real.

For dinner tonight, I put my entire face into a mixing bowl and licked out brownie batter. I mean, my entire face was in the bowl. There was also a pot of soup growing cold on the stove. But after putting my face into the brownie batter bowl, I wasn't hungry for the soup. I think the soup was good and I meant to eat it for dinner. But then I ate brownie batter.

Real life is not perfect. It isn't always beautiful either. My brownie batter face was not beautiful. But I'm an independent lady and sometimes that's how we eat dinner.

I have a few things I want to write about tonight and I'm not going to write about any of them. I have typed a sentence here, in this very spot, and erased it. I've done that a dozen times in a row. A different sentence each time. A different thought each time. When this happens, when I get the edit trigger that I can't stop, then I know it's too late. I need to forget about it and just tell the honest stuff.

I want to write my thoughts on the ways we trick ourselves into writing.

I want to write about the goals we set and accomplish.

I want to write about why some things are easy and some things are hard.

I want to write about the man who gets off the bus at Powderhouse Square to open the laundromat at 8am every morning.

at the beach.

Three years ago, I parked my car at Herring Cove Beach in Provincetown and stared out over the water. I was taking my lunch break. I was writing in a notebook. It was February. At that time, things in my life had taken a sharp turn. A plan had been shattered. Trust had been broken hard. Everything felt, in a word, bleak.

I sat at the steering wheel of my parked car. I gripped the wheel, shivered a bit, let the sound of waves fill my head. I remember looking out over the expanse of the bay and thinking, The ocean and the sky are the same color. I don’t know why, but it felt very profound. It was everything I felt. Life was covered with a thick gray blanket.

The ocean always has a way of pushing my thoughts out of my brain, in whatever form they’ll take. Something about the waves, something about repetition, something about the rhythm of introspection. Maybe this is why I couldn’t really be a writer until I came to know the ocean. And sometimes it is bleak. Sometimes it’s stormy. But peace doesn’t come from feeling peaceful, it comes from feeling everything as each thing passes.

This past weekend, I drove out to the Cape for a day. I just had such a craving. I needed to be hit in the face with salt air. I needed to see the familiar things that trigger the home feeling inside of me. Saturday morning, I picked up a croissant at the Boulangerie and drove to White Crest Beach. I parked and sat in my car. The sun was very bright and the wind was blowing hard. I saw a handful of whales surface - just the spouts blending with rolling waves. I wrote there for two hours in my notebook. Sand was pelting the windows of my car and it was rocking a bit in the gusts of wind. I wrote until it hurt my hand to grip the pen. I mean, I was gripping it hard. I drank an espresso out of a Dixie cup.

lessons.

Many years ago, I read Wendell Berry's novel, Hannah Coulter. There was a lot to the story and a lot I don't remember. I do remember the title character reflecting on some lesson that someone in her life had taught her. And from there on, I began to note what lessons there were in my life, who was teaching them to me and whether or not I was hanging on to them.

Write about that.

Someone who loves me has been saying those words to me, and often. I have resisted them. I have resisted. I mean, I'm resisting them right now. I can't tell you why, or maybe I can. There are a lot of things that can make you freeze. Fear and doubt are two things.

And what is there to be afraid of? Someone asks me. And I answer, but the answer said out loud is much less believable. So maybe there is nothing at all. Nothing to be afraid of. No reason to resist. No more excuses. No more.

forget.

Just start. I say it in my head often.

You think it’s no big deal. Just taking a break, just waiting a bit longer, you’ll do it later, and later, and later. And then you’re staring at the paper, staring at the screen and your fingers won’t move. They just won’t. You’re trying to form some thoughts in your head, but the attempt at awareness destroys every thought that was there.

A good practice is to write things and then forget about them. Just write it, write something, and don’t read it again. Save it in a file, in an email draft, in Google docs, in a notebook hidden on a shelf. Don’t read it again for a week, a month, a year. I think I learned this from Natalie Goldberg. It takes some of the pressure off. You might write something horrible, but you know what? You don’t even have to read it. You just write it down and tuck it away for some other time.

The beautiful thing that happens is sometimes you discover some magic in what you’ve written that, at first glance, you didn’t know was there. It might be sort of better than you first thought. You might sound a bit more inspired than you felt. But most beautiful of all is when you read something your hands wrote, but you don’t remember writing it. Suddenly you can look at your writing with some objective criticism, but also objective compassion. The words exist separate from yourself.

thank you, john d'agata.

I was more or less born a reader, if one can say such a thing. What I mean is that, from the moment I learned to read, I did it voraciously. I read quickly and eagerly. I always loved language. I was not likewise born a writer. I mean, I understood grammar. I could write clear sentences and well-organized paragraphs. But the idea of writing creatively never crossed my mind.

My final year of college, I decided to turn my English minor into a major and, subsequently, I crammed a lot of credits into two semesters. I had more or less covered the literature courses I needed, but not the writing. So I took what was my first real creative writing class. I'm going to risk one great big cliche by saying: it changed my life. I read Brenda Miller's A Braided Heart in the anthology Writing Creative Nonfiction. I heard the term "lyric essay" and I instantly fell in love. I can't tell you why exactly, but it made my heart pound. So, in a wave of impulse, instead of using my senior thesis to analyze a literary work, I used it to study the lyric essay and create my own.

I'm having all this nostalgic reflection because, during this past week, John D'Agata has ignited some controversy surrounding his forthcoming book, The Lifespan of a Fact. Those many years ago when I began to explore creative writing, John D'Agata was something of an idol to me. Not because I knew him, or really anything about him. I had his collection, The Next American Essay, which I thought was very cool. And I had the original issue of the Seneca Review that began to advertise and publish what was called the lyric essay.

on coming out.

Check out my latest post at the Friendly Atheist:

It Took a While, but She’s Finally Coming Out

leaps.

This is what it's like to be an independent lady.

I got to work this morning, wearing one of my four hipster-cool professional outfits. I wore a belt over my shirt in another attempt to make it look like I have more than four hipster-cool professional outfits. Got to work, looked in the mirror, belt looked dumb, took it off. And then I realized my shirt had a hole in it. Not a hole in the armpit or the seam or a tiny hole no one will see. It's a big ass hole right on my stomach where a tiny patch of stomach skin is shining through. It's the kind of hole you get when you wear a shirt over and over and over because you're an independent lady who is out in the world making not-much-money.

The beautiful thing about this day is that I don't care.

Some people love to plan life out. They imagine a big picture and the various twists and turns they hope their lives will take. While I'm a planner to my very core, I hate the big plans. Hate isn't even exactly the right word - I am incapable of planning my life in this way. I have no desire.

You want me to plan a vacation? A grocery list? An independent ladies' dinner? Done.
You want me to plan my life? Not gonna happen.

writing down the bones.

Head over to The Lit Pub, a fantastic site promoting literary community and independent publishing, to see my piece on Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones.

I highly recommend reading the posts at this site. They're beautifully collected and written and often open my eyes to books I'd never find on my own. And you can buy books through the site! A great way to support literary artists.

there is still this.

In January, instead of averaging three posts a week, I barely averaged one. I don't have a particularly good excuse for this. I've been around, mostly. I have time. I have been writing, although rather loosely. Actually, I've even written several posts that just never made their way out here. I certainly have plenty of good emotion to work with, which is oftentimes the only spark I need to get moving.

Well, whatever it is, it happened and that's that. I am inclined to hate myself for my failure and to be paralyzed by what I perceive as lack of talent, ability, commitment, and the like. If you do this sort of thing, you know exactly what I mean. If you don't...well, you lucky bastard. You're probably much more at peace with yourself than I am.

It's happened often in the past, especially in my journals and notebooks. One week without writing will stretch into two weeks, then a month, then suddenly I'm looking at writing that is months ago and I don't even know where to begin.

I hate this fear, this feeling of being frozen in some mess of personal standards and emotions I don't understand. So listen, I'll try to be better, as I always do. But this time I'm not going to berate myself for mistakes made and failing to live up to my own expectations. I will just start again.