In Like a Lion

Praying for 50 degrees and sunshine sometime soon. Right now, 27 and sunshine. Half's not so bad, right?

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I'm going to tag myself. The six word memoir:


What would you say if you had to summarize your life in only six words? Bookbabie got the idea from a book written by Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser, Not Quite What I was Expecting: Six Word Memoirs by Famous and Obscure. It is a compilation based on the story that Hemingway once bet ten dollars that he could sum up his life in six words. His words were—For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.


Here are the rules:

1. Write your own six word memoir
2. Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you’d like
3. Link to the person that tagged you in your post and to this original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere
4. Tag five more blogs with links
5. And don’t forget to leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play!

Here's mine: She always wants to go back.




I'm not playing tag. Do it if you want.


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I've started my "real" memoir. That's why I posted the picture of me and my mom. I'm writing about how my mother's illness(es) impacted me as I grew up, and how her health has effected me as an adult.


Since I started writing, I wanted to write about myself. I thought you had to be famous or at least extra special to write a memoir, but I guess that's not the case. We'll see if I stick with it. Poetry has taught me the joy of being able to finish a draft in 45 minutes. I'm not sure I have the tenacity to write a draft that will take months to complete.

The Road

I started my day by crying over the end of The Road. I tried to finish it last night, but fell asleep with about 40 pages left. Eric was right. It's amazing. I won't do any kind of mini-review, because I'm sure that there are many already out there, but will say that McCarthy is so good at the fragment sentence, at the occasional philosophical observation, at layering simple images to make something more complex, that every writer, regardless of genre, should read this book over and over.

What I'm thinking about this morning, though, is the toll writing a book like this must have on the author. There's been a lot of talk lately about how troubled Heath Ledger was before his death because of the difficult role of the Joker, and I think that writers must go through a similar process when working on an emotionally difficult or intense project. I don't know about you, but for me to recreate an emotion with any kind of accuracy, I have to force myself to feel that emotion. That's one of the many reasons I've turned to poetry in the last few years--the format allows me to capture what I need to capture without wallowing for too long in something ugly.

This is also one of the reasons I'm hesitant to start working on this nonfiction project I've got rolling around in my head. It's about me, my mother, my family, and the events leading up to my mother's lung transplant. It's about the greatest fear and the greatest sadness I've ever felt, but also about hope and faith. To really get it on paper, I have to go back to a version of myself that I'm very happy to have left behind. Can I go there without getting stuck?

So I wonder--are there writers who can deal with bad feelings without feeling bad feelings? Have I just not learned the art of detachment? Or is this part of being an "Artist"--that stereotypical narcissistic persona who must suffer in order to create?

Clams

If you were driving west on 224 yesterday, you would have seen something like this. I'm kind of disappointed in fall this year. I don't know if it was the extended summer (90's in the first two weeks of October) or what, but it seems the leaves are falling off before they turn. For the most part. I do have to say that the weather was nearly perfect yesterday, the sky just the right shade of blue.

My family liked the chocolate pie I made, and the ranch bread was all right. Let's face it, Traceys will eat anything with melted cheese, so it wasn't too difficult to make people happy. But my god, the smell of clams was driving me insane. To tell the truth, I can't remember the last time I tried a clam or anything made with clam juice, because I hate the smell. And I don't know about you, but I can't eat something that smells bad.

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My mom sometimes reads my blog. She asked me yesterday if it was very professional to use the acronym WTF in something that a future employer or publisher might read. Now, you should know that my mother hates "the f word" and any word that sounds like it or is a euphamism for it. "Oh fudge" is a little offensive, frigging or fricking is just as bad as the real thing. She once caught me flipping her off (my bedroom door was shut, she came in without knocking--I would have never done it to her face!) and didn't talk to me for three days. But WTF seems pretty tame to me. What do you think?

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A while back, I mentioned my final project for my non-fiction class--the one about me being a klutz. I wrote a 5 page mini-essay a few weeks ago that morphed into something more about body image and family, but I think they can work together. Now, I have to write a five page object essay for tomorrow, and the object I'm writing about is my folks' kitchen table. Somehow, some way, these two little essays are going to fit together. I'm not quite sure how yet.

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The rejection letters have been streaming in steadily over the last week or so. About half of my HFS has come back already. At least it's a constant reminder to keep sending stuff out.

Susie-Homemaker and Gracie McClutzy

I've been a cooking freak this weekend; first the pot roast, then cabbage and dumplings, and spaghetti today (okay, so that wasn't really cooking because the sauce was from a jar, but at least I didn't microwave anything). I also cleaned the kitchen, did two loads of dishes, cleaned my room, hung some pictures on the walls, and took out the trash. I'm feeling better now. For as much of a self-professed slob as I am, I realize that when I'm feeling emotionally off, a lot of times it has to do with the chaos in my physical space.

At any rate, when I wasn't playing Susie-Homemaker, I was grading papers, reading, doing some official Barn Owl business, and studying for the Lit GRE. Over all, a pretty productive weekend. I'm hoping that I can keep the momentum up this week.

An interesting development this semester is my Creative Non-Fiction class. We're required to take one workshop and one craft & theory course outside of our primary genre, and I'm finally fulfilling my C&T requirement. I'm surprised to say I am thoroughly enjoying all the essay reading. Ever since I decided poetry was my one true love, I've been playing catch-up and reading very little prose (except criticism...bleh!). Fiction (especially short fiction) lost its charm a while back, so it's nice to find something besides poetry that I enjoy reading. If I weren't all nicely tucked into bed, I'd grab my folder and list off some titles, but that'll have to wait until a day-time post.

For our final project, we have to write a memoir or long-essay proposal, complete with synopsis, character sketches, annotated bib, etc. I am thinking about doing something about the body. More specifically, my body. My inability to ride a bicycle, catch a ball, or walk and chew gum. My knack for walking into walls and falling down stairs. This is all very fuzzy in my mind right now, but I think there is something interesting about having little sense of balance or hand-eye coordination. It seems that most people have an innate ability to recognize the borders of their body, but I've never been able to. I think this is part of the reason why I'm sometimes socially awkward and definitely part of the reason I'm a writer. I really have no idea where I'm going with all of this, but it's one of my current obsessions and not one that I want to write poems about, so we'll see what happens.

Speaking of obsessions and poems, I'm thinking about taking my grandparents out of my thesis all together. I finally have enough pages to do that. It just feels forced to have those poems staying in a manuscript that has grown totally in a different direction than I expected it would. It's just a thought. I don't know yet.

I still haven't sent out my fall submissions, which has me thinking that I ought to do an even bigger submission than I'd originally planned. To make up for all the procrastinating. I was going through my manuscript and thinking about how many of the poems have never been sent out and am starting to wonder what I'm waiting for. I think there are 30-40 pages worth that are ready to go. Or will be ready if I sit down one afternoon and do some tweaking. That's a whole lotta postage, though. We'll see.