Poetic Stress

Puntitas had a small but important revelation concerning the almond poem and her poetry in general. While she’s liked the idea and the overall shape of the piece, she’s had trouble finishing it. The problem hasn’t been trouble moving from Point A to Point B or trouble resolving a technical issue. It’s been lack of motivation, which is odd since Puntitas is generally interested in writing this poem.

She’s noticed that this lack of enthusiasm is sometimes overcome by a little formal poetry, either reading or writing it, so she started writing another sonnet, and she spent some time on the web Googling around for other forms and for articles on forms.

Two stayed with her, and now that she wants to cite them properly, she can’t find them. Ah, well …. One was an interview, and the other was the forward for an anthology of formal poems. Both talked a lot about sound.

The first said that a poem is different from prose in that the former seeks to create an emotional effect, which is reinforced by the sound of the language, sibilants for soft soothing poems and plosives for capturing terse, harder pieces. He used many of the terms high school English teachers quiz their students on: assonance, alliteration, caesura.

The other said that the problem with free verse is that much of it is actually prose with arbitrary line breaks, prose and poetry being distinguished thus: prose is stressed roughly every ten syllables while poetry is stressed roughly every four. He talked about other things as well, most especially the line break and the need for concreteness not only in the imagery but also in the experience or moment described. But he returned to the sound of the piece, echoing the first writer’s thoughts about the connection between the emotional impact and the aural experience.

Puntitas’ first revelation was that her almond poem was stressed like prose. When she went back into the text to stress it more poeticly, she discovered that she was more motivated about working on it because the piece sounded like a poem again, and she realized that she is very aware of the way her work sounds. This is in part because of her writerly esthetic, having grown up on formal poetry, lived around songs, and listened to, officially studied, and worked around the rhythms of speech, but it is also due to the way Puntitas writes, typing to the echo of a robotic synthetic voice and considering a piece to be finished when she stops being aware of that voice. When a draft isn’t working or when it contains lots of research, she gets stuck, and she often finds that what produces her stuckedness is a prosaic rhythm, which she either modifies to something more poetic or emphasizes for something prosy.

Her second revelation was that she isn’t clear about how important sound should be in her own work. Some of her poems are rich in sound, working hard to reinforce the content aurally. Others strive for a starker soundscape, letting the content carry the burden of impact. Puntitas own impulses are toward valuing sound, but she wonders whether that isn’t an old-fashion tendency, since much of the poetry she reads has a prosier feel.

Puntitas reads _The Elegance of the Hedgehog_ by M. Barbery, _Dirty_ by M. Hart, _Hell House_ by R. Matheson, _siete años secuestrado por las FARC_ by L. E. Perez, and _The Link_ By C. Tudge. She has decided to finish books she’s started. Three or four are left on the metaphorical stack.

Other Readers Needed

Thanks to a recent bout of insomnia and to a slow work week, Puntitas has been putting a lot of time into revising her narrative essay. She was surprised to read it today and discover that minor changes would fill in a lot of gaps, hint at back-story, support themes, unify apparently disparate elements, and address many of the evils she had worried about last night. She was satisfied enough with the day’s revisions to send the draft on to a friend for feedback.

Puntitas really needs an outside reader for this piece since her emotional response to it on first reading tells her she’s still too close to the subject to gauge the work objectively. The person she sent it to isn’t an ideal reader in that she shares a characteristic with Puntitas that is likely to filter her interpretation, but Puntitas wants to hear what she has to say anyway because Puntitas values her skills as a reader and because their shared characteristic makes her a good person to discuss the subject with. After their conversation, Puntitas plans to go through another round of revision. Then she may ask another friend, who does not share the characteristic, to comment as well, but that will depend on how she’s feeling about the piece at the time.

Inviting others to experience a foreign world is a hard task. Puntitas hadn’t thought about how hard until recently, when she read Dry by Augusten Burroughs, a memoir about a gay man going through rehab and trying to maintain sobriety despite the illness and death of a friend and former lover.

Puntitas was able to identify with much of the book. The narrator’s friendships reminded her of her own friendships. His experiences with addiction and recovery connected her with the people she knows who are in their addictions or recoveries as well as with aspects of her job. Specific scenes and moods evoked parallel episodes in Puntitas own life and in that of her friends’.

One part of the book, however, that she was less able to connect to was a certain portion of the gay story line. Puntitas isn’t gay or particularly oriented to finding a life partner of any type, so love stories are generally interesting as curiosities (hence Puntitas’ fascination with formula romances). This one was more interesting than usual in that it was about someone who has to “fall out of love” and maintain a friendship with a person who doesn’t reciprocate. The story drew Puntitas less when the former lover develops AIDS and dies, prompting turmoil in the narrator, which eventually leads to relapse.

Stories about terminal illness are generally hard to pull off because they tend toward the sentimental or sensationalistic, because characters’ reactions follow a few expected paths, and because the death, which comes at or right before the climax, leads to a handful of predictable events. Puntitas has an especially hard time with stories about women with cancer and (A) big families or (B) close friends.

The few books Puntitas has read by contemporary gay writers have tended to figure a character (major or minor) with AIDS (often in its more advanced stage). For Puntitas, who is an outside reader, this feels like a cliché, but she suspects that, for the gay writers and readers, the AIDS character is an acknowledgement of someone who is part of their landscape and that other characters’ responses to him are significant markers within the community.

Puntitas’ own narrative essay risks the same kind of resistance that characterized her reading of Burroughs AIDS story line. The piece is about exclusion. That will be clear to anyone who reads it. But because so much memoir about this topic centers on exclusion, readers may not bother to tease out the subtleties of the type of exclusion being described. The nuances aren’t buried enough to actually need teasing out. But the readers’ expectation and lack of direct experience or real empathy dull their perceptions. This is why it will be important for Puntitas to have outside readers.

Puntitas reads _The Link_ by C. Tudge.

Celebration and Perplexity

Puntitas sent out her first chapbook in years and got a prompt rejection the following day. That same day, of the five hours spent submitting, she also sent out two poems she really likes and hopes to find homes for. The day after the chapbook rejection, she got a nibble from the journal that received the two poems:

The editor liked the language in both, but found the line breaks distracting. If Puntitas would be open to resubmitting them as prose poems, the editor would love to reconsider them.

Puntitas does not know what a prose poem is. She’s read a few, and she knows they’re all the rage, but the hammer-and-nails part of her brain doesn’t know what to do to a piece of writing to make it a prose poem.

The news was frustrating for Puntitas, so in typical Puntitas style, she sulked, whined to a friend, sat inertly at her keyboard, had absolutely no idea. Then admitting herself desperate for publications and further admitting that she especially wanted these two pieces to thrive, Puntitas pulled up the documents and used the find-and-replace-all command to brutally substitute hard and soft line breaks with regular spaces (after copying the file in case some other editor liked the work as Puntitas meant it).

Sans line breaks, Puntitas read the poems again, only this time she did it the way she reads prose, and what she discovered is that a few of her long, involved sentences collapsed in their own complexity. She fiddled here and there, nothing that anyone would notice, and she put a blank line in whenever she started a new idea. She didn’t think the pieces were any more or less comprehensible, but she did resolve to go back to other poems to read them this way for editing.

When she finished, she resubmitted both pieces. A day or two later, the editor wrote back to say she was prepared to accept one of the poems if Puntitas agreed to a few changes. CHANGES? Who dare talk to a writer about CHANGES? Puntitas read on with a mixture of anger, fear, and shame (not really sure why).

The changes were surprisingly … great. As Puntitas wrote it, the poem is a long fragment, a series of gerundives that suggest a nonstatic moment. Each idea is separated from its neighbor by a semicolon and developed and expanded with commas. There were also lots of and’s to create a rhythm. The editor, got rid of most of the commas, replaced the semicolons with commas, and stripped most of the and’s. The experience of reading suddenly reflected what Puntitas had been trying to do in the language, and Puntitas moved one step closer to understanding what a prose poem is. She’ll have to think about how another one of her pieces may benefit from this form of decluttering.

The other thing that happened when Puntitas read the final version—still no line breaks—is that she was disoriented and unmoored from her own concept of poetry writing. Puntitas wondered, not for the first time, what a line break is supposed to do. Her understanding is that it should create a subtext of its own; draw attention to words, images, and relationships; and make the reading easier. She wondered what other poets think line breaks should be or do, And she wondered whether the line breaks have been a deciding factor for other editors.

For Puntitas personally, one of the functions of the line break is to establish that what she is doing is writing poetry. For her the distinction among creative nonfiction prose, fiction, and poetry is nebulous, and the distinction between such forms as prose poem and flash fiction is too confusing to ponder. So writing in line breaks and attending to their meaning makes her mindful of the need to compress language and convey abstract meaning through sensory experience, evocative action, and physical contour—what the sighted world summarizes in the visual metaphor of the image. Hence her reluctance to instantly do away with all the line breaks she’s worked so hard to develop).

One or two days later still, Puntitas received another acceptance. This one was in the form of a letter that was both sharp and funny, the sort of missives cranky old nuns fire off in novels and on TV. This editor was also inclined to accept a piece if Puntitas allowed her to make changes, like capitalize a proper noun, correct a spelling mistake, and remove a lone parenthesis. Puntitas actually fought the urge to bow her head and whisper ma’am when replying to the message to agree to the changes and apologize for her slovenliness.

She’s contacted the other journals about the acceptances, but she’s a little nervous about it since the pieces aren’t actually in print yet.

Puntitas reads _Garden of Lies_ by E. Goudge plus the two knitting books. She’s found a couple more knitting books that she can’t wait to get through.

Random Thoughts

Puntitas has been wrestling with random writerly thoughts, most of them negative since she’s also at an inauspicious curve in her cycle. She’s already gotten rejections for two batches of poems from her most recent mailings. The letters themselves have been blandly inoffensive, and the quick turn-around has been a pleasant and liberating change. Still, rejections are rejections, objective reminders of the statistical probability that publishing one book, multiple books, is not high.

Another burst of reality along these same lines came when Puntitas was enjoying one of her favorite television shows, knitting needles in hand, of course. Prolific song writer and producer Kara DioGuardi was asked why she didn’t have a career as a performer since she sang well. She said that it just hadn’t worked out. She’d had contracts with recording studios twice, but neither had turned into an actual album. Puntitas’ mind went immediately to her own fledgling writing career (it’s all about Puntitas). If DioGuardi, who possesses singing ability, a successful complementary career, relevant contacts, and inside knowledge about her industry, hasn’t been able to put herself at the mike and on the CD cover, what makes Puntitas think she can go from half-ass writing to the Nobel committee?

Other random thoughts in no particular order:
 In The Friendly Young Ladies by Mary Renault, two of the important characters are writers. One of them, a formula fictionist, thinks about what her characters are doing when she stops writing. X spends the night in a burning shack while the writer sleeps, or Y goes to bed and lies there all weekend long till the writer has time to get back to her manuscript. I think of my characters that way, and those moments of suspended tension help me write more.
 In the afterward to the same book, Renault claims (a little too insistently) that she never censored herself as she wrote. On the subject of explicitly rendered sex, she says that it’s not necessary to describe people making love since the reader will know how a given character makes love if s/he is drawn well. I like this idea—that, without being told outright, the reader knows what a well developed character is likely to do and is capable of doing even in situations that aren’t spelled out on the page. This is not a new idea, to be sure, but put this way, it gives me a more concrete way of thinking about the kinds of details that go into developing the individual.
 In a recent revision session, one of those tinker-before-submitting-rushes, a series of vastly improved poetic lines came to me as did a handful of minor but vital changes. My long poem starts with a short section that is thematically important, but clunky to read. I remember reading and rereading it to smooth out the language, but the line breaks remained pretty hopeless. This time, the fixes were obvious, bluntly so. As I revised, I wondered why they hadn’t been previously. Distance? The powers of mental percolation? Whichever the case, it’s interesting (miraculous).
 In an interview, John le Carre said he didn’t like to spend a lot of time with the literati. He would rather spend the day talking to a wood cutter than a writer because he likes being around the primary sources (i.e., the people he’s likely to write about). I agree with this. I stood under my fig tree three days ago and felt the sparks of a poem, one I’ve tried to write before. The images were clear. So were the details I’ll need. So were the biblical references I spent several hours researching last year. So were surprising new thoughts based on the real experience. I could have written my poem without the real tree, but I needed the tree to write the real poem. This doesn’t mean that a writer must die to write about death or become a drug addict to write about that experience. It means that the writer renders a richer, more significant experience if she or he has had an encounter with death or observed the encounters of others.
 In its mission statement, a literary journal, which is preparing for its inaugural issue, calls for literary work that is lyrical and explores Christian themes without darkness. My initial reaction was typical of someone with a secular education: how limiting. Then when I realized the description applies to some of my work and to some of my favorite reading, I laughed. Joyous does not equate with cliché or platitude. Literary writers and those who aspire to that forget.

Puntitas reads _The Stone Flower Garden_ by D. Smith, _Eve: a Novel of the First Woman_ by E. Elliott, _Constantine: the Man and His Times_, by M. Grant, and _In This House of Brede_ by R. Godden.

Ah, a Beautiful Day

Puntitas has had a wonderful day. She and her mother have been tuning in to Yo soy Betty, la fea reruns off and on. This morning Puntitas’ mom found five VHS tapes with episodes from the original airing, the first one in the pile beginning with the same episode that aired Monday night, so Puntitas and her mother spent the rest of the afternoon and all of the evening reliving the highlights.

It’s a well crafted soap, so Puntitas found herself noticing craft tips as well as getting sucked into the action, and Puntitas also noticed that her attitude toward some of the characters had changed. The most obvious was that she had initially identified very much with the main character, a plain woman with smarts and lots of baggage who makes poor choices because of the baggage. Puntitas herself is generally less attractive and less intelligent than Betty, but she no longer obsesses as much about either, and she’s better about thinking her choices through. That’s a good discovery to make.

The other thing that happened Monday was a lesson in balance. Puntitas received, on the one hand, a long overdue rejection, the last pending submission she can remember, and on the other, proof of her most recent publication, the poem that was accepted earlier this year, the one acceptance of her current mailing effort. It’s a short piece in a chapbook anthology.

As Puntitas has probably written here already, it’s one of those poems that makes her doubt her ability to judge a piece of writing. The poem is short and clever, but it’s not very transcendent or particularly well crafted. Puntitas liked it, but when she went through her brutal deleting phase, she sent it to the recycle bin. Then she pulled it out when she realized she could do with one or two extra pages for her book-length manuscripts. At some point after sending the poem out, she decided that it was deletable after all and that the book didn’t really need the extra page. The poem went back to the recycle bin, and a week or two later, the acceptance arrived.

She fished the poem back out of the trash folder and revised it. The ending is different in the current revision, but after reading the chapbook, Puntitas thinks she’ll keep the changes except for the ending: the original being more effective.

Puntitas is baffled because she really did think she’d gotten better about judging her work more objectively. She’s still sorting out whether this acceptance is connected to her inability to assess it or simply an instance of editor’s preferences.

Puntitas reads _La reina del sur_, by A. Perez-Reverte, which she put down at some point without having finished it.

Less Is More

On the recommendations of friends, I’ve been reading more formula fiction than usual. The realization I think I’m coming to is that less is definitely more as far as plot twists and social issues go. The last two books I’ve read serve nicely as case in point.

Both are mystery series, revolving around unconventional women. The Spencer-Fleming (written currently) is about a female Episcopal priest who serves in a small Midwestern town, has a relationship with the police chief, and manages to get herself mixed up in high profile crimes. The Forrest (written 20 years ago) is about a lesbian police officer who works homicide in the city of Los Angeles and keeps her sexual orientation to herself (more don’t-ask-don’t-tell than actually closeted).

The latter is about half the length of the former. It’s plotline is relatively simple, focusing on one crime, dispensing with secundary crimes and red herrings relatively quickly, and organizing the personal subplot around a clear central idea, how one gets over a past relationship. For me, this simplicity makes both the story and the characters more compelling and the plot twists and red herrings more surprising and effective.

In the former, so much is happening that I find myself spending as much energy trying to figure out how characters and subplots go together (not because the writing isn’t clear) as I do on following the action, and I notice myself thinking, “How clever” and “of course,” rather than “Oh, wow” or “Oh, no.” I also find myself making evaluative comments about how the social issues are dealt with: illegal aliens, age differences in romantic relationships, old guard vs. new guard, intercultural/interfaith relationships, public vs. private. While the story was well crafted, more of the characters were flat, relying on the series, not the individual story, to give them depth.

Now that I’m starting to think more about writing and revising prose, I realize that I felt insecure about keeping plotlines simple, but lately, I’ve been thinking I shouldn’t worry.

Puntitas reads _The Diary of a Nobody_ by G. and W. Grossmith, _I Shall Not Want_ by J. Spencer-Fleming, and _Murder at the Nightwood Bar_ by K. V. Forrest.

First Acceptance in Three Years

Puntitas is a happy, happy person! She’s had an acceptance: one or two (can’t tell from the letter) poems to appear in a chapbook. It’s neither her greatest poem nor the greatest chapbook anthology ever, but both are fine and she’s damn proud. Details will be posted when the chapbook is a reality. For now, the acceptance is reason enough to bust out a few cumbia steps. Be grateful Puntitas does not own a web cam.

The email came at just the right time. Puntitas went to visit her accountant today. Yes, she has one. Originally, he was a low-key verging-on-sixty tax savant, the kind who is so low-key as to be mistaken for unpromising. Then he sold his business to work for the private sector. His replacement is earnest enough, but less wily about what the self-employed can deduct, and Puntitas has not been reassured by his having to interrupt to take a call from the IRS regarding another client’s audit.

Bravely, Puntitas persevered with her interview. Today’s foray into Puntitas’ financial affairs led to a discussion of her delusion that she is a writer. She has claimed to be one for two years now, and because she has made no money at it, he suggests that this claim be downgraded to a hobby. Few things are as shriveling to the ego as the juxtaposition of one’s degree, aspirations, and oeuvre with the government’s thoughts on hobbies and failing businesses. Puntitas supposes that she and the IRS are more likely to reach a happy medium if she were to sell the chapbook in which her poem(s) appears to a recycler for a profit.

In other news, Puntitas is a third of the way through her big, ugly translation. Reading in Spanish, even on something unrelated, while translating such a long document into that language has really been helpful. Puntitas has noticed many improvements in her style, and she has been much more successful at researching terms. She hasn’t been posting here or sending manuscripts out because she’s been so absorbed with that project, but she’ll need to take a day off to do some more mailing.

Puntitas reads _La reina del sur_ by A. Perez Reverte and _Say Goodbye_ by L. Gardner.

Puntitas and the Ignorance of Others

After a computer calamity, Puntitas has been working on her big, ugly translation project, which she has had to start over because of said event. She has finished reading Blindness by Jose Saramago, which she dislikes for a number of reasons, the easiest to sum up being that responding to a metaphor (i.e., the eyes are the windows of the soul) is ignorance and masturbation if the response isn’t informed by active inquiry (i.e. interrogation of the assumptions that underlie the metaphor, observation of the literal components of the image, experimentation that leads to deeper reflection on the subject). Puntitas’ appreciation of the novel has suffered further after a consultation with an oral surgeon who thinks it’s amazing that blind people can walk and impossible for them to participate in a routine doctor-patient encounter. (The surgeon kept talking about having someone translate for Puntitas and was bothered when Puntitas asked why that would be necessary as both were speaking the same language. Puntitas almost … skin-of-the-teeth almost … added, “I mean you’re speaking in Stupid, but since I hear that language quite often, I’ve learned to puzzle it out.”) Puntitas believes that this surgeon very probably shares Saramago’s perception of the blind as a helpless collective of shit covered needs–alegories about alienation, blah-blah notwithstanding. No, Puntitas hasn’t gotten over either the awful surgeon or the fact that the only characters in the novel who have ordinary rational thoughts are sighted. But Puntitas leaves all that for another day.

In the realm of Puntitas the emerging writer–another rejection arrived today. It came from the Missouri Review, a typical form letter on a half sheet of paper. Someone wrote a note, thanking me and telling me to try the magazine again some time. I would have taken it for a generic kindness, like Howard Junker’s “onward,” except that the person who wrote it actually used my name. That almost made up for the writer’s not wanting some of my best work.

I’ll need to send more batches of poems out soon.

Puntitas reads _Maridos_ by A. Mastreta.

Lies and Distractions

Puntitas has not been feeling well, not sick exactly, but tired, achy, and stressed—like the beginnings of sick or the drag of PMS–so she’s done some lying around between appointments and sessions at the computer. She started reading The Likeness by Tana French while still only a few chapters into the Masot because she really liked the first TF she read and wanted something along those lines to help her unwind while lying around.

The book is engrossing: a police officer goes undercover to investigate the murder of a postgraduate student who looks uncannily like her. As in French’s previous book, this one deals with the themes of friendship and of the effect of personal baggage on the choices we make. It also spends a lot of time on dissimulation. Most interactions involve fake responses and half truths, even between people who are expected to be honest with each other.

These are all themes that are near and dear to my own heart, the last being especially on my mind lately because it is such an integral part of the work I do. People lie to social service and government officials, and on the opposite side of the equation, they lie to colleagues and clients. They lie to family members and to superiors, and they lie to themselves. I know this because the details of a single exchange don’t add up and because I’m privy to several conversations involving one person in two or more contexts. The reasons for lying vary from a desire for gain, to denial or avoidance, to simple habit. What I became aware of as I read the French is that, in and out of my job, I notice the lies, predict them accurately, and assign motivations to them, which in most cases, also explain and predict other behaviors. In life, the manner of and reason for the lies are telling when trying to understand someone. This is true in fiction to, but in fiction, lies are sorted out by comparing responses and details from scene to scene. For the reader, the trick is to sift out all the distraction between the scenes to be juxtaposed. For the writer, the trick is to distract, without letting the reader notice and to allow oneself to be distracted when developing a set of characters.

I think I’ve written about this subject. If I had more energy, I’d check to find out whether I’ve changed my mind about it.

Puntitas reads _La sombra del templario_ by N. Masot, _The Likeness_ by T. French, and _Bone by Bone_ by C. O’Connell.

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.