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?