It’s All in the Suffering

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I was going to say no, I didn’t fall off a cliff, but I – uh, actually, did. And though I lay on the rocks, wishing nothing more than to be wiped off the planet, I somehow made it back up, half-carried by angels, broken bones and all. The bruises linger, but the bones, to my wonder, have healed and the bleeding stopped. I wasn’t done for. As long as I had breath, as long as I could form my words, the world had a place for me. Like the page in this year’s California’s Best Emerging Poets anthology. And the classroom in the private university where I taught composition this semester. I had walked past that door many times early this year, wondering why a job at a homeschool center across the street wasn’t working out, when God had my name on that door, His writing on the wall. We launched Drummer Boy this Fall. (After 12 years of indentured servitude coupled with preteen warfare, I was done. I practically threw him over the school fence.) It was time for me to launch, too. I enjoyed the teaching immensely, and although the steep learning curve on school protocols, the grading platform, and all that grading made for a ride under a burst dam, I didn’t feel mentally challenged. And the impossible hunger pangs for the writing – to do it, not just teach it – didn’t help. I’d been away from the page too long.

In thinking through what the upcoming years might look like for me unchained to my son, I discovered the other night a generous, astonishing opportunity a prestigious institution had extended me on LinkedIn months ago. Two, in fact, when I failed to respond. I glossed over the solicitation before tearing up the golden ticket and tossing it not only because the timing was implausible for me as a mother, but because it was such an amazing invitation I couldn’t wrap my head around it. Then there was my age: my son’s long-awaited self-sufficiency would put me over 50. Yes, I want to build a career with the teaching and writing, but I’m supposed to start tiring after 50, not go pursuing the academic equivalent of a rhino chase on an African safari. But Awesome Friend #1 started taping up the ticket: It seems doable, she wrote. And Awesome Friend #2 pressed it in my hand : Why limit yourself? Who cares how old you will be?

Turns out, I was the only one who cared. I was the one who intended on losing steam after 50. And as the playback on my life revealed, I was the one who’d chosen the classrooms with the low ceiling as a student all these years, afraid to prove I really wasn’t smart or capable. But we won’t find our greatest self where it’s safe or comfortable. Retired Navy SEAL and seemingly superhuman athlete David Goggins says we have to suffer. He named every fear he could before running straight into each one because it was only when he had to decide if he would go on with the broken leg and bloody hands that he met with his highest self, not when he was downing a dozen doughnuts on the couch at 300 pounds. He discovered “the answers are all in the suffering.” Accustomed to them, I am very good at anguish and affliction. I am less skilled at mapping the endurance into lasting victory beyond survival. Hope is not a plan. And no matter how we might dress it with color on a vision board, hope glorified, called a dream, will remain nothing more than a pretty picture without concrete day-in, day-out goals we move toward both physically and mentally.

I am crawling out of a brutal year, one in which I faced the hardest truths about myself. And yet grace has met me in the dungeon, thrown open the doors, and held up a breathtaking life that is mine for the taking if I will shed the self-doubt and get to work. At just a few words from friends who wouldn’t let me shortchange myself, my life took on sudden definition. So I’ve drawn up a game plan that will reorder and fuel my life, the things time and stress had gotten in the way of, but that now tangibly serve a larger purpose, from organizing my house to working out again, studying, and writing. No longer am I sitting and hoping that my writing will be good enough and that the future will favor me. I’m gettin’ up to go git it. I will make my work good enough, silencing the imp on my shoulder that’s whispered all my life: but there are so many writers better than you. I shoved Goggins’ book in her face and refuse to hear her out anymore. I couldn’t care less who’s over me or in front. I will continue to write as though my life depends on it because it does. God has shown me that the works I have published and the classes I have taught are only a prelude to what He has in store if I will reach for the life that is bigger, so much bigger, than my failings and my fears.

Don’t Wait For Your Life

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It saddens me greatly that I have only one life in which to read and write. All those books I will not have opened, the ignorance I will take with me to my final bed. And of course, the books I will have left unwritten. And yet, I’ve been given, this year, pages to add to the chronicles of community, and to culture and art at large.

You know how writers start a blog in the dubious hope of being discovered out here (by a publisher)? Well, one found me. I responded to the encouragement to submit, and the narrative The Measure of a Woman made its way into the 2018 New York’s Emerging Writers anthology. I put in under New York for the relevance to my mother’s early immigrant years there. The editors will offer a solo book deal to the author who draws the best reader feedback, so imagine how much I will appreciate anyone who takes a moment to put up a good word for me on that Amazon page. You can take to the bank this public assurance that I will remember you when I’m rich and famous ’til I wake from that dream. Here are examples of comments that readers have dropped on a previous series.

In the summer, I then reached out to WestCoast Magazines, a publication that serves the affluent families and businesses in this part of Southern California. After reading my work, the CEO gave me the run of her upcoming feature. Don’t bother tapping in if you’re not within distance, but I will say the article explains the distinctives of public, private, charter, and home schools to help families navigate choices and to build bridges across the school sectors. Unwittingly, I made some important contacts in the research, and now am on board with a large reputable school district to teach its students poetry and its teachers how to write. For starters, I was asked to share some poems at the district poetry showcase last week where my husband and son also got to do a steel drum duet. (Yes, that is really my husband out of costume.) A few things have evolved for me simultaneously in all this.

Camera-shy (more like vehemently averse), I have always preferred to be read, not seen. And I honor the written poem because the way it looks on the page matters to me. Add to this the jarring thought that in performing a poem, I myself visually become part of the piece. Just as I had talked myself into going for it, I learned of a sudden passing of someone I knew in high school. Her lights went out in a brain aneurysm after 45 brief years, at my age. In the face of the sure limit on my own time, I decided to forge ahead into the world of Spoken Word. Perhaps it’s as simple as middle-age bungee jumping. But I want to create, and in new ways—while I can. It turns out that some of my posts—prose and poetry—work well spoken. And so in earnest defense against dementia and related demise of brain cells, I have been memorizing my work, and performed it at the showcase last week in an electric evening with an impressive turnout. Entering my zone while connecting with the audience was an amazing experience that pushed me beyond the comfortable ride of rolling out words in print.

Connecting with readers virtually is a special privilege but engaging an audience face to face—offering my physical and emotional self—a challenge, thrill, and power all its own. Blogging has taught me to write not like I’m educated but like I’m human, to step closer to the reader. Similarly, performing literally brings me in front of people to ask them to let me in. Perhaps a student of color, along the way, will find her own voice from watching the way I modulate and present mine. Of course I wrangled with that pesky question of whether I was good enough, but managed to be invited back for a literacy conference next month. Einstein said imagination is more important than knowledge, and I think this is so because imagination allows us to keep discovering beyond the knowing, as the arts enable us to do—not with the fastidiousness of a scientist or scholar, but with wonder. The turn in my journey isn’t only about fuller living and the evolution of an artist but also a modeling for my son. I want to help nurture his own proficiency in presentation and performance because if you can look a crowd in the eye and tell a story or share your conviction, you can influence a great many people in today’s world. DIY YouTubes and the variants of TED talks that are shaping our culture say it all. I was accepted as a speaker at an annual state homeschool conference a few months ago. It both empowered and concerned me to see the homeschooling parents take to my workshop like water. They were so appreciative the response made me want to go to the public school teachers because writers who teach are busy with aspiring writers at conferences and special programs. They are not in the schools. I am excited to be guiding teachers so they can build their skill set along with their students’.

Pixabay/Qimono

I laugh some moments, marveling that I can make up stuff and convince people to buy my wares. But I embrace the deeper lesson that opportunity isn’t so much something that shows up as it is something to create. Don’t wait for your life. The doors I tried this year have freely swung open, but I first had to imagine and then believe people would make space for me, should make space for me. Only one life, friends. To dream, think, pursue, make, and because we have not only hands and brain, but also spirit, to do it in community. You bet I had the little Naysayer on my shoulder to deal with. But you’re too old to be doing Spoken Word. Talk to me when Sarah Jones stops doing whatever strikes her fancy on that stage. Your material isn’t angry enough, hip enough. As long as I’m asked back, I will stake my place among the ten thousand voices of poetry. There are better writers. Always. But they didn’t call the district superintendent. It’s one thing for finances, health, or death to get the better of me, but I will not live beneath my ability out of self-scripted fear. Do my job where I am? I am letting life and joy follow where I go.

Age

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Congratulations: Your poem, Age, has earned Honorable Mention
in the 2017 Steve Kowit International Poetry Contest.

Your poem will be published in the next edition of the San Diego
Poetry Annual, due out on March 1, 2018. A PDF of the annual
will be available for free reading and downloading in February 2018
on our website: http://www.sandiegopoetryannual.com.

You are invited to attend the awards ceremony to read your poem
at the Neil Morgan Auditorium on Saturday, April 21, 2018. If
you can attend, you’ll be paid a small honorarium ($50). If you
cannot attend, a certificate of achievement will be mailed to you.

Again, congratulations. Your support for the legacy of Steve Kowit
helps us donate of copies of the SDPA to every public and university
library system in our region, making the annual part of their
permanent collections.

Most of all, thank you for allowing us to publish your work.

Warm wishes,

William Harry Harding
Publisher,
for The Judges

San Diego Entertainment & Arts Guild

Writing: A Hermit’s Journey

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If my life in books counted off the page, I could boast quite a social life. My diverse bibliodiet of fact and fiction includes Pulitzers I study, tracing the contours of the words for clues to their savoir-faire. Best thing is when I fall in, pestled upon a page of genius. I feel ridiculous. Don’t try to fool me into thinking it’s doable. High art is not five feet three. Art at its best shows me the by-ways behind the crags. It cuts and bruises. In The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr shares some questions she asks to “help students diagnose their own blind spots” ~

1. What do people usually like and dislike about you? You should reflect both aspects in your pages.
2. How do you want to be perceived, and in what ways have you ever been false or posed as other than who you are?

[Her answers]
1. My friends usually like me because I’m tenderhearted, blunt, salty, and curious. I’m super loyal, and I laugh loud.
2. People don’t like me because I’m emotionally intense and often cross boundaries….Small talk at parties bores me senseless…I’m a little bit of a misanthrope. I cancel lunch dates because I’m working.

She believes we are to bring to the page the best and worst of ourself, that is, our full and authentic self. Yes, I think you see me in clear color and dimensions, more so than the people in my life, at least those outside my family. One tempers into social roles and expectations, especially by middle age. These socks have to match. I also feel muted in the rituals we call socializing, not able to talk books or art in the circles that motherhood have circumscribed for me when I’m happier in company with the immortal dead and fellow hermits in the cave of their mind. When the tea party is over, I invite a wordsmith over for some wine – and days I need it, the scotch. Ah, the way good prose jolts, and in its beautiful ache. I want to drive under the influence – and once I’ve stepped out into fresh air, too start climbing.

 

Writing 101: Sacred and Simple

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The more I write, the more I am taken with it, the magic of the word. Turn the wrist, hold out a balm. Flick, and you have a blade. To be able to put out one, two, three words for a title and draw people in; convince them to pause in their hurried steps and step inside, there is a power in that. They pull up a seat, and some linger and chat. Some cry a little; other times they walk out still laughing because it was the room of your childhood they had entered, and they remembered. The window to your marriage you’d opened, and they know. It was your messy soul they inhabited briefly, experienced from the inside out, and they blushed a little. It was their one-minute confessional before they drew the door back out to the light.

There is something religious about writing for me, an act that calls for devotion, affection, discipline, even bloody sacrifice. It’s redemptive, every word sacred. If you pile on the descriptors, especially those adjectives and adverbs you are so fond of, you reveal a lack of faith in the rest of your words, either in the potency of language or your own ability to cherry-pick its offerings. Your line must not be vivid enough, else why do you need four modifiers in a breath? Could you find one or two that do the job? I am full of faith. Let’s try this together.

The mountains were draped by black curtains of ominous storm clouds, portentous of trouble over marshy waters.

Sorry this is not sexy. But I am so grateful for the mercy of the missing adverb I want to cry.

For starters, we have the imagery of darkness replaying itself in the draped, black, curtains. Then the picture of something brewing duplicated in ominous, storm, portentous, trouble. As if the two ideas weren’t redundant enough, they are so similar as to feed each other (black and storm, for instance, serving both the gloom and imminence).

Let me illustrate how I see the writing process with a metaphor that is a religion all its own for many. In basketball, the three-pointer is one of the most impressive shots of course, made farthest from the basket. The ball, which we can liken to the word, spurns distance, flying with grace, muscle, surety. This is writing, the art of nailing it. The three-pointer holds an interesting success rate of about 35% in the NBA. The best players in America make it only a third of the time.

So an autopsy of our overclouded sentence reveals the problem wasn’t so much a superfluity of adjectives or even of ideas. That was merely the symptom of either a lack of clear purpose or mistrust in the authority of the word. I say it was a spiritual death. I usually build from the bone of meaning, combining nouns and verbs I hope are crisp and on to relatable metaphors, rather than slather on the fat and spice from the start. If I can use a noun that’s picturesque or compelling enough, I hold back the adjective. And when I want more, I go with the least possible number of modifiers unless I am inflecting other elements of communication. So in rationing my words as I would a meal in wartime, it isn’t just economy I’m after but also meaning, style, tone, and depth. Conveying all these elements as efficiently as one can is simplicity. I am not saying you can’t describe the morning in three adjectives. Sharon Olds with her many trippy, hypothermic descriptives has had me in knots barely able to get through her pain-saturated poems. But let’s respect this thing we call language. That is the sacred.

Obviously I am talking to people who want to raise the bar on their writing. We have a huge pet aisle here on WordPress, and if you mean only to keep up the anecdotes about your dog, you don’t have to hamstring yourself. But if you want to be writing better, cut sharper on the page than you did four years ago, don’t give yourself cheap praise. Question your choices and their motives. Whether you’re writing a travel journal, history, fiction, or poetry, ask yourself if every word is necessary. Is each one doing its thing, contributing something fresh to the picture? Fancy dribbling isn’t what scores your game.

If you have a better way – and the shelves are lined with authors who do – by all means have at it. But first, ask any man. A hint of perfume and he leans in. Assault me with it in the elevator, and uh, excuse me. I think I’ll take the stairs. The sin of gluttony abounds in all the arts. There is such a thing as too much salt in your sauce, too much red on the canvas, too much bling with that outfit. Black clouds sat over the mountain.

Oh, but what’s that? You don’t believe me. You think I’m a blogging Grinch who’s out to steal your Christmas or keep you from your ebook sell-out. You think I didn’t catch that adverb in your clutch. Fine. I’ll leave you to your opinion of fine writing. But if you think me a pious know-it-all, at least close the curtains and on your way out, please remember the shoes you removed. Yes, thank you. In all fairness, no one made you enter my sacred ground.

[Poetry] is for me Eucharistic. You take somebody else’s suffering, their passion into your body and…you’re transformed by it, you’re made more tender, or more human. You’re more alive to your fellow human beings. I could literally read a poem and lift my head from the page and look out and my heart would just be softer. I think it kept me alive for a long time.

~ Mary Karr, 2011 Writers’ Symposium by the Sea

Poets Are Strange

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Poets are strange –
Why can’t they just call the spade
a spade? And what’s a rock but
rock: sandstone, shale from the tiredness
of weather? Coal and limestone, plant
and animal dross

— but nature wastes nothing.

Why do poets look for metaphors under
every rock, the walls that hold the creek, earth
that crumbled, forged resolute, and grew above
my grandmother’s rib, beat hard when she was
widowed with six children on the road

fleeing the Communists
fleeing the Communists
fleeing the Communists

and soldiers who ran out to drag their own
men screaming without their arm
back to the trenches in
too many battles and

and bald children in hospital beds who still
know how to laugh.

Why can’t poets be simple? They see
a crushing burial in heat and time:
marble, quartz, gneiss

— living, burnished beauty.

Poets. They think they can say it
better than
rock.

 

The Best Things About Blogging

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1. Individuality and community.
Blogging gives us the best of both, lets us develop our self in “the collective heartbeat”. (Anne Lamott)

2. The freedom.
Anything goes: some days this is my own TED stage or talk show. On others, my stand-up. Sometimes it’s my notebook.

3. The empowering.
You can take yourself as seriously as you want to and ask others to.

4. The humbling.
You remember you’re just a leaf in the forest. Let’s keep it real.

5. The immediacy, the organic exchange.

6. The traffic.
The comment board is the interface of lives and a place where people can lend their perspective to expand yours.

7. The pay-out.
It’s the immigrant ethos. You sight unchartered space in blogosphere, nothing in your pocket. You stake your ground, work hard, and can build something of worth.

8. The low maintenance.
Comb my hair? Figure out which top to wear?  I can blog in my bathrobe behind my smiling avatar, ever presentable.

Forbes.com

Forbes.com

9. The low cost.
I got the premium plan to keep the ads away, for your sake and mine. I felt vandalized when they started popping up. There is no motive for my writing other than the joy and I’m not here to mark out a trail to a pretty place that empties your wallet. Anyway, at 27 cents a day it beats spending on gas and an overrated drink at Starbucks.

10. The Efficiency.
I’m all set. Honey, no need to write anything for my funeral. Just pull up the comments for the eulogies!

Secrets to a Happy Marriage: For Women

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1. Develop amnesia. Find some way to forget what he did. Or (again) didn’t do. Go without sleep or spin 50 times to reduce cognitive faculty. Stick a finger in the socket.

2. If biting your tongue hurts too much, pop some chocolate. Sure, every time.

3. Lie. Tell yourself he’s listening. The short-lived delusion will reap a harvest of peace for the home and the good of the kids.

4. Use your imagination. He mistook medication for digestive enzymes and is suffering severe side effects. Yeah, that’s it. He forgot because he’s sick.

5. Take a deep breath and count to 10. No, 40. In Portuguese…or Swahili. Lose yourself in a dictionary. Hec, master a foreign language. You’ll get there in no time and can hook any job you want. (Let me help. I can count to 1,000,000 in Korean.)

6. Don’t parrot your requests and be called a nag. Text him the list of Honey Dos (even if you’re sitting facing him) after breakfast when glucose has hit the brain before he plans his day. Lunch is too late, what with food coma and that sweet nap. Cap it at three tasks or he’ll ignore them. Reward him with a drink between tasks. Your head hurts? Consider the mental tap-dancing your cerebral exercise for the day. You’re excused from the Times crossword and Sudoku.

There. You might find yourself mangled, bruised, or diabetic. But gosh darn it, you are loving each other to death. Nothing worth having spares the suffering, and he is so worth it. Because when the amnesia wears off, you’ll remember: he said I do. And in his helplessly human way, he has.

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Bonjour, Texas: Summer 1966

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By the second week I learned that Texans sweat as much
as the French, and swear even more, that you couldn’t fight one
twin without taking on the other. But the librarian would slip me
the choicest donated fiction, and I played baseball every day in the
vacant lot until sundown called the players home to black and white
body counts and cigarette commercials on the three channels we got.

Sometimes I lay in bed under the half-light of the whirring fan
blades, and dreamt of heroes and ornithopters, zebras and the scent
of chocolate chip cookies in the oven. Other nights I wondered
how words could rest so calmly on one page yet explode off the next,
or why a man would climb a tower in Austin to kill fourteen people.
Wasn’t living a matter of simple subtraction?

One by one the days parted and I walked through the dwindling
heat, eyes squinting, questions in hand, emerging fifty years later
having suffered the mathematics of love and success, honor and
truth, still asking why and how, where it’d gone, shoulders slumped
under the heft of those beautiful, terrible summers stacked high
like so many life-gatherings of unread books awaiting a bonfire.

Robert Okaji, O at the Edges

 

 

The Things You Lose in Marriage

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March 6
Mrs: (Exasperated at the A.D.D.)
Mr: It’s been 11 yrs.
Mrs: (Thinking no kidding.)
Mr: You should be used to it by now.
Mrs: *Disbelief*

March 20
Mr: I realized you have your own love language. You love me by serving [not with words or gestures of affection]. When you make me food without sugar and fat, that’s your gush.
Mrs: B thought I have the gift of encouragement. I know people who do and I am SO not one of them.
Mr: *pensive* I think you do. You can be very encouraging with others. You’re just hard on me and Tennyson sometimes. You know you’re driven, right? Mentally, physically, with his school, in every way. You’re hard on us because you’re critical of yourself.
Mrs: (Cupping his face, in baffled search for a clue.) How in the world are you so insightful tonight?? What did you eat today? You…had fruit. Was it the fruit??!

Pinterest: The Mission Inn

Pinterest: The Mission Inn

March 24
After a private celebration at the ritziest restaurant in town
Mrs: Honey, I’d forgotten I enjoyed fine dining and went out often in Pennsylvania.
Mr: Now you’re just a mom.
Mrs: Greaat

March 26
Mrs: Not tonight, honey. I have a headache. And you know what? I’m sure I’ll have one tomorrow, too. But you’ll have gas again, so there.
(When we’d stopped laughing) Hey, I should blog that. Would you mind if I did?
Mr: Go right ahead.
Mrs: Really? Wow, you’ve changed. You’d let me post that, huh? What – no shame? No pride? Dignity, self-resp —
Mr: You can stop now.

================

There are snippets here about relationships in time. Please welcome the guests as we slide into our miniseries, a look back in time. I’ll be bringing up the rear. Hope you join us in the remembering.

Last year
Mr: Can I guest blog?
Mrs: *Chortle. Nonstop*
Mr: Is that a no?
Mrs: *Guffaw. Laugh. Laugh*

Last night
Mr: I should open a WordPress account anonymously and send you submissions.