MFA and beyond

So I’m still anonymous here, and I’m still an MFA, right? Only now I possess the MFA, I’m not a candidate any longer.

Since graduation I’ve been writing some; tutoring at the community college where I’ll be teaching in the fall; going to my writing group every three weeks or so; and dealing with all the deferred maintenance on house, self & kids. Also trying to give my kids a relaxing, fun summer without sending them off to day camp. We went on an overnight campout, visited the observatory on a Saturday night to look at Venus and Saturn, rode on the ferry to a nearby island, went swimming at grandma’s, rode the bus to the farmers’ market, and so on.

Now I’m developing  the syllabus for my first semester teaching Freshman Composition.  I think I’m really going to like it. I think it’s going to be hard.

I also think I’m going to finish this novel soon - at least a draft. And I’m going to shop it to an agent. And my writing group is jazzed about organizing a series of readings; and we’re thinking of doing an anthology - we have this cool concept.

I was worried that after grad school I would lose the thread… lose the friendships, lose the focus on literature. No, I think that teaching will force me to pay attention to words and to writing.

I promise myself to teach what matters to me, and never to teach essays I think are dull or trite.  I promise myself to use the writing prompts to generate my own work … the composition reader I’ve been urged to use is full of essays that make me think - I should have been writing about that, I have something to say.

I promise myself to give my novel time and attention. I promise myself to put words on page no matter what. That means: write. now. even though it’s 11 pm.

OK, here goes. Goodbye for now…

The Thesis

I never mentioned the reader’s comments. He wrote me detailed notes and a long letter (handwritten - I’m keeping it). The feedback was very, very helpful. Whereas on the one hand I see how much I have to learn about writing novels, on the other hand, he was very kind. He said this book is ambitious. (His book, the latest one, is also ambitious and he pulls it off).

However the thesis itself is so very unfinished, fetal almost. I’ve already begun adding things to it: three pages I wrote after submitting on April 20; three pages I’d cut in February.

After reading thesis reader’s novel, I’ve decided that I am after all going to keep the frame story of my piece; yes it’s going to have lots of back story. It may be all back story. So is thesis reader’s critically acclaimed novel. He changes from present to past within the same page, from one paragraph to the next with no white space even. I didn’t expect this, based on what he says in class.

And I’m reading a book he, and many of my friends, loves: Pedro Paramo. Someone in workshop had said my novel reminded them of this book - dead people talking, the small abandoned village. Reading Pedro Paramo (by Juan Rulfo)  reminds me that it’s perfectly okay to write the way I write, and I do not have to flatten out all the weirdnesses. Well we’ll just have to see.

It’s a work in progress and I have to get to work. Now I am REALLY logging off.

Winding Down the MFA

Graduation is on Saturday. I finished the last bits of my work today and bought my regalia, too. Hung out with two of my friends in the grad students’ lounge. We talked. One of us cried.

I will miss the fellowship, the agora of this program, where we run into each other on the plaza and sit down to talk about books, and writing, and inspiring each other and teaching students. But I’m determined - all of us who have been happy and inspired together are determined - to build a literary life out in the world.

Tonight I read a novel I’ve been wanting to read. I also read Jane Smiley’s book on the novel, a little bit. It’s like hearing the voice of a very smart, detailed teacher. I can read what I want now. I have to read well, read carefully, stay present with books and literature.

Wild guppy says she is completely done with paying to take a writing class. I hear that…

It may be time to close down this blog, too. I doubt there’s anybody left reading it but if you are, thanks for dropping by!

Dull

Feeling dull, dulled, as if the successive waves of death and fear of death and war and loss have worn down my language. As if my sensory perceptions and my capacity to turn those into phrases have been eroded. A cousin died - 38. Another cousin died - 49. My uncle died. My father died. Still another cousin died - at least he was old. Five relatives in eight months.

There was a war, and I watched the television, wondering if the blasted minivan with twelve dead corpses was the one my cousins and aunt had rented that morning to try to make it out of the bombing zone. Later, my father died before my eyes.

Yes I feel confused, sluggish, desensitized. I don’t really care what I eat but I still eat. I don’t want to exercise. My children tug at me, wave their hands in my face. Mom. Mom!

And writing. I fear my writing has gone flat, lifeless, dead.

If it has, I know it’s temporary. But I do want a little time. Just some length of time when things are serene, and easy, and my desire to feel life in all of its glory returns.

Thesis went to reader

Friday. Dropped it off to that young male star at Camp Marzipan, the reader, who is also my workshop teacher this term.

I’ve been paralyzed with shame and self-hatred for something like a month. Longer: February 20 to March 30. I didn’t work on the thesis nearly enough. It’s a big mess. On March 30, the emotional weather broke and I got a bunch of work done.

Two kinds of issues plague me on this novel (excerpt at this point, cap of 90 pages for thesis).

Issue 1) technical. How to tell this complex story. POV. Seeing scenes, taking them to the limit.

Issue 2) emotional. I tend to choke. You can see it in the text. Sometimes it flows and sometimes it stops cold. And it’s such a pastiche… I am so scattered, my life and interests are so scattered. The thing is really a mishmosh.

Young Writer says less issues, more pages. He is right. But my demons have been howling this spring.

It doesn’t help that another family member died suddenly this week.

Today I am back to crippling self-hatred and misery again. It’s quite awful. I hang out on the internet to avoid the demons - it’s what I do instead of medicate or watch TV. Total avoidance.

I’m just trying to be kind to myself. What I’m trying to do with this book is so ambitious it f***s me up, because I don’t have the chops to achieve it. I want it to work. What if it doesn’t? I feel I have less time than my 25-year-old and 35-year-old friends to make messes and write novels that don’t work. Robert Olen Butler says he wrote five bad novels before he wrote a good one. O lord. Do I have time to write five bad novels? Can I bear for this novel to be bad, so I can write a few more in hopes that one of them one day will be good?

I don’t have a choice any more. I do, but I’ve chosen not writing before, and it makes me sick. So I will just have to live with these demons and write through it.

It’s tough on my dear husband, however. Really tough. When I am unhappy, he notices. But you see, I was desperately unhappy when I wasn’t writing. So there’s no way out but to write.

Sleep is the New Sex?

So says the NY Times. Seems that my generation of parents has trouble keeping our younger generation out of the parental bed. I always swore I would never let my kids take over my bed. Then I had children. We had the dickens of a time getting #1 to go to sleep at all, and then when #2 came along, eighteen months later, he had all these issues, as did #1, and … well… #2 was in our bed for a year. But I threw a fit (actually I threw many fits) and finally we got #s 1 and 2 to sleep in their room.

They still come into our room at night, sometimes, and won’t be coaxed back into their beds. So one of us grownups will retreat downstairs to the study, where there’s a good quality single bed across from the computers.

My issue is I stay up too late on the internet, even when I’m not blogging. I’m addicted to surfing,. I used to get enough sleep, but age and all the weird things cancer treatment did to my hormone system have made it harder for me to settle down and stay settled.

As for sex…

Hubby and I made a point of continuing to have sex despite the arrival of two children. I don’t remember how we managed when #2 was sleeping in our bed. We probably stuck him in the other room for a while. One time they were in their car seats, asleep after a drive, and we drove the car into our garage which is right under the bedroom, opened all the car windows and the inner door to the house, ran upstairs and made it. You have to be resourceful if you want to have a sex life while raising children.

However, this past couple of years has been extra hard. I was stressed out during chemo because I really didn’t want to have sex at all, and I thought I ought to make the effort. My husband told me not to worry about it. Who has sex when they’re in chemotherapy? It’s in theory possible - I wasn’t totally wiped out sick. But bleah. Plus I was bald, and tripped out about my scars, etc. Ok we got past the post-surgery-post-chemo trip, and then within a year my dad comes down with lung cancer and dies. And there was a war in my hometown with lots of people blasted and bloody on the news. Plus I am in grad school and stressed out about doing well. ARgh. For a few months I was just too sad and angry to think about sex. Now in the new year I am finally pulling out of that.

So for me, sex is the new sleep. Yes I could use more sleep. I’ll sleep sometime. But hubby and I really want to get more sex.

The best solution so far: don’t you just love the virtual office, made possible by DSL lines? Hubby’s head office closed down the local office and sent everybody home to telecommute last fall. I started working on my novel at home - in bed. There’s something about writing in bed that’s very inspirational. But it’s sexy, too, I don’t know why. And my husband is so psychic. I can be sitting there trying very hard to concentrate on my work, noticing that the slightest hint of sexual interest just crossed my radar, and thump thump thump, here comes Hubby up the stairs from the office way at the other end of the house. How did he know?

I always did like the mid-day romp better than late-at-night shenanigans. And the fact that the kids are at school makes it so much better. I’m just freer.

So there you go. As usual, I am ahead of the zeitgeist. I am past the baby-in-bed wars, past the can’t-get-enough-sleep woes, and into the middle-aged-and-going-for-it-while-I-still-can phase. Those poor over-paid under-rested yuppies in the New York Times are just going to have to figure it out for themselves.

Excuse me while I go upstairs for a bit….

O but by the way, I really do think it’s crucial to put the marital relationship first. The kids won’t be better off if the parents grow apart because they’re too exhausted from catering to the kids all the time.

Finishing the MFA

Wild Guppy posts about her conflicting feelings as she finishes her MFA at Camp Marzipan, my alma-mater-to-be.

I don’t want to be done yet. I do want to finish in May because I took so very, very long to finish my BA (the diploma arrived almost twenty-one years after I went off to college for the first time) . I have trouble completing a task, and am determined to finish this one on time. BUT. I will miss my classmates and the intensive courses of reading and writing we have been doing. I am afraid that my amazing, thoughtful, perceptive classmates will disappear and go off into their own lives (as well they should) and that I won’t have them around to teach me and motivate me any more.

Remembering last year and looking over the new crop for this year, I believe that my yearmates are a particularly strong bunch. There were many fine writers in the year before me, but there’s a core of people this year who are fierce in their hunger for literature. They read with passion and intensity and write fueled with the ravenous desire of their reading. I don’t even get along with all these folks I admire in my class (okay there’s only one I admire who doesn’t get along with me). I’m just saying, they are amazing.

Of course, now that I think back over my first year and the entering class of 2004, I’m remembering guppy, jade, Hmmm, Hmmm and Hmmm, who all exhibit that same intensity of focus and passion for literature I admire in my own yearmates. And what do I know of the entering class of 2006? They are quieter (but maybe first years are just scared) and so I am probably missing their intensity. I’ve seen some good stories already.

Anyway. Whenever I start comparing one group to another I end with my foot in my mouth.

I just know I’m going to miss the intense conversations and inspiration from my comrades at Camp Marzipan. Don’t know what I’m going to do in May once it’s all over. I am just not ready to be done with this experience. It has opened me, honed me, stretched me and focused me. And yet I feel so unfocused still, and so unseasoned. I have a lot to learn about the close reading of texts. I want to spend another year taking literature classes and workshops with teachers and fellow students who read carefully and with great respect.

We are promising each other to be in writing group together. Will they show up, or will they peter out and go away? I want to read and write with other writers with all the love and dedication and inspiration that we have right now at Camp Marzipan.

I feel lucky to have had this experience, and lucky that the personalities worked out this way. It could have been very different…

It occurs to me, though, that there are many fine writers in the larger world, building community through the internet, and I can continue to use blogging and email to stay in touch with people.

It will be hard to beat those wine-and-food fueled classes we’ve had with Goddess Teacher for the last year. Maybe I’ll have to have some writer parties after graduation - serious ones, with non-writing spouses NOT invited, where we drink, eat, talk books and read our work to each other, just like we do in GT’s class.

Re: finishing the thesis - it’s due in 7 weeks, 70 to 90 pages, and I have 78 of rough draft with more to write. There are several sections I want to rewrite for POV (third to first, I was distancing too much) and one for tense (wrote first version in present tense, which is how I compose a lot of action scenes, so now I will switch to past). I have notes like “expand this scene” in several places.

The whole thing needs a good polish - ran a chunk of it through the grammar checker today just for laughs, and noticed some of my run-on sentence tics. Too much Faulkner too early in life, is my diagnosis.

Did I mention that Goddess Teacher saw 30-some pages of it last month and told me it’s an important book and I need to finish it? I know I mentioned this somewhere.

A dear friend who isn’t in the program has agreed to read it over for me. I have to email her right now and see when she wants it. I think two weeks from now is a good date to shoot for; then if I get it back from her within a week and respond to her edits, I can get it to my reader (YHMW) in late March.

Anyway. Point is. My nightmare scenario of having no thesis the night before it’s due is not going to happen. I will have a thesis. It might not be a Nobel-prize winning manuscript, but it will be a thesis. Whew.

One last thought about finishing the thing. A lovely teacher from last term, one who brought me and Jadepark together, told us to go look in the library at other people’s theses. So I did. I looked at the theses of friends who graduated in 2006, and of Goddess Teacher, who graduated quite a few years before that. I looked at random theses and I looked at theses of classmates from workshop. I saw amazing work (friends and GT) and I saw mediocre work. More importantly, I could see my own work lined up on the shelf with those manuscripts. Yes, GT’s thesis was amazing and became a prize-winning published novel not long after. She is intimidating in her artistry. But…it really did help a great deal to go and look at those theses.

I just spent a few days with my novel files on my bed, spreading the pages around and collecting them again, until I had a chunk of pages I wanted to stitch together. Then I pulled them from their various files into a new, master thesis file. Now when I edit this master file I save with each day’s name, so I have the Feb. 20 version, Feb. 28, March 2, etc.

It’s gonna happen, God willing and the creek don’t rise. And I have some hope that I may actually finish the whole novel and maybe, just maybe, get it published. Let us hope. (and while I’m hoping, I’m working, too)

Sorry No Posts For So Long

I haven’t been posting here because I have too much MFA work to do; I signed up for three classes AND my thesis; two of those are literature classes, so I’m reading a novel and a Shakespeare play every week.

The third class is a workshop, my fifth at Camp Marzipan; I’d technically used up my quota of electives and was not supposed to take this one, but they were underenrolled (what is that all about anyway? Two of the most admired young writers of our time, and their classes were so underenrolled that the Provost was threatening to pull them?).

I desperately wanted to take a class with Young Hot Male Writer before I graduate (and he goes on to the next hot MFA program). His sensibility and his reading lists have interested me from the beginning, and now that I’m in workshop with him I can see that he’s a good teacher for me. The workshop with him is worth the extra work and hassle to me, even though YHMW is distracted a little by his book tour. We’re having good class discussions and I am writing new work that’s different from what I turn in to Goddess Teacher.

He brought in his friend, someone older, to teach last week when he was away; the friend is a careful, thoughtful, close reader who gave great responses. That was totally worth it.

God knows if I have any readers left, but I wanted to respond to something Guppy wrote, so here goes (see next post).

Compulsive Bookreaders Anonymous

Jadepark links to this test of your bookreading style. Here’s what I got:

What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Dedicated Reader     You are always trying to find the time to get back to your book. You are convinced that the world would be a much better place if only everyone read more.
Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm
Book Snob
Literate Good Citizen
Non-Reader
Fad Reader
What Kind of Reader Are You? Create Your Own Quiz

I don’t usually take these sorts of tests, but this one is spot-on.

Camp Marzipan’s Library

What I did today at Camp Marzipan’s Library:

1. read some Shakespeare

2. tried not to surf the internet too long

3. surfed too long

4. got depressed about my novel

5. pulled through the folder and looked at what I have

6. felt better for a little while, then got depressed again

7. ran into two friends who were kind and said uplifting things

8. looked up and began reading a novel that does some of the things I want my novel to do (Anil’s Ghost, in case you’re wondering)

9. looked up atlases, ethnographic studies and the CIA fact book for the country in which my novel is set. Found a great anthropological study from 1955 that is helping with everything - names, layout of place, customs, etc.

10. read anthropological study

11. took notes on novel and anthropological study.

Last November I got a writing prompt from somebody’s blog (can’t even remember who) which stimulated a nice snippet of writing. I don’t always like writing prompts but they can be very helpful. I need to use writing prompts to generate some scenes. I have an arc to this story but I keep thinking that what I’ve got is lame, not enough, etc.

Anil’s Ghost interests me for lots of reasons. It starts out the same way my manuscript does: woman in a plane returning to home country. Guess this is a classic way to begin a return novel, huh? I’m scared that if I do it, it will be a big cliche. Ondaatje also uses folk songs and snips from the atlas of Sri Lanka and italicized sections of bad scenes from the war interspersed with the narrative of the woman. I have some folk songs in my folder, and now I know what I’m going to do with them. I know as well what I’m going to do with some ugly war scenes that keep intruding into the work. Stick ‘em in there!

Anil’s Ghost models how to delineate great swaths of time and place with a light touch. Ondaatje sketches out lots of character and history in few words. I have a lot of cutting to do (but later, later)

I want to send my thesis director something over the weekend so I’m feeling particularly pressed… and yet everything I’ve written seems so gassy and cliched and banal. Furthermore, my fellow writers in Goddess Teacher’s class are COOKING. They are STEAMING HOT and some of them are so fucking intense that I feel like Barbara Pym. I feel like I’m writing a war novel that is just a lace-collar and tea-cozy domestic drama, with distant echoes of mortar shells. Sometimes my colleagues’ brilliance and intensity inspire me to write deeper, and sometimes they inspire despair.