A Writing Group Proposla (I.e., "Beer & Beowulf")

Ever since I took a class on C.S. Lewis when I was a wee slip of a girl, I've been intrigued with The Inklings. That was the name of the informal writers' club started by Lewis, but included Tolkien, poets, and critics alike. What brought them together was a shared love of literature and a dedication to improve their craft. Such literary clubs are not uncommon. What is uncommon is that they were drawn together to create something that did not exist at the time---literature that was not simply "art for art's sake." They wanted to write the sort of thing that they loved to read.

I can't imagine writing without keeping some Other in mind.

That said, there is something attractive about sharing work-in-progress to those of like (and different) minds. To have one's work critically engaged and seriously debated as you are writing is such a help. Not only does it let you sharpen your own critical/creative approach, but you start to get a sense of what others may see when they read your words. Such a humbling process requires a certain amount of loving-kindness on the part of everyone involved to make such criticism work and allow the truth of a piece to be fully explored.

What I am proposing is a local writer's group (i.e., within traveling distance of Dayton, OH) meet, beginning on a monthly basis. For those who cannot be present, I can set up a faceboook group that will allows people to network, post to discussions, and receive critiques of their work.

If you are interested in meeting, or being a part of the writing group, just email me. You can also post below. Feel free to forward this message to those who might be interested, but might not indulge in facebook :)


-Looking forward to hearing from all my creative friends,

Rachel

Harlan County USA

Every time I go down to Harlan, KY, I'm always struck not just with my own folk's history, which is always present in my own imagination, but I always feel a great amount of pride mixed with sorrow. They are a tough, courageous people, who have had to endure more hardship than most Americans can ever imagine just to st...ay alive.

I'm going to re-watch the Barbara Kopple's documentary "Harlan County USA," which won an Academy award in 1977. I suggest it as required viewing if you want to know about the coal miners struggle to unionize.






http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3IrnNAweM0

Theopoetics?

"What is 'theopoetics'?" is a question I hear all the time.

My answer: "Why are you asking me?"

Now, instead of being sarcastic, I will direct people to this website. It's chock full of informative goodness.

Adios!


Theopoetics.net
http://theopoetics.net/


"Be Willing to Squint"

How did Brilliance Get Wed to Instability?

I have gotten so caught up with Sylvia (and Emily) lately that I find myself seeing things through their 'cheekiness.' The good thing about that is its cathartic value. These poems allow me to express and acknowledge feelings that I might otherwise take out in my own writing. Once I have read their wry descriptions of reality and society, the poison in me bleeds out. I could go on and on about their great talents, but such writing is a lesson, first and foremost, of how to filter the good blood from the bad.

I suppose that makes me the leech :)

Also, I always wondered how 'brilliant' people became characterized as unstable, in one form or another. To pursue that question is to follow my burgeoning fascination with the lives of writers. I used to think that a work existed, more or less, in a vacuum. I read a poem or a novel for its own sake---the singular meaning that would divulge itself to my reading.

Now, I want to know who wrote it? And how? And why?

If you wonder too, follow your feelers...

The link below is one place to start.

Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html


Follow this link for an lively, intimate corresponsdence between two writers.

Theirs Truly: The Lowell-Bishop Letters
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200904/lowell-bishop-letters

Pandora's Box

This link shows a video of a roundtable discussion with Harold Blum, Joan Branham, Lois Braverman, Kathryn Harrison, and Victoria Pedrick on the subject of

Pandora's Box: From Ancient Sacrifice to Family Secrets.

(Courtesy of The Philoctetes Center for the interdisciplinary study of imagination.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMc7GpaDHRA

Following Her Own 'Plath'

In “Above the Oxbow,” Sylvia writes a rather beautiful description of a very real place. She was never incapable of writing more conventionally---she chose the road less taken.

Watch her use of language; I find this passage oddly reminiscent of GM Hopkins.


Above the Oxbow

Here in this valley of discrete academies
We have not mountains, but mounts, truncated hillocks
To the Adirondacks, to northern Monadnock,
Themselves mere rocky hillocks to an Everest.
Still, they're out best mustering of height: by
Comparison with the sunnken silver-grizzled
Back of the Connecticut, the river-level
Flats of Hadley farms, they're lofty enough
Elevations to be called something more than hills.
Green, wholly green, they stand their knobby spine
Against our sky: they are what we look southward to
Up Pleasant Street at Main. Poising their shapes
Between the snuff and red tar-paper apartments,
They mound a summer coolness in our view.

To people who live in the bottom of valleys
A rise in the landscape, hummock or hogback, looks
To be meant for climbing. A peculiar logic
In going up for the coming down if the post
We start at's the same post we finish by,
But it's the clear conversion at the top can hold
Us to the oblique road, in spite of a fitful
Wish for even ground, and it's the last cliff
Ledge will dislodge out cramped concept of space, unwall
Horizons beyond vision, spill vision
After the horizons, stretching the narrowed eye
To full capacity. We climb to hopes
Of such seeing up the leaf-shuttered escarpments,
Blindered by green, under a green-grained sky

Into the blue. Tops define themselves as places
Where nothing higher's to be looked to. Downward looks
Follow the black arrow-backs of swifts on their track
Of the air eddies' loop and arc though air's at rest
To us, since we see no leaf edge stir high
Here on a mount overlaid with leaves. The paint-peeled
Hundred-year-old hotel sustains its ramshackle
Four-way veranda, view-keeping above
The fallen timbers of its once remarkable
Funicular railway, witness to gone
Time, and to graces gone with the time. A state view-
Keeper collects half-dollars for the slopes
Of state scenery, sells soda, shows off viewpoints.
A ruffy skylight oaints the gray oxbow

And paints the river's pale circumfluent stillness.
As roses broach their carmine in a mirror. Flux
Of the desultory currents --- all that unique
Stripple of shifting wave-tips is ironed out, lost
In the simplified orderings of sky-
Lorded perspectives. Maplike, the far fields are ruled
By correct green lines and no seedy free-for-all
Of asparagus heads. Cars run their suave
Colored beads on the strung roads, and the people stroll
Straightforwardly across the springing green.
All's peace and discipline down there. Till lately we
Lived under the shadow of hot rooftops
And never saw how coolly we might move. For once
A high hush quietens the crickets' cry.


Though Sylvia preferred the inner imagery for her subject matter, she was just as capable as writing more on more 'conventional' themes as her surreal ones. She was, like other lady poets, writing against a language, a heritage, a tradition that held her at arm's length, if not in contempt. Stylistically, you can't ague against the craft and depth of her work. Her anti-Romantic originality is obvious. However, what I can critique is that difficulty of translating the language of her interior world into something truthful in everyone's experience. She makes the mistake of Anne Sexton, even of Dickinson---in being so true to the interior voice that we, as readers, are left on the outside. I want to be let in. Maybe the lack I feel is because each of these ladies, in their own way, had psychological issues that, they were ultimately the victims of.

So, as a reader of poetry, and as a lady poet, what can I learn?

Avoid similar tendencies? That sounds a little trite. These are the habits of brilliant women. I can only dream of making the same mistakes. However, I have noticed that my poetry can be 'Gothic'---maybe---but definitely a hard read. While I would love to be brilliant, I would prefer to be soulful. Maybe that's compromising my art (whatever that is), but hell, compromise, is what you do in any relationship. And that's what I see poetry as being: a dialogue, a conversation, a promise. If it end with me, then it doesn't really begin.


Female Author

All day she plays at chess with the bones of the world:
Favored (while suddenly the rains begin
Beyond the window) she lies on cushions curled
And nibbles an occasional bonbon of sin.

Prim, pink-breasted, feminine, she nurses
Chocolate fancies in rose-papered rooms
Where polished higboys whisper creaking curses
And hothouse roses shed immortal blooms.

The garnets on her fingers twinkle quick
And blood reflects across the manuscript;
She muses on the odor, sweet and sick,
Of festering gardenias in a crypt,

And lost in subtle metaphor, retreats
From gray child faces crying in the streets.

Viva La Difference

I just started teaching Ethics and Critical Thinking instead of my normal writing classes, and it seems like the stuff of situational comedies or French farce. For one thing, I am no philosopher. I had to pinch my knee to stay awake in Symbolic Logic. Hell, I don't even remember the Ethics course I took in college. While I liked some of the questions, I thought the answers were pretty vague: reason, thought, will...blah, blah, blah. Lots of guys arguing about who's paradigm was bigger. I preferred the Eastern modes of being: crazy wisdom, Zen koans, Japanese death poems---oh my.

Unanswerable questions. The religious.

A week to plan, and no instructor's manual. And I had to teach another course I had never taught before. That's what happens when you nod your head and say, "I enjoy a challenge," when you should be running to the nearest Starbuck's and saying "Screw this. I am an artist. That's why I pay three bucks for a nonfat café au lait. It's what angsty artists do. I'll even type a sonnet, hunch over the bluish white screen, and mouth a rhyme for 'avocado.' And didn't you notice I was pale? I've got 'deep' all over me, it's in my pores like the bottle of rum that I'll toss off once I'm back to my desperate hovel of inspiration."

But I cannot say that to thirty-odd students who are all looking at me in mild amusement, practiced contempt as I look over my handwritten notes and realizethat I can't even read my own scratches. I again look at my script with the intensity reserved for translations of hieroglyphs or cuneiform.

My stomach rumbles. I can already feel an ulcer coming on, but I can't put my hand on my stomach; invoking Napoleon is generally not the best way to inspire respect. Fear, yes, but only as a last resort. A Waterloo.

It's only four hours. Surely I can avoid the hooves until 10?

A student raises a hand.

I nod "Yes."

"What should we call you?"

I really want to say "Mon Capitan," but suppress my wry grin.

"Ms. Peterson should work."

Another student speaks, "Miss Peterson? Do we really have to read everything?"

"Yes. You must read the chapters before coming to class, or there would be no point in class discussion."

Yet another student grumbles, "Miss, do we have to write and talk?"

"There are questions that need a more thorough answer than a multiple choice or true and false questions are able to supply. Like your opinion."

Moans.

"I didn't take this class to think."

I meet eyes with the one who thinks thought is unnecessary, "I hate to tell you, but thinking is an automatic response, like gagging. Your mind is already making sense out of things---with or without your permission. In this class, I'm just asking you to focus a little of your concentration on this subject and these questions. You have to know that you think before you can have control over how you think. "

"Mrs. Paterson, I think this class is a waste of time."

I rub my gut and scowl.

Books for the Weighty Imagination

I don't like the whole 'genre' obsession. The books I like or find inspiring come from a variety of places. Some are there because they leave me in a state of bliss or ruffle my feathers to the point that I might have to change my wicked ways. These books listed below happen to be the ones that I own and still flip through when I need some manna from heaven or hell or anywhere else in between.

If anyone wants to borrow any of these, just ask.




In no order:


The Bible (Old and New Testaments, preferably in the original languages)

The Republic, Plato

The Odyssey, Homer

Theogony, Work & Days, Hesiod

Sappho

Beowulf, any translation

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

The Divine Comedy, Dante

The Grimm Fairytales

Straw for the Fire, Theodore Roethke (poetry)

The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks (poetry)

Til We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis (his best)

The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis

The Innkeeper's Song, The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle

The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood

Possession, A.S. Byatt

The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell

Life of Pi, Yann Martel

Watchmen, Dave Gibbons & Alan Moore

Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter W. Miller

Collected Poems, Sylvia Plath (poetry)

Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman (poetry)

The Complete Poetry and Plays, T.S. Eliot, (poetry)

Poetry and Prose, Gerard Manley Hopkins, (poetry)

The Collected Poems, Czeslaw Milosz (poetry)

The Lion in Winter, James Goldman (play)

J.B., Archibald MacLeish (play)

Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett (play)

St. Joan, George Bernard Shaw (play)

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (poetry)

The Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe

Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte

view with a grain of sand, Wislawa Szymborska (poetry)

Song of the Sky, translated by Brian Swann

The Sound and The Fury, William Faulkner

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, Children of Hurin, JRR Tolkien

Gerald's Game, Eyes of the Dragon, Stephen King

The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston

Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse

Marius the Epicurean, Walter Pater

Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

Angry Candy, Harlan Ellison

Grendel, John Gardner

The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje

Moby Dick, Herman Melville

David Copperfield, Charles Dickens

Wicked, John Mcguire

The Blue Sword, The Hero & the Crown, Robin McKinley (YA)

Birth of the Firebringer, Meredith Ann Pierce (YA)

The Golden Compass, Phillip Pullman (YA)

The Dark Is Rising, Susan Cooper (YA)

Assassin's Apprentice, Robin Hobb

The Seventh Son, Orson Scott Card

She, H. Rider Haggard

Grimus, Salman Rushdie

The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley

The Book of the Dunn Cow, Walter Wangerin, Jr.

The Dragon Path: Collected Stories of Kenneth Morris

Modern Classics of Fantasy, Edited by Gardner Dozois

Zen And the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M Pirsig

Paradise Lost, John Milton

The World Without Us, Alan Weisman (nonfiction)

13 Things That Don't Make Sense, Michael Brooks (nonfiction)

Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris (nonfiction)

Night, Elie Wiesel

Cosmos, Carl Sagan

The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell (nonfiction)

25 Random Bits

2. I don't like to drive, but I like going places and looking out the window. Taking in scenery can be a pretty awesome (as in leaves me in awe) experience.

2. When I think no one can hear, I sing Disney songs or really generic musical numbers. Yes, I am a tool.

3. I am a sucker for music. I once vowed that if a certain song was ever sung to me---in earnest---then I had to marry the poor schlep.

4. I had GI Joe underwear, and I would make my Joes attack the Barbies and cut off their hair.

5. I am a softy at heart, and I want to believe what people say to me.

6. There's not a day that goes by that I'm not surprised.

7. I don't think I've ever initiated a first kiss: received, yes, but initiated, no.

8. I once just wanted to be a 'good' person, but now just want to be me. I'll always wonder how I might do things better.

9. Mt first story was about a cowgirl. I was inspired by listening to The Outlaws.

10. I wanted t be a dancer when I was a kid. I made my parents but a tutu and slippers, but then I broke the table trying to pirouette and that was that.

11. I will never stop traveling. I think I'm at my best an a new with new people, new places, and new cultures. Maybe it's wanderlust.

12. The Kentucky Wildcats are the only sports team I will pretend to like.

13. I don't think anybody really gets me. I don't think I get me either.

14. I secretly want to slap anyone who makes a 'briar' joke when he/she leans that I was born in Kentucky. There's only so many ways you can imply inbreeding, and trust me--I've heard every possible variation.

15. I'm rarely one to end a conversation. Seriously, when I'm enjoying a chat, I want it to go on for hours---all night, all day. That is ideal, though probably impractical.

16. I love words. I love reading them, speaking them, hearing them, singing them..."Luv them and squeeze them and call them 'George.'"

17. I come from a long line of BSers, and I'm always a little afraid that I'll fall under their influence, or become one.

18. I'm attracted to very few people, but I love quite a few.

19. I like people who don't try to be anything other than what they are.

20. I like sudden, erratic tenderness.

21. I want to hear a story.

22. There are some things I wish could forget, but then I wouldn't be the same.

23. When riding in airplanes, I bed for the widow seat. Flying is...delightful. I get giddy---and it not just from the lack of oxygen.

24. I want to ride a Harley out West.

25. If I live to 80, I want to be one of those tough old biddies that smoke incessantly, show off their tattoos, cook enough to feed two armies, and still bend down to talk to kids eye-to-eye.

Miner 49er

The world is full of intentions. Everyone is trying to figure out how to live, whether through an occupation or a supposition. More things clamor for our attention that we have the capacity to experience, and so we sift like 49ers tapping metal pans with the heels of their palms, searching for the gleam of something precious amid the dull piles of rock and mud. Tap tap. The noise, rhythmic as a heartbeat, is swept up in the gurgling of shallow waters. Tap tap. Faintly now, but the wet hands of the miners keep pounding, squirting arcs of spray, mule's spit. On clear days, the sun seems to jump into the water, they squint their eyes until the pans are outlined in phosphorescent shadows. The younger miners are more apt to stop, reach into the pan with puckering mouths that soon tighten into lipless lines when their hands are filled with pennies or nails. Tap tap. The gentle along with the violent. Tap tap. Until all hands are wrinkled, useless, and cease.

I'm not certain what that image is supposed to mean, if anything.

But it may be about death.

In my family, see, we tell a lot of stories----mostly family-related. It is a ritual to tell certain stories, some of them about relatives I have never even met. Yet I know their lives more intimately than some of my living relations. Telling stories is always a simplification, a way to make sense out of someone's life. We tell stories so that they are not forgotten---that the past is made a part of the present. To leave a story untold or to forget is worse than telling lies. I find the greatest tragedies are not so much those who suffered the worst catastrophes because 'everybody hurts', as the song says ( I derive all my seeming-wisdom from song lyrics:). The worse thing that can happen is to have no stories told about you when you are no longer able to tell them yourself.

My mother's father is a good example. He died before my mom could get to know him, and since the circumstances of his death were, well, horrific, her family did everything to forget the whole messy incident. It's quite understandable, but I think Lee was more than the tragedy he became. He was a paratrooper in WW2---the man fell out of the sky on D-Day. We only know this because my dad looked up his service information on the Internet. It's not everything about the man, but it is something to remember. When I went to France, I wondered what he had seen and done to survive in that foreign place, so that he could survive, and I could walk down those same landscapes with the descendants of the German soldiers that he fought. Two generations had changed the world so much, and yet...I have no idea what he would say. I can't sit down with him and compare our impressions over coffee or sweet tea, or cafe au lait.

Circumstances can cause people to be forgotten, but sometimes people are forgotten because they were too afraid, too private to share the nitty-gritty. No one wants to be a whiner, or to draw too much attention (we just have different points of saturation). I understand the motivation to say what seems appropriate, every life is worth hearing about. It saddens me when people cannot seem to form one word that reveals some truth about who they really are and come from. Every story is worth knowing---especially to those we love, or who would learn to love us. Love is in the details, not in the generalities so many of us try to hide behind. I want every sordid little speck, as well as the glittering nuggets, from those I love. Anything else is fool's gold.


dreadful sorry, Clementine

What Makes Literature 'Liturature'?

I don't know many people who voluntarily read James Joyce. I only attempted Ulysses after I had loved “The Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man.” “Portrait” is much more like his short stories, but “Ulysses” is nearly indecipherable without some sort of class or extensive commentary to help you read it. While I like his characterizations, his playfulness with mythology and language, that book has had little to no impact on the general public. Yet every class on modern British Literature treats Joyce as if he were the Second Coming. Give me Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf , G.B. Shaw, Oscar Wilde, J.R.R. Tolkien. I prefer the introspective/ironic/witty/mythopoeic writers poking at themselves and 'literature' with a wry thumb.

The best arguments involve dinosaurs.


You see, Modernism (Mo) has a 'canon'--- essential texts that are supposed to compose the essence of English literature. Postmodernism (PoMo) says that that canon is there for a reason, but that it is fluid. I'd like to make an analogy, for those of you who who'd like to see the difference between PoMo and Mo:

Imagine that you want to go out to eat. In the Modern age, you would go to a restaurant that specializes in certain cuisine or signature dishes. You would sit down and order from a menu of what is available. Your main concern, as you sit at your table, is what is 'the best' from the limited selection. If you consider yourself a gourmet, you might order based upon your 'sophisticated' palate. If you are more health-conscious, you might tabulate the calories of a given dish to meet your specific needs. Novelty, expertise, and/or convenience are your essential motivators. Food feeds the engine of the body to make it work.

The PoMo dining experience would be a little different. If you decide to eat out, you'll end up at a buffet---a potluck, if your nose pulls you in that direction. You can choose a little sampling of all sorts of foods, from the exotic to the mundane. You are only limited by the sensitivity/capacity of your stomach. While some revel the variety of offerings, there are some who are overwhelmed. It's better to sample than to deny. Most choose based upon what appeals to the senses---gut-reaction becomes the guiding force, but you still use your brain. Your main concern is the quality of your experience as well as your company. Food is an essential part of fellowship and can take on the aspects of the sacramental.

Everybody has to eat, so the difference between PoMo and Mo is a difference of what is deemed food. They both operate on 'ultimate' assumptions. In the PoMo worldview, there is freedom to be Mo, but the reverse is not necessarily true. PoMo, in the extreme, denies absolutisms----a view that is rightly critiqued. Anyone can see that human beings operate because at some point, there are assumptions made, and these assumptions are created solely by an individual. Our views are formed by a variety of things that are completely out if our control. We're always looking for truth, even if we know it is contextual. Modernism allows for absolutes to be asserted without shame or the fear that you will offend someone else. In the PoMo view, difference is expected, whereas in Mo, there is a sense that one way or another, it the Truest view will rise to the top, will naturally convince others by its sheer...'genius.' No one believes in halves---we're all searching for a whole Truth---something that we find undeniable. Just because we have this need (as basic a food), for truth (no capitalized T), that doesn't mean that all other truths are consequentially crossed out. One person makes truth claims that effects how he or she experiences life and reacts to others, but someone making similar truth claims might live in a very different manner. Another person may make different claims entirely, but the effects could be very similar to someone with even contrary assumptions. No one agrees completely with the other---nor should we. So rather than spent time and energy getting folk to believe in a certain formula, perhaps it might be more fruitful to find out what makes that person unique, and what helps he / she to not just survive, but live well---especially with other people.

Ultimately, it is a little silly to try and define an age that we're still living in. Whether PoMo is just really politically-correct Modernism or some relatively new incarnation of the Zeitgeist, we cannot say for certain. The defining characteristic of the next epoch will be decided by future historians and such. Besides, the arguments of Mo versus PoMo are old arguments---any given society is always balanced somewhere between extremes. The terminology may differ, but not the essential idea that there are ideas/worldviews that are in competition with one another, but why must that be the case? Why must one view 'dominate'? All these terms of competition come from metaphors that may have been well-intended when they were uttered, but don't necessarily work in the world that we are living in. Cooperative metaphors and ideologies are what seem most useful in this pluralistic time---whatever terminology will be chosen to define it for future generations.

Laughing at Lolita

Who knew pedophiles could be funny? I had heard in very, very general terms what Lolita was about, but I avoided reading it because a book about a man who got turned on by little girls just didn't appeal to me. I always have stacks of books whimpering for attention, and did not want to read yet another book that wasted my time and glorified a bad guy for the sake of voyeuristic tantalization. But Lolita is so well-written, so immersive, so beautiful (in a tainted sort of way) that you just can't put it down. The only way the author gets away with the subject matter is by assuming the persona of the pedophile who is ridiculously witty, and laughter is really the only way you are able to read the most disturbing scenes where grins transform into grimaces. The story is much deeper than just a profile of a self-proclaimed monster; it's about obsession, art, love, maturity, the new world as seen through the eyes of the old, and the consequences of living out your fantasies. There are no perfect souls---just people, and so it is challenging because it challenges our own sense of normalcy and/or moral superiority.

I didn't mean for this post to become a book review (perhaps havlie been grading one too many papers), but really: How often do you find yourself contemplating something that you've read? Often? Only for credit :)? I'm curious. Do you like to be disturbed? Or do you prefer that everything 'fit': the 'bad guys' get punished and the 'mistreated' are rewarded? Does life conform to such order? Even if everything is chance, should fiction try to make some sense out of this chaos?

Halloweenie

I've been naughty. But hey---it's Halloween---the one time of the year that I can let my horns down. Oh my, did I say 'horns'? I meant 'hair.' I don't have much of it to let down, but you get the idea....

Now is time of year to be looking at grad schools, if I plan on applying. I am considering it. If I get a full time position at the end of my first two tears of teaching, then I will be quite ecstatic. However, if I can't find a full-time position after two years experience, then I must consider other possibilities. I know want to teach, which helps, and I need a PhD to teach at most colleges. That means I need to look at grad programs---creative writing programs. I'm not worried about getting into a program, it's just deciding which subject to write: poetry or prose? I much more torn than I thought I would be. My poetry's probably more...polished; I've just studied it more. However, I'd like to learn more about writing fiction, but I'm not certain a PhD program is appropriate. Most of the knowledge I need there is just practical stuff that you can only lean by doing. By attempting a novel, I'm learning quite a bit, but a part of me would really like getting 'credit' for doing something that I already am doing. The doctorate, if I decide to go for it next fall, would be so I can teach, which I really, really like doing.

Hopefully, I'll get a full time teaching position in the fall, but if not, I may have to suck it up and go back to school---a scary notion, and an appropriate one for Halloween.

I just might dress up as the person I should be: a good little Brethren girl in modest garb, asking for directions to the nearest potluck, where I may meet my future spouse, a similarly-simple-minded pastor or deacon with whom I shall create Brethren spawn of mostly-German exaction...

...I'm sure I can find that costume at K-Mart.

X-mas...In October?

'There is nothing new under the sun.' We've all heard that quote. Whenever I hear it, it is usually used to support something unoriginal. A prime example would be if one of my students wrote a paper on how much she loved her grandma, but it turned out that the student wasn't even writing about her own grandmother. Let's assume the student doesn't have a grandma, so she just wrote down what other people said in class about their own grandmothers. The assignment was just supposed to be about an influential person in the student's life, so why she would write about a fake grandma is quite beyond me...There are probably better examples, but while there is certainly many common experiences (like having grandmothers), none are completely the same. To take a real world example, you and I may both have grandmas, but I'm certain that mine are rather different than yours---unless you're my sister. Even if you are my sister, Amy, you'll have something different to say about our grandmothers than I will. Oh yes. (And if you are my sister, you'll also say, "Get to the point, Rah-rah...and stop being a dumb ass." Thanks, sis.)

People have been living on earth for quite some time, and will (well, hopefully) continue to do so. There's nothing new about life. It begins with birth and ends in death---with a few complications along the way. Some call for simplicity, for less-complicated lives. This can manifest as a 'stripping down' of a busy life into something less burdened, but more substantial in ways that are outside the 'normal' need for constant content, stimulation, or excess. Others seem caught in what they think are 'mediocre' lives---lives that to often feel like you're living out the expectations of others. Do this enough, and your own life can seem more and more like someone else's. Or you may feel that your life is much too ordinary because it is too yours, which is---too often---disappointing.

No matter who you are, there is always 'that person' you just might be. The problem is that once you become aware of this possibility, it's rather hard to ignore. It tends to make you look over your shoulder---discontent, anxious, even fearful---even when you may have a perfectly logical explanation and/or solution.

We live in a world of diminished possibilities. What might I mean by 'diminished'? Well, because of your unique birth, your choices are narrowed from the beginning. You don't ask to be born, or to choose your family or culture. In other words, the conditions are already set. You can only re-act. Since these conditions are beyond your control, the possibilities for what you might be become limited. Completely free will does not exist because you can never sit in a vacuum and freely decide from every possibility. Just as the story gives the setting and the situation and lets the characters discover their own unique existences, these limitations give shape to the form of your real-life transformations.

Like Ebeneezer Scrooge, we are confronted with the shades of: What Is, What Could Be and What Might Have Been. We too must weave the threads of our lives into some cohesive story that pushes us to the point where some sort of decision must be made or some action must be undertaken. The only place to choose or act is now. Will we discover that what was a dreary day like any other dreary day is actually Christmas morning? Perhaps. Or maybe the day that we have been dreading becomes one that we end up celebrating? These things may happen.

If they can happen for a guy like Scrooge, there may be hope for the rest of us.

Power Outages Do Not Halt Inspiration

Writing about Native American-inspired civilizations is a tricky process. Though I claim a drop or two of native blood, I really don't have the right to mess with native cultures. I am, ultimately, an outsider, who can only sneak a glimpse of some half-seen truth when she decides to show herself. I say 'she' because wisdom and truth have usually been personified by the Hebrews and Greeks as female---not because I' think men are incapable of personifying those virtues.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we live in a world where God is called “Father” and his (notice the masculine pronoun) embodiment is called “Son.” Even if you're not dealing with Christians, God is still a dude to most of the world. Whatever rationalization is used to try and assuage and/or empower women, it does not change the fact that God is “He” in the language of these traditions, which has an impact, even if you come up with convoluted theologies to make sense of God's blatant masculinity. I'm not blaming anybody---just saying that you can't call god a guy without having consequences. For me, it means that every time I hear that language, I can't help but feel a little left out. It causes me to ask questions that I'd rather not ask, questions that plant seeds of doubt that only a sense of irony can assuage, but never completely. For if I have to try and explain away every instance of gender bias so that the message might be relevant to me, then what stops me from re-interpreting everything that I disagree with? Everyone has to figure these things out for him- or her-self...And no one gets it “right.” At least we have some comfort in knowing that this questioning, this discovery of relevancy is as perennial as the grass: it has continued long before we were born and will continue long after the galaxy itself finds another embodiment.

As I am re-inventing religions in my story, I'm trying to make it consistent with what I know of Native American practices and beliefs, but like any system, it has it's flaws; to depict these systems otherwise would be wrong, since there is no perfect religion. There are also 'competing' systems from different peoples and even different tribes. If you fear that I'm going to make every bow to the One Goddess, rest easy. I have no desire to replace one sort of sexism with another. Each culture does have a different notion of gender roles, which I do find quite fun to play with. Admittedly, I have an interest in seeing the effect a lady 'Odysseus' would have on the culture in which she appears. Homer wrote about a man---that's made clear in his first line. While we are very, very fortunate to have Homer and this long line of creative minds stretching back to the murky origin of Western culture, history only recalls the thoughts and creations of men. They are the ones who are named. We could argue as to why that might be the case, but it doesn't change what we have to work with, and what we must (continually) work out.

That said, enjoy the finer comforts of our cultural inheritance (i.e., electricity).