Monday

My daughter is lying in my lap, feeding, my dog is at my feet, sleeping, and I am thinking about the page. It's been a couple of days since I have written. I am filling the hopper by getting some of my reading done but tonight is homework night and I'm pumped to hit the page running. I will be formulating all day about what I want to write and then, when the time comes and I sit down at my computer, I will probably write something completely different than what I expected.

I'm curious to see if my packet will come in the mail today. That would be a nice treat, to be able to sit down and read through the packet before I sit down and begin a new project. I'm really curious to see what kind of response I get on the creative work I sent out this packet. It is the rawest piece of material I have ever sent out to an advisor. I "finished" the story 12 hours before I sent it off. SCARY! My normal routine is to do a revision, a line edit, a revision, a line edit and another revision before I even consider sending it out to an instructor.

Oh well, life is full of risks.

What's funny is that a month or so ago I was told that I wasn't a risk taker. It bothered me. I'll be honest it really bothered me. I felt that I had taken many risks, especially over the last year, and to have someone tell me that I didn't really set me back on my heels. This is what I've come up with in reaction.

I am a risk taker. The person who told me that I wasn't didn't know me well enough to understand what risks I was taking. She wanted me to take her risks. She wanted to see me make the decisions she wanted to make and she thought that because they were dangerous or risky to her that they were to me. This situation directly pertained to a story I wrote. She wanted big action, big drama to be a part of the story and what I really wanted out of the piece, what I really wanted the story to accomplish was opposite of that response. It is easy to write high drama. It is hard, and risky, to write the quiet dramas that face us every day. It is hard to expose the truth of the daily insecurities of daily life.

I think I'm done with thinking about that comment now. It's bounced around for a little bit and now I think I can finally put it to rest because this blog post has enabled me to put some ideas together.

Ahhhhhh, Monday.

Where is the Art?

Life comes fast, changing every day, putting an infinite amount of pressure on me (or I put an infinite amount of pressure on me) and it is sometimes hard to find the thread that leads me back to the page.

My personal struggles with work and school are pretty mellow at this point but what is funny is that when I reach a dip in the tension, in the manic press to meet all obligations at once, my wife reaches a peak. Tracy is trying so hard right now to be everything to everyone and there are simply not enough hours in the day. Her work has exploded, throwing out impossible deadlines, month long events and new coworkers. She is swimming as fast as she can but I feel like she is fighting the undertow.

It is really hard for me to watch her experience this and I want to reach out to her and offer some kind of lifeline, a buoy on to which she can hold, but as her stress level increases, her resistance to me grows.

I think, in her mind, if she decompresses with me, if she lets go of it all and relaxes, she will stop and not start again. The narratives in our lives follow strange curves, peaks and valleys that do not flow in the same manner for each person. I feel like Tracy and I have intersected in our journey, me decompressing from end of semester, her compressing under the pressure of work and somewhere in my descent and her ascent we briefly met for a moment and were equal.

So, in taking care of the baby, trying to do the housework, maintaining my commitment to my day job and trying to help her be OK in her skin, I wonder where does Art fit into all of this. How important is making up stories?

The answer, I know, is that it is critical. With each new story I write I gain a greater understanding of what it is to be a human, a man, a son, a husband, a father, a brother, a friend. Writing is my meditation. It is my outward seeking into the world and I am a better person for it. It seems weird that such an isolated activity can teach me so much about connectedness, how sitting alone in a room can teach me about my need for my loved ones.

In looking at my life right now and seeing the stress my wife is having to endure, I love her all the more because I can recognize myself in her. I can feel her pain and wait for her, patiently, as I should. For when she stops for a moment and looks around at her life and her world. She will see me standing there, holding our daughter, smiling, and it is a picture I created. It is a picture of my devotion to her. It is my greatest work of art.

Deadlines and Reading

It is the last night before a packet must be in the mail and I am feeling nervous about the whole thing. It is always interesting to start over with a new advisor and learn their methods. I am happy that I got Jack this time around. I have been very lucky in who I have been able to work with during my program. It has been a wonderful and rewarding experience so far and I have one more year left before I am kicked out into the real world and expected to be able to do this on my own.

Reading, I think is the key here. Reading carefully and with an eye towards inspiration. My best story from last semester was a tribute to a good story I read. I read a story that I enjoyed and it sponsored questions in me that made me create my own story, made me want to write, not a rebuttal, but an associated piece that took the material from the story and twisted it a little bit. It was a great exercise. I think emulation is a huge part of being a beginning writer. I don't know what I would do if I didn't have great writers to read and emulate.

I'm not ashamed of the fact that I find inspiration in the work of others. I think there are people out there who would lash back at me and say that I am not "truly" creative, but I don't feel that way. I became infused with the desire to write by being an avid reader in my youth. I can remember how I used to devour books back then: C.S. Lewis, The Boxcar Children series, The Wizard of Oz series, Choose-Your-Own-Adventures, Roald Dahl, Beverly Cleary, etc. I read everything that I could get my hands on. The process of being engrossed in a book is one of the greatest pleasures I know. It is hard for most people to find the time to read but if they can, they should because it is one of the greatest endeavors one can gift to him/herself.

So, I read. And I've been trying to read a lot. As I go to work at the library tonight I will try and find my own voice but I know it will be more like a chorus of voices brought forth by the great works I have read in my own life.

Duh!

So, I read through the intros to a couple of essays from students who have graduated in my program a year before me and I feel so much better about what I am doing now. It is nice to know that this essay doesn't have to be the greatest achievement of dry academic analysis in the world but can have a life and energy and a touch of me within its pages.

I should have taken a look at these essays ages ago but I didn't want to freak myself out if they were way better in quality than what I thought I could produce. Silly me. The devil you don't know is always scarier than the one you do.

Silly.

Inadequate

I've begun my day at home today with feelings of anxiety about my job performance. I'm beginning to wonder if I am doing my job at all. I know I am making phone calls like I'm supposed to but not as many as I should and I'm not having the most stellar results.

I can't tell if this is merely me being unused to the part time gig and that I just need to settle in for the long haul and hope that I will become adjusted or if I really need to up the ante here and get to work.

I just can't get over the feelings of despair when faced with my days work. Calling strangers one after the other all day long is not how I imagined myself spending my life. I'm hoping that I will have the opportunity, as a result of school, to change professions and get out of this job that I have hated for three years, part time or full time.

So, this is basically a "I-hate-my-job" tirade and nothing more. Tomorrow is another day.

Air

Now that Tracy and I are in the house and mostly unpacked and my father is successfully moved down to Eugene, today is a day to take a breath. I'm coming up for air and I'm glad that today is shaping up to be a fun day where Tracy and I can both relax.

The in-laws are coming over to watch Shea and we are going to head off to a movie and lunch. Just an afternoon away where we don't have to think, move, or work. It's going to be nice. I'm hoping that when I get back this evening I will be afforded the opportunity to work on some sorely neglected school work.

All in all, it looks like the heavy lifting is behind us and its time to settle in for a chance to enjoy the rest of the summer.

One Step Closer

Having come to the library for the first time in about two weeks, I was nervous about what I was going to be able to get done tonight. I realized that I had left all of my reference books at home when I pulled into the parking lot but decided not to go back for them and to focus on what I could do this evening.

Well, I really couldn't have asked for a better arrangement because without my reference books I was left with only organizing my thoughts and I have now completed a four page outline for my 15 page paper that is due in two weeks. Normally I am not an outline kind of guy but my essay topic was beginning to get too large for me to hold in my head and by outlining it like I did tonight I am free from having to remember it all and I have a framework that I can work inside of now.

It is very exciting. I just wanted to rant for a moment about my bookish moment of victory!

And I will leave you with a quote that I think will make it to my essay. I love it.

"Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action." - James Russell Lowell

A Dream

I've just woken from a dream. It is 3 am on the eve of moving day and it is the second dream that I have remembered in the last week. I often do not remember my dreams and this one was so vivid that I felt I had to write it down.

I am at residency surrounded by all the students and faculty who I am familiar with in that environment and we are on our way to a performance piece by someone I know as a publisher for a small press. She has planned a piece that includes some of the other students, music, dance, and spoken word. When everyone goes into the auditorium, I wait outside. I can hear perfectly well what is happening inside, almost like I have a baby monitor filling me in on what is happening inside the auditorium.

Music begins playing and a student in a sing-song chant walks to the center of the room. It is theater in the round that C. has set up and it is filled with bizarre objects big and small. The student introduces C. and hands her a microphone. The performance continues and I am soon bored/annoyed with the performance and I get up and walk out of the auditorium. I go outside and sit against the wall of the building, waiting for C. to finish so I can walk home with everyone.

C. appears outside the auditorium with the microphone and she is reciting more spoken word poetry and she flutters around outside. There is a man with her who I don't recognize who bends down and is trying to smoke the crushed out cigarettes that litter the sidewalk around the auditorium.

I'm beginning to feel unsettled and I duck behind a wall to hide from C. and her friend/fellow performer. C. finds me tucked into a small alcove and winds out her performance with something along the lines of, "It isn't the clarity of expression, but the journey, the Sweet Home Alabama of it all." She plays a couple of notes on something like a large recorder or a clarinet and ends the show.

Outside, where we sit it is silent and before I can stop myself I tell her, "I disagree."

She gets a hurt look on her face and says, "Why?"

I look at her and she holds the microphone/recorder to my mouth so that I can be heard in the auditorium. In a mild, stuttering voice I tell her that I think saying things in its simplest, truest form is what it IS all about."

Her hands fall to her side and she doesn't say anything more.

The audience, my fellow students and our faculty, begin filing out of the auditorium and there is some whispered talk about being confrontational with C. about her performance. I'm embarrassed and try to stick to the shadows. I sit on a curb a small ways away from the gathered attendees.

One of the faculty approaches me from behind, Sandra Alcosser, and sits next to me on the curb. She tells me that she agrees with me and to not listen to the scolding of the other attendees.

She turns her head away from me, it is night and a street light is shining from above and behind her and her hair looks radiant. She says something in a foreign language that I can't make out and I ask her to translate. She says, "Auburn is the place where it all levels out." I wake.

(It isn't until my waking mind has been at work on the contents of my dream when I realize that Auburn could be a place because in my dream, she meant a color.)

So, that's it. That's the dream I remember. It was a fun one and it makes me wish that I could remember the contents of my dreams more often. Well, it is now 3:20 am and I should hit the hay. It is moving day in the morning.

Sure, why not!

So my wife is asleep in the bed, the house is empty of almost all our stuff (a chair here and there). Shea is dozing in my lap, sucking on my finger and I'm typing one handed to let you all know that life is good even when crazy. love ya!

Way too long.

So it has been way too long since I have thought of my poor neglected blog. I apologize for not posting over the last couple of weeks but life has been CRAZY. It has been so in the best possible way.

It started with house hunting, of which we found the one we have been looking for and we signed the offer agreement the night before I left for 10 days.

The 10 days that followed were brain-crunching full residency days filled with my literary friends, too much thinking about writing (not enough doing), visitations by T and S and the inevitable crash of a highly inspired week coming to a close so that I can return and make cold calls.

Our house is in shambles, boxes everywhere! My ability to string two words together to form a comprehensive sentence has been nil but I know in four days I will be living in my new home, content with my wife and child, loving the space and the comfort this home will afford me.

I think that is mainly what is different for me about this house that the previous one didn't have going for it. The first house I saw as T and I's launching off point, the point with which we would gain the necessary momentum with which to launch our family and now that we are moving into this house, I can see YEARS of happiness coming down the pipe at us. I can see us walking the same hallways, no need for lights, jumping up the stairs with ease and seeing the marks on the wall that will show S's steady increase in height and age.

I am excited for this. But I promise you this. This I promise you! I am done with major life changing events after this move. I am tired and I want to rest and so I am going to be content and happy in my now for a while, in my here, in my place, in my home that I share with my beautiful family.

I'll try and write more later that will describe some of the amazing things that I have learned and experienced over the last couple of weeks, but for now...love ya and I'll talk to you soon.