"Break"

Okay, so now I've had some time 'off' or 'away' and know who my next teacher is to be -- Bernard Cooper -- I'm excited. Reading Andre Aciman, "Call me by your name." Blown away. Inspired. And, for the first time, too intimidated to write again yet. Can't wait for January's residency.

Holidays in Sight, Just...

Last packet of the semester, and I am desperately punching out pages and pages about my past romantic life -- having a great time, while also suffering from the remembrance and wondering if I could ever publish any of it without destroying my karma -- meanwhile avoiding the 10 page lit. essay I have to write. Hmmm, not much has changed there.
Have managed to almost get through this second term while also dealing with kids' school issues, head lice (twice) and generally wanting to give them both more of my time and affection before they get too old for my hugs and tickles, or before I turn grey, whichever is the sooner...

Crossroads

So now I am at a point where I almost have a finished manuscript and feel suddenly terrified, as I can't just write anymore -- I have to figure out how to make it work as a book. Thank goodness I have 2 terms left to figure it out...Hopefully I won't panic too much and do anything Oedipal...

The Sweetest Place in the World

I must be almost at the midpoint of my program, and I am so thrilled by what I can sense happening in my writing and understanding of all I'm studying -- in myself. Words, like these falling autumn leaves outside my window, fall off the branches and reveal the tree's brilliance beneath -- its striations. There is little more thrilling, I think, than discovering our voice, and keeping discovering...this thing that always develops and is never 'done.' A wonderful immortality.
Every day that I get to do this, to live like this, to pursue my passion, surrounded by the people I most love, the little island that is my family, I want to get down on my knees and thank whatever power or fate it is that has allowed me this respite from all those earlier years of confusion and struggle. If I'd only known on those many dark days how blessed I would feel now, how I was always my own greatest gift. But we cannot discover this alone. I am so grateful for my teachers, formal and unintended -- my peers and my children as much as the wonderful mentors who read each month my work and say, 'Yes. Go on.' All any of us really needs, but how seldom we find ourselves in such a sweet place.

October already?

A beautiful cool, sunny fall day. A time to shift over, in the kids' case to sweaters and blankets on their beds; in mine, to reading of a different sort -- Phillip Lopate (who I keep wanting to call Larkin) and Sven Birkerts, one of whom I hope will be my teacher next term. Interesting to see how a man responds to my work. I need to open up to it -- more good life lessons...

Packet in the Mail...

...now can I give myself a day off? I doubt it!

Fall-ing

Getting ready to send out my September 'packet.' It's been a rough and crazy ride, ideas flying out from the horse's hoof's like gravel. Dinah Lenney is a wonderful teacher (have I said that before?), pushing me, asking the difficult questions, but kindly. Marvelous, painful therapy, and the words get clearer every time I sit down to write. Direction? Onwards.
My son, now in first grade, has homework -- eek -- and it is a real lesson in patience and a reminder that writing is always, from the start, a hard process, but that as it comes, it brings great pleasure. The questions I ask him: "Can you think of another word?" "Would you like to say more about that?" "How do you end a sentence?" are the same questions I ask myself.
And my daughter? She's taking it all in from a distance. Can't wait till they are both off and writing stories and poems. Shame about the math genes!

Weekend stops play

Soccer, ballet (theirs only, alas) and grading (mine) ...and fifteen minutes this morning with Natalia Ginzberg -- I just can't wait to get back to it, though my little girl's fever may further postpone my selfish endeavors...Oh, well, it's all good gathering time. And I did finally get to yoga this afternoon -- always good for creative thinking when I'm supposed to be emptying my mind!

Going Everywhere Fast

So, armed and dangerous with what I've been learning, I went back to my original book length manuscript and began really re-en-visioning it. Revelatory and so much fun. It's probably a good thing (I wrote 'god thing'!) I have to pick the kids up at 2.30pm or I'd never leave my desk. I'm just having too much fun. Beginning to daydream just a little about publication, if that still exists by the time I get there! A soccer practice and a bedtime meltdown kept my feet where they belong!

Revise Revise

Finally produced some 'free standing' essays thanks to some contests that forced the issue. Writing madly all morning then picking up the kids or teaching in the afternoons. I am suddenly very, very tired. My sweet little first grader also has homework these days, which means of course I have homework, but the relative independence of 6 and 4 is a gift.

Now Totally Confused

Project sparking off into several different ones -- I now have about 4 or 5 books instead on one, but here's the joke. None of them are finished. All part of the process, I s'pose!
Dinah Lenney is amazing. So are her reading recommendations. Why had I never discovered Mark Richard or Bernard Cooper or Jo Ann Beard or Abigail Thomas before? Worth every penny of the tuition in itself!

Progress?

Went back through the first 50 pages of my manuscript and still liked it (today at least) -- a good sign, I suppose. Also working on adapting a chapter as an essay for a competition. Suddenly feel like I might actually have work of sufficient caliber, or maybe I'm kidding myself...

Dragging

Worked like crazy last week and then spent this Labor Day weekend in a state of completely useless exhaustion. Can't read or write another word...

Packet in the Mail

Revised and revised and revised my pieces before sending them. Every time I tried to close the envelope, I would spot another place for improvement. Oddly satisfying -- at least I can see it now. Also less oddly satisfying to have it off my desk and in the mail. It's Friday so I plan to give myself the weekend off (though it's impossible not to read now I'm so into the big pile beside my bed. This week, William Maxwell, "So Long and See You Tomorrow" -- a book from another generation, another world. Sad.)

Bad Momma

Was almost late picking the kids up from school because I was lost in an ecstasy of revision!

Summer's End

We adapt, we evolve, these are the lessons of a summer as a student & mom. Somehow I managed to get at least as much work as I needed done by reading at night and typing madly with Pokemon screeching in the background. Not teaching helped. Children also maturing.I am learning patience with them and myself.
I have a new teacher, Dinah Lenney, and am thriving under her guidance. Her reading recommendations are especially wonderful. I have been immersed in the likes of Jo Ann Beard, Abigail Thomas and Mark Richard, and have found them all thrilling. Yet I know I too can write like this -- this is the great leap for which I've been waiting all these years. Now I just need to find my story & to learn about how to organize my material better, where to cut. Always learning, and loving it.
About to send off my August packet. I've made it this far. And the children seem fine!

Semester Two, Packet One...

...is going in the mail! I did it somehow, though not sure how I will manage the next one with two weeks away, two classes to teach and a rather considerable Mommy load. Miracles do happen, and at least my new teacher, Dinah Lenney, is a mom.

Too Hot to Write

Nothing stymies the creative mind like a hundred degree heat... There's a reason the British wrote so much famous literature -- it's called rain.

Bouncy castles and memory

In my wonderful yoga class, I float into a state of serene mindfulness that is invaded by thoughts of taking my children out for hot chocolate in their pajamas, and a beautiful memory of my mum and dad taking my brother and me out in our robes that my mother had made, with the cords of twisted wool she later taught me how to create. Wonderful the way the writing of memoir renews one's memory and revives moments we thought lost forever. Twisted yarns, let go...

As for the writing itself, while the children are bouncing on inflatables in the morning this week, I am struggling with bringing my text to life. Frustration, elation, frustration -- the bouncy castle of the writer...

Trying to do Schoolwork while the kids are on school holiday...

..is like trying to clean your teeth with a frog... or something! Back to inter-spousal juggling to try and fit in at least an hour or two of writing here and there, but I don't think it's going to work in the long run...Hard to read at night, too, when the kids are still bouncing off the walls at 10pm. But it's making me amazingly phlegmatic.

Oh, Proust...

You are stealing my heart...how you make me long to return to the delicious boredom of childhood!

Home Again: an appreciation

Back from Vermont. So good to see the family and sleep in my bed. Lovely to just swap roles and be given the opportunity not to think too much. It's been a whirlwind residency -- so much to listen to and think about, and many moments of inspiration and epiphany. Really getting to know a good handful of friends. On my last day, a wonderful bike ride through the Vermont hills, beauty all around. Hard t believe next time I go, it will all be covered in snow.

Strangest thing, when I woke up after getting home late Sunday night, my four-year-old daughter came in and started talking, and seemed as if she'd aged by months -- a great leap in verbal and physical, and it seemed psychic maturity -- perhaps because I went away and she had to adjust? Amazing. Thrilling. I get, in this way, to see my children from a distance, without having to go too far away for too long. I wonder if they perceive a change in me?

With Who Else Would I Give Up My Sweet Hours?

Glorious cool, cool rain today.

Sitting talking with my 'class' -- my writing buddies, missing my children so much with a pain that actually does seem to come from the heart, I look around and think, 'These are some of the only people in the world for whom I would give up my sweet hours.' We all are learning from this separation, from the anxieties and putting down of the anxieties, from the way we stretch our wings when we are without the support of the mother, or the lover or the child...

Their little voices on the phone, their bodies whose heat and worries I can't feel...thank goodness it is only ten days. And then we will all be changed.

Poetry, Stories, Workshop, Karaoke

A pretty full day. Still feeling kind of tenuously linked to myself here. Longing for true entry...and wishing it were cooler at home so my family could play outside at least.

My heart is like a singing bird...

... but her song's a little weary today. Feel a bit like I've flown to the moon, though the moon creatures are beginning to show themselves and populate this strange landscape. I got books from the library and carried them back to my room like friends. There was mist over Mt Anthony this morning as the rain abated -- a bath for the soul.

I keep thinking of my children in the 100 degree heat and their sun hats, and wanting to protect them. It already feels like I've been away from them for a lifetime. When they go off to college or off on their own lives, I must remember you do not just forget your past, the place and people you came from, but carry them with you, a pile of beloved books under your arm, a choir of lovely voices in the heart.

Walking back from a faculty Q and A through the rain-soaked meadow tonight, these words accompany me:
Smell of sweet wet grass
and clover and daisy and buttercup,
Smell of sweet wet grass
and clover and daisy and buttercup,
Smell of sweet wet grass
and clover and daisy and buttercup...

The music of a summer evening in Vermont. Feels like home!

I am Here

Tired and discombobulated; more anxious than excited this time around. Why do I feel so different?

When I left this morning, my son and daughter both said, "I don't want you to go," because this time, I realize, they remember what that feels like. I want to protect them and cannot do it from here...

I'm Off to See the Wizard!

Leaving at 7.45am tomorrow. Equal parts excitement and anxiety/sorrow about leaving the kids. For some reason, I'm more nervous about it than last time. I'm usually all packed by now but I can't seem to bring myself to do it today...

Two Days to Go

Equal parts anxiety and excitement beginning to creep in. The children look more lovely every day, and I am able to be increasingly patient knowing I won't see them for 10 days. If only it were always the case. They seem okay about my going, as long as I bring back candy!

Working on my July packet as I don't know how I'm going to write much with the kids at home next month. Proust is proving wonderful, but I wish I had the time to read it in French.

Four Days to Go...

And we shall have...rain by the looks of it. Four days to pack, spend time with my family & try to get through the Combray section of Proust's "A la Recherche du Temps Perdu" What a wonderful treat it is -- so much delicious, vivid detail.

Took the kids to a splash park this morning -- such unbridled joy. If they can just run in water everyday, they won't even know I'm gone!

I Can Still Do It

Ah, yes, back into memoir mode -- but it's a lot harder without feedback. It will be nice to have a teacher again. Not long to go!

Further Avoidance of Masters Work produces Poem

So I cleaned my office and wrote a poem instead of diving back into memoir, as soon I must:


On Rediscovering My Old Ink Pens

It’s been years since I held them, the sleek silver one,
the fat Mississippi one, lazy in its flow,
the Oxford silver, the cheap pink whore from Woolworth’s,
but when I open them, each of their strong, curved heads
looks ready for action, old lovers, steady, true,
happy to meet my demands: “Yes, that. Like that. There. And there.”

Once, my words flowed from them like a stream,
water on pulp, my looped a’s and b’s
riding the wave of the triple-ruled page, rolling
between the sweet grey covers of a book
I marked, at seven, with my whole name.

No one writes like this now.
The author drags black chains across the screen,
sends words marching and retreating like ants:
no way to write the wrong thing these days,
to bury a mistake in an angry storm, kill it; keep it.

There are five pens – five! -- like the lost fingers of
a hand. I carry them to the kitchen, the Union wounded.
My two palms upward, I bear them to the sink
where I separate them, head from body,
unscrew their separate parts and lay them out
on a sheet of kitchen paper. There. There. There.

With my right hand, I hold them: with my left,
I run the water, a cold stream, then give them
one by one to the cool flood till they weep their colors,
purple and brown and blue, away down the sink,
then weep some more.

I watch their jeweled effluent chase down
the remnants of my lunch: tuna and noodle and bean.
It colors them. It swirls through the dark pipes,
down to meet the earth, to wet it.

I flush out the last pen, the stubborn one,
sending water through and through its vein, and
setting free, as happens sometimes, a sudden clot,
which gushes out, quick, astonishing, like the moment
a woman looks down into the water between her legs
and sees her blood, dropped there like Chinese ink.

When all the barrels run clear and the nibs lie shining,
I wrap the pens in their sheet of paper, marbled now,
and bring them to the table. Then I push each pen’s
sharp secret beak into the hard plastic of the cartridges
I’ve kept, without remembering, for this day.

The pens receive the ink, unsure at first,
then quickly, like thirst: like that same woman
drinking from a man’s body after long years without.
One at a time, I press the nibs, gold and silver,
to the best sheet of paper I can find.

When I move my hand, they bleed,
and I write, as I did the very first time, at seven, my name:
over and over, my name, my name, my name.

Getting Ready for Round 2

Sorted my office. Now I just have to create in it!

End of First Semester

I am losing count of the days, so semesters and weeks will have to suffice for now...

Am taking a little break at last -- my mother here with us, forcing me to put aside all the books and give my brain a rest. A very good thing. Thanks, Mum!  Days in the mountains standing in streams and clambering over rocks -- a wonderful antidote to too many hours on my butt, staring at this screen.

Got my last packet back from teacher Honor Moore. She is so generous -- helps me believe I am doing the right thing here, which is worth all the money the program's costing! VT  minus 2 weeks and counting now. Can't wait for the lush meadows and company and a different kind of mental and social stimulation. Then onto a new teacher, the wonderful Dinah Lenney, and six more months of being booted into creative nirvana. ONWARD!

Day 129

Pedicure!

(Also started reading my peers' work for the upcoming residency -- such a relief to read these instead of write my own!)

Day 128

Packet in the mail. Went to my son's field day and then Marshall's with my mum!

Day 127

Does it make you a bad student or an enlightened individual to sending out work you know is imperfect and feel okay about it?

Days 124-126

Essay. Edits. Up till 1 a.m. just like a real student, except without any artificial stimulation!

Days 121-123

Essay, essay, aggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh... (To essai = to try) (I'm trying to remember that).

Days 115-120

Have successfully avoided working on my essay this week by writing my own stuff instead -- great, except I still have to write the essay. At least I know I wasn't meant to be doing a literature degree instead.
Got my packet of peer work for the upcoming residency, and Dinah Lenney as a teacher. Very excited!
The weekend, alas, has been a storm of small-person emotions and parents not dealing very well. Monday tomorrow, then Grandma is coming...maybe I'll get some work done, bu then again...

Days 113-114

Spent part of the morning with my daughter making sure she was well enough to go to school, part sorting folders, and part writing with a total lack of confidence in the product and its direction. Just can't seem to find the motivation -- need a 'gathering' time -- totally happy to read and sort, just not to write another word...

Mother's Day yesterday? Not the best, though there was a moment of pure loveliness when we finally reached the mountains, got out of the car, found a streamside walk and they just RAN! There's a metaphor in there somewhere but I'm too tired to go searching for it.

Day 112

Actually began work on the dreaded 10-page essay while my daughter did Disney computer games and developed a 104 fever. This is the perhaps the classic tableau of a mother trying also to be a student.
Now I just have to finish it in some vaguely intelligent way and then write 20 new pages before May 21...hmmmmm...

Days 109-111

My mind is peach fuzz. Trying to sort through all I have to do for the upcoming residency in June, while also attempting to create new work. Agghhh. Sat in bed this morning and read Alice Sebold's "Lucky" as a kind of escape from it all -- talk about lucky. What a wonderful way to 'work!' If only it was all that simple and pleasurable. The book, of course, is traumatic, but riveting.

Kids seem to be getting sick again, so who knows if my planned work intensive month will materialize, but never forget I am lucky, lucky, lucky to have them, and that it was my son who was my first real muse. Bless them both and their sweet craziness.

Days 107-108

While the whole world goes crazy, I am typing up notes from "Trauma and Recovery" and Morrison's "The Bluest Eye" and Coetzee's "Disgrace" and going to yoga, where we say a mantra for the peace and well being of all beings. It's hard to focus when you feel like your countrymen are drawing down hatred and retribution upon themselves...

Days 104-106

Stayed up with headache and almost total lack of motivation to write book annotations last night, then drove to the main post office to get this month's packet in the post this morning. It will be late by a day -- my first academic transgression -- but I'm trying to forgive myself. April has not been easy. Right now, I would dearly love to not read or write another word for at least a week. But I can't...


Now have 10 page essay to work on as well as my other writing and reading, and my teacher wants it all EARLY!!! Roll on June, when all I have to do is haul my a** to Vermont and sit on it for 10 days!

Days 102-3

Small child with scarlet fever + MFA packet due = aaaaaaaggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh....

Day 102

Writing, writing, deadline approaching and still not done. Might have to scrape and beg an extra day. Still 2 book write-ups to do, too. Usually they're the first thing I get done, and now I'll be rushing them like an undergraduate, but without the time and youthful energy or any of the chemical benefits from which today's teens seem to 'benefit.' I'm realizing how valuable are my three hours on a Sunday morning with a sitter coming to look after the kids. Somehow, the loss of that time over the month -- a total of about 12 hours in April what with Easter, etc -- has floored me.

Why is it the busier and tireder I am, the more I am able to successfully write a blog entry?

Day 101

"Oranges are Not the Only Fruit" but there's no writer like Jeanette Winterson. Good to have the excuse to go back to her, though Easter rather got in the way!

DAY 100

Yay -- but like the President, the report card is not all glowing!  Also like him, such a big undertaking, so many long term goals that feel frustrating when looked at only partway finished. It's all about the process, of course, but it's hard not to want it all finished and published and shiny already!

Only about 400 more days to go till graduation!!!

Days 93-99

Almost at one hundred days! As is no doubt clear from my recent paucity of posts, the balance between mommying, teaching and being a student has been tipping me dangerously away from my studies. I have been trying to play catch up this week, after the children's spring break, two dentist visits, two doctor visits, hubby's birthday, and numerous other small items pertaining to life with two bubbly, crazily energetic small children.

Have read Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye" and Coetzee's "Disgrace," along with Harriet Jacobs' "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl," all amazing. So many other books piled up beside my bed. I also started watching the "Seven & Up" series on DVD -- powerful and helpful reminders of the England of my childhood.

I'm writing about my time two summers ago teaching on the Upward Bound program for first generation college students. It's a traumatic tale in a quite different realm from my grandmother's death. The words just keep tumbling out, which is thrilling and exhausting, too.

So, upward!

Days 91 and 92

Writing going better than expected. Really excited about what I'm reading too, and the whole book project is coming into focus. Ideas given to me on my way to teach, on my bicycle - in a state of creative frenzy. Thrilling, really. But we're away this weekend, so not so many days to achieve all my wild imaginings...

Days 89 and 90

Losing track of the days...

Children back at school, tears and excitement, and now I must return in earnest to my studies. Racing through "The Bluest Eye" -- an amazing read, and  writing about my experiences two summers ago here in SC -- a painful but necessary return.


Somehow got to get ahead before the summer vacation...

Days 83-88

Kids on spring break, so enforced break for me too -- much needed. In between playdates and visits to the park and Chick Fil-A, I have managed to read Harriet Jacobs' slave narrative, watch a bit of "Roots," go to a reading by Richard Rubin and begin my new chapter... not so shabby really. As for teaching, my students and I are tired -- all written out, I think. Only three more weeks till the end of the semester, then a glorious handful of weeks when, God willing, I can write almost everyday. Good thing, since that 10 page essay is looming, as well as another packet due...

My children are so beautiful with sweet happiness this week. I wish they were this rested and free all the time. I know school is important on so many levels, but I'm beginning to see the attractions of home schooling (not till I've finished the Masters though!).

Days 80-82

Finished off and mailed my third packet, then tried to clear and organize my desk, ready for the next month -- a new chapter to write, one about which I am especially nervous, since it involves race issues with which I'm still grappling in an embarrassingly elementary way. But the process is so wonderful -- all my brain cells tingling.

The biggest challenge will be getting anything started next week when the children are on spring break. Hopefully I can squeeze in some reading and thinking, and then start on the writing the week following. I am not reading as much as I'm meant to or want to. My brain is screaming at me to SLOW DOWN and that's where I end up doing things most slowly, but in part because I am not just reading but teaching myself, line by line, page by page. Morrison's "Beloved" is a marvelous case in point. The pile by my bed just grows and grows...

Day 79

One of those days when everything I read over sounds childish and bad. Need to take a break from it all but can't really afford the time... Something to be remedied by kids' spring break next week!

Day 78

Finished a sendable draft of my writing for this packet, but exhausted. Can barely read at night...resorted to catalog shopping! Rereading "Beloved" after a period of years and finding it this time absolutely electrifying, now I get it a bit more and can be more patient with the quirks in the writing. Just beautiful, but maybe I'm getting too old to read about such suffering. Longing for some peace.

Kids were wild this weekend -- too much indoor time and red food coloring (Cat in the Hat cokies). Consequently, I have few reserves. My eczema-ringed eye is beginning to make me look like  a battered wife. I can see people looking at me, wondering if they should ask...

Gave up two hours of writing time this morning to go to yoga, just so I could survive the day. Wonderful. Even helped me with my essay on somatic memory, though of course I wasn't supposed to be thinking about that!

Day 77

The more I try to edit, the more the memories come flooding and the pages grow and grow...

Day 76

Ballet with my daughter and "Queen of the Sun" documentary with my 6 year-old son, a wonderful date, then walking in the rainy blossoms. No possibility of doing any work. Time to just think and be.

Day 75

The effort of remembering is making me ill...
but it is a purging.

Day 75

In the twenty minute period between teaching and picking up my son early from school for a half-day today, I looked into my office and peered wistfully at my computer. "Tomorrow," said she, so I went to Starbucks with my son and we ate cake pops while together we did his first ever homework assignment. I saw the man in the corner smiling at us and thought, "Yes, I am as lucky as you think I am."

Tomorrow, of course, no more excuses!

Day 74

I've said it before but I'll say it again, the practice of memoir writing is epiphanic, mind-blowing and a better healer than just about any therapy. Talk about the examined life -- even the little dust bunnies of moments that went creeping off under the bed years ago and think they are safe, even they get pulled out to stand to account. What a marvelous time waster!

Walked tonight in the evening after looking after 4 kids and getting to a crazy point with my son, who had displeased his teacher with his over-exuberant behavior at school today. The light was soft, the blossoms fragrant, the birds loud as spring itself. On that walk, I clarified the purpose of my writing project and maybe came up with a subtitle for the book. 'Oh,' I thought. 'I can relax, I can take a walk and call it work!' Ha!

Day 73

Bought books, ordered books from library. Now just have to READ books!

Day 72

Work interrupted by taxes...

Managed to get a couple of hours writing done -- edited some pages and read some Gornick. Then T-ball this evening -- unable to think too much about anything but my little man and how cute he looked in his uniform!

Days 70 & 71 Tired & Humbled

Worked like crazy in the few work spurts I managed to steal this weekend. Otherwise, tried to clean up the house -- dust under my son's bed to make my mother (and me!) cringe... Got further exhausted in the process.

Reading Vivian Gornick's "The Situation and the Story" about writing non-fiction. A wonderful read -- she just gets it! Getting anxious about all the other reading I should be doing in preparation for a 10-page essay, due in a couple of months that is the basis of a lecture I will eventually give when I graduate. Thinking a lot about somatic memory and how it gets revealed and can be useful in writing, especially memoir. Fascinating stuff, but there's so much I don't know.

This evening, we fished in the river and the kids played so happily together, I couldn't help but smile through my tiredness. Beautiful creatures. May their sense of freedom and togetherness last a lifetime. They teach me every day how to live and what matters -- a cliché perhaps, but the best kind -- absolutely, perfectly true. I bless them and this body and the science and miracles and tenacity that made them each possible.

Meanwhile on the other side of the world, such suffering...and here, the dogwoods about to break into blossom, big moon, everything changing and changing, me evolving and actually watching it happen 'on paper' in the edits I make in my writing. Wow -- I am so lucky to have been given this direction, this love of words. They help me see myself and the world in ways that help me love this life so much more than I ever could before I simply sat down at my desk and picked up a pen -- An exact parallel with the gifts that are my children. And if the writing doesn't keep coming, then I'll always have these children in my life, my heart. I am so humbled. I am so TIRED!!! Sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep....

Days 68 and 69

Getting a little frazzled and bedazzled. So much I want to do. Read, write, revise, work on other projects...got my packet and helpful comments. I am a melo-dramatist, who knew!

The weekend cometh, and walks in the sunshine.

Had another epiphany on the massage table, about somatic memory, which seems to be becoming my subject...

Day 67

So many things to want to do: my mothers' group project, my chapter, going to hear David Shields read tonight. How do people ever find the time to research markets and send out their stuff, I wonder? It's so much easier to just write!

Trying to keep it all together and clean the kitchen too, while Tinkerbell and Wolverine have a tea party.

Still no packet...

Day 66

Slogged through some editing this morning in between teaching. feeling good about the chapter I'm writing, but dreading the next one, which is woolier by far. Still no packet -- what if all those comments are lost in the mail?!

Back to teaching after spring break -- writing about our little camping trip, good fodder for fiction, though everything feels a little tenuous and guiltily achieved considering what's going on in Japan right now. Impossible to explain to the children. How lucky we are as innocents -- no wonder we cling to our childhood.

Day 65

Still waiting for my packet to come back -- trying to fend off thoughts of dread!

Kids went off happily to school this morning, in spite of daylight savings, proving that they too just needed a break from the routine and some oceanside fun.

Spent the morning grading -- genuinely impressed by my students' work -- then working on some poems for a SC competition. Made me work fast and forget all about what I should have been doing.

Have to teach tomorrow, so lots of homework for me tonight. By the time I get back to working on my non-fiction, it will have been almost a week. Hopefully my brain will reboot without too much trouble. My back, in any case, has thanked me for a few days not hunched over the keyboard.

Almost at the end of Joyce Glassman's Beat memoir -- an interesting read, but the prose feels a bit flat. Maybe I just need a little fiction to spice things up. Proust, perhaps, or Tolstoy...

Days 61-64-- I Give Myself a Break

Spring break. We drive to Edisto Beach, where we camp beside the ocean and sit watching the children delight in the wonders of nature and their first camping trip. They sleep like angels while we grown-ups freeze at night in the tent, and I dream of a tsunami swallowing us up, then wake to find such an earthquake-induced disaster has struck on the other side of the world in Japan. Co-incidence or not, I am in touch, I think, with the world, and this is the life of the writer-mother, its great privilege and burden, too: to be alive to everything, each detail, the rushing in and sucking out of each wave, the shells and fossils each tide leaves behind.

And should I never publish another word, it doesn't matter because my children are already both poets. "There is no remote to control nature," sings my six year-old on the car journey, looking at me through the eyes of pure, simple adoration a son has for his mother, and my daughter delights us all with the sweet crazy wisdoms that come out of her lovely, rosebud mouth. I cannot get enough of kissing them.

So easy to be in love when you sleep in the same small space as your family, and feel their every living breath and their first joyful utterances on waking. Easy even to love the alien place that, in spite of my resistance, holds out its Spanish moss covered arms to me and says, 'I'm not so bad, see -- I have pelicans and dolphins, I have angel-wing clouds and moon snail shells and angels' toenails and whelks that look as if they've been imagined by mermaids, carved by ocean gods.

When we get home, I'm hoping there'll be a packet of comments back from my teacher on my last submission, but it's not here yet. Funny, it's like waiting for love letters, almost -- a reminder that love is a far-reaching thing, and something that is in part about ourselves, and that that's okay -- it's alright to love what we create, in fact, it's essential.

Daylight savings and the children are asleep already as I write this, back in their own beds. And this break from my work has let the thoughts in my head and heart settle into a deeper place, and create, I hope, a more resonant music. Maybe when I sit down to write tomorrow, I will be on fire, or maybe nothing will come. How wonderful to feel, truly, that either outcome is a good one.

Day 60

Graded, edited my next writing assignment, then got ready for the beach tomorrow -- 4 days away from computers, editing, annotations, blogging.

Went to yoga this morning and my teacher spoke of how we learn the most when we suffer -- I'm writing about things that inspired my youthful suffering. I smiled, then hurried home to apply the lesson. Made looking at the past so much easier. We DO heal, though of course it can take a very, very, very long time...So good to live in the present moment.

Day 59

Taking the evening off to go to "The King's Speech" after grading this morning and starting to look through letters from 25 years ago -- such a strange and wonderful process. I am so lucky to have kept all the letters and cards people sent me over the years. Trying, in reading them now, to watch myself from a distance and understand my particular attachments and detachments.

Started Joyce Johnson's memoir about her life with the Beats. Her teenage desires and hang-ups are strangely (or not so strangely) similar to mine. Plus ca change, as the saying is, plus c'est la meme chose (add your own accents!).

Day 58

Good writing session, bad writing session, ho hum, ho hum. When I focus on  particular moment in time, it's good; when I try to get beyond the 'here and now,' not so good. As in life, so in writing.

Very very very very tired. Finding it hard to keep it together with the kid. Had the wisdom at least to go for a walk when husband got home. Making jello with kids while overtired, not such a good idea. When struggling with writing, walk away from the computer; when struggling with parenting, same. It's all so simple -- why can't we always just remember?

Day 57

New chapter on the way. Four blissful hours of creation in Starbucks this morning while the kids did an obstacle course with the sitter -- win-win!

Two hours in Target afterwards: lose-lose. Needed yoga class to decompress!

Day 56

Not a scrap of work done today. Looked at "Sula," thought about reading it, then l lay down on my pillow (this at 2.30pm) and slept like a baby for 2 hours, and I'm still ready for bed at 7pm! Guess my brain is telling me it's time for a break...

Day 55

Started working on a new chapter today. So glad not to be writing about death anymore. I actually felt myself smiling as I wrote.

After school, kids played in the school playground with a million others -- it was absolute chaos (though they were happy enough).  Something necessary about quiet and stillness for the creative mind, otherwise we are merely surviving, watching our backs...waiting for our children to fall and bloody themselves. Maybe we cannot work creatively in an atmosphere of fear. Considering what's going on in the world these days, it's a wonder anyone can make art. We are so lucky to have this privilege.

Day 54

Blossom everywhere...clocks going forward soon. Ahhhhhhh. Breathe it in!

Wrote up my notes from "Eyes on the Prize" today and realized Martin Luther King's ideals are my ideals exactly. This could be a memo from my heart:

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

Also, I think he has it on the money (unfortunate metaphor) when he said that the wealthy (especially whites in America) were "more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality and humanity." When I tried to suggest these ideas to my students on Tuesday night as we discussed a photograph showing a vulture hovering over a starving child, they looked at me with  something like terror, because, I think it meant we -- including me -- must not simply do something to help the disadvantaged, but must CHANGE OUR LIVES.

Jumping down off my soapbox, I ask myself, 'So what are YOU going to do, Nicola?'  Whatever it is might be the most important lesson my children ever learn. It will take courage, something the Civil Rights Movement tells us we have in spades if we will only use it.

I think right now my body is exhausted by my mind's desire to run a marathon every day...maybe tomorrow I will try to rest (ha!).

Day 53

Is it really only 53 days? Feels like my life now -- I guess that's how long it takes.

Wrote an annotation on "Eyes on the Prize" (PBS series) today, and really enjoyed writing in a different vein -- a little bit academic, a little bit critique, a little bit personal. Good to get a head start on the next packet. I have to dive into something fresh with my own writing, and I'm looking forward to it, but at the same time am anxious it won't go well.

Spend the afternoon in the fresh air with the kids -- they do me such good -- force me out from under the desk and into the beautiful world.

Reading Toni Morrison's "Sula" -- wonderful writing and more accessible than some of her later work, I'm feeling.

Day 52

Sent off my packet today -- 100 pages of it, then had a massage at the chiropractor's. While the therapist pummeled my aching hip bone and glutes, working out years of tension and the scar tissue from an ancient injury, I worked out the theme and structure of my forthcoming 10-page essay, and came up with the ideas for FIVE, count them, five stories! Talk about value for money...

Came home from teaching to see my daughter kissing the blossoms on the nectarine tree. Best therapy in the world. :)

Days 50 & 51

Finished my packet today -- revisions + new work + annotations + letter. Feels good, except now I must get going with the next one immediately! Have a little camping trip planned for spring break, which will make me take a break. My eyes have broken out with eczema -- never had it before -- and I'm generally feeling pretty run down, but my brain feels strong and healthy -- my imagination's on the right diet, if nothing else.

Watched the Oscars yesterday and found myself most moved by the writers' awards and by Natalie Portman's very pregnant belly and the feeling of grace and joy she seemed to have about the baby that I recognized so powerfully. Also by the deaths of old British favorites like Susannah York and Lionel Jeffries. The generation before mine dying off. Didn't really care about any of the rest.

Monday -- everyone tired. Early nights all round.

Days 49 & 50

Almost at the end of my edits for 'Packet 2' and feeling okay about them, euphoric in places, depressed in others, so that's probably about right. Finished "Fierce Attachments" -- an amazing read -- and on now to Toni Morrison and other treats.

Starting a second round of virus-related symptoms and tired, tired, tired, but the blossom is coming out everywhere and it's such a joy to watch the children rediscover the joys of outdoor play, to lie on the hammock with them and sway.

Getting excited about June, imagining a Vermont summer and all the green lushness and good company.

Day 48

Managed to sit down to do a little work after teaching, getting down on (as in not impressed with) my writing, and then there was a call from my son's school. "It's early pick up today!" Well, no more time to get down on myself. Bought ice pops and sat in the garden watching my spring chickens. Bubbles and laughter. Best medicine.

Great poems from my students tonight -- warmed my toes on their fire...

Day 46 & 47

Trying to keep up with editing and reading while my little one watches "The Wonder Pets," home sick still. Yeucchh. This little bug really wanted to hatch in our house.

Reading Gornick's "Fierce Attachments" -- an amazing book. Such a powerful voice.

Days 44 & 45

Flu. All of us sick. Oh, the agony of having to postpone the work when one wants to do it so much...

Days 40-43

My little girl turned four and I turned all my attention to her. Getting a bit behind with the writing, but I figure she deserves my all just now.Pink frou frou, chocolate cake and a party in the garden complete with mini trampoline, teepee and bubbles. We even played 'Pass the parcel,' a favorite game of mine from childhood. Earlier, my son (6) documented her dance/gym class by drawing each new segment and labeling it. Just adorable-- maybe he will become a documentary film maker. I made a book of it with him, and he shared it with everyone and read it maybe 20 times -- his first published book! His excitement reminds me I'm not so crazy to feel that way myself about wanting to share my work (though I'm not sure I can ever produce anything so sweet, nor so simply clear -- a good lesson).

Finished Atwood's "Surfacing" -- I don't remember any of it from 20 years ago, but loved it -- she's so willing to blast ahead and look out! Now reading"Fierce Attachments" -- Vivian Gornick. All inspirational stuff.

Not writing for a couple of days makes me happily desperate to get back to it...

Day 39

Rewrote my last essay following my teacher's comments. Wonderful process. Why can we not all have a teacher to refer to for guidance on each aspect of our life? I suppose if we're good parents, we might provide at least the feeling of that -- something to aim for, though I find I learn so much more from my children than I think I can possibly teach them. Wish they had never seen me angry, but then they wouldn't know how to recognize it, right, and have strategies for dealing with it. Today they mostly only saw me happy, and that makes me happy. Actually went out and had a cocktail with a girlfriend. Whoo Hoo!

Day 38

Inspired by my students, who must be able to tell I am practically on fire with the process. Good feeling, but tiring. Ready for bed by eight!

Day 37

Got my teacher's comments in the mail yesterday, and began working on revisions today. What a joy to have someone tell you where to "cut!"
Valentine's Day -- a BEAUTIFUL spring day -- meant I 'sacrificed' two of my work hours to go out to breakfast with my husband. What a lovely way to play truant. I got a new phone as a gift -- on the same day the numbers stopped working on my old one -- the one I got for Valentine's Day just after my son was born (6 years ago) so we had a means of 'emergency' contact in case the car broke down with us in it in California. How far we have come!
Kids were blissful today about all the Valentine's fun and looked adorable -- all red and pink and hearts. What simple loveliness to carry me through the days.

Day 36

Wrote an essay on my readings this morning in Starbucks -- tap tap tap -- such a relief to write about something other than my life. Ha!

Days 34 & 35

Weekend and small son's stomach flu or food poisoning, up all night changing sheets, plus grading plus cleaning doesn't leave much time for real studentship. Still, set out on Atwood's "Surfacing" -- an amazing piece -- and found my own 'graded' packet in the mail from my teacher. She was helpfully critical and complimentary in the right doses. Now I have revisions to consider plus new readings and work on my new piece, in which I have meagre confidence. At least now I have a new deadline to kick me along! i also find myself being more generous in my own comments on my students' work.

My 3 -almost- 4-year-old daughter rode her bike almost without help this afternoon, and my son came home from a trip to Lowes with his own tool set. Oh, my little grown-ups -- how beautiful they are. Sweetness personified. Now I have a birthday party to plan!

Day 33

Feeling a bit discouraged about what I'm writing, probably because ill and premenstrual, and looking at yet another ear infection to treat -- makes me oddly anxious. Wondering what good it all is, and knowing I have to just write through the blues... It will be good to get honest feedback from my teacher -- one way or another, I'll have some kind of marker or goalpost...not that it's about goals, but sometimes it helps to know which direction to kick the ball...

Day 32

Writing about my grandmother's death -- a strange detachment from the reality of the memory as I write -- the logical brain interpreting the emotional pathways...

My little girl has begun to cry in the mornings when I leave her at school -- has always been so happy to be left before. I know it isn't an issue of abuse, so perhaps it is the development, at almost 4, of attachment. Her body is so warm, she is so intensely alive, and it is her dance through life, her movement, and sudden moments of pause, that inspire me, just as my son's 6 year old questions and desire to understand push me on to question and understand. A purpose-driven life driven by my children's sense of purpose and drive.

Day 31

Finished Winterson and Woolf, and just today watching PBS' documentary series, "Eyes on the Prize" in a belated attempt to educate myself about the details of the Civil Rights movement, and to try to comprehend my current setting  -- SC.  Wept most of the way through, in part because of the poverty and segregation I see still very much alive here. There are a handful of black kids in my son's "school of choice," and very few black teachers. If I write about it, though, of what value or use is my voice? And yet we must write about what speaks to us -- I can write at least so that my children grow up knowing how I feel and will, perhaps, think about issues of human rights. Feeling heavy with it all, and terribly tired. Can't seem to stop, though, for if I do, it will be like starting up an old car whose battery has run low...

Got a group e-mail from my classmates. What a beautiful clamor of voices -- the best thing about being a student again -- community and free speech that gets a little heard!

Day 30

Interesting how writing an essay, like riding a bike, comes back to you immediately. It's just that you can now hear the squeak that's developed...

Days 28 & 29

Crazy weekend, trying to read and write half-logical essays on the reading while also negotiating runny noses and meltdowns. Have not, at least, melted down myself yet, much thanks to a yoga pajama party last night and a sitter this morning, but there are still 4 hours of Sunday left...

Day 27

Rain, rain, rain, drowning my abilities to get going. Trying to get some of the reading done while I'm in this 'stay at home' kind of mood. How lucky that I can.

Reading Alix Kates Shulman's "Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen," published 1972. How frightening how little has changed between men and women...and yet so much HAS changed. I am on an MFA program where the majority of students are women (not so the M/F teacher ratio, but it's getting there). Wondering though, what new thing I have to say, other than a different voice to say it in. Just write, says Woolf, so I will...(but not tonight!).

Day 26

Medicine. Massage. Good.

Day 25

Body rebelling; mind in turmoil -- watching PBS series about the Civil Rights Movement and reading "A Room of One's Own" simultaneously, I feel the same mixture of adrenalin and pain swelling just under my solar plexus as I did when I first read about these things -- both a horror and a desire to act. I am reminded, too, of Woolf's brilliance and influence -- things I couldn't appreciate when I first read her back in my early twenties. I cannot believe she was suicidal -- her mind is so clear in these pages. But I know, don't I, how things can turn. I found myself looking out of my window after I'd finished to see if she was there. I wanted to embrace her, make the pain go away, thank her. She is in so great a part why I am here doing this -- why there are books I want to read out there. She brushed off the dust of the establishment and revealed the shine -- women's voices!

Day 24

Mailed my first 'packet' of writing and reading responses to my teacher -- it will be fun to have this old fashioned type of correspondence -- real mail! Feeling tired and exposed and wondering how I'll keep it up.

Day 23

Writing in the morning, feels so good -- a glorified hobby, really. Wish me body felt as limber as my imagination -- back issues, etc. Need to exercise -- balance body and soul, but I am so hungry for the time to write.

Learning about the Civil Rights Movement, to educate myself about where I live now. Why don't I watch it with my six year old son, who would surely ask insightful questions and in some profound way understand? But I can't stand for him to see some of those images yet -- to know how cruel the world can be. One day, they will need to know. Oh, how I wish I could bathe them forever in innocence, though my own pleasure in writing comes of course from knowledge, from the incremental unveiling of understanding.

Tonight, my children danced for me to Vivaldi's Allegros. Oh, how beautiful their unimpeded movement, their uninhibited interpretation of that beauty. If only I could write with that same freedom, that glory in the self that is without a trace of either shame or arrogance.

Day 22

Reading 'The Lover' in the hammock -- end of January and it's 65 degrees and feels hot! All these sexy books are having an effect on me...

In the afternoon, walking up and down the street with my two riding their little bikes. Watching confidence actually grow. When my daughter falls, I do not panic, so neither does she. Nor do I admonish her, as I did with my son, our firstborn, "Stay on the edge!" every second minute. So she is brave. What can I learn from this? Well, I have learned it, finally -- am putting it into practice with my children -- courage, letting go of fear. If only I'd learned it long ago.

We have a sitter on Sunday mornings now so my husband and I can both write, and maybe see each other, if only across a computer screen. A marvel. Can we afford it? I have no idea. Why didn't we allow ourselves this before?

Day Twenty One -- week 3

Writing about Winterson and my grandmother. Five hours, tap tap, tap save.  Learning to compartmentalize -- when I am at my desk, I am wholly there; when I am with my children in the playground, I am only there. Presence: such a simple lesson: why has it taken so long to learn this? Such a gift, perhaps the better appreciated because it has come so late.

Day Twenty

Reading, reading, writing, and watching PBS documentary on the civil rights movement. Tired beyond belief -- face breaking out, eyes closing of their own accord. At a parent conference, I find my son has filled a book with wonderful writings, and that "his favorite thing to do is read." Oh, I have cloned myself in one beautiful little boy. When I pick up my sweet 3 year old, she has written the 't' of her name. How wonderful to watch it begin and develop, this desire to express ourselves, to put down marks on paper that will tell us who it is we are, and what we think about this world.

Day Nineteen

Reading Jeanette Winterson again -- like visiting a friend you haven't seen for years but always knew was your soul mate. How lovely to be 'made' to read again these wonderful authors of my past! Teaching day, so not much writing done, but everything now connects -- as if everything I do and read and hear and see is helping me towards a greater understanding of my life, as it is framed in terms of my writing project. An inspirational way to live!

Children so sweet today -- in the post office, everyone oohing and aahing over them, and I could think to myself 'I get to be with them!' Then someone says, as someone so often does, "You've got your hands full," and I think back and say, "Not as full as they used to be," but thinking, I am so blessed -- yes my hands are Full -- in the best possible way -- my heart, my life is full, and wanting, as always, to fall down on the ground in wonder and worshipfulness. I got to be a mother. And now I get to write too! Truly, what a wonderful life.

Day Eighteen

Wrote an essay, worked on my manuscript, emptied the garage, picked up the children, played 'tickle tag,' went to the bank, wrapped up my Dad's present, prepped my class for tomorrow, made dinner. About to fall over. Got to remember to s-l-o-w d-o-w-n...

Day Seventeen

My husband and I got a sitter this morning so we could both write. I have been writing these past three days about my grandmother's death, and have no idea if my story will speak to a general audience, but the doing of it is powerful and redemptive. It brings my grandmother back into my present life in a way memory alone cannot do. She becomes bright and substantial once again, and she blesses my endeavor.

Tonight at yoga, I meet a substitute teacher waiting at the door. At first I am disappointed (for I love my regular teacher) but I tell myself, as that teacher would tell me, not to judge, to give her a chance, and I am well rewarded, for she speaks of doing with your life the thing that makes you feel even and joyful in yourself, and this, of course, is how I feel when I write, then take a break to be with my family. It is the balance of these things that makes me happy, that lets my inner light shine, that makes me feel I am acting with the proper gratitude for this life I have been given: using my true gifts, learning to stand tall and be myself, and speak my truth.

Day Sixteen

Jim and I switching off with the children, each stealing time to write. We can see the danger of never seeing each other and have a sitter coming so we can maybe at least go and sit at a cafe table together with our computers! Writing about my grandmother, her death, while also reading Kate Walbert's book about women of her generation. We never talked about women's rights, but she must have been so glad to see me go to university, to choose my career.

Went to a colleague's exhibition of Victorian women's lives in America - "Beyond Domesticity:" amazing fire in the voices of women like Gilman and Alcott. The frustration they felt, and the action they took -- what I have felt, except we have learned to make compromises to live with men, perhaps too many? Am I a little jealous, I wonder, that I wasn't part of the rebellion, the Romantic disruption of a whole paradigm?

Day Fifteen

Fell asleep reading...but wrote like a demon in the morning -- a good feeling!

Day Fourteen

Reading Kate Walbert's "A Short History of Women"  -- the first of my "hundred books" -- a just amazingly crafted book that touches on so many issues to which I can relate. Began writing too -- a scarier process -- oh, how my train of thought loves to go off on its own little branch lines...

Day Thirteen

Spent the day with my Mum before taking her back to the airport. She is still sick, but we had a lovely day. Thus, no work done, but the least I could do in return for her enormous gift of time and love, so I can really do this thing. We talked about her own experiences as a 'non-traditional' student in the 1980s. How far we have come as women, and men in accepting us as partners of the mind.
And now, to my books...

Day Twelve

Teaching today, so not a moment to think about my own schoolwork, but teaching creative writing, so able to share some of my re-energization. Love being in a room where new students are just beginning this wonderful journey of the creative life. Their faces are like the first drafts of poems, fresh and bright, surprised and shocked by their own beauty, and ready to become the truth, to become their potential...

Days Ten, Eleven

Watched, on the last day of the residency, the graduating class don their gowns and be awarded their hoods -- tears welling up in me, in gratitude for their success, but also I think a sudden understanding of what it is I -- and all my class -- are reaching towards. A humbling and powerful and inspiring moment, followed by a great dinner, more dancing, and a walk in the snow alone before bed. Stillness. Starlight. Absolute beauty. The next day, saying goodbye to new friends and "See you in June!" So many wonderful new comrades.

Exactly ready to come home, and when I did, there was the lovely face of my husband, and then the faces of my children asleep, more beautiful than I had even remembered. And this morning, waking up to find them in the bed with us, and love, love, love -- sweet words and holding them on the long barge my body, across the strong new deck of my soul: "I missed you!"

Then a day at the zoo, and taking in all their wonderful observations, their joy at noticing, their sweet words, their demands for kisses.

Day Nine

When I look up from my breakfast or my lunch or my dinner, what I see is faces brimming with life -- bodies turned towards one another, engaged in the give and take of a shared passion, intellectual stimulation -- real human connections zinging around the whole room. And I realize I am part of that. So many wonderful people here -- fellow sympathizers and practitioners of the artfully weird! We are all sad to leave this behind, but how lucky to know we can return again in the summer and start all over.

I heard my daughter's voice in the background on the phone to my husband tonight, and my heart sang me its great aria. Tomorrow, I will hold them in my arms and feel their warm bodies, and see their shining beings. And the real journey will begin.

Day Eight

Wonderful lectures and readings and workshops all day. Scribbled down writing ideas madly and filled half a notebook. Then danced my heart out tonight. The amazing James Wood on the drums -- a Brit born the same year as me, who came to America the same year as me! Cured my throbbing headache.

Note to self: dance more often

Note to family: wish you were here

Day Seven

Words words words...

I should be writing here about how writing is like cross-country skiing, but it will have to wait.
Tired tired tired.

Only three more days until I see my babies, and my sweet, exhausted family.

Day Six -- Toot It Out!

From a writing prompt given to us by wonderful actress, memoirist, and human being, Dinah Lenney today ( I love my teachers, hurray!):

Someone I love just picked up my hot baby from her crying, pulled her to him and told her, "It's okay, Babe, you're okay."
Someone I love just wiped away her snot, and again, later, gave her the tissue box: "That's right. Toot it out!" Someone I love gave her the toast she threw away, then the yogurt she didn't touch, then everything she asked for that she then left on the mocking plate.
Someone I love took her to the doctor, just to be sure, then someone I love made animals from colored shapes, played games, bought movies for the 'nothing else will work' times.

Someone I love took the breath he needed so he could tell her brother, for the tenth time, "Leave your sister alone!" Then someone I love took that little boy by the hand and told him, though he was ragged from the ice-long days, "You're my favorite boy on earth."
Someone I love gave the phone to that boy so he could speak to his mother, miles away now, days away, so he could say to her, alone in her room, quietly childless, "In my heart I know who you are, and I love you."
Then someone I love told me to enjoy myself -- weary songstress, between her coughs, she told me, "We're okay. We're doing fine. We'll rest tomorrow."


This is dedicated to all those someones. You are the pillars of my dream.
And to all my writer friends out there, listen to the good advice of my beloved: "Toot it out!" Just get out your pen and toot it out!

Day Five

Half way through the residency. I feel as if the whole concept of time has altered -- things go slowly, yet suddenly we are nearing the end of this intensive 'kick off.' Then it will be home to teaching and trying to fit in all that has to be done by early February, when I have to send my teacher a fat packet of new writing and also reading responses (I am to read 100 books!). Somewhere in there, I also have to fit in being a Mom; a wife, even :)

Took off in the middle of the afternoon to go cross-country skiing, something I haven't done for years now. A very wonderful form of relaxing exercise, though I'm not sure if I'll be able to walk straight tomorrow. The sky was magnificent. Also borrowed a sled, since I aim, above all, to have fun! Meanwhile, back home, there is ice on the roads and the children are home from school for another day, and my mother still sick. I wish I could bundle them up and feed them good, warming things.

Tonight, all we 'newbies' read a snippet of our work to one another. I am so lucky to be among so many people who write so well, and 'get' where I am with my writing. I read non-fiction today, having read some poems last night, and can hear I have a lot of work to do in my prose, but we're all heading in the right direction, at least. It's good to be an apprentice at a craft like this one, where the older you get, the better you get. So, while my knees and ankles might fail, hopefully my writing voice at least -- and maybe my heart -- will get stronger and more defined.

Have to read 50 more pages before I sleep... It is set to snow 8-12 inches by tomorrow morning. I'm looking forward to waking up and seeing the ground dressed in its thick layers. Can't wait to kiss my children goodnight.

Day Four: A Poem

Walking in Snow

You walk, you fall,
you walk, you fall,
stumbling across the field like a Magus
wringing his ungloved hands.

You are outside at last and the world
suggests itself to you in a grey cloud
that hangs over the long hill to the east,
or west – you can’t tell which --
and makes you shiver into life.

The clouds shake out their pretty confection
of snow, each clump bouncing in the wind
before your face, each singing its misshapen jingle,
each flake barbed to another,
and then another, and then again more.
The silence, too, sings to you.

The snow doesn’t care who you are,
though you love it, and
though the cold would kill you,
you bless the moment
into which you have awoken,
which is this moment.

Turning back towards the house, you hear
a chiming coming from the trees
and turn your whole body to face
the one note that is this Now,
when you should be inside, but
are outside, cold and yet so
hot with life the fire burns a hole
through your borrowed coat,
burns away the world:
everything.

Day Three

I look around me and the lecture hall is full of women -- many of them my age or older; I have a room of my own in which to think and work; a female lecturer talks about the LAPD; another puts up a slide of Virginia Woolf and reminds us her first name was Adeline. I am reminded of her beauty, and her sadness. A male writer longs to empathize about a woman's experience of rape. But in the 'New Yorker,' someone says, only 20% of those published are women writers. How very far we have come: how far we still have to go. It is my grandmothers' bequests that have allowed me to come here. I wish I could thank them.

'We carve a self out of words,' says Vivian Gornick, and I am busy carving, putting all my strength and concentration into it. Sometimes it hurts, but I come away whittled, changed. 'You tend to your innocence as long as you can...' (Bob Shacochis).

I have eaten fish and ice cream. Someone is cooking for me. 'Is this heaven?' I think. Then, no. Heaven would include my family, but they are not here. They are far away, beset by illness. I picture my boy and girl like child soldiers on the battle field, resting in the arms of my husband and mother, brave souls waiting for the retreat to sound.

Day Two

Snow quiets the world. Is it possible that winter exists to foster humanity and connection? I guess history would laugh in my face at that logic, but it feels true to me tonight. I long to walk these fields and feel the crunch of snow beneath my boots, to stop in the silence and look up at the long ridge of mountains that borders the campus here, but there has been no time today. Lectures and readings and workshops all day long. And what readings! Honor Moore, my teacher, on the sadness of ageing, and Bob Shacochis on pepper-spraying his balls in Russia (!) and atrocities in Haiti. Laughed hard; wanted to weep harder, but kept the sorrow to myself. A reminder that great writing can be an act of grace and transformation -- can move us to be better human beings, can move us to get up off our complacent asses and act.

I am trying to live out my beliefs in small ways -- to be true to myself and my fellow beings and to practice right speech: not to exploit anyone who's not present for the sake of entertainment -- as a group like this may be tempted to do. Trying to dispense small, usually verbal acts of kindness, which may or may not be appreciated (some people, of course, are shocked by the attempt of a stranger to connect, and take the kindness in their metaphorical hands, roll it around like a confused child, then stash it, embarrassed in a pocket). Sometimes perhaps the kindest thing is to allow a person their solitude. But we can always hold a door open for the person who follows; we can always smile, even if the smile is, at least on the surface of things, rejected.
But I ramble...

What have I learned today? So much. Too much to record here in any detail. About the uses of contrariety in an essay; about the ethical implications of writing about our families in memoir; about the possibilities presented by the left hemisphere of the brain in creative endeavors; about creating of ourselves a character who lives on the page.

And also: about the supreme beauty of a warm and welcoming face; about how I feel when I hear that my children and whole family are sick and feverish at home while I am here. This is not guilt, as some imagine here, for I know I am right to follow my path at this moment, but something more, well, feverish -- a slight rise in body temperature that fills me with sorrow: a malaise that invades my bones and interferes with the circulation of blood through the heart; and a powerful desire to lie down. The hardest thing, perhaps, about being here, is not being able to give of my body to my family. I can be a voice at the end of a phone line, but if my body is not there to rest against, to wail and cry against, to lie down beside, what good am I? I am so grateful to my family, sick as they are -- my husband and mother and brother -- for filling these roles. I cannot always be there: this, of course, is a lesson we all have to learn one day.

I am amazed at how I can wake at 6.30am here, having gone to bed late, and not feel exhausted, as I would do at home. Saturday and no fights to break up, but also no long pajama-lazy, hug-filled mornings. I'm using up a different kind of energy -- I think I remember this from undergraduate days -- a thin rivulet of memory trickles back -- that studying can exhaust the brain, but the body somehow rallies. The younger students, of course, know this, and party each night. Then there is the noise of the bass from the student center, thumping through the snowbanks and across to my windows. There are slamming doors at midnight. Yet I'm not irritated, as I once would have been, to be kept awake while others play. Let the young play, I think, and know I do not need to pretend. I am partying now on the dance floor of my brain.

We share milk here without the sense of murderous vengeance I sometimes experienced as a poverty-stricken undergraduate when others took what I had bought. I shudder at that part of my old self, and want to apologize to those who suffered my kitchen tyranny. I was poor and desperate, but I behaved badly. One can be gracious, even in poverty. I wish I had understood that then.

There is a young woman here I somehow knew was suffering, though she also glowed. It made sense when she revealed that she had a one year-old at home. I admire her coming here, nurturing herself as I failed miserably to do in the early days of motherhood. But I know how she must feel torn from her very flesh, divided from her new self by half a continent of snow and all these words. I am happy not to be again where she is now, and yet I remember those glorious days -- the months of feeling lifted above the concerns of the world of others. Now I am becoming more connected to that everyday world, and have to meet it again in the face -- its horror, as well as its great potential for good. I hope we will look after this world. Our children deserve to walk out across a snowy field at dusk, and find the footprints of a deer matching their own: no blood, no fear. Just companionship, connection. Love. How I miss them. But I am here. I unwrap this gift, layer by tissued layer, with grateful caution.

Back to school I go!

Day One: January 2011

At my first MFA in creative writing residency, Vermont.

I go into the bathroom, unzip my pants as I walk down the hallway, and then leave the door unlocked. Then I remember I am no longer alone. It is not my children who might follow me in here, but adults – this old, new world I have rejoined. I must lock the door. I must bare my soul, but carefully. I must remember the old rules. Grown-ups are not always what they seem. We open to each other, then become afraid of judgment: that we have revealed too much to the wrong person. Then the shutters slam shut. I make friends: I talk too much: I doubt, yet I continue.

“I just want to suck less,” says the young woman from the plains, and we laugh. “So flunk me,” says another, not wanting to be done yet. Others raise a glass to the woman who’s dropped out. I say hello to the gentle soul who’s admitted to her own fears. “Hanging on by a thread,” she says, and I want to reach out and hug her, but cannot. Not yet. I meet another woman I think will change my life. “Don’t I know you?” “Haven’t we met?” We stand and talk, face to face, our different colored faces reflected in one another's eyes, our hair static with cold. We talk about people making other people feel worthless, and its results, about history and the south; about my confusion. My soul is wide open. Come into my garden. Who will come? Who will slam shut the rusted gate?

Slept in my socks last night. It is cold without the bodies of your family to heat you. With my third eye, I see my little girl’s face and my heart knows it needs to stay close; I feel the memory of my little boy’s warm body curled around me. I want to play with them in the snow. But this is another world. I have reentered the strange planet that is the grown up world, that is my own potential, and a hope for connection across the many barricades ‘grown-ups’ construct to keep each other out.

Beautiful silence descending as night falls on snow. Words feeding me, yet not yet entering me quite: the love for my children erecting a low gate between heart and brain: the white iron gate of my own childhood. ‘Be careful. Remember what’s important.’ The power of human invention; grief, joy, amazement, the sometime beauty of the human world revealed. A longing to merge the worlds of mother and writer: a hesitation. And now to sleep alone: so strange after all these nights of interruption by the loveliness that is my new-made family, that is my simple purpose as caretaker of the next generation.

What business do I have here? What gifts can I bring? What receive?