Greater Submission

Puntitas is exhausted. She spent most of her Sunday preparing groups of poems for the mail. The process was supposed to take an hour or two (three at most), given that she would just go through the collection of previous submission letters already on her hard drive. How hard can it be, after all, to check the addresses and append the latest versions of a set of poems?

Puntitas clearly still believes in the tooth fairy, hence the teeth she is about to lose.

It took nine hours, with minimal breaks for decaf and self-pity, to go through most of the fifteen or so old submission letters in her documents folder. Some of the journals have since gone under. A few have such ambiguously written WebPages that there existence really is a coin toss. One has gone contest (i.e., reading fee only). Many now post sample poems, and reading those poems prompted Puntitas to dig out her stacks of unread journal issues to read some more.

Puntitas thinks she really would have quit somewhere in the third hour, when she was stuffing the third envelope of the evening, if it hadn’t been so obvious that she had given up before. Most of the letters on the drive were dated 2004. About half of them were full letters, properly addressed with lists of the specific poems to be enclosed. The rest were partially filled out form letters and in a sad percentage of cases mere addresses with notes about reading periods and numbers of poems/pages. Puntitas did send out other submissions after that, her last publication being in 2006, and she both has a memory and found evidence of a letter dated after that. But what seems to have slid out of her consciousness is the fact that at one point she gave up. She didn’t simply decide to wait or focus on her job. What is clear from the emotional surges associated with these specific letters is that Puntitas thought her work was crap.

That’s not the best frame of mind to be in while sending out again. Suddenly, she found herself skipping poems, not because they were particularly bad or unsuited to a magazine, but because they hadn’t gone over well in workshop, and what was playing in her mind was the classroom version of the piece, not the one she revised for her thesis or the one she revised for her book. The business of getting stuck in a particular stage of the writing was the strangest experience. It was as if she hadn’t grown as a writer while putting together the thesis or gained some level of maturity from her latest year of writing and revising. She wasn’t even aware of where her head had gone until she noticed that she had sent all but five poems out and that she was reluctant to mail out the rest because they were unfinished and beginnerish. Puntitas sent them out after all, but she did so feeling she wasn’t sending her best work though, when she read the current poems, she couldn’t think of a logical reason for having that thought.

The stacks of poems are finally ready to go out: ten envelopes and one electronic submission. Tomorrow Puntitas and her mother will take them and the book submissions to the post office. It’s probably too late for two of the book submissions, but people who believe in the tooth fairy also harbor delusions about publishers needing to read them anyway out of boredom or generosity of spirit.

Puntitas ended her night’s work by reading The Adventures of RantWoman, a hilarious blog about the extraordinary ravings of an ordinary life, and she ate prunes until her bowels made her forget all other writerly trivia.

Oh, she did revise two poems as she stuffed envelopes, but that’s a post for another day.

Puntitas reads _The Barred Window_ by A. Taylor.

Perspective

I’ve been less diligent about keeping my blog lately because I’ve been behind on other things. My thinking has been, “Once I get X done, I’ll blog,” as a reward. That line of thought led to my not reading, except what was required for a class, for over ten years. I would say to myself, “As soon as I write this paper, I can read a novel,” or “When I study for this test, I can get back to reading the poems.” I rarely wrote the essays or studied for the exams, so I read nothing, and I felt interest in very little.

Last week, I picked up my largest translation project to date. It really isn’t much larger than the previous record holder, which was one of my early assignments, but I’m feeling intimidated. I haven’t found very many equivalents for much of the terminology, and I’m starting to think I may have to do more improvising than I had expected. To add to the stress, I’m working on a short timeline, and I’m still finishing up an interpreting assignment that keeps me pretty busy.

But I haven’t stopped thinking about the writing. In fact, I almost put everything else on hold to do some last week. The piece was the extraterrestrial story. One of my aunts lives in a city which is alleged by its residents to have a Martian base either under the pier or in the hospital basement. As I’ve probably said here before, the story is set in that city around someone who has grown up with that lore. Because the plot and conflict were prompted by something my cousin said, as reported by my mother, the characters were originally loosely—very loosely—based on my mother’s sister and her two daughters, the protagonist resembling my oldest cousin.

I’ll interrupt myself at this point to say I’ve had very little contact with my relatives. I grew up far away from them, and when we did visit, their approach to me, though courteous, was more remote and less friendly than their attitude to my siblings. This particular set of cousins also lived far from the locus familiae, so my contact with them was rarer still. The last time I was in the same room with either of them, we were in preschool. Not surprisingly then, I got only vague scraps of information about them until three or four years ago, when my mother suddenly developed an interest in and a cell phone plan that allowed for calling them regularly.

I’m saying all of this because I know my cousins mostly the way I know characters in books: through hearsay and the imagination I use to fill in the gaps. Lately, their lives have become eventful (the older one has developed a malignant and apparently aggressive cancer), so the hearsay is coming, not just from her mother and sister, but also from other aunts, cousins, and uncles, who are making the trip out to pay helpful visits. Suddenly, what I know about her, my conception of her, has changed dramatically, and details from previous reports are taking on new meaning. This is an unsettling feeling to have about a real person with whom I have a blood tie.

About the story, my conception of it has changed as well. The protagonist is now modeled after my younger cousin, a character I’d initially thought boring, and less of the plot line comes from my head. More accurately put, less of the plot comes from my imagined experience, and more of it is based on what I imagine their experience to be. It’s still by no means a faithful rendering of events, but it is a story about something that can happen to my cousin or someone like her, a story she’s more or less told my mom over the course of the last few months. I feel better about what that story is supposed to do.

Puntitas reads _Three Bags Full_ by L. Swann and _The Barred Window_ by A. Taylor.

Good Wisdom to Keep in Mind

I’ve been experiencing the cocktail of feelings that tells me my period is just around the corner. The worldly nostalgia and humbling promise of the Christmas season don’t help, and neither does a talk I recently relayed at work by a speaker who fell apart after her mother’s death. (Let’s hear it for depressing reflections on Puntitas’ life if she were to lose her mother today!) The counterpoint to that melody of gloom was an oddly hopeful confluence of events: an email exchange with a fellow poet and the experience of reading Jason Roberts’ A Sense of the World.

The first happened Friday night. I’m on a list for the creative writing students, alumn, and friends of my university. It’s low traffic, mostly announcements for readings, publishing opportunities, and parties. Yesterday someone unexpectedly responded to something I posted. He published his first book of poetry a year or two ago. It’s been very successful, the sort of book people teach. I know him only slightly. Having met him and joined in several group conversations with him more than ten years ago, while he was part-timing at a community college where I was tutoring.

Anyway, since his follow-up to my post happened off list, I congratulated him on his book and told him I appreciated the effort that goes into sending work out now that I’m trying to move my own manuscripts. His response to that was:

It’s my first published book, but the 7th I’ve written. I guess what I’m saying is: you may get lucky right off the bat, but you may also find a reward in perseverance.

After several seconds of loud tearful laughter (“hysterical” is also a good way of describing it), I decided his experience was far more reassuring than grim. Rejection is definitely part of the writer’s life; so are revision and a mindfulness of both.

About the second, it took me a couple of weeks to read the book. I didn’t finish it until Saturday morning–at 7:00 a.m. on a weekend because my early rising father feels that turning on the heat and waking everyone who is already cozy and warm is easier than putting on a jacket or wrapping up in an afghan. But I digress.

A Sense of the World is a wonderful book, well researched and beautifully written. Its subject, James Holman, a traveler and explorer who did his work in the early 1800’s while being totally blind, is profoundly inspiring. I don’t mean this in the kitschy, Hollywood-violins way of most things to which that word is applied. I mean it in the truest and simplest sense, a reminder of hope and the very ordinary things that bring about great goals.

For me, the book was especially encouraging. Like Holman, I’m blind. In most respects, blindness is more inconvenient than actually difficult, and it’s expensive: many of the appliances and workarounds that mitigate the inconvenience cost a lot of money. Where blindness is truly difficult, however, is in the vast discrepancy between the way blind people perceive themselves and the way they’re perceived by the rest of the world.

I’ve had a sad number of job interviews where panelists were more interested in finding out how I spend my day, dress myself, and handle a fork than in asking about my education or previous work experience. Needless to say, those people don’t hire me or any other blind job applicant, but they do pray for me, a couple with their hands on my head and appropriate praise-the-Lord’s. Still, I think I prefer that form of blunt ignorance to the silent condescension of the many others who either refuse to interview me (citing a sudden meeting) or interview me in the most perfunctory or adversarial way (the latter, I suspect, believing themselves to help me realize how inadequate for the position I am).

These kinds of attitudes make it very hard for me and people like me to

Go to school — Teachers have refused to have me in their classes at all levels of education.

shop — Many store employees get upset when I touch the merchandise.

Establish or maintain social relationships – Sighted people think about blindness much more than blind people do. For example, many people will now understand the first paragraph of today’s post differently. On first reading, they will have assumed that I have a close and harmonious relationship with my mother. At this point, however, they will have decided I am unhealthily dependent on her. Talking to people who always know what I’m thinking is frustrating when they happen to be wrong most of the time.

work — It’s still a common misconception that people who are blind can teach, counsel, or do other things for other blind people, but not for people who are sighted.

raise a family — It’s not unusual for Child Protective Services to remove children at the hospital from their blind parents.

Travel – Many guides and non-guides think it’s dangerous for blind people to take the stairs; walk on a slippery floor; walk in general; do anything on a boat, bus, or train; or … well … travel.

Or do any number of things that we feel quite capable of doing.

The problem with identity is that it depends to some degree on an agreement between the self and others. When so many people are of a mind about the self, it’s hard to remember that they can be and often are mistaken. The best course of action is to go along for as long as is necessary, despite them all, without investing any energy into the fairness or unfairness of anything. It’s been my policy, and it seems to have been Holman’s. Reading the book has reminded me of how important that is in life and in writing.

Puntitas reads _Virgins of Paradise_ by B. Wood and _Landing _ by E. Donoghue.

Books and Plots

I spent a little time on the computer yesterday, prowling the Library of Congress website. I went to the Book Festival page and listened to one of this year’s podcasts, an interview with Peter Robinson, of Inspector Banks fame.

The first point of interest is that our good friend Robinson, whose mysteries I like, started life as a poet. Food for thought, to be sure. That it comes as I’m about to launch my manuscripts into the world is … well … not satisfying.

The next is that one piece of advice he gives to fledgling crime writers (or any other kind of writer) is that the back story doesn’t all need to be at the beginning. That’s one of those things I know, but hearing it came as a revelation, probably because it’s easy to forget. Knowing the back story often helps the writer plan and organize, but dropping it all on the reader’s lap, especially at the beginning, is rarely necessary. My favorite example of this is an Anne Rivers Siddons novel I read years ago. The first fourth was all back story introducing a character. I remember thinking that the point had been made and that, if she didn’t actually start going somewhere, I would stop reading at the end of the next chapter. Fortunately, the next chapter included plot, and when I finished the novel, I reflected that most of the first fourth of the book could have been condensed to an early chapter or two plus one really telling scene that appears near the end of that introductory fourth. I think I also noticed the comment because two of my prose pieces suffer from the curse of too much back story at the beginning.

Another piece of advice is that writers don’t need to know the whole story when they start writing. This I know for a fact. Generally, I know key moments in the story, certain aspects of the character, and the central question (conflict) addressed by the narrative. The rest emerges as I go. I was surprised to find out that the same happens in a crime novel because I assumed the crime had to be well understood for a story to be built around it, but that kind of writing involves the same process of discovery and revision as any other, so … Why not?

On the subject of books and their impact on my writing, I just finished the Navarro book. It’s a sci-fi version of James Patterson: lots of action, suspense, archetypes, and cliché, which combine well to keep the reader going. The book does a couple of things that are unusual and worked well for me.

One is that it holds off on physical descriptions of the characters until two thirds of the way through the novel. When the characters are introduced, they’re described in terms of their personalities, habits, and the things in their work areas. Later they’re all described in terms of height, weight, dress, and hair color when characters from a different plot line review dossiers compiled about them. It was interesting both to compare my conception of them with the writer’s and to meet them yet again through the filter of other characters. I also noticed the writer tends to notice people’s hands, which I think are very telling.

Another is that the writer handles distrust realistically. In one of the plot lines, two characters, who don’t know each other, are put in a situation of having to work together. Over time, they learn that they have reason to mistrust the people they work for. What happens in most genre fiction is one of two outcomes: (1) they reveal their mutual mistrust and snipe at each other, each trying to save his own skin, or (2) they form a precarious bond that turns into collaboration as their mistrust of external forces compels them to rely on each other for survival. More often, both scenarios take place, 1 followed by 2. In this novel, however, characters act as they would outside of fiction: each man harbors his own mistrust, conceals it, and acts for his own best interest. That self-containment creates interesting tension and great plot turns.

Finally, the writer brings two plots together in ways that complicate the action. She develops two plot lines, each with its own protagonist. The expectation is that the point of convergence is a meeting of the two protagonists, but it isn’t. The story lines converge when each protagonist encounters a supporting character from the other plot. In fact, the story teeters on the edge of farce at this juncture as the action hinges on sexual union between a man who thinks of sex as something one does when necessary and a frigid woman. The effect of coupling a protagonist with a supporting character is that, instead of one point of convergence, there are two, complicating the action unpredictably for characters in both story lines.

Over all, the novel was an enjoyable read without much lasting value, but I did learn a lot from it, and I did recognize seeds of something that could have been great.

Puntitas reads _Virgins of Paradise_ by B. Wood.

The order of things

Puntitas is having one of her all too frequent moments of doubt. She was surfing the web for poetry book competitions and poetry book publishers when she came across this advice page from the Main Street Rag Publishing company website. It’s got tips for people entering both fiction and poetry contests:

http://www.MainStreetRag.com/AdvicePage.html

A lot of M. Scott Douglass’ advice is common sense (e.g., “Don’t wait until the last minute to mail your manuscript.”). What’s valuable are the additional explanations and the section on judges comments.

The former includes observations like This one: “The question I think an author has to ask him or her self is: If it takes until the very last day to get my manuscript ready, is the manuscript really ready?” It also provides information about how a contest is run and what makes it more or less pleasurable from the publisher’s perspective. In his case, manuscripts are read in groups of fifteen, with a “logjam” occurring right around the contest deadline.

The latter is a treasure trove of frankly surprising information. Judges comment on everything from the underuse of spell check and complete sentences to the lack of depth and voice. It’s surprising because I expect people who enter book competitions to have more of that under control.

What is more surprising still is that several of the comments deal with the way poems are organized in poetry books and chap books. My alma mater has recently begun to hold a poetry book competition. A friend of mine was one of the preliminary editors one year, and her description of the process was pretty much as I imagined: people sit in a room for weeks, reading/skimming manuscripts to turn a big stack into a small one for the judge to select from. While it’s possible I’m misremembering, what I recall is that she didn’t actually read each book from cover to cover though I do remember she read most of it.

My own current doubt comes from this aspect of my books. Are they organized meaningfully enough? I’ve read enough published books of poetry to know that some poems are stronger than others, and while I know this is definitely the case for me, I think that even my weaker poems are good enough to send out for consideration on their own. But does the manuscript as a whole hold together? I don’t know. I spent a full week organizing the poems in my books, and I made a few last minute changes based on how this piece or that fit into a given section, but I didn’t read either book from cover to cover because I’m too close to the work to do that effectively.

How to describe what I’m saying … In one of my poetry workshops, a classmate wrote a poem about a conversation with her grandmother. Later in the semester, she wrote about lighting incense at her grandmother’s grave. Several people in the workshop, including the instructor, suggested that the second poem would go nicely with the first, as part of a series perhaps. The writer said it wouldn’t work because the poems were about different grandmothers. She was so close to the poems that, for her, they were descriptions of two specific events. They weren’t art forms that exist separately from the experience that prompt them, art forms that can be merged to form a reality unconnected to the events of the writer’s life.

I am far enough away from the poems to know they have stopped being about me or the people I know. In most cases, this is because I wrote the original drafts so long ago that I know longer think like the person who wrote them. In others, the work has gone through so much revision that the poems don’t actually resemble the original drafts. But with some pieces, I still recall the prompting event, and I catch myself thinking about the event, rather than the poem, something I don’t do when I write fiction.

I didn’t read my manuscripts because I was afraid that the ghosts of those events would get in the way of my sense of the book. What I did instead was to skim for or recall images that can link poems to their neighbors. I also used my recent memory of the poems to construct timelines or dramatic arches. But I know that the only way to test the success of either strategy is to read.

I’ve got fifty copies of each manuscript. If I don’t have a publication by the time I get through the stacks, I’ll reconsider the order and maybe even read the books.

Puntitas reads _El llanto de la comadreja_ by E. Navarro.

Personal Fictions

Puntitas has been away from her blog because she has been cherishing a number of fictions that make no sense at all except to individuals living in denial. I’m not ready to get into them now. They’re material for another post. So I’ll resume as if my last post had been earlier in the week and backtrack later.

I do need to understand denial and the habit of sustaining personal fictions because a couple of my protagonists engage in this sort of behavior (shocker). One, the protagonist of my novella, in fact, has a breakdown when she discovers that her reality is an elaborate façade constructed by herself. In my own case, façades have to do with what is most convenient.

One issue, for example, is that, as someone who is self-employed, I don’t have health insurance. Yes, I can buy it at a high price (six to seven hundred dollars a month) and with a high deductible (twenty-five hundred dollars) because I’m over weight, which puts me at risk for many possible illnesses, and because I have the preexisting condition of seasonal allergies, which potential insurers consider an “incurable” disease. But if I do that, I spend what I do already on medical expenses plus an extra seven to eight thousand dollars a year on healthcare I don’t actually use, leaving me to put off such things as the purchase of a new washing machine for another time and another place.

My current health insurance complaint is that I just discovered I’ll need four thousand dollars worth of dental work, something not generously covered in most plans anyway, along with the cost of a visit to a gum specialist and two probable extractions. So far, it has been convenient for me to think about what I need and want to do with the money when the reality is that my flabby forty-two-year-old body is probably as deteriorated as my mouth—a thought that leads to a long, long series of depressing musings about the money I’ll be spending over the next few years and … well … mortality and what not.

Some of the “what not” has been sparked by my father’s latest tussle with death. He rolled off the roof and landed on concrete while putting Christmas lights up in November (let that be a warning to all premature Christmaculators). Save for a few minutes of unconsciousness, lots of bleeding, fourteen staples to the back of the head, and massive bruising, he survived unscathed: a miracle, to be sure. The chaos of anger, fear, sorrow, gratitude, and all the other undefined feelings came days after the event. The whole how-would-life-have-changed-if-the-scans-and-x-rays-hadn’t-turned-out-so-well inner monolog is going on still.

What do my dad’s roll and my pending root canals and other procedures have to do with denial–you ask. The former prompts me to face a major job related decision I’ve been putting off for about two years, and the latter is yet another instance of how well I indulge my wishful thinking, despite all logic.

But back to the writing. I did nothing until last weekend. I wrote a poem I’ve been thinking about since my mother and I visited my sister at the end of September. I’ve had the idea in my head and a few lines since then, but I didn’t have enough to start writing until a couple of weeks ago. I wrote the bulk of the initial draft last weekend. I’m still in the phase where I think the poem is brilliant and should be published by anyone and everyone, so I need to wait a few weeks to read it again more objectively.

On a positive note, I learned to knit gloves during my hiatus. I’ll post a pattern eventually. I’m still working out the kinks.

Puntitas reads The Discipline_ by M. Anderson, _The Power of the Dog_ by D. Winslow, _The Heretic’s Daughter_ by K. Kent, _The Brass Verdict_ by M. Connelly, _The Pillars of the Earth_ by K. Follett, _The 19th Wife_ by D. Ebershoff, and _The Keepsake_ by T. Gerritsen.

Counting Down

After much wasteful procrastination, Puntitas has had a productive weekend. She wrote a new poem last night, one of those poems that come of themselves with a little prodding, the kind that can stand and walk and speak in telegraphic sentences when they’re born so they can go into the mail with minimal nurturing at home, and today she has gotten over the last of the hideous hurdles in the damn poem she’s been working on forever—well, off and on since Easter more or less.

Both poems have been interesting experiences. The one I wrote last night was inspired by the Independence Day celebration, which has always struck me as far more Dionysian in nature than Halloween or even Carnival. I’ve never quite been able to explain why that is, but eight years ago, when the good home schooling Mennonite neighbors argued over whether to let their screaming five-year-old go ahead and light a Fountain (Mom was for allowing her in order to teach a lesson about obedience and parental judgment while Dad objected on the grounds that the resulting emergency room trip would ruin the party and spoil all the food), I came close to putting it into words. This year, with all the forest fires and talk of global warming, I found the perfect context. I didn’t write it out there and then because my mother and I were having such a nice time laughing at the neighbor’s silliness and munching on big pieces of fresh fruit, that getting up for the note taker only to tune her out seemed crass. Later, of course, the moment was gone, and I didn’t know if I could recreate the piece.

Sunday night, when I did write it out, the poem was different from what I had imagined. While I remembered the general movement of the piece, I didn’t remember all of the elements that got me from the opening image to the climactic ending. I also didn’t know how to prepare for the final image and overall conceit without giving it away or making the poem feel like a riddle. What I did instead was to suggest the conceit in two places and organize the details to do the rest of the work. I won’t know whether I pulled it off until I read the thing relatively fresh.

One pleasant surprise was the closing image. I couldn’t use the one I had planned and was floundering around for a direction to take the poem when I read what I had and realized it was already somewhere. I did a little tweaking to make the ending less abrupt and went back to work on making the conceit stand out enough. Then I was done.

I hope it’s as complete as I think it is the next time I work on it. There is one image I really like, but I’m nervous about it not quite blending in with the rest of the poem. I can tie it into the general conceit, but that may be more trouble than it’s worth. I’ll just have to wait to decide.

The other poem has been a struggle. I’ve stuck with it because I really like its potential. I like the idea, the images, and the general narrative arc. Done right, it can turn out to be an excellent piece, but maintaining a balance between exposition and metaphor, resisting bathos, keeping two ideas separate while using one as a conceit for the other—all have been extremely difficult for me. On top of all of that, I’m not sure that I have the right life experience to write it. It’s about marriage, and I’ve based it on conversations with and observations of some of my married friends, but having never been married or involved with anyone for a long period of time, I’m nervous that I may not be true to the speaker’s feelings.

During our last tussle, I did some rearranging. That made for a stronger draft, but it also created a massive gap that called for the speaker’s history and a link to both the present situation and the metaphor for her marriage. Since then, I’ve been researching the linking details and thinking about how to integrate them into the details of her history.

Today’s mission was to fill in that gap even if the work was far from polished. The gap has definitely been filled. Again, it’s a matter of waiting a few days to read the poem fresh and have a more objective sense of how to direct my revisions. At this point, I’m thinking it would be helpful to have someone read and comment on it. I’ve got one or possibly two people in mind, and depending on the next round of revision, I may ask them.

I think the next time I work on my book, I want to read the really long poem. The last time I read it, I thought it was just about done. The changes I made involved cutting out excess in the final section. I was only concerned about an important transitional point, where too much snipping could affect pacing.

Puntitas reads _Quiller Salamander_ by A. Hall and _The Zookeeper’s Wife_ by D. Ackerman.

The Shawl

I’ve been down with another bug (chills, vomiting, and diarrhea), and before that, I was doing some high speed knitting for a friend, so I feel a little disconnected from my writing and from this blog.

That isn’t a bad thing necessarily. A clear head will help me with the last few poems of the book, and once that’s out of the way I can focus on fiction for a while and start planning the next book of poems.

The knitting episode did keep me from becoming discouraged about the book. I was making a shawl for a friend who is having a vow renewal ceremony this weekend. I wanted her to have it before the ceremony in case she decided to wear it, but I only had four weeks to get it done. That first week, I made good progress, working up between 100 and 150 grams of sport weight yarn. Then I didn’t work on it for another week because I got sick, then again for another because I was cracking down on the poetry. Finally, I picked it up again, and I knit morning, noon, and night to get the remaining 250 to 300 grams in.

The last couple of skeins were hard going, The shawl was in the Faroese style (triangular beginning at the center top), so each row got longer, and by the end, each skein covered only two repeats of the pattern stitch. I kept asking myself whether I really wanted to give my friend this gift, whether it really had to be this size, whether the vow renewal wouldn’t work just as well in August, whether I couldn’t keep the damn thing since she didn’t know of its existence. I’d sit and knit and think that the pattern stitch was unattractive, that the work was uneven, that the fabric was too drapy, that giving the thing away was embarrassing.

Then I finished, and I put it on, and my mother said it was beautiful in a tone that sounded like she really thought it was, and I believed it was less ugly. I called my friend right then to let her know I’d be dropping it off later in the week so that I couldn’t chicken out and hide the thing, and today, when she received it, she sounded pleased with it too.

I thought—hope—my book would be like the shawl, awful in that final stretch, but worth the effort in the end.

Puntitas reads _In the Wake of the Plague_ by N. F. Cantor.

Exploring the Other

Since I just got spammed by Beowulf (good to know diamond replicas can be affordable and glass is still cheap), I figured I’d post.

I’ve been reading lots of creative nonfiction lately. I didn’t choose the books for any particular reason. Some sounded really interesting. Others were interesting enough, but really on-sale. What they all have in common is that they are largely about what literary theorists call the Other.

My stories and poems spend a lot of time in the realm of the Other. Mostly, I think I handle Otherness well (details about the life of other, but rarely at center stage, except for the one that seriously impacts the character’s motivation or the action), but I’m not always sure.

Some of the books (Holy Cow, The Ritual Bath, The Sex Lives of Cannibals) describe difference as if their authors were standing at a display window gazing in. In the first case, the writer stays outside always, marveling at the quaint and exotic clothing, wanting a piece or two, but never forgetting that she would buy it to make a statement, not simply to wear. In the second (a mystery novel), the shop keeper is standing in the doorway pointing to the clothes, saying, “Look. Isn’t it lovely,” but not selling it because it’s significance is too complex for the admiring writer to properly convey. In the third, the writer goes in, tries on the garment, likes it, and considers what items in the wardrobe go well with it. The unfamiliar item (a religion or way of life) is always described in reference to the known. The first two books never really explain their subject because the first doesn’t really leave the norm and the second appears to be unsure or afraid of exploring the Other. The third book does something interesting. It refers to the norm, sometimes from the perspective of one who is Norm and sometimes from the perspective of one who has gone bush and sees the norm as Other. The reason the technique works for me is that the writer is not writing for two characters, which sometimes suggests that one is the “right” one, but that he writes from the perspective of the same character, who changes over time. When he arrives at the South Pacific island country that will be home for the next two years, for example, he notices men wearing skirts. By the time he’s invited to a formal event at the British Office and by the time he has a face-to-face encounter with the Mormon missionaries, he’s spent so much time in a skirt, defending both his manhood and his woman, that Western pants are exotic and out of place.

The other three (A Child Called It, Teacher Man, The Things They Carried) are written from the perspective of one who is Other and very aware of being Other. Though I can’t yet articulate what techniques were used and why they were helpful, these three books, especially the O’Brien, made something in my head click. Well, the O’Brien made my head click for lots of reasons. Emotionally it was a hard book to read. The stories were about people making difficult choices and living through them and with them. Technically it was impressive. In almost every selection, someone dies, gets angry, feels scared, or some combination thereof, yet no two sound alike because they interpret the anger, death, and fear in different ways, and the interpretation shapes the narratives from beginning to end. Beyond the content, it made me think about why I write, and remembering how I used overheard conversations and television and radio show dialogs to make up stories in my head for hours and hours while people at school and in town pretended I didn’t exist kicked off a few nights of insomnia and obsession. Good thing I don’t drink.

I’m now reading another nonfiction (Kabul Beauty School). I haven’t gotten into it far enough to have an opinion, but so far, its writer seems to be more participant than observer, though a little of both.

Puntitas reads _Teacher Man_ by F. McCourt and _Kabul Beauty School_ by D. Rodriguez.

Temporarily Out of Commission

I’m sitting in my bedroom with a humidifier, trying not to cough. Illness is such a humbling experience, stripping us of all the airs of grandeur we dress in daily. This morning I got out of bed, smelling of menses and urine from when the cough was so bad I voided. I went straight to the shower, unable to stand myself. After that, it was breakfast, a conversation with my mother, and more cold medicine. I think I’m back to the yearly thing, the one that requires antibiotics and a stronger than usual cough suppressant. My mother says it’s time for the doctor, but since I haven’t had this long enough to obviate the lecture about how colds and viruses need a week to work themselves out of the body, I disagree. I want my $100.00 and my two-hours wasted to result in a prescription, not a follow-up (i.e., no prescription, one condescending lecture, an appointment for another $100.00 and two more hours wasted). By this point in my life, I know my own body and my own ailments well enough to distinguish between a cold and something more serious.

I’m not sure why I’m bringing this up here, in a blog about writing, except that Adrienne Rich has a poem about how coming out of a fever is like a resurrection, how you feel like a survivor afterward, like you left someone else behind. I always think of that poem when I’m sick because she captures exactly what it is to be well again.

I think too that it’s hard to write about the way the mind betrays us when the body doesn’t respond to whatever power we think we have over it. My novella is about a person who is falling apart in mind, body, and spirit. While each collapse has its source, the collapse of the body exacerbates the other two. It affects her judgment and her responses to things. When I had a friend read an early draft, she could not understand why the protagonist couldn’t just do this or that more obvious and normal thing, so I realized that I hadn’t done a good job of reproducing that mindset.

Speaking of mindsets, I started the story I mentioned last time. I got 345 words down. I don’t really know where I’m going with it. Usually I’ve got a good idea. But I’ve decided I’m going to go ahead with it because I’m afraid of talking myself out of it the way I talked myself out of writing the poem with the ball, the swing, and the woman at the foot of the stairs. This story is about extraterrestrials, not at all my cup of tea, so developing the right mindset for the characters and in turn for the reader is important.

Now I’m going to stop. I’m rambling far too much. Between the humidifier and the last of the cough medicine with codeine, I’m having to work less hard at not-coughing, so I may be able to sit here and knit while listening to one of my famous audio books. The one I’ve got on the player now is not very good. It’s called The Lost Diary of Don Juan. Normally, I love retellings, hearing the story from another character’s point of view, etc., but this very obviously made-for-film novel has so little to do with the play that I suspect its writer hasn’t actually read the source of his narrative. The two clearest details in support of that fact are that the galanteador of the retelling is in love with a woman named Ana while the one in the source play is in love with a woman named INEZ and that the Don Luis, best friend of Don Juan and betrothed to Dona Ana (with whom Don Juan has a payback quicky before meeting the saintly Dona INEZ), of the play is no where to be found in the novel. I haven’t read the poem by Byron, so it’s possible that this novel is based on that. Anyway, aside from giving me an excuse to be pedantic, this book is helping me understand that I stop reading altogether when I lose interest in something. I still can’t bring myself to not finish a book, however crappy, so I suppose that finishing it slowly is better than not finishing it at all.