MFA Monday: I'm Back and My Head Didn't Explode!

My fourth residency is over, and I didn't blog a single day. I don't know why every time I go, I think I'll find the time. Time is something there is not a lot of at residency!

I admit my third residency back in January was a bit rough. I can't explain why, and it wasn't that I didn't learn a lot, or have great time with friends. It hardly rained at all - a miracle for Seaside! We even had a bonfire on the beach! But it was hard. Made me rethink writing, and my abilities, and the decision to shell out money for a degree I might not be very good at.

Last semester, though, I buried my head and worked my tail off. Harder than I've ever worked before on writing. Not just longer hours, although that too, but I worked harder to get it right. To learn and absorb more about writing, to implement it, to craft a story well and then hone it. Characters, setting, pacing, dialogue, abstracts, tension, conflict, revision, word choice, ideas... I tried to take it all on. Not all with success, but I can say I've never grown more, faster. Painful, but worth it.

(If I could draw what my brain felt like in May, it would look like this. Only less blue. And I wouldn't have the mischievous smile on my face.)

BUT: I didn't end my semester feeling great about everything. I produced a lot of less-than-stellar short stories. I made the mistake of working to please my advisor, of secretly harboring hopes that he would send my work back with the MFA equivalent of an A++ and say I'd managed to master it all. This, even as I knew I'd picked him specifically because I didn't want that, because he is tough and demanding, because I wanted to grow more than I wanted my ego massaged. There were a few weeks I felt like giving it all up - that I'd never make it.

But I came out of that hole in time for residency #4, mainly because my friends there ramped up the excitement shortly before we went, and in the end, I'm really just a hopeless optimist.

And this time around, it was amazing again.

I got more out of the classes. I made time to get coffee every morning and sit in the library and write some. I wrote every day. This is the first residency I've ever done that, and I loved it.

(This is the library at Pacific. Isn't it amazing?? I sat by that big window, behind the stained glass, in big comfy chairs with my feet propped up on coffee tables. I wrote 30 - 60 minutes a day here.)

I was sitting in classes three to four hours a day, in workshop an hour and a half, in faculty readings about an hour and a half, and graduate presentations about an hour a day. 

I roomed with some of my favorite writers in the whole world. (Aren't they beautiful? Every time I think about not seeing these people every six months I cry.)

We had a little apartment and stayed up late drinking wine and diagramming sentences and talking about commas and watching My Drunk Kitchen. Only writers could dub this a perfect night.

We did our share of socializing, too. We weren't entirely geekish. We went out to parties in the dorms next door and talked about commas with whole rooms crammed with drinking people. Because, while on the whole there are a lot of near-alcoholic writers, they all STILL care about commas.

We went to wineries...

...where there was a nearly unlimited amount of wine and blackberries.

And other stuff. But who cared about anything except the blackberries? Not me!

We toasted. A lot.

We ate and drank and laughed and talked. A lot.

We listened to Ann Hood read a piece she'd written in honor of her daughter who died, and we all cried. We listened to Craig Lesley read from his memoir Burning Fences and we all laughed so hard we cried.

We left. Our work here was done.

(Wait! Is that a blackberry on the table?? Someone should eat that!)

I went out to eat at a bunch of great places I don't have pictures of. :(

The first day I went to a place called "1500 Subs" and they only had 15 subs. What a rip off!! (Okay - it actually was a good sub sandwich, and I laughed so hard with Katie while eating it, I didn't care how many were on the menu. Also, I got massive blisters walking there in sandals and spent the rest of the night walking the campus barefoot.)

I also ate Tai food (with one of my past advisors), Middle Eastern food (a special going away dinner with my roomies), Pub food (to celebrate/cry over graduation with my graduating friends), and pizza at my favorite joint - Pizza Schmizza - with two of my favorite newer friends.

(Some of my favorite graduates. Don't get me started. I'm crying just thinking that they won't be back.)

(And some of my favorite "sophomores" and Pizza Schmizza fanatics. Stolen from my friend Katie, because her picture was better than mine.)

I had a fantastic workshop group, with the best leaders and best readers, and I walked away feeling like I actually could write - and knowing how to do it better. I wish I'd taken a picture of that group of people. It was my last workshop ever at Pacific, and it was a heck of a way to go out.

There was EPIC karaoke, in which we stayed up WAY WAY WAY too late and sang a lot and had a blast. 

There was, like always, major stress around advisor pairings. There's no guarantee that who you want as an advisor for a semester will be the one you'll get, and while it always feels huge and critical, it's nothing like THE LAST ONE... the advisor you get for thesis seems so important. Well, it IS important. And rumor was that this was the most difficult pairing ever - that a huge amount of students wanted the same few advisors, and we all sweated a little over it.

But in the end, everyone I know got who they wanted, even me.

So those two good-looking and talented men are my workshop leader (Jack) and my thesis semester advisor (Pete) (again). Seriously, I could not have gotten any more fortunate than to work with them.

So after the pairing there was a lit magazine party that went long long long into the night in which everyone celebrated on an outdoor patio lit by candles and scattered with wine and chocolate truffles. It's a rough life.

And after that, everything was downhill until graduation.

Ah, graduation. Where a million tears were shed. Mostly by me.

 
So many of my friends there in cap and gown, on to bigger things in life. Hard to believe next year that will be me!

And what does one do after graduation, you might ask?

Party!

(and get each others' text number to stay in touch!)

 

And pretend like this is not the last time things will ever be like this.

 

So...

It appears there was much wine, eating, and partying.

There was. But also, a TON of learning. But I can't put everything in one blog post now, can I? :)

For now, I am home, with five months to gather my writing wits and produce enough quality work to bind into a leather-bound-by-monks thesis. I am loving writing again. I am missing my friends like crazy.

And with a little luck, I'll be back on this blog later to tell you more. :)

Residency #4: Here I Come

Less than 19 hours until I leave for my fourth residency.

Fourth. How did that happen?? How have I already completed three entire semesters?

I thought I would get better at this. The first time - ya know - I didn't know anything. And I'd broken my foot and gotten the flu and hosted Christmas for 14 people. So of course I was running like a crazy person (only metaphorically running, not running, literally, because of the foot thing).

I feel like an old geezer, walking around with a cane and my wobbly old voice saying, "I remember when I was just a young whipper snapper getting ready for my first residency, having no idea what to expect and scared and excited and wondering what I'd gotten myself into." (This is much better if you actually hear this in your head with an old, high, wobbly voice.)

And now. Now.

I am STILL frantically trying to figure out what clothes to bring on the day before the flight leaves. I still have nothing in my closet but black. Black! Like I'm some emo artist with goth eye liner. How did this happen?  Oh yeah.. black is slimming. That's why...

I am STILL thinking I can spend ten hours and completely overhaul  my house, finish laundry, pack suitcase and backpack, fill the fridge with food for those left behind, write a list of the kids' schedules and the dog's eating habits, vacuum out the car...

have I forgotten anything?

Probably.

Oh yeah. Homework. I still haven't finished critiquing my worksheets for this residency, which is scandalous because I always finish those WAY early and then have time to go over and over them. And this time I'm hoping somehow I can get them done and printed before I even leave, but that's not looking likely.

And I didn't finish my newest short story. Or the book I was reading.

It will all work out. At least that's what my husband says. I suppose it will. Funny how, two years later, I am still struggling with the same pre-residency issues: letting go. If I end up learning anything in grad school it's this: I cannot do it all.

I'll try to keep this blog somewhat updated with my goings-on there. No promises, of course, but I'll try.

What I'm looking forward to:

• FRIENDS!!! These are people I only see twice a year, and they are like family to me. I cannot wait to see them, hang out with them, room with them, get coffee in the morning and wine at night with them. There will probably be screaming in the airport. I'm not embarrassed about that.
• Laughing.  I've never laughed so much in my life as I laugh at residency. Hoping that trend continues.
• Craft Talks: Cramming my head with an insane amount of knowledge that it will take years to synthesize and incorporate it all. And all the laughing that happens in them, too.
• Vineyards: There is a night at the winery again. Wine, food, author readings... does a night get any better than that??
• Karaoke: Okay, if a night could get better than the winery, the karaoke night is it. There are plans under way that may or may not include me singing. It also may or may not be Bohemian Rhapsody. It may or may not be epic. I'm thinking yes.
• Ten days of not cooking and cleaning. Shallow, I know, but that alone makes it like a vacation.

So blogging buddies, I'm off. See ya on the flip side!

Even Going Backwards Is Sometimes Going Forwards

Patti Nielson posted a great blog post this week about writing - and how her brain feels like it's going to burst trying to incorporate everything she's learning, and learning so much at one time she wonders how she can implement it all. I know the feeling.

Honestly, sometimes I think writing was easier when I didn't know anything. It feels like the more I learn, the harder it is to sit and write because my head is full of all this stuff I need to remember to do, and I can never remember to do it all. At least not at the same time. Or in the same story.

I focus on getting rid of backstory, and my tension goes downhill.

I get tension higher, and my characters fall flat.

I grab hold of my characters, and suddenly there's no real plot.

My advisor last semester is a great swimmer and has coached swim teams before. When I wrote him that I was frustrated that I kept forgetting stuff - that as I mastered one skill I seemed to be dropping all the other skills I'd learned - he wrote this, and I thought it was brilliant enough to pass along to you:

It’s a lot like when I coached swimming.  You’d have these pretty decent swimmers, who’ve been practicing for years, and you’d have to tweak their stroke.  So, suddenly they’re concentrating on the pull of their right arm.  And they’d just fall apart.  Forget to kick, forget they have a arm, hell, forget to breathe.  Then they’d get the right arm thing and the rest would start to come back. 

Totally.

That is where I am so often... concentrating on getting one aspect down, and forgetting the other things I either am still learning or even those I've previously mastered. So suddenly I look like I have no idea at all how to write a story. 

But the more I learn and practice, the more I can incorporate this new learning into something that comes more naturally, and eventually the old skills kick back in.

I've come to have more peace about this process. Maybe because I'm now practicing on short stories, which allows me room to goof up more without completely wrecking an entire book.

But when I feel like I'm losing it - losing any thing that made me a decent writer to begin with - I go back and look at the stories I wrote before - a year ago, three years ago - heck, even six months ago. And am I better? Heck yeah. I almost cringe at my old writing.

So even though I'm stumbling sometimes through this learning process, I have to remind myself that I am still going forward, and when one aspect of my writing starts to slip, it's probably because I'm learning something else. And when I get that one new thing, the other things will come back, and I'll be that much better.

At least, I'm holding out hope it will all come together again.

On the other hand, I also hope I don't stop learning. :)

Jubilee!

I love that word. It's so... jubilant. It's hard to even say it without smiling.

With Queen Elizabeth's Diamond Jubilee celebration going on in England, the word has been floating around much more than normal these days. In its simplest form, Jubilee just means a joyful anniversary.

The first time I ever heard the word, though, was on a Michael Card song many, many years ago. And to this day, that Jubilee is the one that sticks in my head. Lately, especially, the true meaning of it is swimming in my head.

I'm no historian or theological expert, but this is what I understand about Jubilee:

When God created the world, he ordained that six days would be for work, and the seventh would be for rest.

When the nation of Israel was formed, God ordained that six years would be for work - sowing and harvesting - and on the seventh, the people and the land would rest. No farming, no working in the fields. He was asking His people to have faith in Him, to trust that He would provide for them. During that time, debts were forgiven. It was a time for everyone to start fresh.

Taking this pattern of sevens, the 49th year would be a sabbath year, but the 50th year would be a Jubilee. Not only would there be still no sowing and harvesting and debts would be forgiven, slaves would be set free, and the land ownership would go back to God.

Radical, eh? I imagine for those who had much, it was hard to let go, and for those who had little, it was a year of great celebration - and maybe a bit of fear. Starting over, even if in a good way, is sometimes hard. Trusting God to provide is not something that comes easily.

Yesterday I finished a book titled The Harbinger. I have mixed feelings about the book itself - the way it's written and the implications of it - but it is definitely thought provoking. In it, the idea is put forth that America is suffering judgement for not following God, and has, in essence, had a "forced" jubilee - the fall of Lehman Brothers and the collapse of the economy.

I think one reason the idea of a Biblical Jubilee has been playing in my head is because taking a "Sabbath," or time off, is something I fight against. It's something Americans in general fight against. This country was built on "work harder." Many businesses operate 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. Many people work far more than 40 hours a week.

My graduate program, unlike traditional colleges, runs year round. There is no long summer or winter break. But there are a few weeks between the end of one semester and the beginning of the next, and traditionally in that time I've taken time to let go of reading and writing and just focus on the family and holidays and the things I neglect when I'm buried in school work.

But this spring I've increased my work, and my expectations of myself. Rather than taking time off, I've put more pressure on myself to complete more work. To restructure my novel and rewrite the first half of it, to revise all of the short stories from last semester, to write a new short story, and to get a good jump start on my reading for next semester so I'll have more time to write in the summer. My mind is working on the next story even when I'm not at the computer - on weekends, at the pool, in church, out to dinner with the family.

Write more; sleep less. My motto of last semester continues.

And I'm worn out.

My creativity is dry. My brain is like the Sahara.

You know what fascinates me? As hard as it is to leave the ground fallow for an entire year, it's good for the ground, and in the long run, good for the farmer. It's not just the farmer that needs the time off - it's the ground itself. It needs time for the minerals to be replaced, so it can in turn feed its crops better.

Are our brains like that, too?

I resist this idea with everything in me. The idea of stopping for a time, letting ideas rest - and not just some ideas, but the whole of trying to create - is abhorrent to me. Like I'm being lazy, or not working up to my potential. Or that while I'm "resting," some harder working writer is going to pass me.

I sympathize with the Israelites, who stopped doing their Jubilee and pressed on in an effort to build a stronger, richer nation. I'm sure there was a great part of them - like me - that justified that hard work as something noble and honorable.

In the end, though, it's really a reliance on myself and not trusting that God will provide. That the accumulation of pages and books is not the ultimate goal of my life.

I'd like to say I've conquered this struggle, and I'm officially off writing for the next week, and I'm happy and jubilant. But I'm not. I will probably close this blogging window and open my Word document and keep pushing on. Or maybe I'll walk the dog first, and listen to music instead of plotting. Little steps, right?

Making A Mess of It

Being the mom of three kids, I'm no stranger to messiness. Not just the clothes-on-the-floor or food-on-the-face variety, but in everything. My kids love art projects, and I struggle not to roll my eyes when they dive into the art cabinet and begin pulling out markers and play-dough and construction paper and glue. For me, the mess is the price I pay to let them explore their creativity. For them, the mess is part of their creativity.

A few weeks ago, I was reading an article in The Writer's Chronicle (a publication of AWP - The Association of Writers and Writing Programs) entitled "Where do you get your ideas?" by Alice Mattison. The article was not so much about coming up with ideas as it was how we as fiction writers invent stories - from the first idea all the way through the end of the story. How we create.

I'd love to print the entire article here for you, but here is part that spoke to me, especially where I am right now in this writing journey (which is a journey for everyone who writes, no matter how little or how much you are published):

How do we invent? The answer I want won't be simple; it's not a set of instructions.... There is some process we have in common – not a dignified one that could be given the pretentious name "craft," which suggests a number of things that rarely lead to good writing... but a sloppy, embarrassing process involving fooling around, moving haphazardly from whatever we began with, in the general direction of something else.

Craft is something you can do in public and explain in public, while good writing is more like taking your clothes off when that's not appropriate – something that may even do harm or make our friends and family ashamed of us. And "craft" suggests control, while a good book requires surrendering control, at least at times.

There is so much more to this article, things I may come back to on this blog, but right now I'm sitting on this. I am in the sloppy, embarrassing process of creating.

I'm discovering there is craft – which I am learning in school – that is helping my writing get cleaner and more focused, and there is the process of creating, which is messy and embarrassing and often confusing. I disagree with Mattison's idea that craft rarely leads to good writing. I think it's critical to good writing; it just isn't enough on its own.

I think, maybe more accurately, we should say there are two aspects to writing well: one is craft  and the other is the creative process. If craft is defined as the tools and skills that can be learned, the creative process is the artsy, personal side. It's what we as writers have to muddle through on our own, in our own way, which may actually even differ from story to story. The process is something we have to discover and rediscover.

I don't like messiness. I like things to be clean and neat and orderly. I like there to be answers to problems, a clear path from bad to good with a set of instructions to go along with it. But most of good writing isn't like that. It's a big fat muddy mess sometimes.

Maybe this is no revelation for you, but this has been a big revelation for me in some sense, in that I couldn't understand how I was getting so much better at the craft part, and still feeling like my writing as a whole was floundering. I am currently mired in my own creative process muck.

I'm still trying to find ways to make that process less messy. Jolene Perry recommended the book Save the Cat by Blake Snyder to me, and even though it's about screenwriting, I am finding in it terrific tools. But on the whole, I think I'm just going to have to accept that not all of writing is clean-cut. Not everything can be learned from a book or a class or even a brilliant mentor. And that even though some parts of my process are messy right now, doesn't mean other parts aren't making great strides.

Where do you thrive? In the disorderly, creative part of writing, or in the things more systematically and concretely learned?

The Reading List

The semester is over and I lay panting on the floor under a pile of books. The first two semesters I tried to keep up a running review - a once-a-week go-over of my favorites and what they meant to me. But this semester has been more intense, and I've been less online, and here I come to the end with hardly a word said about them.

I'm not sure how many people who read this blog will be interested in these books. It's been a more "literary" semester, one with far more short story collections and less books off the bestselling list. But just in case someone is in need of some titles, here they are:

Short Story Collections:

Refresh, Refresh (Ben Percy)
Night Swimming (Pete Fromm)
Jesus' Son (Denis Johnson)
Ship Fever (Andrea Barrett)
The Pugilist at Rest (Thom Jones)
American Salvage (Bonnie Jo Campbell)
The Fireman's Wife (Richard Bausch)
Where I'm Calling From (Raymond Carver) (ebook)

Novels:

A Soldier of the Great War (Mark Helprin)
Geek Love (Katherine Dunn)
Run (Ann Patchett)
City of Thieves (David Benioff)
The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway)
In the Lake of the Woods (Tim O'Brien)
Let the Great World Spin (Colum McCann)
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Jonathan Safran Foer) (ebook)
The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins) (ebook)
Animal Farm (George Orwell) (ebook)
The Book Thief (Marcus Zusak) (ebook)

Non-Fiction:


Indian Creek Chronicles (Pete Fromm)
Hooked (Leslie Edgarton)
Writing the Breakout Novel (Donald Maas)

There's not any in here I would not recommend, although I love some more than others.

The Book Thief, if you haven't read it, is a must. Amazing read. My son and I read it together - he for his school and I for mine, and we both were in awe. It's narrated by death, during World War II, in a small town that borders Dachau. So... yeah. Incredible.

If you don't mind a little experimental writing, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is also well worth your time. Even though it takes place in post-9-11 New York City and the narrator is a boy whose father died in the World Trade Center, it is really a story about a boy trying to find answers when there are none, and instead, finding that he isn't alone. Very touching.

If you like memoir, or books about surviving in the wild, Indian Creek Chronicles is a book I will not soon forget. I burned dinners while reading it. I got grumpy when my family demanded things like clean underwear and food. Pete is my advisor this semester, though, so I have both a face and voice to put with the story, and that might have colored my reading some. I also am a huge fan of survivalist memoir. But the writing in this is truly beautiful.

You can't go wrong with anything by Tim O'Brien, and if you haven't read him, you should. He will spoil you for any other war books. 

I found Maas's book to be very basic and simplistic, but good. I don't think there was anything revolutionary for me in it, and it seemed a little overhyped in the idea that if you follow these rules you can become a best-seller, but it's a good beginner primer for writing novels.

Hooked was a little better, although it leaned too heavily on movies, for my tastes. I underlined a ton in it while reading, but a few months later, I can't remember what it was I thought was enlightening. I guess I should go back and look at that again.

I still don't get short stories. I can enjoy them, the way I enjoy a good poem, but I don't get how they work and how they're put together. The entire list of ones I read this semester were brilliant. There wasn't a one on there I didn't like. Fromm's, again, were probably my favorite because they resonated with me the most, but all of the others were also very well written.

So now I'm onto my next semester books. The tentative list is done and turned into school, but I imagine that might change over the semester as this one did.

I know you all read a wide variety of books, very different than the ones I've been reading, so tell me: what are the best books you've read in the past five months?