So. Okay, here we go. The new novel time line means that I will have this next chapter finished in two months. You heard it here. I've got the year (1932), a main character, and a first page. That's a start. I wish this beginning part were easier.
I have had two readers of the just finished chapter. They had some good suggestions. They say they liked it. One of them will be baking me an apple pie very soon.
Last November, I saw a call for submissions for Women's Wonderlands, a proposed anthology of lesbian travel writing, from the University of Wisconsin Press. I sent off an essay about kayaking. The very next day one of the editors, Gillian Kendall, sent an e-mail saying that she liked the piece.
She had some suggestions, we worked back in forth in this lovely way, and the piece got better. Then I waited.
This morning, nine months later, I woke up to an e-mail saying that it's on. And I'm in it. This is such good news and perfect timing.
It's been two days of revision at the sentence level. It had gotten so that whenever someone said something to me, I'd see their words as if they were a strip of closed captioning. Then I'd add commas and rearrange phrases. It had to stop. I had to clear my brain.
And now, after a night of dancing and lovely flirting at Wild Iris Books, I don't care if you run your sentences on it won't even make me blink. To seriously dance will remove all my worries about split infinitives, and upon arriving home, even dangling modifiers left my mind.
Well, I and those dangling modifiers I brought home with me are going to bed. Sweet Dreams, all.
Belea had to be in Gainesville yesterday, so that meant I had an evening of dinner, gelato, and bookstores, all wound through with writer talk. We met at ACA a few years ago and have been sharing our successes and rejections ever since. She showed me how to format my first submissions list. She told me how to send a full ms. off to an agent that time one was requested. Her mother made me a patchwork bag to hang off my wheelchair that is just the right size for file folders and yellow pads. Writers (and their mothers) are so generous.
Check out Belea's websites here and here. And if you like the gay male romantic smut - buy this.
"What does the act of writing signify? That you, the writer, have an inner life, that you are more than what you appear to be, regardless of what that may be, that you possess spirit, imagination, thought, that the world of the immaterial is housed in you. And that you believe others - others who might, in an ideal world, be readers - possess these attributes as well. The act of writing is an act of faith." Kelly Cherry, Writing the World.
And this is the writer that I get to spend time with at ACA in October.
I think I'm the first of my crowd (mostly over forty, some of whom don't even own a television) to Twitter. It's fun and would be even more fun if I had more company. I promise, it only wastes a little bit of time.
For a writer who sits alone in her room for most of the day, it works. I get to announce every small accomplishment in a quick (140 characters or less) blurb out to the world. It is satisfying even if hardly any one reads it. Is that pathetic? I don't care.
Already, I have one follower, and our exchange of writerly moments makes me feel like part of a team. Go Tayari.
When I'm at a conference I'm just being there all prickly nervous one moment and heart-open engaged the next. It's not until later, sometimes much later, that I know how it went.
Here's a follow up from the Below Sea Level workshop. Since that first week in June, I've rewritten (twice) the chapter that was critiqued there. I like it. At the urging of Connie May, I made a time line for completing this novel - two months to write each chapter. Today, a week short of two months, I'm done (Well, not done, done. I'm never done, done.) with a brand new chapter.
I think it's safe now for me make a few conclusions about the conference - productive, worth every penny, and meaningful in ways that continue to be revealed.
This evening I printed out the final (for now) revision and then twirled around my house in celebration. In the midst of all this, the ink not even dry on the pages, I heard a trampling up my ramp and then a knock at the door. My poet friend and her house guests were, coincidentally, delivering fresh baked chocolate chip cookies (The type with ground oatmeal in them!), and we squealed together about my day's accomplishments.
Alert. Cliche to follow. Close your eyes if you must.
Life is Good. (She says this while brushing cookie crumbs off the keyboard.)
It's July 23rd, a week before my self-imposed deadline, and I mostly, almost, maybe after one or two more go throughs, have a decent draft of this latest chapter. I like it. I printed off this latest version and with each slap of a page into the bin, my face scrunched up in little girl glee.
Yeah, I know, it won't last. But if I don't look at it until tomorrow, I'll have a great night.
I've always thought of chapbooks as little treasures. On trips I'll look in small bookstores or gift shops in State Parks to find an oral history or local field guide or a retelling of the regions fables and myths. Chapbooks are just the right size in my hands and the right length for a before sleep or waiting at the doctor's office read.
My latest treasure find is One Story. Everything about it is perfect. You subscribe for a reasonable price and every three weeks you receive a chapbook containing a jewel of a short story. And then you can go on-line and read what the author has to say about the writing of it, and, if you want, blog with others about it all. And, unlike many journals, there is a way decent percentage of woman writers included.
My first two deliveries were just so good - Harriet Elliot by Robin Black and Wilderness by Jean Thompson. I can't wait until I have a stack of them.
And check out this interview in the New York Times. An out lesbian as Poet Laureate of the United States - life is good. So is the poetry. My favorite is her "chickens flying" poem.
Sure, your local, independent bookstore provides reading and booksigning events, they give front shelf room to the work of homegrown authors, they hand sell your book to customers, and they are excited with you about any writing success, but my local feminist bookstore serves even more of my writing needs.
This past Saturday, after a week of near cloistering in my writing bed, I put on an orange bra and a red dress and went dancing at Wild Iris Book's monthly women's dance. It was perfect for post-writing immersion - social and physical and filled with lesbians looking good. It was so much fun that the next day I had to take extra Extra Strength Tylenol.
Once again, thanks and appreciation to our bookstores.
It was another Sunday author event at Goerings, one of Gainesville's independent bookstores, and I was there listening to Mary Anna Evans.
We should thank, all the time, over and over, our local, independent bookstores for existing. As an ex-bookstore woman, I know the best way to do this is to spend money in them. Yes, I bought two magazines and Mary Anna Evan's new book, Findings, while I was there.
After a week of mostly staying home and wearing a variety of mumus (caftans, patio loungers, ugly house dresses - whatever it is you call the garments that hardly touch your body anywhere.), I'm a stack of pages in on this chapter. They might not be worth much, but they're there, telling some sort of story, a story that at this moment is boring to me, and it might be, but I know enough to know that I always think this at this point. Anyway, it feels good to have racked up some words.
I'm finishing a decent draft of this chapter by the end of the month. Now, there's a nicely adamant statement of deadline. We'll see what happens.
The toaster oven is still dirty. I've been writing hard and, finally, maybe, I hate to say it out loud, this chapter has momentum. Things are pulling together. I think, "no, she wouldn't do that" and "this, this is what needs to happen right here." The chapter is having its own authority. And sometimes, just sometimes, I think I have this character's voice right.
Whew, I was getting tired of feeling bad about myself.
These are blooming in my yard.
Journal editors everywhere must have spent the weekend catching up on their backlog. They work hard, each and every one of them, and I appreciate all their efforts. So, thanks for the many wishes that I have luck placing the piece elsewhere.
And, all weekend I've been procrastinating. In the few hours that I was actually working, the writing was ineffectual. I tried putting in a little hint of what was to come, realized my hint had the size and grace of a bulldozer, and then went and watched ET with a million commercials instead of redoing it.
And, now I'm whining. If I still had periods, I'd think I was premenstrual. Well, I'm going to post this and then I'll either get back to work or go clean the toaster oven.
This October I'll be spending three weeks with a slew of other writers at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach. They feed us, they give us lodging in architecturally stunning buildings set among scrub oaks and palmettos at the edge of a bay, and they bring in writers like Kelly Cherry as master artists.
A few years ago it came to me that I had to go learn about writing somewhere outside my comfort zone of friends and books. The very first place I went to was the Atlantic Center for the Arts. It made all the difference for me. I finished my first book (as yet unpublished, but that's not the point), and I still have writer friends from those weeks we spent together.
I am excited.
The monthly Lesbian Potluck and Readings were last night. I scooped shrimp from the broth of a low country boil and sucked them out of their shells as women talked about the happenings of their day, their week, their lives. Pitched among their voices was the goodnight song of a cardinal and the chaotic medley of frogs gearing up for a night of cruising around the lake.
After the readings, some of us stayed on the screened porch. The lake was only a sheen in the darkness. One woman had written of the thoughts in her mind just after a car wreck. "I didn't mind not breathing," was one of the lines. I asked a rambling question about if she remembered everything and was just transcribing the events or if the writing of it had allowed her to remember. Was it all "true" or did she take the moment and write what must have been happening the best she could figure out?
Then, in a sort of mind meld, we asked each other if we'd heard Jill Bolte Taylor talk on NPR, on YouTube, on Oprah? All of us writers were fascinated with this story of a woman who had (during a stroke) gone to the other side of her brain. And that she still lived in that place to a certain extent. All of us had visited there in our writing but not enough or easily enough or long enough. We yearned for reliable access.
Here's Jill Bolte Taylor.
First check out Wordgathering. It's a journal of disability and poetry produced by the Inglis House Poetry Workshop. In their own words it's a "literary journal with the mission of developing poetry and discourse around disability literature." Then go over to the blog Dispoet where there is all sorts of discussion about poetry and disability. Here's a little something for the poets.
And Breath and Shadow, a journal of disability culture and literature, always offers poetry as well as prose (including, in the past, two pieces of mine.)
So, does anyone else have other links to add?
Oh, p.s. and by the way - if you link to the 2008 Inglis House Poetry Contest winners, you might find a familiar name.
We never met. I did write her a fan letter once. I'd just read To Late to Die Young, her book of essays about disability. I closed the book and felt part of a community of writers, like we had a style. She never left the body out of the discussion. She had that particular crip humor that combines earthy self-deprecation with verbally nailing assholes to the wall with their own bad logic. Death wasn't so scary, and she was relentless about living well, about all of our rights to live well.
Her essay Unspeakable Conversations, is important. In 2003, when it was published in the New York Times, I made everyone in my life read it. She says the things I always want to, but without the impotant sputtering. Read it here.
Every year the Astraea Lesbian Foundation For Justice selects a few emerging lesbian writers of fiction and poetry and awards them the majorly big bucks. Here's the link for the submission guidelines and the in-their-office deadline is June 30th. Hurry. Fame and fortune await!
The printer just finished spitting out the pages of my post-conference chapter revision. I am in the really-pleased-with-myself stage, so I'm not going to read it again for awhile. Tomorrow, it's on to the next chapter.
One of the big "ah ha" moments for me at the conference was when Connie May said we should have a time line for the completion of our novels. I sort of had a little freak out when she said it. It was shocking to me that I'd never even thought of it since I'm the type who makes time lines and lists for everything. But then, you know, I'd have to claim that the novel was real.
I came home and did what I've done for any project I've ever worked on in my whole life except writing and started figuring out word count and the number of chapters and how much time for each one and built in draft revisions and added extra time for sudden life stuff and it may be totally unrealistic but DECEMBER 2009 is the date. Yikes.
Thank you, Connie May.
It's as if I had the wax spread out on the car, but it was still smeary and yellow. These past days I've been rubbing the chapter, moving the words around in circles, putting a bit of writing muscle into it, and now, in places, it gleams. Color is showing through even in the not-perfect-yet sections. And I had thought, before the conference, that I was bringing the best work I could do. Hah.
There is exciting news in Gainesville. We're having the first significant rains since March. Friends call each other to squeal "it's raining, it's raining," and strangers mutter "great rain, huh?" as they pass. I check my rain gauge every day, chart the results, and then tell more people than want to know the results. 3.6 inches this week, so far!
After the sweet goodbyes, after the drive home, after dealing with a stopped-up sink and a toppled tree, after many loads of laundry, I was ready.
I upended the stack of notes, critiques, book suggestions, e-mail contacts, handouts, and hotel memo pads onto my writing bed and have spent a day and a half organizing. I am excited. This novel seems possible.
I have a friend who, every year on my birthday, calls my mother to thank her for the existence of me. Well, today's the day for the call.
And tonight there's dinner and a reading with Connie May and Dorothy and Laura van den Berg, and then a champagne reception. What a fine birthday celebration. It's also the last night of the conference.
All this week we've been experiencing and talking about the importance of a writing community. We say things about how our family, our friends, our partners don't quite understand what we do. We say how fine it is to be with fellow writers who, even as strangers, "get" us.
I have friends who don't care that they don't quite "get" me. They just support me. They bring me reams of paper and ink cartridges, listen to me read and say it was great no matter what, go to lunch with my mother, buy any book I have anything printed in, and, for today, hand over envelopes of cash towards attending this conference. (It was like being a bride or mafia boss.)
So, thanks to all of you - the writers here in St. Augustine and to all my people at home.
Here's the salt marsh view outside my hotel room window. It's good to be close to the rise and fall of the tides and the occasional rush of a train. I've had my manuscript critiqued (thoroughly), I've helped critique a manuscript, I've read in front of a roomful of writers, I've talked writing at lunch, in the lobby of the hotel, and through bathroom stall doors. I've heard and read many (put an exclamatory adjective here) pieces of writing. I am so tired. I am so happy. That's it for day one of the Writing Below Sea Level's St. Augustine Project.
The 20th Annual Lambda Literary Awards have been announced, and First Person Queer won for the best anthology. Whoo Hoo!
Which means that my essay "Theories about Bodies and Truth" is part of an award-winning book. (Can you tell that I'm practicing how to bring it up in a cover letter?) I hope that my few pages added a little, but the big congratulations go to Richard Labonte and Lawrence Schimel, the editors, and to Arsenal Pulp Press for being independent and wonderful.
This evening I snatched up my mall savvy friend and we went bra shopping. Yes, this does have something to do with writing.
On Monday, for more than an hour, a room full of writers will be critiquing my chapter. That evening I read my work to Connie May Fowler, Dorothy Allison, and twenty others. Then they will say things about it.
Now, I'm fairly tough. This means that I can appear calm while my skin is prickling with the shame that I ever thought I was a writer, and that I can keep reading even as I notice, with increasing horror, that every word is stupid, stupid, stupid.
Some writers have a touchstone that soothes - a locket of their mother's, a mental image of something like a waterfall, or maybe a meditative chant. But let me tell you that, for me, nothing works as well as a new bra.
Just knowing it's under there, all plunging and pretty, and I'm the rock star of writing.
Well, I didn't get one this year. But listening in on the teleconference where a panel decides these things was fascinating. Wow, if the group grants didn't have their accessibility ducks in a row, they just didn't get the money.
Unfortunately, there was this part where, when they gave me a just barely not quite good enough for funding score, I muttered, "Aw, f***." And then "oops" as I scrambled for the mute button. Maybe they didn't hear. Maybe they thought it was amusing in a "you know how those writers are" kind of way. My best hope is that maybe they won't remember my name when I apply again.
A week from tomorrow I leave for The St. Augustine Project.
I've had Meg Rosoff's new novel on hold at the library from since before it was published. You might remember that I fell in writer love with her after reading Just in Case and especially How I Live Now.
This new novel, What I Was, it is riddled through with homophobia. I tried to make it not be true. I ignored the early slurs and then devised convoluted excuses, but it got worse and worse. This is such a disappointment. And it makes me mad - children are reading this stuff.
The love affair is over.
Sometimes, when I'm still in the spell of a novel, I think "this is the best thing I've ever read." Then the enchantment wisps away and the book takes its place with all the other beloved writing in my life of reading.
Earlier this week I finished Lavinia. It is the story of 
a minor character in Virgil's Aeneid - "the unfolding of a hint" as LeGuin calls it. Ohmygod, the book, and there's no way out of using this cliche, took my breath away.
The best thing a novel can do, I think, is connect you to the intimate heart of the world. It always makes me cry. It's what I want to accomplish in my own writing. And now, days after closing the book, waiting for the enchantment to lessen, Lavinia still holds me to her world.
I wanted the book to never end. I wish I hadn't read it so I could be reading it for the first time. I want everyone I know to read it. I want to read the book again - I must study the sentence structure more thoroughly. I might have to actually buy it so it can live in my house, always. (I traded the library copy to my poet friend for her copy of Virgil's Georgics.) It made me wish I had learned Latin.
What can I say? Read this novel.
Yes, another one in a long line of those "we like your work, not this piece, please send more" rejections. I know these are "good" rejections that are supposed to buoy spirits and reaffirm purpose, but they are wearing me down. I just want to take that e-mail, crumble it into a ball, and throw it across the room while yelling/whining "why can't you just accept something."
Okay, back to writing.
Dang, I sure am tired of the rejections. I know, I was complaining about not getting any. What was I thinking? At least my poppy mallows are blooming.
So, I wallowed for two days. Then I thought, "hah, you're not getting rid of me" and prepared another submission. And I've finished the upcoming conference critiques. And I've prepared and timed my selections for the nightly readings. And tomorrow I take my van in for a tune-up.
And I've also actually written a bit on the new chapter. It's strange. My character dies of the Spanish Flu, and I have my first bout of the flu in over thirty years. At least I now have some relevant body experience to work with as I write - like the way sound burrs in your ears when you get a high fever.
Not in my mailbox out by the road or waiting for me on my yahoo account - not a single rejection in weeks. It makes me nervous not to be rejected. They're being saved up, I can feel it. It's like those ants. The ones that crawl up your arm and lurk until they all bite at once.
I've been reading the manuscripts for the upcoming Below Sea Level conference, making margin notes, and writing a critique summary for each one. I have to manifest my most arrogant writer self to carry this off. I mean, if I think about it, who am I to be say things like "redo the opening paragraph?"
In the meantime, I'm post-flu enough to start writing again. It won't do to not be writing when the ants bite.
Friday night in Gainesville, and I was at Wild Iris Books to hear Joan Larkin read from My Body: New and Selected poems. She finished with a narrative told in sonnets, some so fresh that they were still handwritten in a palm-fitting notebook. The audience was filled with us "OL's," as a friend of mine's child calls us old lesbians. (As in, "sure Mom, we'll be at your party. We like hanging with the OL's.")
Us gray-headed ones (with a few proudly clinging to bottled red and blond) hummed along with Joan as she read, as the swirl of past decades rose up among us and connected us, and I clutched my faded, 1975 copy of Amazon Poetry edited by Joan and Elly Bulkin.
Joan lives here now, beside our spring-fed lakes and tannic rivers, where stories and poems, like cottonmouths looking for sun, wrap themselves around branches that bend over the water.
"Set in the Florida tourists don’t see, from the cheap motels of Tampa to the steamy small towns of central Florida , these stories take us into the kind of lives not usually documented in fiction. These are men who know what it’s like to betray a lover—and to trust one. Full of emotional insight as well as hot, steamy sex, these are the best kind of stories, the ones that draw us in and show us a slice of life—and in the process tell us something about our own lives as well." - Neil Plakcy
I know. Another half-naked man on my weblog. But the above blurb is from the back cover of the just released today Rough Cut: Vincent Diamond Collected.
Yes, a dear writer friend, writing as Vincent Diamond, has a long overdue gathering of the wildly popular and widely anthologized Vincent Diamond stories (plus new ones). In a today only offer - leave a comment on the Vincent Diamond live journal and you may win a copy. "Mushy butt romantic smut" is the author's own fond term for for these stories.
My own fond terms for the author and her work and her generosity to other writers is "fabulous" and "thank you."
This is why it's good to go to conferences - the booklet of manuscripts for the Connie May Fowler/Dorothy Allison workshop in June arrived, I printed them out, stacked them at the end of my writing bed, and without even reading the first word, I wrote the best so far on the new chapter.
I'm going to use them as my "good girl" reward. I show up every morning to write at the chapter and that night I get to do a snuggled-in-bed, no-pen-in-my-hand first reading of at least one of them. I've already earned my first story.
Overcoming inertia to begin this new chapter - this is how I almost started the post. Me, who has a since-a-child long, nasty relationship with the word "overcoming." I have a long rant about the how the word is nearly always insulting and disrespectful. "Overcoming" your disability - please. How rude.
But here I am, using the word about writing. The weeks of research and agonizing and hours of playing Wordy on the computer and starting and stopping and writing in circles of cliches and unmoving plots and saying "I'll never write again" in a joking way to friends but really I'm stomach hurts worried - is this all something to be "overcome?"
My analysis of the word says it's wrong to throw any of yourself away, to say it isn't part of all of who you are. So, if I plug writing into this theory then the skin creeping despair and surety that I'm a useless person that come before the writing is the writing. Crap.
Overcoming sure would be easier - if only I believed in it.
This building used to be the Florida Industrial School for Girls - a reformatory. These days it's the home of the Marion County Museum of History. Yesterday I sat and talked with the couple responsible for its existence, and their own memories and their generosity, as much as the exhibits, have me writing again.
Part of the writing of this current novel is to show how earth and water and plants and bone can pass memory forward through the ages. Yesterday, I listened as a man told me that, since he was young, he could go into the woods and be able to know what to eat and how to start a fire and make a shelter. No one showed him, but he knew.
Tomorrow I'm going kayaking on this river that I'm writing about. My Earth Day resolution is to listen to it the best I can.