That said, the links have been fixed. Even in a bit of a daze, in addition to regular work / teaching, I at least got the Creative Thingies page up, finished two stories this week, crossed some stuff off the to do list and read a whole bunch. And I took pictures of butterflies. And it is still only Thursday!

This afternoon I finished the story I started during the Spring semester. I am not entirely sure why it feels like such a big deal – it’s just a short story. Maybe it is because this is the first finished work to come out of grad school. Maybe it is because this is the first piece of straight fiction I have ever written with the intention of publishing (once I got through the first couple of drafts). Or maybe it is just because it was so challenging to write. It is a relief and a letdown and a proud moment all at the same time, and beyond all of that I am really going to miss my characters. They have been with me in some form since February. I have inhabited them and they have surprised me. Even up to the very last little edits and flourishes, I was surprised by the things Melissa saw. I love her softness and Paul’s artistic bluster.

This is one of the reasons why fiction writers are a little crazy.

Also, just in case anyone is wondering, acrylic paint tastes like burning.

Following are the inspiration and response pieces for the round. My sestina has some religious imagery which always makes me nervous, especially when it is imagery that is outside of my own inherited or adopted traditions. Although the language is in places suggestive, really the heart of the poem is that when we (yes we, all of us) drop our defenses and connect on the soul level, we connect with the divine in other people and ourselves. It took some rough language to get to that gentle place.

My inspiration piece, from the very talented Mark Martin – music this time!

Music Box

And my response.

Rose Heart

I watched you unfold from your little car
As I stood on the steps of St. Theresa
Your shoulders scarcely cleared the door
Less a vehicle and more a suit of armor
You smiled, shaking the groom’s hand
Looking so much taller than I remember

I wonder sometimes if you remember
That icy night, talking in your car
You breathed warmth into my shaking hand
In the parking lot of St. Theresa
I wore my intellect as bright as armor
Refusing you when you held the door

When last I stood here, by this heavy door
Another wedding long ago, I remember
A limp rose pinned at your chest, your only armor
We shared a flask of whiskey in your car
Bellies burning as we walked into St. Theresa
Each the fire in the other’s hand

Fire swirling between your hand and my hand
The groaning of the arched wood and iron door
That closed us up inside St. Theresa
All tangle in my breath as I remember
That night with you in your little car
Your limp rose heart pressed to my tarnished armor

Fire cleaved to fire, left molten armor
Above me, you held a flaming spear in your hand
A plunge to the heart left me brittle as a burned out car
All glass melted, seared-shut door
Diabolical or divine, I cannot remember
Surrendered in ecstasy like St. Theresa

Standing on the steps of St. Theresa
Time does not heal, it only forges armor
Soldered plates of what we choose to remember
The fire swirling between your hand and my hand
The groaning of the heavy wood and iron door
That frigid night inside your car

Let me suffer, like St. Theresa, or let me die at love’s hand
Memory’s spear pierces armor, melts the hinges off the door
This is the fire I remember, as you unfold from your little car.

I sent the third part of my uber-triptych, Elements, to my partner as inspiration, and this was his very beautiful response. Parts of it made me weepy and made me want to be a more gentle writer.

A number of things have gotten me thinking about publishing lately, not the least of which is the suggestion of my writing instructor that my current story should be publishable after some revision, and I should send it out. Publishing in a mainstream journal means getting a little cred as a writer, and getting my work out to a broader audience than I have here. But, the tradeoff is that if I look toward publishing in a journal, it has to be published in the journal first. Journals want unpublished work, and work published on one’s own blog is work published, by their standards.

So, I can post stuff here, where I know a couple dozen friends and acquaintances will stop in and read it, or I can send my work out, wait for it to get accepted somewhere, and if it gets accepted somewhere fancy like Ploughshares*, it goes on their site and lands in print in the hands of 6,000 or so strangers. And really, who else reads literary journals aside from other writers and their moms? Ok, agents, maybe.

It comes down to patience, I guess. I do not like the idea of waiting for a story to get rejected thirty times, then get picked up, then get published, and THEN linking to it from here, but it is something I am going to have to get used to if this is the track my life is going to take.

*Hey, remember that time I got into Emerson’s MFA program in 1998 and didn’t go? That was awesome.

Sitting in a room full of writers means sitting in a room full of world class procrastinators, deniers, and liars, and I know this because I am one. But if there is one thing I took from yesterday’s conference, other than that I kicked ass with the PR, it is that while I may not be the best writer, I am better at being a writer than I thought.

There are so many reasons not to write, so many reasons not to move forward on that big story, novel, or project that the soul yearns to create. Writers make up all sorts of good stories about not having enough time or not having the right time, or place, or outline, whatever, but with few exceptions, it is fear talking. What if I spend all this time, and it turns out I can’t do it? What if I do it and it sucks? What if I do it and I think it is great but everyone else thinks it sucks?

And then if I do this, what next? No longer having this desire to create this thing will make me a different person and what if it sucks being that person? What if the next desire is to do something even bigger and riskier? Or what if I run out of writing?

We are all afraid of not being good enough in some parts of life, and of course the closer we identify with whatever it is and the more we love it, the bigger the fear. But the thing is, being a lousy writer doesn’t make some one less of a writer.

For writers, it is all especially intense because living the dream means spending a LOT of time alone. Thousands of hours for a novel or long collection. Thousands of hours of sometimes writing crap and knowing it’s crap and having to keep on anyway, because it is part of the larger goal.

I am not sure when I stopped being afraid, but I am not afraid of writing crap, I am not afraid of what comes out of my head, and I am not afraid of people thinking I suck. And certainly I am not afraid of being alone with myself (I’ve had tons of practice); if anything I could use a little more of that sometimes. That doesn’t mean I am not overly critical of my writing. I am, but it is not fear. Writing, more than anything is a) fun, and b) a drive I have to understand the world in a way that is beautiful and changes people. People includes me. I have to do this.

Maybe, more accurately, I am still scared as hell of plenty of stuff in my head and in my heart, but I am not afraid of meeting it anyway, and if I am lucky, transforming it. Over the past few years I developed this almost obscene trust in the world, that if I just keep at it, what I need will appear. So far, so good. I still procrastinate -an enormous amount of laundry gets done when I don’t want to face something I am writing- but I also know when it is time to sit myself down on the couch, set a timer, and just fucking write.

So, I write, and these people come to life in a story, and they’re all me: the manipulator and the easily led, the objectifier and the willingly objectified, artist and subject, extrovert and introvert, male and female, ocean and sky. How could anyone read what I write and not know everything about me? Scary, right, except that people are too busy looking for themselves in the words. And that is the paradox of fiction: the better I know myself, the better my fiction becomes and the more people see themselves in it instead of me.

That said, It is 10:30, I still have three of my classmates’ stories to read so I can critique them thoroughly before class tomorrow, a facebook campaign to launch, and any changes I make to the draft of my story that I am turning in tomorrow. I suspect that after I read my classmates’ stories tonight, I will have a little freak out about my own and want to change everything, but I am trying to be happy with what I have.

Workshops are scary. Letting eleven other people read something that is unfinished, that I know is unfinished, leaves me feeling extremely naked, and not in a Misbehaving Tuesday kind of way. But, workshops are also great ways to learn, and great ways to get some momentum into a story that needs a shove. I am starting to get mad at this one, so it is the right time. Presently there are only two things I like about it: The title, The Illusion of Flying Backwards, and this paragraph:

One night I was lying awake in the top bunk, in the room I shared with my cousins on those trips. Over the sounds of ice in glasses and my aunt shuffling a deck of cards, I heard the adults talking. “That kid, it’s like she don’t know how to play. Just stands there, staring at the water, all blank, serious all the time. Whoever heard of such a thing? A kid who don’t know how to play.”

On an entirely unrelated note, amidst the thousand other things going on, I am thinking about Apple’s marketing of the iPad. As word gets out about how good it is -even to the geek world that scoffed- I wonder if Apple intentionally hyped the product but underhyped its capabilities, knowing that the word would spread quickly enough. If they knew it was that good, they would also know that word would get around, and that kind of marketing is WAY more powerful than Steve jobs standing on a stage, saying “everything works! Really, alot!” Apple has a history of underpromising and overdelivering, and it sounds like the iPad does just that. Still, I won’t buy one just yet. One of the very practical, intelligent things I learned from my father is never to buy the first model year of a new car, and I apply that to tech, too. But, next iteration of iPad, I’ll be in line.

Today was ridiculous. At some point late this afternoon, I wondered if there would come a point in the day – heck, a point in the week – when I wouldn’t be doing anything. The Maryland Writers’ Association conference is just thirty days away, and as the PR director for the group, every spare moment of my life, and some not so spare, has been all about the buzz (Look! Over there to the right! At that badge!), and so far, it seems to be working. It is going to be a really good day, and everyone reading this who is a writer within a few hours of Baltimore should attend. Gaze upon the badge. It compels you.

On the topic of buzz, I came back from class tonight buzzed about fiction all over again. I can’t wait to dig back into The Blind Assassin, the wheels are turning on the story I’ve been stuck on for a while, and the exercises we have been doing over the past seven weeks have given me much to work with once the semester ends.

Here is one in that queue. The exercise was to write a character working on a difficult physical task while exploring the internal world of that character. This was my response. I like it as groundwork for a full story. We’ll see where it goes this summer – for now, just a sketch.

I hooked my feet around the side of the ladder, closed my eyes under the goggles, and swung the sledgehammer over my head. My palm stung as the hammer made contact with the ceiling. When I opened my eyes, I was looking through plastic and dust and there was a four inch dent in the plaster above me. Dad better fucking appreciate this. So far all he has done is complain about being displaced from the room he didn’t want in the first place. I closed my eyes again, took the hammer back over my shoulder and swung hard. The sting in my hand ricocheted up my arm. This time there was a four inch dusty hole over my head. Four inches in a sixteen by twelve foot room, and already my shoulders were tight. Another swing with the hammer, another slap of the handle against my palm, and now I felt the plaster dust starting to catch in my hair and beard.

They assured me that the hive was dead. Now that I have a hole started in the ceiling, the plaster is falling away in chunks with each strike; some pieces cling together by stands of horsehair as they fall to the floor. The exterminator was here three times, and while the floor overhead is no longer hot over the hive, I still wonder if at some point this sledgehammer will strike a spot made soft by years of honey and decay and release thousands of angry, panicking bees into my face. One night mid-summer, after we had been seeing bees swarming under the upstairs window for a few weeks, I went to the side of the house to check it out, expecting to see a hive under one of the sills. Instead I saw hundreds of bees flying in and out of the house through a gap in the cedar shingles. I went upstairs to the spare bedroom on the third floor –the one that we had planned might someday be a baby’s room- and pushed the boxes and bags of old clothes out of the way to make a path to the window. Halfway to the window, I noticed the floorboards were warm under my feet. I took a few more steps toward the window, thinking it might be from the sun coming through, but this window faces north. So I knelt on the floor, and as I brought my ear to the floorboards I heard it- the chaotic vibration of thousands of bees. It was more of a hum than a buzz, thousands of wings and bodies, their hive a machine that hummed along with its own life. “Char,” I called. “Charlene, you need to come up here.”

My neck was straining from looking straight up. In an art history class in college I learned about Michelangelo painting the Sistene Chapel suspended in scaffolding built out from the walls. I always imagined that scaffolding like one of the nets that kids have over their beds to hold stuffed animals; Char had one over her bed in her dorm and sometimes it brushed against my back when we fucked in her bed. But that was a long time ago, when each of us could fit all of our stuff in half a room.

I was getting into lathe now, bringing down slats of wood with the plaster. The hole overhead was about a foot in diameter. My shoulders were burning, my face itched from the dust, and my legs were tight from hanging onto the ladder. I should have called Dave and John to help, but I was kind of looking forward to spending the day with no one to talk to and nothing to do but knock shit down.

When I had knocked out all the plaster and lathe I could reach, I climbed down the ladder and moved it a few feet toward the back of the room, away from the spot where I knew I would find the hive.

One of this week’s readings for class was about the importance of place in fiction. There were two wonderful quotes from an article about setting by Richard Russo. The first:

“Now that I’ve lived in Maine for several years, I’m often asked by virtue of my address when I’ll be writing a novel set in Maine. They don’t realize what they’re probably asking is when I plan to leave the state.”

Having lived in eight metro areas, this made me smile. Baltimore is the only place I have ever felt comfortable writing and occupying a the same time. All of this moving and coming home has been a strange blessing for my writing. I was away long enough – from age eight to thirty-two – that I have some distance from it, but at the same time I have always had family here, there have always been visits, and it has always been home. Even though I did most of my growing up around Philly, it never felt quite right to me, and even when I visit places in Philly that I enjoy, I am at my center agitated (or, less judiciously but more accurately, trips to Philly make me really, really bitchy). Baltimore is in my guts, so I can write about it without sounding like a tourist, but at the same time, I have enough distance to do it justice, or so I would like to think. And lucky me, I think it could be my favorite place to write about, other than weird little towns in Pennsylvania.

“Writers have to recognize and accept an essential artistic paradox – that the more specific and individual things become, the more universal they feel.”

This applies to the arts overall, and I do not have much to add. It is another lovely way of saying that at our core, we all have common stuff, and the more honest and bare we are in our art, the more we have to offer and the more likely we are to be accepted (maybe not by everyone, but it helps), if not understood.

Guess how long that lasted?

I had this idea about painting on a person that rattled around in my head for more than a decade, and it just happened to fit in with the assignment and characters I was writing for class. Also, shoes are of course involved. The instructor noted that if I chose to develop the story, it could evolve either into erotica or literary fiction depending on what I did with it, and that the difference is that in literary fiction the characters have something at stake. What the characters had at stake, at this early point in the story, was unclear.

(Of course, a lot of erotica centers around infidelity, so technically, the characters have something at stake, but it is a tacit agreement between the writer and reader in erotica that the characters will not get caught, unless it is that kind of story, in which case, the same idea applies. All bets are off in literary fiction.)

I had not given much thought to what differentiated literary fiction with lots of sex from pure fantasy. I figured it was character development plain and simple and was taking more of an “I know it when I see it,” approach. Consequently, I have a handful of stories from the past six months that probably sit right at the edge between erotica and literary fiction.

So, this gives me a framework for moving forward with the story I started for class, but the concept of what is at stake as a defining characteristic of fiction relative to fantasy also has me looking a little deeper. It has been said that literary fiction is a culture’s conversation with itself about itself. Fantasy is fantasy, and exists purely for pleasure. In the epic that is a life, how do we determine the difference between the stories that we tell ourselves everyday in order to define ourselves, and the stories we tell ourselves purely for pleasure? It is easy in the extreme: we know that telling ourselves the story that, say, our job is important supports our identity and keeps the status quo humming along, and we know that imagining the barista at Starbucks straddling the counter and serving up a double tall handjob is a flight of fancy. If we lose the barista there is always another fantasy object. If we lose the job, there is so much more at stake – identity, world view, etc..

But, what happens when the lines get muddied between the stories that do the work of defining us and the stories that are simply passing pleasures? What happens when you can’t tell the difference?

What happens, I think, is that life gets interesting. Whether it is sex or food or cars or some other object of obsession, in this messy, smokey area of things that should be light and fancy but are tightly, dearly, deeply held there is tension, darkness, energy to be found. Wanting, compressed by time, forms a thick vein of coal at the center of a being. Everything is at stake with that much fuel sitting there; release it, life could blow up. If we’re brave, we throw in a match from time to time. If we’re a little less brave, we let some one else strike the match.

Regardless of how a person ignites, in fiction as in life, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are only as interesting as what is at stake if they turn out not to be true.

SPARK writing doesn’t sound like any of my other writing. I do not know if that is because it is so compressed, or if there is something more karmic about it. The pieces have their difference from my other writing in common, but each round had a unique feel to it a well. My first SPARK piece was a struggle down to the last minute. It is the only sonnet I have ever written, and until a few hours before the deadline, all I had was one line and a bunch of junk. The second round was a quick, sparse story with a nod to Kawabata. It came to me within seconds of seeing the inspiration piece – I put down a few notes, and the next morning, the whole story poured itself out in under forty-five minutes, and I was able to spend the rest of the ten days revising it. This third one took a few days to kick in, and then was written in fits and starts up to the end. The story is… something. I feel that it might be a sketch or an outline of something larger. It clocks in at just under 1,400 words, but I think it easily could unpack to something more than twice that length.

But for now, it is what I have to show for my ten days of collective creativity, and a welcome and much loved deadline.

This was my inspiration piece.

Copyright 2010, Vita Sims

And my response (which I would like to note is not about feet, sex, or affairs like the rest of my stuff lately, although it does mention all three. In a way, it’s about an affair with the self).

Burning

The cool slats of wood under my feet as I rose from bed anchored me to the old house. I was in and out of the room often during the years when I burned. Beth rented it to me at a discount because of the two twin beds. The room was set for children, but families with children rarely stayed there, as there was little to do except walk the mountain trails and be quiet, and so the old inn mostly attracted people needing a retreat.

At night, I burned until I fell asleep. In the morning, I awoke and burned until my feet touched the cool floor. My whole life was on fire then, with everything I lost, every trip I never took, every man I never bedded, the children I never had, and every yes and every no that came from my lips when I really meant the other.

Beth was the third generation of her family to own the house and the second to run it as an inn, which I learned from the framed clippings in the lobby over the fireplace. She never married. Her whole life had been in the house. She was as much as part of its presence as it was a part of her; her face had aged pleats like the stiff but faded curtains over the window seat, and her chestnut hair was shot through with the same gray marks that streaked the old sideboard she used as a desk. I wondered what she would have been without the inn, probably something soft, earthy, and quiet, a florist, maybe.

Every few weeks I arrived at the inn with my backpack and a camera, no jewelry except for silver post earrings and the necklace I’d had since I was a teenager: a tiger’s eye pendant on a silver chain that hung just to the right of my heart. After the first visit, when the children’s room was the only room available, Beth rented me the room at a discount, and never asked questions. She nodded, and smiled closed-mouthed, lips turning slightly upward like handles of a basket. When I came through the door on Friday afternoons, that basket-handle smile was the extent of our communication, except for the items she began leaving in the room for me. Often, I left the old house on a Sunday afternoon having not spoken for two days.

Countless times my husband asked if I was having an affair, and I think he may have believed me, eventually, when I said no. I did not return from my weekends flushed and girlish. I returned quiet and, as Vin put it, “spooky,” with the smell of the mountain on my skin. An affair was the last thing I would do there. The time alone burned brighter than any new love. It was its own kind of passion, a passion for myself, for quiet.

After my feet touched the cold slats in the morning, I put on my one change of clothes from the drawer –the rattling old top drawer of a small bureau that smelled of newspaper and fresh tobacco- and smoothed the blankets back into place. It took just three swift motions refresh the bed: bring the corner of the sheet and blankets, all still aligned, back to the top corner of the narrow bed, smooth it over with my hand, and center the pillow. It was so much easier than making the bed at home, where after a night of shifting and burning and yanking the covers back from Vin dozens of times, the sheets all needed to be tucked back in, the comforter rearranged, and the pillows fluffed. At home, I washed the sheets every three days. My sweat and Vin’s sleepy breath made them stale.

When I was dressed and the bed was made, I went downstairs to the lobby, took a cup of peppermint tea with one sugar cube back to the room, and drank it sitting on the edge of the bed in front of the window. Then I went for my walk.

Every morning at the old house I went for walks on the wooded paths around the old house, up to where the paths joined hikers’ trails on the side of the mountain. In spring, the damp smell of defrosted earth giving rise to life; in the summer the thick odor of the moldering floor of greens, wood, and fungus, in autumn the dry perfume of dying leaves, and in winter the simple smell of cold. I always walked with my camera. Sometimes I took pictures.

I returned from my walks in the early afternoon, nodded to Beth at the desk, and took another cup of tea up to my room. I passed the afternoons looking out the window at the old trees; sunlight rendering the leaves translucent, mist giving them a softness, and in winter the branches’ skeletal nakedness. Sometimes in front of that window I replayed my life over and over, picking through the bones of my history, but mostly I just sat and watched the trees. The branches bent in the breeze and the roots sank twice as deep into the base of the mountain as the trees were tall. Every hour or so, I took another cup of tea, and in the evening, I took a pistachio muffin from the basket.

After my third visit, there was a folding tray in my room when I arrived. On it was a hotpot, a teacup and saucer, a basket of peppermint teabags, and a bowl of sugar cubes. On later visits, I found the tea setup, along with half a dozen pistachio muffins wrapped tightly in plastic, and a six-pack of bottled water. After a few months, Beth left me the tea, muffins, and a bowl of fruit on the bureau, too – bananas, grapes, and occasionally plums when they were in season. She understood what I was doing there, that I was too young to be burning like this, and I needed to be fed alone.

Because of her kindness I saw her even less, only when I arrived at the old house, and going to and from my walks. Always we greeted each other with the same nod and closed-mouthed smile. I was more at home there than I was in my own house and my own life.

In the autumn of my second year visiting the old house, I laid in bed one night, burning, unable to sleep. Although I burned at night and burned in the morning in the old house, I burned far less than I did at home, and the weekends in the old house were the only nights I slept well in those years. By the light of a bedside lamp, I put on jeans, a heavy sweater, and thick socks, pocketed the key to the room, and padded downstairs to the lobby.

The fire in the fireplace was burning bright and Beth was sitting on the sofa, a cross-stitch next to her on the cushion. She stared straight ahead at a window that was black in the night except for her reflection and the flicker of the fireplace behind her. I sat down in a wing chair, the fire to my side. “Don’t you sleep?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “My house is always full of strangers.“

I sat for another few moments, until the heat against my legs was so deep that I had to fold them under me on the chair. Beth resumed her cross-stitch.

When my feet touched the cool slats of the wood floor the next morning, I knew that it was my last morning in the old house. I dressed, reset the blankets, and centered the pillow at the top of the bed. It was as if I had never been there. After settling my bill, I nodded to Beth, and walked out to my car. “Good morning,” I said, although there was no one but the trees around to hear. me “Let’s go,” I said as I got into my car. Once I started talking again, I felt like I might never stop.

This is the inspiration piece I sent to my partner.

This love, a roughly knitted blanket
tangles between my bare feet
as I lay awake and
unravel like a lopsided stitch.

And her beautiful response.

Copyright 2010, Vita Sims

Strawberry Freeze is second from the top.

Exercise #1 was to dig into a bag of paint color cards and pick a set of colors that resonated either personally or for a character, then to pick one color on the card and answer a bunch of questions about ourselves or a character, based on the color selected. The questions were the usual sort of thing: what shape is this, what sound, what kind of car does this person drive, etc. Every time I do an exercise like this I am struck by how goofy and how incredibly useful it is. Simply asking to make illogical leaps – what kind of bird this person based on a color would be – opens the door.

As soon as I picked Strawberry Freeze, I knew this color was not just me, nor was it a character I have been working with this week, but some one new. “I am a frozen strawberry, preserved just the way you want me to be, sweet, picked clean of my stem and thorny brush. When you remember me, the hum and rush of the air conditioner is Ave Maria and the wheezing engine of the old silver Ford Escort is a silver flute trilling on a summer night.”

Exercise #2 was writing in celebration of something that isn’t usually celebrated. The workshop leader gave an example of writing a celebration of bare feet in sunlight (safe to say she has missed huge sections of the internet). I wrote a short ode to Google Analytics. By that time I was so cold I could barely write, having gone rapidly from strawberry freeze to Lauren freeze, but it is something I may want to rework. Excerpt:

Oh, Google Analytics
Arbiter of virtual affection
Offers sweetly URLS
That point in my direction

27 visits, 38 page views
Sort by location, host or server
I’m a fool for data, Google
Your capture has my fervor

The last exercise was to make a list of things you need to know to live.
1. Know where to find food and other things that nourish you: the city, woods, a field, the beach, home.
2. Know where to find shelter, and other things that protect you: an apartment, tree, brush, a pier, home.
3. Know where to find clothing, and other ways to announce yourself to the world: a store, fig leaf, laurel garland, shell necklace, home.