mimsy and outgrabe

Inside The Grind When I first learned we were moving our classes fully online, I thought, "no big deal -- so much of my material is already up on Blackboard," but this was a false sense of security and possibly excessive pride, because this has turned out to be very untrue. I mean, yes, my materials are up on Blackboard, but they are not necessarily useful in terms of *teaching* -- discussion boards have to be created, and slide presentations need supplementary voiceover in the form of screencast videos, which are not necessarily difficult to create but *do* require me to have a quiet room to myself for at least 30 minutes per video -- usually more, because sometimes you mess up, even when you create a script. And the creation of the script itself takes time, as in at least another half hour, and creating these scripts when I'm interrupted by other members of my household every 15 minutes makes all of this course prep *while the class is already running* much like nav...

This is the last weekend of freedom before the new school year begins. I went into the office yesterday to clean it out -- there was so much junk stashed everywhere from last year's drop-and-run. I would come into the office with one pile of folders and books, place them on a desk or a table, and then pick up another pile of folders and books, and run off again. When I did work in the office it was often between columns of stacked files and assignments and general clutter.  I don't really want to do that again, if I can avoid it -- so I had a "purge day" wherein I went through all of the stacks and sorted through what needed to be filed and what needed to be recycled. When I left yesterday I had three or four boxes/bags of material to be recycled (which I'm doing at home because I don't trust that the school genuinely recycles -- I've watched our janitorial staff combine trash and recycling in the same cart and that's just suspicious  . . . I mea...

In both my Intro to Lit and Creative Writing classes I've been covering drama for the past two weeks, and it's been a light, bright breath of fresh air in a semester that's kind of stagnating. It means I get to show scenes from movies I love and respect (since scenes of stage plays are damn near impossible to get) and talk about how text and visual image intersect, how story is developed, how tension is created and dissipated, symbols, differences between direction and script, etc. I've been using Lucas Hnath's Red Speedo in creative writing, which is brilliant and darkly funny -- but only one of my students really commented on its humor. I thought that was strange. (Are we so far into the semester and the joylessness of deadlines that students can't pick up on jokes?) Always. Be. Closing. Anyway, Hnath's writing in that particular play has been compared to Mamet, another of my loves, and while I kinda see the comparison, I more or less used i...

I don't know if anyone was holding their breath for it, but I took last week off from the blog. The college's spring recess was last week, and while I did attend to some grading and house-cleaning I also wanted to treat those few days like the period of rest they were supposed to be, so I gave myself this little reprieve. Mostly, I just wanted to sleep a little longer in the mornings. Because sleep is lovely. What's also lovely? Blocks of time to read. I had an amazing Sunday at the beginning of the break, so amazing it almost felt like a practical joke -- I kept waiting for something horrible to happen and undo all the good & happy of the afternoon. A. and I went to lunch sans children around noon (they were at their aunt's house hanging out with cousins)  and then -- you guys -- I sat on the couch under a blanket and read for three hours . No joke, I haven't done that in YEARS. That is not hyperbole. And it is not exaggeration to say it felt quite mirac...

This week has been a strange one. Actually, the month has been a little strange thus far. As per usual, I had "big plans" for January -- lots of writing, reading, and preparation for the spring semester, along with getting my household in order. Also as per usual, too, none of that happened. Or, it has yet to happen. (I mean, perhaps I should be optimistic. We're not quite at the halfway mark, right?) A. was told at the end of December that he was being sent to Puerto Rico for a month -- and they told him, yeah, right after New Year's, be ready to go. And then New Year's passed, and he was still here. He was happy about that, but also a little exasperated. They gave him a new date: Thursday, January 18. And then yesterday he received a call on his way to work, oh, we might leave tomorrow. Friday, January 12. Be ready.   And, naturally, nothing was ready. So A. called me, asked me to help him with some laundry and errands so that he could pack quickly...

It's been a week of sleep and silence, more or less. I'm really tired lately. I've been using the mornings to rest instead of waking and writing, and not feeling too poorly about it because I'm having one of those do-I-really-have-much-to-say moments.  I've been doing more reading. I have a huge stack of books in my bedroom and a larger stack of chapbooks piled precariously in my living room that I need to read, and I'd all but taken a blood oath to refrain from book-buying until I'd made my way through these stacks -- and yet last week, before I attended the art crit in Brooklyn, M.S. and I ducked into Books are Magic and I bought -- because I have absolutely zero impulse control, apparently -- two books, one of which is Durga Chew-Bose's Too Much and Not the Mood . The title of the book comes from a diary entry of Virginia Woolf, who was also deep inside one of those do-I-really-have-much-to-say moments, and I suppose some feeling of solidarity w...

"What happens to a person, however odd this may sound, also happens to a nation, a nation being, when it finally comes into existence, the achievement of the people who make it up; and the quality of the nation being absolutely at the mercy of, defined and dictated by, the nature and quality of its people." -- James Baldwin I've been working on a blog post about my micro-sabbatical in bits and pieces, and I'd planned on publishing it today in an attempt to just ignore the Inauguration, and yet, I can't.  I can't ignore the very real implications of Donald J. Trump's ascendancy to the highest political office in the nation. Or how much it bothers me that people I know, people I like, voted for Trump not because they are intrinsically racist or misogynist or ableist, but because they felt comfortable dismissing his racist comments, and his misogynist and ableist words and acts, in favor of casting a vote along party lines. It bothers me that they...

I managed to work on my verse play every day of last week, so something is going right. On Tuesday I created a schedule wherein I outlined the parts of Act I that I will revise or create in order to have a complete, working draft that I can submit to the Southampton Theatre Festival in early June; the schedule itself had to be drastically revised on Sunday when I discovered I'd taken nearly six days to revise one scene. I am not a fast writer nor a prolific one. I'm trying to come to terms with this. Even when I have more time than usual, like I do right now, while the older kids are in school still but I'm not teaching classes, I can write at a snail's pace. It doesn't mean I'm not working -- in fact, I believe I've spent more hours writing over the past week than I have, collectively, over the past year -- but much of the working consists of trying lines, words, whole stanzas and then scratching them out and starting over . . . or staring at the page a...

I have a different blog post to write (for my union) and a gazillion papers & assignments to grade and a very disordered house to put in order and clean before my mother visits at the end of this weekend, but I felt the need to check in here. I've been sending my manuscript to a slew of publishers and first-book contests this week, and there's something about continually posting a bio that states you keep "a record of [your] writing life, experience in academia, and motherhood" on a blog that makes you think, "oh, maybe I should actually DO that." Also, when it comes down to it, I blog more for my own sanity and catharsis than I do for another lame line in my bio. Of course, since I haven't written here for a month you can probably gauge pretty accurately where my sanity's at. This weekend we're throwing a co-ed baby shower for my brother-in-law and my sister, who's pregnant with my first nephew (another boy in the family!), and...

Still not much to say. Juggling many different projects, and not well. I think I should just accept that I am a writer like I am a reader of books; one at a time, and slowly. I'm really good at reading essays and poems on the internet, though. How much of my life has been spent falling down rabbit holes, I wonder? Anyway, here are two of the latest: 1) The Mezzo Cammin Women Poets Timeline Project: I just discovered Mezzo Cammin, the online journal of formalist poetry by women, and then I tripped onto their Timeline Project, where they archive lovely little essays/introductions to poets like A.E. Stallings . 2) On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, experimental and not linked to form, is this "thin narrative in fragments." Lisa Ciccarello and Emma Trithart, the poet and artist respectively, call these ".gif poems." I'm in love with how this is so playful and yet so dark at the same time. The project is different and risk-taking and Num...

The Quest by James Wright In pasture where the leaf and wood Were lorn of all delicious apple And underfoot a long and supple Bough leaned down to dip in mud, I came before the dark to stare At a gray nest blown in a swirl, As in the arm of a dead girl Crippled and torn and laid out bare. On a hill I came to a bare house And crept beside its bleary windows, But no one lived in those gray hollows, And rabbits ate the dying grass. I stood upright, and beat the door, Alone, indifferent, and aloof To pebbles rolling down the roof And dust that filmed the deadened air. High and behind, where twilight chewed Severer planes of hills away, And the bonehouse of a rabbit lay Dissolving by the darkening road, I came, and rose to meet the sky, And reached my fingers to a nest Of stars laid upwards in the west; They hung too high; my hands fell empty. So as you sleep, I seek your bed And lay my careful, quiet ear Among the nestings of your hair, Against you...

The Armadillo by Elizabeth Bishop This is the time of year when almost every night the frail, illegal fire balloons appear. Climbing the mountain height, rising toward a saint still honored in these parts, the paper chambers flush and fill with light that comes and goes, like hearts. Once up against the sky it's hard to tell them from the stars -- planets, that is -- the tinted ones: Venus going down, or Mars, or the pale green one. With a wind, they flare and falter, wobble and toss; but if it's still they steer between the kite sticks of the Southern Cross, receding, dwindling, solemnly and steadily forsaking us, or, in the downdraft from a peak, suddenly turning dangerous. Last night another big one fell. It splattered like an egg of fire against the cliff behind the house. The flame ran down. We saw the pair of owls who nest there flying up and up, their whirling black-and-white stained bright pink und...

When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone by Galway Kinnell 8 When one has lived a long time alone, one likes alike the pig, who brooks no deferment of gratification, and the porcupine, or thorned pig, who enters the cellar but not the house itself because of eating down the cellar stairs on the way up, and one likes the worm, who by bunching herself together and expanding works her way through the ground, no less than the butterfly, who totters full of worry among the day lilies, as they darken, and more and more one finds one likes any other species better than one's own, which has gone amok, making one self-estranged, when one has lived a long time alone. from When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone , published by Alfred A. Knopf (This whole cycle, printed at the back of the book, is one of my favorite poems ever, but I didn't feel like I could really get away with publishing all eleven parts here.)

In Heraclitus' River  by Wislawa Szymborska, trans. Joanna Trzeciak In Heraclitus' river a fish fishes for fish, a fish quarters a fish with a sharp fish, a fish builds a fish, a fish lives in a fish, a fish flees a fish under siege. In Heraclitus' river a fish loves a fish, your eyes -- it says -- glitter like fishes in the sky, I want to swim with you to the common sea, O most beautiful of the school of fish. In Heraclitus' river a fish invented the fish beyond fishes, a fish kneels before the fish, a fish sings to the fish, asks the fish for an easier swim. In Heraclitus' river I, the sole fish, I, a fish apart (say, from the tree fish and the stone fish) at certain moments find myself writing small fish in scales so briefly silver, that it may be the darkness winking in embarrassment. from Miracle Fair: Selected Poems of Wislawa Szymborska, published by W.W. Norton & Co. ALSO, NIGHT-POST BONUS: This gorgeous long poem by...

Also, unremarkable but pretty Instagram pics of my garden this spring, 'cause, you know, this blog needs some help in the visual department. Day One:   XVI by Derek Walcott So what shall we do for the dead, to whose conch-bordered tumuli our lifelong attraction is drawn as to a magnetic empire, whose cities lie ordered with streets and rational avenues, exact as the grid of our vibrating metropolis? In our arrogance, we imagine that they, too, share the immense, inaudible pulse of the clock-shaped earth, slower than ours, maybe, but within our dimension, our simple mathematical formulae. Any peace so indifferent, where all our differences fuse, is an insult to imagine; what use is any labor we accept? They must find our prayers boring, for one prays that they will keep missing us when they have no urge to be ever-remembered, they cannot see what we hoard -- photograph, letter, keepsake, muttered or knitted homily -- as we change flags and h...

A quick note to say, excitedly, that the online journal Menacing Hedge has accepted the first FIVE chapters in my fairy tale poem, "The Woman with the Frog Tongue," and as well as a handful of the in-between poems that enact a kind of conversation between a child reader and her mother.  I know. The whole thing, from title to conceit, just sounds weird, doesn't it? I hope the actual poems are better than they sound when I try to describe them. Also, I just finished reading this incredible poem by Monica Youn on the Poetry Foundation's web site. This thing is a fucking achievement and might even make me subscribe to Poetry again. I might use it in my Advanced Poetry class in the fall, too . . . if it runs. (Fingers crossed, please let it run!) I'm feeling schizophrenic again. There is SO MUCH TO DO and that I want to do that I can't quite figure out what to focus on next. I'm doing, piecemeal, little things for school, little things ...

It's been a week of recovery! And Plan-Making Lite, meaning that I'm beginning to think of the best way to tackle all of the things I'd like to do with these next few teaching-free months. My summer class was under-enrolled and didn't run, which is probably more good fortune for me than bad: I'll have less money, but now I can use the next month (the one where my children are still in school) to do prep for the fall at a leisurely pace, and to work on the things that I'm feeling starved for, like reading and writing. And exercise -- even the simplest kind, such as walking through my neighborhood or stretching. And sleep. Lots of sleep. I've begun reading this week, as a kind of segue between Disaster Semester and Disaster Semester Prevention Planning, Lynda Barry's Syllabus . It's really marvelous. Lynda Barry is one of my new favorites. I discovered her via my colleague D.W., who studied with her at University of Wisconsin-Madison (and is actu...

This semester I think I've come as close to quitting my profession as I'm going to get.  I mean, I won't , because, first and foremost, I need a job that helps support my family, but ALSO because I've invested a LOT of freaking time and effort into doing this particular job, this career, and how does one just walk away from all of that? I suppose it would be one thing if I'd made Full Professor and I'd jumped through all the hoops I was supposed to jump through, but I haven't, and so: How do I leave behind all the hard work to get where I am, with just a tiny bit more to go? (I apply for Full Professor at the end of next year.) This feeling, this closeness-to-quitting, stems from more of the same, not enough hours in the day, but it differs from previous years because, perhaps for the first time, it's not really tinged with resentment. I mean, sure, did I grumble yesterday about my students obsessing over grades on papers but not really connect...

This week marks the beginning of the new semester. It may, also, mark a return to actual writing on this blog. And perhaps that writing will be ABOUT writing and about reading, and maybe/hopefully slightly less about stress and overcommitment and whatever other nonsense makes me sound (and act) like a crazy person. We can hope, can't we? Of course, part of what helps me navigate stress and overcommitment is being able to write about those problems here on the blog: putting them out into the ether and hoping that, if someone reads them, they find in my ramblings some kind of solidarity or kinship, a kind of hey-I-go-through-that-too recognition. So, I'm working my way back into a regular early-morning reading/writing schedule, as well as a regular exercise/running schedule, both of which also go a long way toward making me more clear-headed and less, you know, anxious/obnoxious. Reading regularly always helps me find my way back into writing, even if it's som...