Remembering Iran in Black and White, in Glaring Light

John Berger, in his book Keeping a Rendezvous, a compilation of essays on art criticism and life observations, notes that "Painting brings home. The cinema transports elsewhere" (14), meaning that a painting is rooted in the sense of a shared setting between the viewer and the piece of art, while cinema serves to allow the viewer to escape her setting and journey out into the realm of the film directs her to, the surreal, the other-real, the historical-real. A movie moves, it transports, and it changes time, size, shape, and tone. A painting is absorbed whole, in a moment, and the leaps that occur around it occur not through the director's guidance, but in the mind of the viewer.

In thinking of this, I begin to see Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi, as the memoir that most resembles film, while Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi, a graphic memoir also about Iran, as the memoir that resembles painting. In Reading Lolita in Tehran, Nafisi wanders, she reflects, pontificates, observes and moves closer to and away from the political and personal trauma experienced during the shifting regimes and fundamentalism polluting Iran from the late 70's. Her memoir, to me, hearkens the film Y Tu, Mama, Tambien. There are piercing rays of light bouncing off shores, boys too bright in cars, a woman in white on a balcony, a hut, shadows, dapples of light, a road, leaves. Mostly it is the lighting of the film that most resembles the memoir, the shifting distance and brightness, the way it hurts to look at it, and the way it makes everything hazy.

Nafisi frames her memoir around books. She splits her thoughts into four sections--Lolita, Gatsby, James, and Austen--books I would hardly associate with the restrictions felt by the tightening grasp of Iranian fundamentalism during the time period she observes. She writes about her encounters with her students, of their discussions of the text, and in between, of the atrocities felt in her culture as freedoms are stripped from the people, oddly, as veils are forced to cloak the women. 

The balance in this memoir between personal and academic tips mightily in the direction of academic. Nafisi is a thinker, a fact she asserts herself when she says "I am too much of an academic: I have written too many papers and articles to be able to turn my experiences and ideas into narratives without pontificating" (266). She devotes one page to her terror over the bombings in Tehran when she was pregnant with her second child and says simply, "Tehran was the object of continual bombings and I had become hysterical" (171) but gives three chapters to a class period during which the class put the novel The Great Gatsby on trial as to whether or not it was corrupting society. She does not bring us into her hysteria. She brings us into her classroom.

In contrast, Persepolis, like a painting, brings to its readers an immediacy inescapable. Satrapi portrays no flickering lights. Her memoir is not angles of light shining too brightly, not hazy edges, shadows, or dappling spots on a landscape. Her memoir is black and white. It is instant. Whole. Visceral. Emotional.

Both memoirs, for instance, describe the suicide soldiers convinced to fight for the Islamic army in exchange for a tin key painted gold, the key to paradise. Nafisi describes this in prose. Distant, reflective, intelligent prose. Satrapi frames an image in two blocks of text, at the top: "The key to paradise was for poor people. Thousands of young kids, promised a better life, exploded on the minefields with their keys around their necks" and after the image, the line, "Mrs. Nasrine's son managed to avoid that fate, but lots of other kids from his neighborhood didn't" (102). More powerful, though, is the image, bodies convulsing upwards, lines indicating explosions, and fingers grasping at keys. Satrapi brings us to the horror she felt, without the eloquence, but with lots of guts.

The two memoirs couldn't approach their subject more differently, but there is, of course, good reason for that. Two women do not experience the same thing in the same way. The Iranian society registered differently in two different women who were at two different time periods in their own development and who had two different sets of coping mechanisms in order to confront the Iranian regime.

Satrapi makes it clear that her Persepolis is "A Memoir of a Childhood" and so the memoir hangs on the arc of her growth from childhood to adolescence, ending when she leaves Iran as a teenager to go to school in a safer place. The arc, the structure, allows her to naturally let the political events and her personal response to them shape the memoir. She conveys the experiences she felt as a child by going into that child's emotional make-up. She uses image to bring a sense of immediacy to the reader. She cuts the narrative to a skeleton and lets images convey the flesh. 

Nafisi, a grown woman at the time of these political changes, cannot use the "coming-of-age" structure to build her memoir. She must find some other shape upon which to drape her story. Her selection makes perfect sense for her background. Frame it in books. Let the stories inform her story. 

In a way, Nafisi has the much harder task. And her unwillingness to plunge into the personal emotions she felt is, in a way, noble. She focuses her attention on her students, on her magician, on her encounters with other faculty. She sees herself, clearly, as lucky and does not dwell on her own frustrations for long. Moreover, it is not hard to imagine that as a mother, relying on books for sanity saved her from giving over to the terror that she must have felt during a time in which terror became boring and so it makes sense that this became the framework for her book.

And so, the interesting question is this: which is better? The film or the painting? Womanly and reserved? Child-like and visceral? What is the task of the memoirist? What depths must the writer plunge to? Allow the reader to see? 

Memoir, like art, has no rules. It may, in the future, have patterns, and even evolution, but at this point, there is no rule about what memoir must do other than be focused on what is remembered. 

This is not to say that memoir requires no craft nor academic awareness, but only suggesting that memoir, like visual art, serves many purposes. Movies transport the viewer away from the present setting and into a new setting. Paintings bring the other setting to the viewer. Memoirs can do both and do so under the instruction of their writers. 

For myself, (and I say this begrudgingly) I believe my personal writing must unearth the emotion. It must root in the muck. It must dredge up the dirty guts and reveal them to the reader. I don't like doing it, but there is a certain instinct in me questing for the barest truth, the autopsy of the memory.

We are the century born after Freud. We have adapted in ways Darwin couldn't have predicted. The emotional is not to be scoffed at. It is part of the evolution.

When We Write

My last journal entry was 2/22/09 at 2:02 in the afternoon. That was over a month ago.

Prior to this journal-drought, I filled journals prolifically over the course of a year and a half, starting in September of '07, and filling up five and a half journals before this sudden, jarring stop.

Prior to this prolific-journal-period, I didn't journal. I stopped altogether. I was in an MFA program at Hamline University and yet I wasn't writing for myself. In the first nine months of 2007 there are only two entries. The first, written in January, a list of events along with corresponding months of every adventure, trip, or holiday that occurred since June of 2004, the date of the next most recent journal entry. The second, written in August I guess, though there is no date, is a three-page entry. On the top of the third page are the words "Can I love Shawn Again?" on the second, at the top of the page are the words "Does Love Exist?" and on the first page of the entry, there are no words. There is only a drawing, a collection of images representing the terrible personal crisis I found myself facing. I did not even have words to articulate my problems. I had only a few scribbled shapes, lines, questions marks, and, as I look closer at the image, I see there is one word. Trust. Crossed out so I missed it the first time.

It is significant to me to realize that after being married for a year and a half to my husband whom I had been with for four years prior to the wedding in December of 2002, I suddenly stopped journaling. We separated in August of 2007. Just before the flood of introspection began and I returned to journaling.

Mark Doty writes his memoir Heaven's Coast miraculously in the midst of and on the heels of loss. His partner ebbs out of life due to the increasing waves of illness that come crashing onto him from AIDS and Mark, somehow, picks up pen, and elegantly, records the journey. This both surprises me and feels natural.

His writing is marked by urgency, honesty, and a wish to preserve, to keep, to hold the twelve-year relationship he shared with his partner Wally. His writing anchors him in the relationship. It keeps Wally close.

In the prologue, Doty writes and rewrites, letting the reader see the rewriting. He says on page six: 

If I write about it as if it's already done, that's because so much of it is--W. is less present, each week spends more time asleep, and is less and less capable of involvement in the stuff of mutual life. We're pushed into a different kind of relation.

Then he adds in parentheses:

(Those sentences were true when I wrote them, but this week he's much more alert--still unable to walk but ready to get out of the house, ready to shop for new shoes and  

magazines...

This rewriting lets the reader see the progression and recession of the disease, the push and pull of the waves hitting them on the shore. It shows that the act of writing, of depicting, transcribing cannot but capture what is true in a moment, from an angle, and then let go of that image and accept the truth is new again.

For this reason, I find myself wondering why I am venturing out into this terrain of memoir and writing about what is personal. I don't like to do it. I lose all orientation in my personal writing. I lose my tight grasp of the control on the pen. I sense neither whether my writing is effective or of any importance to an outside audience, and for me, a highly critical reader used to grading, editing, revising, selecting, and critiquing, this is like being out in the deep purple water of the sea with no clue what swims below my thrashing legs.

My writing will not do anything but capture a momentary truth. And that only if I am lucky.

Doty likewise resists writing, a situation that manifests physically in back spasms and chronic pain. He writes on 132:

There is so much I don't want to write.  I can feel the interior pressure of turbulence, latent feeling opened and invited in--out?--if I begin to speak directly about illness, dissolution, the end of my heart's desire, the wreck of love's body, the failure of medicine. There is so much there to--I begin to write "dredge up" but it isn't at all like uncovering something from which I have recovered, something far in the past. It's that there's all that grief and anger right there and I'd rather not feel it than look at it directly...

I can relate to this feeling. As I began to write last fall, in October of 2008, about the sexual addiction that started filling up my marriage, eventually drowning it altogether in February 2008, I noticed that my fingers ached. My back ached. My eyes hurt. Writing, an even usually that fills me with optimistic creative energy, instead drove me to my bed. I would write for 45 minutes and then sleep for two hours. The keys pounding me back to that place of grief I was working so hard to ignore.

Why did I continue to write about my grief? About my failed marriage ( a term that leads me to plot many more essays in my head even as I type it)? What compelled me to the writing when it felt so painful?

Doty, too, confronts the push-pull, suck-spew power of writing. His writing, an elegy for his partner, his love, I imagine, compelled him because he wanted to preserve his lover, make an altar of their love. This does not mean it wasn't filled with the weight of pain. He writes on pae 205:

To write was to court overwhelming feeling. Not to write was to avoid, but to avoid was to survive. Though writing was a way of survivng, too: experience was unbearable, looked at head on, but not to look was also unbearable. And so I'd write when I could, recording what approached like someone in a slow-moving but unstoppable accident, who must look and look away at once.

I am struck by the way he says writing was a way of surviving. In that sense, I feel like it is survival that draws me most to the field of memoir writing. A woman in one of my classes, after hearing yet another piece about my divorce, said to me, "You know, I've been thinking about your writing." I perked up immediately ready for some praise to assuage the anxiety I have about writing the personal. "It must be really good that you're doing it. Sort of like therapy, right?"

Writing as therapy. Definitely, at times. In my journal, when I finally came back to images, to lines, to question marks, and finally words, writing, I believe, saved my life. It was my life-preserver, the rope pulling me out of a sea of depression, a sea I fully believe might have swallowed me forever.

But what I am doing now is not that kind of writing. The comment stung. Especially as a critical thinker about writing, especially as someone who knows the tediousness of a particular type of narrative. I am not writing to soothe only myself. I am writing for an audience, though I don't know why. It is not meant to be therapy. It is not meant to be an account of the way in which I was wronged (far from it). It isn't really meant to be anything other than shared. I know I am writing for an audience, but only because I am compelled to. Only because I can't do anything else.

Again, I don't want to write about this subject, this, the most personal subject of my life. Writing about the pain of living with a sex addict, of seeing him choose pornography over me (a situation I now realize was not about me to him, but the pain of witnessing it definitely is what it felt like to me, not to mention the pain of realizing the choice wasn't even about me for him, that I was secondary, always, to his addiction) feels like returning to sea on the life preserver after making it safely to shore the first time. I know that I am safe, but I do not want to go back to the storm. Bad things happen out there.

Doty writes bravely in the face of death. He writes though it nearly kills him. As he writes about his final days with Wally, the foot-rubbing, the brief smiles, the simple "I love you, babe" he hears from Wally one last time, he asks, "How can this be written? Shouldn't these sentences simply be smithereened apart, broken in the hurricane?" (259). (Incidentally the tears are running now, down my cheeks.)

After Wally dies, Doty stops writing for a month. He stops.

Grief takes over.

So what I think is this:

We write when we are supposed to, when to do otherwise would mean destruction, when we know we need to; and when the writing would break us open, when we are not ready for the current world to drown, we stop. We wait. We gather our strength.

Then, when we are ready, we pour our story out into the world to swim with all the rest.

How it Feels Now--

It is not often that the past runs right past you. But today it did for me.

While walking the yorkie-poo on a usual Saturday morning route, to the coffee shop, over to the lake, around the path, and back to the apartment, I saw my ex-husband run past me.

He lives two blocks away from me, so I know there is a fairly high likelihood of running into him. Literally. We both run circles round the lake near our places. Who knows? Maybe we're chasing after each other all the time.

Other images and ideas have been chasing me, too. Ideas I cannot string together into any real sort of coherence just now. Labyrinths. Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz. Tunnels and holes. The idea of falling down the rabbit hole. Alice in Wonderland.

Twice today while at a book store, (pre-coffee shop), I felt my heart jump twice--the first in the entry way seeing a bargain book called the complete works of Lewis Carroll, with Alice on the cover, and later in the fiction section while browsing past the classics and catching a glimpse of Alice in Wonderland out of my periphery. 

I feel a deep obsession coming on. And how appropriate--I leap out of a marriage with a sex-addict right into a literary obsession on the works written by a pedophile. One who wrote a legendary story about a little blond girl getting lost.

There is something to the idea of the journey of female and child protagonists getting lost in a world of fantasy, myth, and confusion. Doors change sizes. Scarecrows talk. A giant flying dog saves a young boy. A boy lives inside a peach and talks to bugs. A girl falls asleep in the opiate haze of poppies. A girl eats a cake and shrinks. A girl finds herself trapped in a glass sphere, a wild party, where no one looks like anyone she's ever seen. 

The ancestors of these modern stories, the fairy tales, set up the archetype.  Children crave candy and are trapped by a witch.  A girl discovers her grandmother is really a wolf. A girl falls asleep after eating a poisoned apple. A girl is forced to marry a beast.

And further back. Psyche finds herself in a cave hidden underground, told by her husband that she can never look at him. 

In all these instances the protagonist is alone. Separated from family. Separated from the world she knew. There is an energy of seduction. There is an energy of confusion. Disorientation. The surreal. The dangerous. The girl does not understand her enemy, but she knows that following the rules she used to live by will no longer work. The people, the creatures, around her do not operate as she has been taught they will.

I felt disoriented when I saw my ex run by. I recognized his breathing first, subconsciously, so that when I saw his back my thoughts were--it really is him! I couldn't believe it. He looked fit. He was running. He looked healthier and saner than the rest of world. I was at my crumpled post-Friday night best. Raggedy. Disassembled.

Could it all, divorce, addiction, really have happened? Did it need to? Why does he look so normal when I am still lost in a world of confusion? A world of strange shapes? Why do I feel like the one who's gone mad?

He ran right by me. No stopping to talk. Did he wonder at the dog by my side? About my new life? 

He ran right past. Bent on a course he knew well and had planned out ahead of time. I continued my own wanderings, lost, I am sure, forever in wonderland.

A blogger becomes a server and channels Nabokov in her observations...

Well- as a solution to a very concrete problem of lacking personal finances, this particular blogger went out and got herself a job as a server at a nearby restaurant located inside a grocery store frequented mainly by regulars of the elderly, Norwegian variety. They like their coffee black and strong, their lefse thickly buttered, and their seasonings--well, they don't much like seasonings.

As one of the experiences of a new server, I have had the chance to come in at 5:30 in the morning to open up the restaurant and get to know the customers, many of whom order the same thing every day. Lately I have also been reading Nabokov. Speak, Memory.

I know there doesn't seem to be a direct correlation between working at a restaurant and reading the autobiography of a Lolita-writing Russian author, but because I am sleep deprived and waking up at 4:00 these days, it occurs to me that it might be fun to observe the "characters" I have met so far through the eyes of Nabokov- or at least give a sort of Nabokovian description as I interpret his aesthetic from his memoir.

Character #1: Older man, regular.

A man walks over to the counter upon which sit the coffee mugs, water glasses, utensils and various other necessities of the initial ritual of fetching a beverage for the customer. This man does not wait for the coffee to come to him, but walks right up and helps himself to a mug turning on the spigot of the regular coffeepot and grinning at me as I struggle to work the cash register and ring up another guest's meal, a particularly difficult moment for me and so he has me at a disadvantage. I greet the man, a man wearing jeans about ten years out of date, an old gray sweatshirt, and a man who, despite the beaked nose, gray hair (complete with morning cowlick) and skin tired of fighting the war on gravity, was probably once somewhat handsome.

I ask the man how he is.

"Do you really want to know?"

Of course, what I want is of little regard to this man who is intent, as evident by the gleam in his eye, of delivering a joke he clearly finds amusing. He proceeds, despite my protests that no, it's ok, I don't need to know and says:

"I'm ornery and horny."

 And with that he laughs at his own joke (non-Nabokovian me laughs too) and walks over to his usual table, a round table in the back of the restaurant where he hangs out with his cronies each morning sipping coffee and complaining about the state of things in general, and in particular, the service at this restaurant. 

Character #2: Woman at counter, ordering large turtle latte.

A woman with faded brown hair that falls lower than her shoulders and bangs that look like they have been pushed hastily aside in a rush to get out of bed and on with the daily routine approaches the counter, bug-eyed or bleary-eyed, it is hard to say.

I greet her, as bound by my new position as server, and ask how she is today. 

"It's too early to tell," she retorts, clearly annoyed that anyone has the gall to pose such a ridiculous question at the god-awful hour of 7:30. She is such a woman who delights in crushing the enthusiasm in front of her, like she delights in squishing an ant when she sees one walking along the sidewalk slowly in front of her and she happens to be wearing some thick-soled pair of shoes, or perhaps her "outdoor" crocs- the pair that will not come inside, thereby trailing ant remains behind them. 

I know she is this particular kind of sadist because her response to her own retort about it being too early goes something like this:

"I suppose you have to be here even earlier, huh?" (she grudgingly concedes that she is not the only one who has to face morning before it is light and I tell her we arrive at 5:30.) "Well, I saw on my calendar that I think it's this Sunday that we shift over to daylight savings.  I guess you'll be getting here at 4:30, huh?" She walks away after smugly tilting her head toward the plastic lid on her drink and taking a big sip.

She didn't leave a tip.

Character #3: Delivery man, Ghiradelli chocolate-sauce delivery man

I greet the man walking confidently behind our counter wheeling four cardboard boxes on a dolly. I say "How are you?"

He says, "Better each time I see you. You know that's why I come here, right? To see your pretty face each time. You know that too, right? I know you got a man who tells you every day how pretty you are, or you better."

The man continues on despite the fact that I am looking away and working on the cash register again and other servers are rolling their eyes. Of particular note is the fact that this is only day three of my time at this restaurant; I have not seen this man, with his glasses and Ghiradelli jacket and black-and-gray curly short hair. He has never seen me either, so it is impossible to take anything he says seriously. Thus I turn my attention in my mind to the Mnemosyne butterfly, the species that I remembered not so much for the moment in which I caught it, but for the moment my Nanny, Mademoiselle O, sat on it and crushed its wings into six lop-sided and broken pieces. I don't pretend to assume their was any connection between the Mnemosyne butterfly and the Ghiradelli delivery man, but the thought serves merely to illustrate how disconnected I was from the conversation he was having with himself in my direction.

The End--of Nabokovian interpretation...

And now- the why of it all. Why did I choose to have a Nabokovian flight of fancy in thinking about the customers I have met? How is Nabokov different from me?

Well, there is the obvious--He was a Russian writer born in the 19th century before the crumbling of Tsars and Lenin's reign on the world who wrote well and hunted butterflies and grew up in a household full of dozens of dozens of servants all taking care of the personal business of his family. I am an American woman born after Vietnam and before Desert Storm part one who took karate and dance and was held accountable for washing dishes at a very early age. But beyond that-- how do we interpret the world differently? What have I learned from his autobiography? From my own life?

Aesthetically, Nabokov holds his reader at arm's length. His visual description of people and places emerges out of a bounty of details that appear on a page like an image beneath an artist's charcoal pencil. He lets us revel in imagery but resists approaching emotion in anything more than a detached and bemused sort of way, such as when he says of his time in college at Cambridge, "Emotionally, I was in the position of a man who, having just lost a fond kinswoman, realized-too late- that through some laziness of the routine-drugged human soul, he had neither troubled to know her as fully as she deserved, nor had shown her in full the marks of his not quite conscious then, but now unrelieved, affection" (261).  It is a lovely passage, thoughtful and intelligent, but certainly not emotionally engaging. The emotion has been put in an aquarium and Nabokov is instructing his readers of its nature much like a tour guide would do in a natural history museum.

I like that about Nabokov, or at least I like it right now. My own writing has been much more the variety of bleeding onto a page as late, and my emotions are too raw to continue. I want a break. I am tired of describing the gut-wrenching pain of heartache and self-exploration.

Aesthetics aside, Nabokov as a server amuses me to no end. Me as a server depresses me a bit. I'm starting to think becoming a server for me, a woman with codependent tendencies and habits, is a little like sending a drug addict to work in a crack factory. How many times a day do I get to ignore my own boundaries in efforts to please the customer? How many times do I get to smile at a derogatory comment all in an effort to keep things running smoothly and also make a tip? Not that I don't understand the playfulness of the customers or the delivery men, but I feel myself slipping into pleasing-mode and away from the self-containment that Nabokov has in such abundance. Nabokov would make no apologies or accommodations for the customers, but of course, I do.

Perhaps that is why I choose to look at the customers from Nabokov's point of view. Even if in the moment I am wrapped up in being charming and smiling and laughing and putting others at ease, I can always come home and rewrite the scene.

Sentence Length (Despite the Failing Economy--Personal and Global)

A million little thoughts are dancing in my head about writing despite the thunderous weights of the disasters that are our own personal lives that threaten to descend at any moment and squash my dancing filaments, (you know, the usual suspects--finances, fatality, failed romances, fuel depletion, etc.) And yet, ridiculously and miraculously I am thinking about sentences. And tricks. And love.

Today I went to my internship at a small but mighty publishing company, a place I love for its location within a building for artists and for its old-fashioned printing presses that are still used with honor and love, and as usual I felt a certain pride and excitement at being involved in "the process"--that magical germination of a manuscript from slush pile to bestseller. Granted-I mostly see the slush, and very rarely does a gem make it all the way to bestseller, but nonetheless--I honor my craft and I love the editorial journey. I thrill to examine manuscripts and determine what exactly would make it work, make it great, and make it sell. 

Except today was different. Today I looked at the introductory pages of a work already well on its journey to publication and I was disappointed. There were many spectacular and brilliant aspects of this text, but for me the point of view was arbitrary and irritating. This is a subject I could ramble on and on about in a boring way for many paragraphs and it would probably matter only to me, and so I jump to a far more fascinating topic: sentence length, the subject of irritation for the other intern on duty. And of course, given the topic of all of my blogs, I must address one more topic: love. 

(Hah! You think--how will she pull this off? A blog about sentence length and love? Just watch.)

Yes- LOVE and SENTENCE LENGTH. Here goes: 

[the following is a play depicting the conversation about sentence length I had with Fellow Intern... the love comes later, in the third or fourth act]

ACT 1. Picture two erudite interns sipping caffeinated beverages. Neither wants to admit they are dismayed by the manuscript they are reading.

Intern me: So, what do you think?

Fellow intern: I'm not sure I even want to say right now.

Intern me: Yeah.

ACT 2. The plot thickens--the two interns begin to discuss language and semantics and syntax. Whoo-hoo!

Fellow intern: I'm reserving my judgement, but the language of a story is so important to me and there's just nothing happening so far in this work. 

(to the author's credit, an author probably pulitzer-prize bound, we are only 26 pages in, and we're interns... what do we know?)

Intern me: Well, for me, it's the POV that is a problem. I felt like the language was ok; the sentence structure at least was engaging. The pace increased at times of action, you know, when the sentences stretched on and on forever, no periods in sight.

Fellow intern: Sure... I can see that, but it's just such an old trick, you know?

ACT 3. Stop. The actors on stage freeze and the lights begin to swirl. The phrase "old trick" echoes through the theater. As the audience, here's where you think about the words old trick and interject an interpretive dance scene of your choice. Think of a love triangle between writer, content, and form. Feel free to dress interns up in masks and feathered attire if you feel you must. 

ACT 4. Here's where the action slows just a little, in Shakespearean tradition. 

Intern me: Sure. Huh. Old trick? Hmm... Internal rumination occurs.

ACT 5. The dramatic conclusion! Brace yourself!

Intern me: Well, I'm outta here. Have a good afternoon!

Fellow intern: Ok. See ya. She smiles cheerfully.

*****

Ok, before the tomatoes start landing on stage, let me, as director explain that the most dramatic action, of course, happened off stage, in my mind, as I started thinking about old tricks and sentence length and love.

See, here's the deal-- sure, any writer can do what this writer did, let a sentence run on and on without a period in order to emphasize the drama and tension of the scene, such as a young boy getting beat up by resident gang members. The run-on sentence serves to enhance tension, suspense, fear, urgency, and horror. But is it done as a trick? Because it has been done before is it just a routine card trick? Is it just a tired old rabbit popping out of a hat, red-eyed from partying the night before?

True,  any writer could use this technique. In fact, I could teach my Pre-AP 9th graders to use just such a trick. We could have a mini-lesson and workshop the idea in partners, and then individually they could imitate this "trick" in their own work. But here's the thing--all of the 109 9th graders in my charge will achieve a run-on paragraph; only 3-5 of them will give me chills. Those 3-5 kids who do it right aren't just on stage showing us a trick; they are performing magic.

I use the "trick" of run-on sentences myself. I like to think when I do I'm not using it as a trick. As writers we need  to address the theory of our craft and acknowledge the responsibility as artists to push on the edges of what has already been established. We need to explore language; paint lexicon; play on the jungle gym of syllables and letters that make up our discourse. We need to avoid falling into common patterns; we need to avoid relying on "tricks".

At the same time, like staring at one of those magic pictures, we need to keep a trance-like gaze on our content and let the content dictate our form. If the content calls, truly, for a run-on-no-period-paragraph, it will let us know. It will demand it from us, authentically, and it won't feel like a trick to the reader.

This is the kind of love I'm talking about today: love for our stories, love for the amazing gift language is. And it is a kind of love that means relaxing the brain and letting go and feeling the story rise out of the page in whatever length sentences it desires, waiting only for our pen to add ink to its letters.

And of course, love between people must be like this too. Love must be relaxing the mind and letting the story unfold as it will.

(See? Told ya. Sentence length and Love. What now?! Yeah, that's what I thought.)

Freaky Friday

You just never know how things are going to go. Especially while at a writing conference. In Chicago.

I planned to go to a panel at noon, another at 1:30, the art museum at 3:00, dinner at 5:00, and a reception at 7:00.

Instead, I took a nap through the noon meeting, showed up for 20 minutes of the panel at 1:30, went to Buddy Legend's at 3 for a burger and to use their wifi. Instead, little writing got done but I talked to the precocious and not-at-all shy daughter of a local headlining blues singer, chatting it up with a fellow AWP attendee, and watching SNL skits with the staff after wishing one person luck on applying to Northwestern and listened to them give each other shit.

It's a strange day. I think it will only get stranger.

It is Friday the 13th after all. 

And I realize this is not only something that occurs while at a conference. This happens while writing, dating, existing, etc. And sometimes you have to look at the strange patterns that spring up in your life and try to make sense of them.

In my fiction I have a pattern: my stories involve parent-less children. Moms abandon daughters. Boys survive mom's suicide. And babies drop out of the sky, no parents to be found.

In my dating I have a pattern: guys without mothers. Some have lived through moms leaving after a divorce. One was abandoned completely. One sat in the doctor's office while his mom had an aneurism outside.

Today, being a strange Friday falling on the 13th, I am forced to examine these patterns. Just what is going on? I posed the question to a friend.

"Do you think they're looking for you to be a mother?" she asked.

"Or am I looking for an orphan?" I replied.

Both are equally disturbing. 

Really frightening when I stop to think about it. Obviously abandonment is an issue in my life. I can't deny this--it shows up in my writing, my dating, my crying tendencies during movies like The Hotel for Dogs when orphan siblings are separated. I'm not really sure yet why this issue keeps coming up in my life, having been raised by two parents married for 34 years, but if there's one thing I know about my fiction writing, the issue will eventually reveal itself. I just have to be patient and keep noticing the patterns, keep asking myself why all of this is going on.

As for the surprising pattern of planned situations turning to surprising encounters at the blues  joint down the street? That's easy. I just like to have fun.

Doing the Write Thing

I'm sitting here in a Caribou on Wabash and 8th street and trying to think of what to do, what to write. There are escapee writers from the annual AWP conference crawling all over the coffee shop and everyone is networking and strategizing and planning and selling and schmoozing and handing out business cards all over the place, all of this while buzzing on caffeine and the intoxication that washes over a group of nerds who usually work in solitary spaces when they suddenly encounter thousands of their own kind in the marble and carpeted Hilton in downtown Chicago. There are a lot of fragile egos all over the place.

Including mine, of course. Fragile ego, fragile sense of stability, fragile first foot-hold in this new world I want to become my life. 

And I want to throw up a little. 

Perhaps it is just the overstimulation and overcaffeination, but suddenly I feel like everything must happen now--my writing needs to hit the pages now--I need to find ways to fund my life through grants now--I need to make all of these connections with people now. Not tomorrow. Not next year. It must all occur now.

And yet, much as I compelled to figure it all out now, I find my wheels are spinning. Do I get my stories in shape to send out? Do I search for viable grant sources? Do I start adding bunches of people to my facebook account? Do I update my resume? Start a website? Update my blog?

The process overwhelms me. 

And yet--what I have chosen to do, with this list before me and only 40% of my battery available on my laptop, what I have chosen to do with my precious time is write on my blog. My shoulders are dropping back into their normal place. My breathing is slowing. My stomach is unclenching. 

And suddenly, now, as I am writing this, ignoring the tweeded-out writers that are chatting and scribbling around me, watching my fingers click over the keyboard, and watching letters form on the screen, I am understanding that this is a good sign. I am meant to write. Writing brings me clarity and relief and release from the insanity that is my life--my lack of routine, funding, constant companion, stable career, and on and on. I can come back to the writing for sanity. I can come back to the screen and find solace. 

Here, now, in the Caribou on 8th and Wabash, I am starting to feel like myself again. I am starting to calm down. I no longer want to throw up. I have no idea how I will go from wannabe-writer to Writer with a capital W, but I think I must be on the write track. 

Every Frog Has a Silver Lining

So I was sitting with some girlfriends at dinner last night and as talk turned to my dating life I pulled up my sleeve to reveal something shocking to them all: a hickey. I have not had a hickey in over a decade, so it was traumatic to have to share this with them, but I was also bubbling with information about the crush who had been the one to give me the hickey.

"What happened?" asked one of my friends. "I read your blog on Friday. Last I heard you were..."

"Getting stood up?" She nodded with a smile. To which I replied, "Oh, that."

And so began our discussion of what has in a Minneapolis minute become the whirlwind of my dating life. In less than a weekend I have shifted my mindset about dating: no longer am I pining and whining and wishing and hoping. Now I am researching, exploring, trying things out, making observations, not committing to anyone and saying yes to most invitations--in short, when it comes to dating, I have become a guy. 

Or perhaps a biologist.

It has occurred to me that the best tool in the dating scene is a certain degree of levity and amusement. Thus, I have given up the fairy tale, foregone the romance of movies, and stopped expecting the frogs to turn into princes. Now I just see them as frogs who will stay frogs. The question is what kind of frog do I want to hang out with?

In my research so far, I have catalogued a number of different species, with Darwinian zeal. There are the vile cane toads, that awful invasive species now poisoning everything in sight in Australia. To be on a date with a cane toad is to be looking for exits in restaurants. Then there's the garden toad--fairly harmless, but the kind of date that makes you question why you got off the couch and out of your sweatpants. My favorite amphibian to date is the shiny green tree frog. They are charming and adorable and have soft, white bellies, and occasionally they will even chirp in a moderately endearing way. 

I have also learned, in my exploration of this amphibious species, that it's smart, sometimes, to give a frog a second chance. My frog from last Thursday, (not the hickey-giving frog, but the one that stood me up because I suggested it to him) contacted me all weekend, and so I gave him another chance and suggested we hang out Monday (post-dinner with the girls). Monday night came and so did frustration. In two hours of sporadic texting we could not come up with a plan to hang out. I was losing patience with the frog. I thought to myself--at least he's taking himself out of the running. Now I won't have to worry about how I will squeeze him into the line up. Like Darwin pointed out--a species must adapt or become extinct. There has to be a way to thin the heard in the quest for finding a decent frog.

Just as I was about to mark this strand of amphibian legally extinct in my observation notebook, he called. He proposed we grab a drink. I was already in sweatpants, and the vindictive side of me wanted to say no, but then the explorer side of me said--it's in the name of research! And so I went.

Here's what I learned: some frogs let you down and stay their normal lumpy, slimy selves; some frogs surprise you and put on a top hat and tap shoes and start singing "Hello, my baby, hello, my darling" just like the delightful little frog on the WB. This particular frog was just such a frog. He put a smile on my face and I learned all sorts of new facts about the species. In fact, this frog once did the worm in a chain with four other guys in high school during a pep-fest while wearing overalls and wife beaters with one strap undone. Such hilarious information is bound to make any good researcher smile.

Even when she gets home.

Even when she wakes up the next day.

Zombies and Vampires and Other Scary Things

Well, tonight I got stood up.

Or maybe I stood myself up.

It's a little hard to say. A cute guy and I made tentative plans which I cancelled and then we rescheduled with trepidation for a dubiously late hour cocktail after my evening class. Class ended; we exchanged texts and I gave the cute guy two outs.  He eventually took the out, and then I did what I always do when I'm slightly annoyed and disappointed, I made a joke and let him off the hook. He said he felt like a zombie and wanted to stay in; I said I preferred going out for drinks with vampires anyway.

I may have sabotaged the date from the start. 

Then, I called my soulsister and together we analyzed the situation. He's busy. It's late. We planned the whole thing last minute anyhow. I cancelled our original plan. He probably thought I wasn't really interested. Of course it wasn't like he was standing me up. Of course he's interested. Of course things will eventually work out.

But the analysis didn't work. I still felt disappointed. 

Never mind that I was a little tired myself. Never mind that I started thinking of all the things I could get done if I didn't go out tonight. Never mind that I know I am not interested in a lifelong sort of relationship with this cute guy. Never mind that I have other dates, other guys, other mild flirtations brewing in the future. Never mind that even if the cute guy did suddenly develop a devoted passion for me I would panic and worry about crushing him; I wouldn't want him to get hurt.

I still felt put out.

I began to rail against this guy in my mind. Just what was he thinking? I went out of my way to be ready to go out with him. Didn't he know what he was missing? Why did he act interested if he really wasn't? And he must be interested, right? Because if he wasn't.... well, then I'm uninteresting?

And so began the self mutilation. I must have said something wrong. I must have given off the wrong signals. I must not be so fabulous after all. If he's not interested in me, I must not be interesting to anyone.

Round and round my mind spun. Finally, it occurred to me stop. I realized I was using reason to fight off emotion. I was arguing my way out of feeling. I was pretending there was a catch, a trick, an equation I could solve to fix the problem. I was pretending not to notice the feeling that wanted out.

I finally sat down on the couch and let the feeling wash over me like a wave. It was sadness. And I stopped moving, became still, under its weight. Miraculously, the yorkie-poo who had been nothing but irritable and demanding all day stopped too and crept onto my lap. Together we were just still and sad for a minute.

Then I laughed a little, in a kind way, at the girl in my head who does this, the girl who beats herself up when something like this happens. The girl who thinks that it is her responsibility to keep people happy, keep peace, keep smiling no matter what. If someone is angry, it is my fault. If someone is sad, it is my fault. I determine my own worth by making people approve of me.

Of course, my brain knows this isn't true. And I've been able to let so much of this complex go. I can watch friends argue and know it has nothing to do with me. I can calmly sit in the middle of chaos while my mother goes slightly crazy preparing holiday meals. I can disagree with a friend and know that I do not need her approval of my opinion in order for it to be valid. 

But I still get stuck with my particular strand of neurosis--peoplepleaseria-- when it comes to dating. 

Tonight, yorkie-poo on lap, I felt my sadness and then I let it go. I chuckled kindly at that girl. I let her say her piece and then I hugged her and said, "honey, you're amazing." 

And the scary thing is, I suddenly knew it was a little bit true. I felt another wave, a wave of certainty, wash over me. I suddenly knew that I am meant to experience these bumps, that I am meant to write about it, and that someday, maybe not too far away, I am meant to find that person in my life, that great love. I suddenly knew all this and I shivered.

And I don't know which is scarier, thinking no one will ever love me, or knowing someday someone will.