mimsy and outgrabe

The Summer 2012 issue of The Gettysburg Review arrived via mail. It has two of my poems in it. These guys showed up for the student panel about Independent Studies. (Look how excited Kaitlyn and Kayla are. They are too cute.) All of these people showed up to listen to them. Awesome.

I can say the same about running. I was doing pretty well for a while there, waking at 5 a.m. when A. went to work, writing/revising/or at least thinking for and hour and a half, and then running on the treadmill in our basement for forty minutes or so . . . and then it's like a switch was flipped and I haven't really followed that pattern for the past week. Some mornings I've awakened at 5 a.m. only to do something other than writing, which has demanded (as tasks do) to carry over into running time, so that neither writing nor running is done that day. And then other mornings, I sleep. This morning I slept. Apparently, I need sleep. I keep trying to convince myself that I don't, but hey, I'm getting old, and I think it's time to face the facts that old people need sleep. Or rather, maybe this is the precipice before I fall into true oldness, where I'll need sleep in the middle of the day because I can't fall back asleep at night. This week is the w...

I began revision of the fairy tale this morning. Slow going, but it feels good (and right) to be working on it again. Yesterday, this arrived in the mail: These two things make for a nice beginning to the week.

I suppose I'm feeling guilty lately because this blog is supposed to be about that weird, manic intersection of teaching and writing and raising children, but when things get particularly busy at school the writing and even, yes, the raising children parts seem to get less of my attention. It feels like my life is less and less of an intersection of these things. Instead, issues at the college take up all my concentration and those issues aren't even about teaching . I haven't known what to write about in this blog and so I haven't written, period. And then I realized last night that these conflicts, these issues at work, seem so large when they first occur -- problems with students, problems with other faculty, problems with the bureaucracy of the college -- that my little peanut mind shivers inside its shell and kinda shuts down all of the parts (the miniscule little peanut parts) that could possibly deal with anything other than that "big problem". Or, ...

I'm still short on time, short on inspiration, short on sanity -- but reading the work of authors I admire -- really admire -- always makes me feel a little more calm. I'm not sure what it is about Paul Lisicky's work that draws me to it -- he writes prose primarily, but really lyrical prose. No, wait, strike the first part of that sentence. That's exactly why I like his work -- its lyrical quality, and its music, which I would describe as mostly quiet and unobtrusive but still strong, still there . Like, um, the current of the ocean pulls you back and forth, gently but definitely, on a calm day at the beach. Or like a lawn - I'm looking out the window at my backyard right now, lit by sunrise, and I know that if I were to walk out there in my bare feet I'd feel the ground under every curve of them, and I'd feel supported (despite the wind that's kicking up). The music of his work is like that. And the imagery of his writing is like the work of my fa...

Allow me to give you a better sense of perspective re: my life and the post below. For all of the calm and "yay, things are getting back on track!"-ness that the post exudes, please note that almost the minute after I closed up my laptop, the morning went to shit, the kids did everything in their power to buck our system for getting out of the house on time, and I had a major meltdown. I'm now really stressed out and panicky because I have only one real day to myself left in this spring break, and I'm spending it driving cars back and forth to the garage for inspection. Yay. Blurg.

Once again, the blog isn't getting much attention. The rest of my life is, however. I'm using spring break as a way to kind of tune-up areas of my life that have been a little neglected as of late. I'm getting more sleep, and I'm running again (in anticipation of a 10K in June, no less.) I spent yesterday at the office taking care of creative writing festival tasks, and today will be filled with a mixture of grading, more festival business, and getting the truck inspected. I've been writing, well, minimally. Yesterday morning's writing time was spent putting together and then sending out submissions to literary journals, so I'm not beating myself up too much, because submissions are a necessary part of my writing life as well. I'd planned to spend this week revising my fairy tale poem, but like most of my best intentions, that was a bit too ambitious. I need to have my head clear of these tasks that are screaming for my attention right now . . . and I...