you can trust me, it's a great read! Oh, and some other writers who aren't his close, personal friends have said great things about the book, including Charles McNair and Gary Zebrun.


You can order it from any bookstore if it's not stocked there, you can buy it on Amazon, and you can order it directly from VHP.


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I'm headed to L.A. this weekend. I'll be staying with an old high school friend and his beautiful family. Always great food and swimming pool time there. They are taking me to something called the Avocado Festival. I expect it to be a bacchanalia as it always is with them.


I reconnected with this old friend not long ago after not talking to him since high school. He's such an upstanding citizen now that have so much fun teasing him about the things he did in high school. One time he snuck out of history class through an open window and the teacher didn't notice--not until he did it the third or fourth time. Everyone played dumb about how he escaped. I "passed" Chemistry class only because this dear friend changed my grades in the grade book for me when that teacher had left the room, probably for a drink from his flask. This friend also taught me how to drive a stick shift at the fairgrounds, so if not for him I never could have driven cool sports cars.


On Sunday I'll be at the West Hollywood Book Fair. if you're in the area, come by, see our books and say hi. The three lovely authors present will be happy to sign your books or body parts.

Divorce: A Report from Earthquake Country

Here I am in my new life. A life that six months ago I would not have imagined. But, as with earthquakes, I suppose the ground was quietly shifting at subterranean levels for years. When the quake itself happens, we are taken by surprise. It feels as though the earth's violent movement has come from nowhere. But, indeed, it was set into motion long ago by invisible pressure against the tectonic plates.

So now I am a single woman living in a downtown apartment. It feels worlds away from my previous incarnation as committed partner in a 15 year relationship, where the focus was family and creating a domestic world together.

Here are some things I'm learning in my new incarnation:

1. When you are with a woman, people see you as a lesbian. When you are dating men, people see you as straight. Bisexuality is invisible. Maybe even to the self.

2. When you have two small dogs in a 6th floor apartment, buy a piece of sod and place it on the balcony on top of a piece of plastic. That way, you don't have to walk the dogs more than once or twice a day. The rest of the time, they can use the small square of grass. It costs only about $3 at a place like OSH. Water it regularly and replace it when it gets too dry or smelly.

3. Time becomes more friendly when you have only to walk across the street to get to work.

4. Coming out of a long-term relationship, while painful, is also an opportunity to reinvent yourself. Suddenly you realize that you can plan a trip and go. You can play your piano or grade papers at 2 a.m. You can spend all day in bed, revising your novel on your laptop.

5. Speaking of writing, when you write autobiographical fiction and poetry--and your life takes a major U-turn--reading your work can feel like reading the work of someone you know very well but who clearly is not you.

6. A divorce turns the most intimate person in your life into a stranger.

7. In your new incarnation, your own strength can surprise you. You can do things like peel your sorry, sad ass off the floor and make an appointment with a shrink or attorney. You can catch yourself laughing after thinking you never would smile again. You can begin running and biking again, feeling the muscles awaken in your back, your legs, your heart.

8. When your attorney or attorney's assistant calls, you feel they are talking in slow-motion, which works great for them since they charge an absurd per hour rate.

9. Friends and family are oxygen. They call you, invite you over, let you come live with them, email you, offer you boxes and arms for moving, make you dinner, spend the night when you can't imagine making it through the night alone.

10. When you begin to heal, you want to do more for every person who crosses your path. Loss can morph to tenderness. The earth shifts: We humans are vulnerable. And resilient.

phoenix in the house

I feel like a woman who was hit by a truck and had a near-death experience--and now all I want to do is live! This is manifesting as a desire to do all kinds of new things. In the past month I've had a number of firsts: first rounds of golf, first time to the horse races, first time to a boxing match. At each one I realized that so much skill is involved. I have a new, growing appreciation for the abilities of the human body.

And I also have a growing appreciation for fun! I have so many loving friends who've been inviting me (the single gal!) to join them for the activities I've described above, as well as meals, swimming pool & wine afternoons ... And this isn't just about fun, but it's about human connection. I'm coming out of the cave of grief and into the light of celebration of life.

I'm also feeling the desire to write again. It's been a few months since I've had the focus or drive to write, but I can feel stories and poems swimming in my veins.

As my friend Sally said, life is amazing; it wants to live.

Here are a few words from Walt Whitman on that score:

O LIVING always—always dying!
O the burials of me, past and present!
O me, while I stride ahead, material, visible, imperious as ever!
O me, what I was for years, now dead, (I lament not—I am content;)
O to disengage myself from those corpses of me, which I turn and look at, where I cast them!
To pass on, (O living! always living!) and leave the corpses behind!

Summer Music, Summer Reading

Divorce poems

I haven't posted in so long because of what's going on in my life. I wanted to check in and say that I'm alive and struggling with trying to face the truth of my life right now...that after 15 years I'm in the process of a divorce. I know many of you already know this about my life and have experienced such difficulties yourselves. It's an excruciating time, especially since this is not my choice, but as the song says I will survive--lyrics I must trust.

I will be back to the blog again when I'm feeling healthier and stronger. In the meantime, feel free to check in with me on Facebook. And I close for a time with two poems that emanate my truths.

The Afternoon Sun
by C. P. Cavafy (Translated by Aliki Barnstone)

This room, how well I know it.
Now they rent it and the one next door
as commercial offices. The whole house became
offices for agents and merchants and companies.

Ah, this room, how familiar.

The couch was near the door, here;
in front, a Turkish rug;
near the couch, two yellow vases on a shelf.
On the right, no, across from it, was an armoire with a mirror.
In the middle, the table where he wrote
and three wicker chairs.
Next to the window was the bed
where we made love so many times.

These sad things must still be somewhere.

Next to the window was the bed;
the afternoon sun spread across halfway.

...One afternoon at four o'clock, we separated,
just for a week....Alas,
that week became forever.


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A Pity, We Were Such A Good Invention
by Yehuda Amichai


They amputated
Your thighs off my hips.
As far as I'm concerned
They are all surgeons. All of them.

They dismantled us
Each from the other.
As far as I'm concerned
They are all engineers. All of them.

A pity. We were such a good
And loving invention.
An aeroplane made from a wife* and wife.
Wings and everything.We hovered a little above the earth.

We even flew a little.


(*original says "man")

Shaindel Beers: "Some people fall into alcohol, some people fall into drugs; I fell into poetry."

When you read Shaindel Beers' poetry, it soon becomes clear you are entering a complex, compassionate, smart mind. Beers' book, A Brief History of Time, is described by Salt Publishing as at once an exploration of what it is to grow up in rural America and a treatise for social justice. These poems, many of them award-winning, span a wide range of styles—from plainsong free verse to sestinas to nearly epic works. The characters/speakers in Beers’ poems range from the rural working class to mythological characters. These poems look at the world with an honest, unflinching eye. She is one of the up-and-coming poets from Generation X we will be hearing a great deal from in the future.

"Up and coming" is not just PR blather. As I read her book, I got the sense that I was being introduced to a poet who is doing serious work that will have longevity, a poet who richly incorporates craft and experience.


Please tell us about the genesis of your new book.

I started writing some of these poems quite a while back, maybe even ten years ago, before I ever thought about going to graduate school for creative writing. I always knew I wanted to work in academia and be an English professor, but I assumed I’d go the PhD route and teach British literature at some small, private liberal arts college. You know, the standard dream everyone has when they fall in love with literature. I loved doing my Master of Arts in the Programs of Humanities at the University of Chicago (sort of a design-it-yourself program built around a core course—mine was British literature with some philosophy mixed in), but after that sort of intensity and the exorbitant price tag, I didn’t know how to go on to get a PhD. Luckily, I started adjuncting at a community college and a university, and one of my colleagues invited me to take his creative writing class. I ended up using the work I generated in that class for an application manuscript for grad school for creative writing and then went to Vermont College’s (now Vermont College of Fine Arts) low-residency MFA in Writing program. This book is basically the manuscript I generated there as my creative thesis.

Of course, I kept taking out weaker poems and adding stronger ones in the five years I was sending it out to publishers, but the bulk of it was written during my time at Vermont under the tutelage of my advisors that I had each semester. I couldn’t have asked for a better graduate school or writing experience.


What's the one thing you most want people to know about your book?

I really wanted to write an ambitious first book, and I hope I’ve accomplished that, but it’s one of those things that only time will tell. It’s tempting to get enough “good” poems to put together a first book and start sending it out as soon as you have enough, and I tried not to do that. I chose the poems that are in this collection out of hundreds I’ve written, and a lot of them, I feel, are ambitious poems, and several of them have won awards or honorable mentions in contests. My goal is to do writing that is important, not just good.


A Barbara Walters question: If you were a poem by any writer, which poem would you be and why?

I really think I would be “Do Not Duplicate This Key” by Richard Jackson. It’s brilliant and daring and smart and gorgeous and all kinds of things I’d love to be. Here are the first few lines of it:

It is not commonly understood why my love is so deadly.
At the very least it uproots the trees of your heart.
It interferes with the navigation of airplanes like certain
electronic devices. . . .

Isn’t that great? Who wouldn’t be won over by a love poem like that? And he fits everything in there from Ovid to the Spin Doctors (as in the 1990s band) to war in Sarajevo. Another favorite part is:

… Even the skeptic,
David Hume, 1711-1776, begins to believe in my love.
My own steps have long since abandoned their tracks.
My own love is not a key that can be duplicated.
It knocks at the door of the speakeasy in Sarajevo
and whispers the right word to a girl named Tatayana.

It’s just a beautiful, beautiful poem, and it sustains itself for three pages, which shouldn’t be considered long but is, in the poetry world these days.


Why do you write poetry?

I think I do it because I have to. Some people fall into alcohol, some people fall into drugs; I fell into poetry. It really just seemed to be my natural response to the world around me; I can’t even explain it. When I was a little kid. Little. I don’t know what age, I used to try to make up songs when something was happy or sad or upsetting, and then I think the music part of that fell away. I guess it was too much to try to plunk out the tune on a piano and then write out the notes on staff paper. If I wrote poetry, I really just needed paper and (back then) a pencil. I still think it’s the cheapest, most accessible art form to take part in. You really just need a notebook and a pen, and you’re all set.

The first time I can remember a poem being my initial response to something happening was in elementary school, my cousin shot my dog. I heard about it after school; someone told my sister about it, and she told me. I was devastated, and I wrote a poem that had a definite stanza structure with a refrain. If I remember correctly, I had a drawing that went with it. Poetry is sort of how I deal with everything—a good day, a bad day, a beautiful sight, and so on.

Do you think teaching is a good complement to writing--or does it just get in the way?

I think that the teaching itself and the interaction with students is wonderfully invigorating for writing. I said in an earlier interview that I learn so much from my students, I even thank them in the acknowledgments section of my book because they are so inspiring. I think that the massive amounts of grading that most instructors have to do for their jobs is what is prohibitive. There are those lucky souls who have a 3/2 course load; I am not one of them. I teach five courses a quarter on the quarter system, so fifteen regular courses a year, and I elect to teach two six-week summer courses for extra pay.

If you’re a writer, though, you make yourself write whenever you can. I know writers who get up at three in the morning every day to write for two hours before “the real world” intrudes, and another who teaches full-time and writes like crazy for the entire month of May and revises the rest of the year. Each person just has to figure out what works for him or her.


Do you believe all poetry is political--or just some poems?

I believe all poetry is political. First of all, you’re expressing that you’re literate if you’re doing something in writing, and you’re showing that you have leisure time (of some sort) during which to write, and if you’re intending to be read by others, that what you’re saying is important enough to be put down on paper and passed on. These are all political acts. Of course, getting out of bed and going to work is one sort of political act, and refusing to get out of bed and go to work is another. I guess I’m one of those cultural theorists. The ones your mother warned you about.

Please share with us one poem from the collection, and then riff a little about the journey the poem takes the reader on.

I think I’ll use “A Man Walks Into a Bar”:

A Man Walks Into a Bar

He was tall, well-built, blue-eyed,
a guy most girls would want to take to bed.
Then he reached for the beer with his left hand,
revealing the stump of his right.

We could tell the second he knew that we knew.
We’d smile, but the smile wouldn’t travel
all the way to our eyes. He’d turn back to the bar,
fold his arm closer so that we could
no longer see

as we rushed off to sling beers for guys
not as good-looking but more whole,
the ones who leered lecherously,
on “Short-Shorts Night”
and left ten dollar tips for two dollar beers

always expecting more, always bitter when we didn’t deliver.
The quiet one, we wounded week after week, a guy
any of us would have considered “out of our league,”
“a long shot,” if he had been unbroken,

the sad, blond man we were afraid to love.

--
I worked in this sports bar the summer before my last year of undergrad, and it was like another planet. It was this bustling, rowdy place that seated something like 360 diners, and it had a TV on nearly every imaginable surface—even in the bathrooms. I used to have to know how many TVs in case a customer asked, but I don’t remember now. I want to say 81 TVs. But it was really this sad place a lot of the time; people would lie and say they had tickets to be somewhere important and get us to put a rush order on their ticket, and then they would spend over an hour there; this one lonely obese man would come in and sit in the same attractive server’s section each day and order a gigantic meal and then a caramel apple sundae for dessert (and we felt like we were helping to kill him by giving him all this food), and all kinds of pathetic, drunken loneliness.

The above poem is one of those instances that I felt bad about taking part in. I wanted to start out with the standard line to a joke, “A Man Walks into a Bar” because I think we generally think of bars as a happy place, but a lot of people are there to escape and forget their troubles, and it’s doubly sad when they are wounded there, too. So, we have the expectations of the servers seeing this attractive man, and then that acknowledgment when “he knows that they know.”

Nancy Mairs has an essay about how the reason for our discomfort with the disabled is because we realize that it’s the one minority we can become a part of at any time, and looking back at how I was when I was twenty-one, it makes sense. There was something really scary about seeing this man who was beautiful, and then noticing his missing arm. But, somehow, it’s still too much in the poem, and I have to keep up with the pace of the sports bar and rush off, serving more beer, but I mean the poem as an apology and to show (I hope) that I’ve grown in the last ten years since I was a server at a sports bar. I hope I’m a better person and that I would treat this man differently today, and I hope that life is being good to him now, wherever he is.

Anything else you'd like to add?

I’d like to thank everyone for following along on this virtual book tour and all of the interviewers; it’s been fabulous.

I’m doing a book giveaway on Goodreads.com that I would love for your readers to enter. In honor of my book’s half birthday, I’m giving away six free copies; one for each month the book’s been out. And if people message me on Goodreads that they’ve entered the drawing but didn’t win, I’ll sell them a book for the cover price, but I’ll cover the shipping for them (US only).

Of course, everyone can find me on Facebook; you can never have too many friends in the writing world!

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To watch Shaindel read two poems at the Northwest Poets Concord, click here for "Clean" and here for "The Last Ballet Class Before the Operation."