In the "it never rains" department...

Kinda bananas.

I got the online class--which I've got ready to "go live" tomorrow (despite some moments of random stupidity on my part and one glitch that--according to tech support--is a "known problem" with Blackboard). I got the materials to edit for the NYPL that I've been waiting for since November. A little project I'm editing for the Met boomeranged back to me, as they do (I have to comb through them several times before they go to press). And the assistant at the NYPL who has been my point person there recommended me to some people she knows; they're designers who are putting together a proposal for a large art book for a west coast museum, and they need to include an editor in their proposal. I'm saying yes to that, too. In the near future, all I need to do for that is produce a bio paragraph (what the hell do I say?), an estimate (at which I suck, but I'll get better at them as time goes on), and "samples" of my work--which will be just a list of some of the big book projects I did for the Met.

And I really, really wish I had an office. Even just a designated room in my house, but somewhere big enough that I have some desk space on which to spread out materials. My "office" (or "study") is in the little guest room, so the guest bed is covered with books and papers and I don't know what all. (I really do need to go through it all, clean up, sort, file, toss.) To look at a piece of paper while I'm working on the computer, I have to open the drawer of the little file cabinet that's doubling as a night stand and balance the paper there (otherwise it's too far away for me to see it clearly).

Well, maybe some day I'll graduate to a place big enough that I can have a sizable desk, not just the little flimsy thing I have my computer and printer on (the footprint of which isn't much bigger than either of those things).

Meanwhile, I'm calling a halt to work on the class earlier than I did last night; it seems to take me about three times as long to wind down from this as it does to wind down when I'm doing anything else--and it always takes me a long time to wind down. I have about five more weeks of content to get online, but the students have all they need to start. I also have changed the order of assignments at least three times since I posted what I thought was a "final" syllabus and assignment schedule; I'm hoping that won't happen again, but at least I haven't made 28 paper copies of the wretched thing; I just change the file and post it again.

My brain needs to make mrrrrr-eeee mrrr-eee noises for a while. More tomorrow.

Unexpected development

Much to my surprise, and very much at the last possible second, I am back in the educational trenches. I got a call a few days ago (feels more like weeks) asking whether I'd be willing to take a "late start" online section of 101. I was feeling a bit despondent about the fact that I had not gotten any materials to edit from the NYPL and had just about made up my mind that that exhibition was going to be scrubbed--or at least that they wouldn't be using my services--so, in the spirit of "I need the money," I took the class.

And then I promptly got the materials from the NYPL with a request that they be turned around by today.

I should also say that, although I've taught fully online before, I've never taught 101 online. Fortunately, I've taught it "web enhanced" for donkey's years, so at least some of the work of pulling the thing together was done, but the vast majority of it needed--and still needs--to be worked out. I've ditched a few assignments--and may ditch one more, unless I can figure out a good way to do it and assuming doing so won't screw up the grade calculation enough to be a problem. (I have extra points built in, so I think I can ditch those points and still come up with more than the 2,000 that I use as the 100% of everything mark.)

In any event, I slammed through the editing for the NYPL--and I am hoping I made no egregious blunders, though I worry a bit, as I had to go back through everything about four times to fix little inconsistencies or to check for things I could have missed (along the lines of "did I remember to use 'U.S.' with the periods everywhere that appeared?"). But whatever: it's done. Eventually it will boomerang back to me with some new material that needs a preliminary edit but mostly with the stuff I already edited fixed up and ready to be checked again.

That won't happen until next week, though, so I'm now up to my antlers in getting the course put together. But I am about to take a break from that work for the rest of the evening to go do some dancing. I'd be very tempted to bail for any number of reasons, not least among them my "hair on fire" panic about having the class ready to roll by Monday, but my ass has been nailed to this computer chair for at least three days now, and if I don't get up and move, I may freeze permanently in this position. There is life maintenance that needs doing, too; I'm hoping to take care of some of that on my way to the dance thingy.

As for my own creative writing, heaven knows when I'll get back to it. I wonder if I will feel more or less energetic about working on it when I have something I must do because of external pressures. If that makes any sense. My brain is about the consistency of pancake batter right now, and nowhere near as much fun. But off I go, merrily, merrily, or some such.

Distracted by "research" again

My writerly duties today consisted primarily of selecting somewhere to submit a story or two. Ended up being one--and not one of the ones that recently got rejected, though I'll submit those as well, just elsewhere.

It's a strange thing to throw those darts: there is no way to anticipate where one of my stories might find a happy home, or which one to send to what journal or magazine.

But I also got distracted by some research, as I was also doing some revising. I came across a file with a title I didn't recognize, so I thought I'd look at it. It seems I once had an idea of turning the "story suite" I've been noodling with into a novel, though I'm now very sure there isn't a novel in there: the interconnected stories are the right size and shape for what I have to say in that setting. But I realized that my mental image of the common setting has varied some over the years, and I wanted to try to get some of the details more clear to myself so the setting coheres better among the stories--and indeed, in the one I was looking at, so the setting coheres within the story. For instance, I had imagined a town with only about three businesses along the main street--but with a relatively large high school and a public library. That doesn't hold together. Any town large enough to have a high school of its own and a library is decidedly going to have a few more businesses in it. (I should know: I live in a town that size.)

So I was digging around, trying to find towns I could use as approximate models for the one I'm imagining, but that led me into thinking about growing zones (could there be a melon farmer, as in the story I was revising?) and who the local big-wigs would be (mentioned in one or two stories, and one story is that of the daughter of that family, assuming there's only one). (And I just got distracted for a minute there by what the family's source of income would be, which will require more thought and possibly more research.)

I also opened up some of my other stories because I wanted to record word counts (it matters for some submissions), which got me revising a different story--actually, the first that I wrote in this suite--and that led me to trying to find out what plants would be growing beside a creek in that setting, which also led to an attempt to find a good synonym for "weed"--and I don't mean the kind a person smokes, so I was rather out of luck on that one.

And I was going to work on another story, or at least record the word count, and I suddenly realized that I have to do some snow removal before I head off for tonight's get-together with my mother and sister, but I wanted to post to the blog first so ... here I am.

And here I go. That driveway isn't going to shovel itself.

Yeah, not feeling it.

This is why I do not and cannot think of my self as that wondrous being called "a writer." There are days--such as today--when I really, truly just can't write anything of substance. I can blather, as I do here in these blog posts; I can do the verbal equivalent of noodling. But I can't dig into either coming up with something new (another story, another chapter in the novel) or working with something that already exists (revising, oh, anything). My brain just won't let me go there.

I did spend a little time doing some revising of the personal essay I'm working on, and I may be a tiny bit closer to having something reasonably well put together there, but I'm now wondering whether I want to publish the thing at all. Again, how personal is too personal?

For the record, when I submitted my two short-stories to The Masters Review, I thought I had submitted one to the fall contest and one to the "New Voices" segment. Apparently I submitted both to the fall contest--I think I may have said something about the very nice rejection email I got--and I did, as I thought, submit one also to "New Voices": I got a much less lovely rejection for that one the other day.

But thinking, "OK, I'll hunt around for somewhere else to send it for rejection" also got me thinking about the title--and the epigraph. The story is about a young man of Native heritage and his unrequited love for a woman he works with. His being Native has little bearing on the story, however; it's simply an interesting little character detail. Nevertheless, the story is titled after the Hank Williams song "Kaw-Liga," and the epigraph is the first verse of the song, and goes like this:

Kaw-liga was a wooden Indian standing by the door.

He fell in love with an Indian maiden over in the antique store. 

Kaw-liga just stood there and never let it show, 

So she could never answer "yes" or "no."

And yeah, that's a pretty serious racial stereotype: cigar-store Indians are considered pretty offensive these days, for I think understandable reasons.

So the question of the day, kiddies, is this: should I retitle the story, do away with the epigraph, and remove the mention of the song in the story? Is my story tainted as racist by association? I don't think it's any better if I just omit the first two lines of the verse: anyone who knows the Hank Williams song will know the racist reference (and anyone who doesn't can very easily look it up, as I have to say where the epigraph came from).

As I'm blathering about this, I'm beginning to think I'll change the title and remove the song references. The story certainly doesn't need them, and I do think the "offensive by proxy" charge would have enough merit to stick.

So, yeah: I can "feel" that much.

How personal is too personal?

Since one of the things I'm writing these days is that thing called the "personal" essay, I'm finding that there is a place where I suddenly wonder about what is right and good to share and what is maybe too much. I'm not so concerned about myself. I've sometimes wondered if I have "boundary issues," as I am generally pretty forthcoming about my life, sharing things sometimes that others might consider too personal, too close to the heart, to share. Not with everyone--I do have very specific boundaries with specific individuals--but I often find myself writing something for Facebook and then thinking, "No one wants to know this. It's really more than I 'should' share."

But there's also the received wisdom that the most personal is also the most universal. But that's a dicey proposition as well--as testified by a lot of the "poetry" written by my students (when I had students). Sometimes the most personal is squirmingly uncomfortable for the reader--or feels ungodly trite. But my specific, personal, individual story of great grief, for instance, or a moment of feeling blessed: that can indeed approach the universal.

It's a strange thing about writing personally. We essentially do it for two reasons. One is to work our way through whatever we are feeling or thinking, while it is happening, making sense by turning whatever is going on into a narrative, which helps us manage it with a modicum more grace. We don't generally share that stuff hot off the griddle, as it were. Before it sees an audience, it is carefully combed through and recrafted to more precisely capture the experience--and, I think, to more directly universalize the experience, to help readers to feel vicariously whatever it is we went through. But then there is the writing that is done in retrospect, after all the personal processing is complete. The end result is very much the same: a more clear, calm, and deliberately structured attempt to convey an experience.

As I write this, I realize that part of what I've been wavering about is that the thing I want to turn into an essay is still a little too fresh and raw for me personally. If I can't get the requisite objective distance in my own head and heart, I can hardly produce something that feels appropriate to share with an audience. I'm suddenly thinking about some inspirational talks I've heard, in which the speaker is relating something deeply personal and often extremely painful--being raped repeatedly by a trusted figure in the past--but is able to do so completely calmly. It isn't that the feeling isn't there; if the speaker didn't have all the feeling behind the words, audiences would not be as captivated, I think. But the feeling vibrates behind the presentation, which is ... well, not matter-of-fact but clear and objective.

I hasten to say that what I'm writing about is nowhere near that personal nor that painful. I'm trying to verbalize something I value and to explain why I value it. That requires a fair amount of self-examination, of course--which is why I love writing personal essays. They give me an opportunity to find clarity in myself, as I try to put the clarity into the words I write.

Again, the process is not entirely dissimilar from academic writing, in that I must continually ask the questions that might arise to counter whatever it is I'm saying. I actually do imagine being asked, "Do you mean X? Is Y really the case, always? What about Q and T?" And my work to answer those questions, not to dodge them, helps me clarify what I think, how I feel.

Shifting gears: the freelance job I was expecting to arrive yesterday is, once again, late--god knows when I'll actually get it, and I'm starting to wonder if I'll actually get it. Instead, I have a second round to do on a smaller job that I got last week. So my personal writing may be, again, put on hold for a while, which means blog posts may be put on hold as well. But when I'm back writing, I'll be back blogging.

Gotta love research

I've been working on a little essay that I may eventually toss up on Medium, and for it, I found myself doing a tiny bit of research. And man, I love chasing down all the possible rabbit trails research--even of the superficial "search Google" kind--can reveal. I used to tell my students that I am not good at coming up with search terms, which is true; my brain does not get "search engine optimized" approaches to topics, so it takes me a fair amount of floundering around to find what I'm looking for. And if I head to Google Scholar (which I enjoy doing), I almost invariably find something I want to read that I can't access directly (not without paying a larger sum of money than idle curiosity would justify), so I try the NCC databases--and generally I strike out. If I'm serious enough, I'll use ILIAD (ILLIAD? I can't remember), the inter-library loan service of the NCC library. The librarians who staff that service are amazing. They can find just about anything. Librarians clearly have a particular kind of brain--one I just as clearly do not have.

Perhaps tangentially, I will report that my retirement brain has gotten hungry enough for metaphoric red meat that I have actually embarked on reading non-fiction for fun. At some point in the past, I started reading Antonio Damasio's The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. Clearly I got about half way through, then put the book down, intending to pick it up again--and didn't pick it up again until a few days ago. I will be interested to see whether I finish it this time. It is certainly fascinating. It has absolutely nothing whatever to do with the research I was doing for the little essay I was writing--nothing whatever to do with any of my writing, really--but I'm enjoying the knowledge for knowledge's sake, and I do notice that any time I read about the workings of the human mind, I see applications to my own life that are, to me, fascinating.

Shifting gears, but I realize I didn't persist in a program of writing every day long enough for it to become habituated routine. Still, I haven't given up on the prospect of that happening. I do love to write, and I have enough things going, and enough places I could go, that I don't have to feel nailed into writing just this one thing. It's writing itself that I love, not so much any specific thing that I'm writing.

But I have nothing else of great interest to report just at the moment. Tomorrow I will get one small editing job, which is returning to me after the authors have had a chance to look at my initial edits. I was supposed to get another editing job today--a slightly larger one--but so far, no sign of it. However, if it does show up, or when it does show up, I will have to put my head down and grind on it to turn it around jiffy-quick: we're running out of time before the hard deadline of "materials to press." We'll see how it sorts itself out.

I mention that because, if I'm immersed in editing, I won't be writing--or blogging--for a while. Again. But we'll see what transpires.

Spelunking in the psyche

Well, I was doing that personal writing, and then there were holidays in there, and life maintenance, and what with one thing and another, I kinda forgot about posting to the blog--and wasn't quite sure what to say in any event. This is, after all, a public forum, and personal writing is, well, personal, so there's only so much I can say about it.

But I will say a few things about it, not in terms of what I'm actually writing about, but about this process, and how it connects to other writing more generally.

For one thing, although eventually there will, in fact, be an "audience" for what I'm writing, that audience will be one person. And I realize that most of what I'm doing actually isn't intended for that individual at all; it's for me. I need to do a lot of "writing out," which can be a form of acting out: I have to "perform" the various personas that get involved: the warrior, the victim, the philosopher, the psychologist, the supplicant, the judge, whatever parts of my psyche get involved in the issues I'm working out. But "writing out" also is a process of clarifying thinking. That was a continual struggle (and continual area of failure) when I was a teacher: trying to get students to understand that writing is actually a form of thinking. Putting something into words--even spoken words--does help us clarify what we think, but putting what we think (or feel) into writing has advantages that speaking does not: one can go back to rework, clarify, change wording, change order in which things are presented, all in hope that what is going on inside the writer's psyche can be comprehended, or perhaps more accurately apprehended, by the reader.

However, we can never know how a reader will see what we've written. Le Guin was very willing to allow readers to see things in her works very differently from what she had in mind when she wrote them. Example: One of her characters is from (future) earth, from a future nation called Borland. Since the character is black, I always assumed that was from "Boerland," i.e. some part of what had at some point been South Africa. She had something similar in mind (as long as the character didn't talk with the Dutch-inflected South African accent but rather with the British-inflected version)--but she said that some readers had assumed "Borland" was a stand-in for "Portland"--as in Oregon, because that was her home town, and she was OK with that idea, too. (She also was generally OK with readers pronouncing things however they chose, though there were a few instances in which she got rather fierce about the correct pronunciation of names.)

I suppose a writer whose work is out there in the public, especially if one is fortunate enough for the work to start to receive critical attention of any kind, must get used to "misreads" of her (or his) precious and treasured words. I don't have that concern in terms of any of my public writing: no one is paying that much attention to it (and likely never will, which is fine by me). But when a piece of writing is intended as specific communication to another individual--or even a very specific group of individuals--then the challenge to prevent potential misreads becomes more highly charged.

So in order to clearly convey what I feel/think/mean, I must work to put it in language that is absolutely clear--or as clear as my skill can make it. But that in turn requires that I understand what I feel/think/mean well enough that I know what words best convey it. Personal writing of any kind, then, becomes an exercise in knowing the self. I can be a lot sloppier about clarity in my journal writing, as that's intended only for me (and yes, I have a plan about my journals when my life is close to complete: I will read each one, taking them in chronological order, and then, after reading it, ceremoniously burn it.) As my students often said, "I know what I mean"--and in a journal, that's enough. (I will say, though, sometimes I go back to an old journal and read an entry and have zero clue what--or more often who--I was talking about. Memory like swish cheeze.)

The connection I see between that personal spelunking--exploring the inner reaches of the self and bringing back whatever crystals or dull stones one finds there--and writing creatively is that the successful writer must have at least an intuitive sense of the inner life of the characters. That's why one of the exercises I gave my fiction writing students was to answer a huge list of questions about the character. None of the answers would end up in the story, but it helped the writer fully visualize and get a sense of the character, each arbitrary decision informs the writer's understanding of the character's inner self. ("What kind of shoes does the character wear?" "Hand-tooled cowboy boots"--ah! we know something about this person already.)

So although the writing on which I am currently embarked--and have been and will be for some time--is purely personal, it still informs my creative work: what I get to know about myself helps me understand all humans more clearly, including the ones I invent, and the effort to communicate clearly is good practice generally.

And as a sort of post script to this examination of this writer's process, I should note that the two stories I submitted to The Masters Review were very kindly rejected. They said, "However, your submission stood out among others and received praise from our staff. Unfortunately, we always have to decline some excellent pieces, but we are grateful for the chance to read such high-quality work." That may be boiler-plate, but if it is, it's very nice boiler-plate. So, now I get to go back to the list of literary journals I have somewhere and throw a dart to see where I might try next.

Thus begins the new year. May we all find the words we need for every situation in the year to come.