My story, “Double Dutch,” is up at Scapezine as of this moment! The amazing Galen Dara illustrated it like she knew my own mind. I wrote this story during Week 3 at Clarion West in 2010. So happy it has a home now. And it’s a beautiful home. I don’t think I can go to sleep now–and I apologize in advance if you read it and find you don’t want to eat eggs in the morning.
A few days ago I received an email telling me I’d been accepted into an excellent looking workshop/retreat, led by primo-supremo writer Dan Chaon. I’m floating a little right now, especially because this workshop takes place in Fairyland, aka the English Countryside. You can visit the website here: Word Theatre Writers’ Workshop & Retreat.
For a week in July I get to speed off to other climes for what I hope will be a rejuvenating writing experience. You can bet I’m over the moon about this one.
In other news, I had a phone interview on that same day for a dream job (aside from being a writer, this is perhaps one of the only other things I can imagine doing for the rest of my life). I don’t know how it went exactly–I lean between it went well and I destroyed my chances by babbling about it being a ‘dream job’ at the end. Sheesh. In any case, if I somehow am able to wow the forces that be and I actually get the job, it will be life changing. That’s about all I can say about it right now without freaking myself out again.
In less than three weeks now, we’re packing our bags and will be driving to Seattle. Most people reading this blog will know we decided to move, but just in case you didn’t, come Feb. 1, this girl will have evacuated the concrete land that is Dallas for a greener (literally) world. I really can’t wait. We’re leaving almost all our possessions behind and are starting over. A good friend of ours is renting us the bottom floor of her house. We’re ready to begin again, in the right place for both of us.
I’m also working on a story right now that must be finished before I go. I’d started it several weeks back, but now more than ever I have an impetus to finish it. On New Year’s Eve, a young woman who was very dear to several of my friends was murdered near her home in Austin. I didn’t really know her, but I knew who she was, and to know that violence is so close, so easy to ignore but always trembling beneath the surface, keeps working at me. So I’m writing this story, knowing she was murdered, trying to pull shards out of death and put them into some meaningful order. Very rarely can anything come of a death like this but pain and grief. I’m not sure what I expect to find in this story that says differently. The story is only trying to offer companionship to the ones who lose their lives, to ones who don’t get to speak back, who don’t get to smile or laugh and share with us again. Even if the words are only a whisper, I hope they can channel a reprieve from the chaos this loss brings.
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.” -Rumi
I have regrets. The ways my life has unfolded are both beautiful and fraught. We’re never completely one thing or another. We’re multiple, never-ending, scintillating beasts that enrapture and enrage. We frustrate, we devour, we bleed upon one another and ask for more.
I would give all of myself if I had it to give, but that’s just the way–I don’t know what all of anything is. Will never know. In each moment I change, burst into a ray of colors ill defined and misunderstood. I will be kind, as kind as I can be, and still be capable of causing pain. I could be angry, as mean as I could be, and still be capable of grace. I will love, as much as I can, and still break because love always comes in its own way. The only thing I accept about myself is contradiction.
So, yes, regrets, because the self, as far as it extends into the future, is unknowable, uncontrollable, despite our need, our desire to shape it to our current existence.
So much I want in this world, so many moments I let wrap through and around me, that make me ache for the real, the now, the forever. And in my mind worlds expand, unravel, pull me through a million scenes, both real and imagined, all saying, “You, you are multiple, full of possibility and inevitability and everything you do, forever, will bring you to one single point, always, always, and then you’ll move forward again, into a new era, a new life that is both you and not you, forever changing.”
But that only lasts so long–life ends eventually. We leave pieces of ourselves behind, scribbled on pages, hoping someone somewhere understands, who pieces together the lives we lived and did not live, discovers something hidden to ourselves, something we always wanted known but could never say. This is the writer inside, the one who is whole and broken and always a contradiction. Because this is to be human. This is to love and be loved and to give and to take and to sit inside the world with intention and with presence and to try to tell our stories however they come, ever shambling, beautifully incomplete.
A few weeks back, before World Fantasy Con, I came up with a “five-year plan.” If you know me, you know I’ve been struggling with concentration and focus, problems erupting from teaching too many classes, not giving myself enough headspace, etc. This plan was to help me regain that clarity of vision, to help me write consistently and to do something with myself. I thought I’d share it because it seems that as soon as I put it to paper, at least one of the things I’d written for Year One occurred (and that is to get out of teaching composition by 2012). The image is below. I may not achieve everything on it, but I’m very close to hitting the higher points for Year One, so that’s encouraging.
And speaking of World Fantasy Con, I’ve written another post in that vein, but have decided not to publish it just yet. We’ll see. It has something to do with my reluctance to write, of fear of exposure, of letting others know too much. I never thought I’d be so self-absorbed as to worry about that problem. But it has appeared and I’ll have to overcome that issue if I want to succeed.
