Debriefing

SO.

Just in case you didn't read the last post or forgot or something, I was at the Esalen Institute last week at a writer's workshop with Cheryl Strayed and Pam Houston. Big Sur is foggier and chillier than you'd think.

All week I composed pieces of this blog post in my head, trying to figure out what I was going to say and what I was going to keep to myself about this experience. It would have been a lot easier to write this if I'd still been at my old anonymous blog; I went through an interesting emotional arc from Sunday to Friday, and I'd love to have the chance to decompress about that in thousands of rambling words. I also have a lot to say about experiencing Esalen, not all of which I'm eager to set down under my real name.

So rather than trying to write the most exhaustive or illustrative post about the experience, I'm going to use a technique I learned from Cheryl, and make a list.

1. I am so much more enthusiastic about rewriting now than I was at the end of last week. About the prospect of writing a scene four different ways, even if it takes precious time. I think the way they made us do a pile of exercises and then only mentioned some of them again, leaving the others to be washed out to sea (or expanded upon in one's own time), helped enormously with the feeling that effort expended on writing is disposable, should be disposable, in order for good work to appear at the end of the road.

2. Pam showed us how literary dialogue is supposed to go: at cross-purposes, two separate conversations going on at once rather than direct communication. This was a total revelation. Everyone I talked to about it said the same.

3. The whole time, I was on a knife-edge between pleasure that a place like this exists and astringent cynicism. Very hard to take seriously at the same time as it was a relief to open my mind to hippie woo-woo stuff and enjoy.

4. My writing exercises improved noticeably (to my eye) over the week.

5. I kept coming up with questions that I knew it would be stupid to ask, because they'd send us down a tangential rabbit-hole that would have been great for a lazy afternoon seminar but not good at all in this limited environment. Things like "can MacGuffins exist in lit-fic, or are they just for genre writers?" and "how do you keep from writing the boring story?" and "why is it good to show instead of tell and bad to tell instead of show? Who set up that standard?" Some of these I brought up with other writers over lunch or dinner and we had interesting talks.

6. I made amazing, wonderful new friends, and am terrified that they didn't like me as much as I liked them.

7. I didn't miss Facebook and whatnot at all while I was there, but once back, I fell into the same pattern as before I left. I hope to remember that feeling, though, and treat the commitment of FB a little more lightly.

8. "Yeah, but Alice Munro is a wizard."

9. Form will set you free! Alton Brown says this about keeping organized while cooking, and he's exactly right. Writing a sonnet sounds like it'll be a lot more complicated and difficult than writing free verse, but at times, the limitations can help you to imagine your way into far more interesting places. I saw this come true under my pen this week (not literally with a sonnet but with something similarly formal). Previously I knew this wisdom in a very different context: classical Hollywood cinema labored under a LOT of restrictions and still turned out remarkable art. Sirk wouldn't be Sirk, in all his hilarious symbolic glory, without the Hays code.

10. I smoked too many cloves and even a few regular cigarettes. Aside from looping conversations that drifted well past bedtime, this was the best thing about the evenings there. I miss smoking so goddamn much.

11. One of our exercises was to write down the question at the core of our work. I had a very hard time with this at first, although eventually I came up with an answer. But more on that in the next post.

It was a remarkable week and I'm very, very glad I went. I wish I could do a big workshop like this every season, four times a year, because it's just the sort of thing that quantum-leaps my writing into a new place and presses me back into the confidence I sorely need to get to work.

PS: Everybody to whom I described the wikibook thought it was a neat idea. Nothing is going to keep me from getting this thing done, even if it takes two years.

Stars in My Eyes

I saw this, in different form, shared on Facebook a couple of weeks ago and haven't been able to get it out of my mind. In a panicky way. I don't understand how it follows, exactly, and the idea that life is THAT short just freaks me out. Maybe next year it'll seem like wisdom.

--

Over the weekend I went to see Florence + the Machine at the Hollywood Bowl. The Bowl itself was not what I expected and was extremely cool. I look forward to going there again with a picnic basket now that I know the rules. If I can find one. There were people walking around with traditional woven baskets with flap lids, like you see in period movies, and when I said to Matt "I don't know where you even get a picnic basket like that," he replied, "Bears. Well, one bear in particular."

This is why I married him. For wit like this.

In any case, Sunday was probably the second time in my life I've been to a big stadium concert. When I was a kid, my parents wouldn't let me go to such things, and when I was in my 20s I couldn't afford it. I've only been to a handful of concerts in my life at all - probably more operas and symphony performances than popular concerts, if I think about it (unless you count shows at the VFW when I was in high school, which isn't quite the same thing). There are lots of surrounding aspects I don't like about concerts - the noise, the people, the trouble, the expense - and it just doesn't often occur to me to seek them out.

I generally go when the artist is something special to me, or when I'm curious about what the live experience will entail. I really want to see Sigur Rós, for instance. What the heck do people at their shows do? Stand and sway? Check their watches? And I want to see Beck one day; he's special. I was so, so glad to see Joanna Newsom last year - both reasons coincided with her. She's one I'd like to see again, but she does her last tour date for a while in San Fran in a few weeks. Next album, I'll definitely catch her. Florence was special, and I'm glad I got to see her, although I wished I'd been a bit closer to the stage.

When I look back, I actually feel grateful that I didn't get to go to many concerts, because now I like for it to be special, a once-in-a-great-while kind of treat. If it's an artist I just like, I would generally rather not go, because the experience of having stars in my eyes when watching someone bring their art to moving breathing life is what I prefer to just having a good time with some live music. This is probably stupid. But it's how I feel.

I set out to write this post with a plan to tie Florence and Joanna to insecurities in my writing, but the connection isn't really forming on the page, so that might be all I have to say. Oh, except: I got a baffling rejection last week. The story was something I scalpeled out of the [non-]horror novel, something that I thought stood on its own pretty well.* The stand-on-its-own thing didn't enter into the rejection, to my surprise. The editor seemed to expect an arc for the main character that I had no intention of resolving, that wasn't really the way I'd built the story. Like expecting Humbert to straighten up and stop lusting after Lolita. But now I know that the story doesn't really work as a story, which is useful information. I'd sent it out as something of an experiment rather than an expectation, anyway.

And one other thing: I signed up for a five-day writing course at the Esalen Institute next summer. It's taught by Cheryl Strayed and Steve Almond, and I am pretty sure I signed up for it the very moment it was available. I'd been watching the website like a hawk for the sign-up link to appear. I can't wait.

*For those of you who've read the book, it was that little diary piece about the arrogant jerk Caretaker who doesn't clean the storm and who meets the Authority in the shape of his father. 

The Dim Star

Before I get going - yesterday I blazed through Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother? in about four hours. I know there are people who read this blog who have challenging mothers, and if you're one of them, get yourself to the library and put your paws on this book. I admit bias, because her Fun Home is in my top ten favorite books ever. But really. Read it. Epiphanies await you inside. (And don't listen to this sexist asshat.)

All right, so, today's subject. Remember how I said I went to the beach in part to see if I could make some biggish writing decisions? The one that was troubling me the most was which book to buckle down on: the [non-]horror novel or the KUFC book. For one or the other, I need to set a deadline and commit to it and get to work.

I could reproduce for you the dithering I was doing over these two projects, but I do not think it would make good reading. In short: the most significant attraction for the [non-]horror novel was an agent telling me it's an extremely saleable idea and she wants to see a rewrite if I do one, and the most significant attraction for the KUFC book was a heady and totally new blend of confidence and organization. The most sig. negative for the [non-]horror novel was having to write from scratch a book I'd already written and am a bit sick of, and the most sig. neg. for the KUFC book was fear (creeping terror, in truth) that I'd get to the end and be similarly fucked.

Trust me that there were many more things to consider and I've rifled them all.

Mid-last week I was so tired of worrying about it and wanted so much just to write that I opened up KUFC and started writing. I'd only gotten to about 9,000 words on it, which is really very little, before setting it aside. Last week I added 4,000. After my third day of work on it, I guessed that my decision was made.

They Simply Dig

My friend Dave, who is a visual artist and much, much wiser about the creative process than I am, posted a video of Louis CK talking a bit about his creative maturation on my Facebook wall a couple of weeks ago. I think I had previously conflated Louis CK with some vulgar-for-the-sake-of-vulgar comedian I don't like, or maybe I had just seen an act of his that was over the line for me, but anyway I had him in my head as a person whose work I had little interest in. He's started to get a lot more attention among my circles in the last few years, but I never investigated. And I waited a day or so before I watched this video. Don't make the same mistake I did; watch this now. I know it's 10 minutes long, but watch it.

After I saw this, I knew I had to blog about it. Because this is a central worry for me, that at some point I'll have used up all my ideas and be left with nothing. So I keep believing in trunk stories, fiddling with them and polishing them and sending them out, instead of writing new stories.

This is wrong. This is the complete wrong thing to do. The only way to do work is to do reams of it, to write and perform an entirely new comedy special every year, to dig deeper and deeper and deeper until you're sure there's nothing left. That's when you find your best stuff, the stuff that distinguishes you from the eight zillion other comedians out there, and that's when you go forward.

I know exactly how lost and resentful and terrified Louis CK felt when faced with Carlin's process. The old stuff, the fifteen-year-old jokes, it all feels so valuable. I clutch the old stories to me with sheer panic at the idea that they're disposable. They felt like the best I can do, and how can I just throw out the best of me?

But creative work has to be disposable for it to get better, and the best I can do is way, way ahead of me. That's the lesson I'm assembling this year. Even if it's a lesson some of you reading this learned long ago, and you think me very silly and creatively immature for just getting it now, you've got to be patient and understand that it's a total head-spinning epiphany for me. I have to trash everything before I can unearth what I really have to say. There's a reason Louis CK just kept getting bigger and bigger - he was getting better and better, along with doing his own stuff more and more strongly instead of jokes that could be anybody's jokes.

And the thing I've been repeating like a mantra, as if I can make myself believe it if I repeat it enough times, is that you can't use up all your ideas. That human life is so rich and so wide that even if I thought I'd put everything I had into one story, I can put everything I have into another story I write next year and it'll be completely different. And not only that, you can still mine the same thing in innumerable ways. Tiny Beautiful Things, heck, Strayed's entire career, is proof of that. Very little that she's written has not looped back to her mother somehow, and yet it's all worth reading.

Those trunk stories? Sure, they've been polished to a high shine, but they're only copper. The gold is still ahead. That's what you get when you dig deeper.

Power and Inevitability

Well over a year ago - it might have been in 2010 - my dear friend Catherine introduced me to Dear Sugar, an advice column on The Rumpus, by sending me a column of hers that was about writing, as I recall. It might have been a different column, one just about life, but when I try to think about how I read her work for the first time, all I can remember is a day and night of clicking the back button and then clicking on the next column on the list, devouring them all in a tiny enlightened space. There was so much beauty, so much wisdom, so much life in her columns, and most of what she said shot straight to my heart. Her columns touched various parts of me, inspired me in many different ways. But I loved her completely, the pure and drooling and nameless love that a reader feels for a writer when those words click into an empty part of you.

I couldn't bear not to know Sugar's real identity, so I looked it up. I'd never heard of Cheryl Strayed. I didn't read her first novel; I read a chapter of it, and it was so intensely written that I was pretty sure I couldn't get all the way through it. Catherine did get all the way through it and she told me that yeah, it was like that the whole way, and wasn't easy to read, unfortunately. But I knew from her column that a second book of hers was soon to be released.

That book was Wild, which you may already know about. It's a memoir of the summer Strayed hiked the Pacific Crest Trail, and I knew that it was going to be big-hearted and glorious and filled with a kind of truth that was downright holy, but I had no idea it would make the kind of splash it's been making. Which is to say: Oprah has restarted her book club just to get Wild into as many readers' hands as possible.

Of course I knew I had to read Wild. This writer changed my life. This was apparently the book of her career. I knew that something incredible waited between its covers. But I also knew that it was in hardback, which meant it would be expensive and annoying to read. And I knew that since it was selling so well, it probably wouldn't be into paperback for more than a year.

So I waited and waited and heard about Wild and how amazing it was from every possible source, feeling that lame hipster burn. Because I could have told them all exactly how amazing Strayed was, since I knew about her a long time ago (sniff, hair toss).

Two days ago I was at a Barnes & Noble in Bozeman, Montana, and I'd had enough. I broke down and bought the hardback. And yesterday, I sat outside on the porch of my friend's little house near Whitehall and I read about a hundred pages of it, adding on to the 50 I'd read before bed the previous night. While I read about Strayed connecting to the spread of nature in California, I listened to the birds and felt the breeze, I watched as my friend's father dug in the earth, and I looked around at the trees and the sun and the mountains. I felt the same thing I've been feeling ever since I drove into this state, leaving the dull farmscapes of Idaho and driving straight into the most take-no-prisoners humbling experience of my thirty years and ten months. I felt here. I felt alive. I felt real.

Now I'm not sorry I waited so many months before I bought Wild. I'm not sorry that the indie bookstore in Hollywood where I saw Strayed had sold out of it. As I read about her sensation of being the only person in the world, alone with the landscape and its power and its inevitability, I looked at the sun in the big sky of Montana and I felt her sitting there with me, telling me her story, woman to woman.

I wrote this post last night outside on my friend's porch, getting eaten by mosquitoes, listening to the evening and looking at the fading palette of the sunset. The sprinklers were going, water splatting against the tarp stapled over the greenhouse. As I wrote, the sprinklers shut down for the night, and from then on, there was only utter silence.

Dear Sugar: The Other Night I Went to a Reading

Margaret Atwood once said - and I don't remember if it was in this wonderful book or in an interview or what - that once of the very best things you can do as a writer is to give readings. I was close to dumbfounded at this advice. This might sound arrogant, but if you're a writer you probably recognize it as true: you hear the same goddamn advice over and over and OVER again. It comes in different forms, and sometimes it appears as the opposite of itself, but there are certain things that stay true and bear repeating and you can still get good and tired of hearing them from every possible source. But this was new. This was the first time I'd heard this advice.

It astonished me to hear something new in the sea of yeah-yeah-yeah, so I instantly doubted it. How are readings really going to help your bottom line? You reach a small roomful of people in most cases, a couple hundred in an auditorium at best (and most unlikely). But she's Margaret Living-Canadian-Treasure Atwood, so I figured she knows best, even if I didn't really understand.

As of Monday night, I understood. I went to my first-ever reading (...I think? There must have been another one before now, surely, I'm not that introverted) at Book Soup on the Sunset Strip, and the reader/writer was Cheryl Strayed. This UTTERLY FANTASTIC and not-large bookstore was quite packed with Sugar and Wild fans waiting to hear her. I stood up for about two hours, all told. From the personal perspective, the one where I'm me living in my skin and this is the woman who's inspired me to be a better and truer human in 84 different ways, it was incredible. When she signed my book, I said idiotic stuff, including "thank you" about 6 times in a row, which was really what I wanted to say most even if it didn't come out the way I wanted it to. I wanted to hug her and bow to her and ask her about my mom and cry into her nice black dress. But there were too many people also waiting to say thank you and watch her hand write into their books.

From the writer's perspective, so much was accomplished: big sloppy fans of hers, like me, got to hear her voice and see her in living life, which I'm sure was gratifying for her. People walking by looked in, saw the crowd, came in for a listen, and discovered her for the first time. She sold a ton of books that she wouldn't have otherwise sold (the bookstore sold out of Wild), all of which have the potential to be lent around to friends and lead to more sales. The bookstore itself profited quite a lot (yeah, I bought some more books, some of which I'd intended to buy and others not so intentional). People in line for the signing got to trading stories and learned about even more books that needed reading. And now I'm telling all of you that if you have the chance to hear Cheryl Strayed do a reading, don't miss it, and that will lead to STILL MORE sales and word-of-mouth. It's just a big round robin of book-reading and book-buying. Even though it's only a little, person-to-person thing, doing a reading - not like appearing on Oprah, for instance - it makes a non-insignificant, stone-in-a-pond kind of impact. Lesson learnt: Margaret Atwood is right about everything.

So go see Cheryl Strayed if she comes to your town. Here's her schedule for the rest of 2012. If you have no idea who this Cheryl Strayed is that I'm talking about, buy this book. Don't ask questions, don't protest, don't read about it and think about it before buying. Just buy it. I can pretty much guarantee you won't be sorry. If you insist that you can't afford it, here's the archive of her Sugar columns at The Rumpus, but it's less fun by an order of magnitude than reading it in book form, and harder to fold down pages and write YES!! in the margins.

In other news, I think there's an essay on its way out of me this evening. I'm feeling a little less confident about my KUFC book, for reasons I want to write about in the essay. It has to do with Salieri. That's all I'll say.

Miraculous Birds

Finally some writing-esque news. Cheryl Strayed is apparently doing The Book Tour That Never Ends for Wild, and she's coming (back?) to Los Angeles in late July. I am SO going. If I said I had a special connection to her, that would be wrong, but to say that she's never helped me gain perspective on my own life, or that I don't admire her writing, would be even more wrong. So I'm really looking forward to seeing her in person. July is a banner month, in fact - Singin' in the Rain is coming to theaters for one night only, and I've already bought tickets for that.

And now back to Mi Vida, the continuing telenovela of my move to L.A.

This move has meant that Matt and I, previously spread out over a two-bedroom townhome, now live in a one-bedroom apartment. While not tiny by city standards, it's about a third of the space to which we were accustomed. Our TV/game center, both our computer setups, our living room, and our dining room now occupy a single room, rather than three. It's been an awful lot of work to make it uncrowded and homey, and I still don't love the way the tech is cheek by jowl with the comfy chair and sofa. However, we have no road noise whatsoever in our apartment, where previously we lived on a mainish road and couldn't really have the windows open and still retain peace; we have a slightly vaulted ceiling in the main room due to being on the third floor; and we have a small but pleasant balcony with a large sliding glass door, and before we couldn't use our patio at all due to its smallness and juxtaposition to the road. Even aside from these perks, I am kind of loving the effects of downsizing so far. I truly am creating a space where everything belongs somewhere, and the Raptitude guy was right, it has an incredibly positive effect on one's mental health.

I chose to set up my computer next to the glass door, and one morning while "working" (intermittently staring at the computer and out the window), I saw a wee brown bird buzzing up and down by the big fluffy tree/bush across the way. (I have no idea what most of the flora is out here, so, um, big fluffy tree/bush.) It was a few seconds before I realized I was looking at a hummingbird, because it hovered in midair the way no other domestic birds do that I'm aware of. It wasn't bright green and pink the way textbook hummingbirds are, it was brown and mottled, but it definitely had faster-than-light wings and a long thin beak.

Squeal! The only times I ever remember seeing hummingbirds were for fractions of a moment before they sped away, and I had to say "was that a hummingbird? Is that what they look like? Or was it just a really fast sparrow?" So seeing one was pretty cool for me.

I went right out and bought a hummingbird feeder, an antiquey red glass bottle screwed into a tray with flower-shaped holes, along with some packets of food that you mix into water. (Yeah, I know it's essentially sugar in a packet, but it wasn't expensive and I don't want to fuck up a homemade recipe and hurt the birds.) I hung it on the balcony and watched obsessively for about half a day. Nothing happened. I hung it a little further out, worried, thought about buying flowers to attract them...and then I saw a little brown thing come up to the balcony, look intently at the red bottle, and beeline away. "Looklooklook!" I shrieked at Matt (who was peaceably playing Heroes of Might & Magic), far too late for him to see anything.

He asked me what I liked so much about hummingbirds, anyway. Nothing, I told him, I had just rarely seen them. Later I realized that was mostly the reason, but there's something else, too. Something that has to do with me not being able to grow any sort of plants to save my life, and having such pale skin that I burn like a forest fire even under SPF, and being seriously allergic to bugs, but desperately wanting to be out-of-doors as much as possible, anyway. Something appealing beyond words about the idea that I could hang up a feeder and tiny, miraculous birds really would show up and hang out on my balcony.

And they have. Yesterday I worked most of the day, looking to the left 847 times to see if there were any birds at the feeder, and I had customers on and off all day long. They drank my sugar water. A couple times they even sat on the edge of the feeder and folded their wings while they sipped. I haven't tried to get pictures of any of them, because they mostly drink from the flower-hole that's farthest from me and I can only see their edges around the bottle. But it's still so damn cool.

Feeder, hummingbird-free at the moment, unfortunately

I could connect this to how awesome Los Angeles is, how much I'm enjoying it here, but there are hummingbirds in many, many places in this country. What it really connects to is the joys of this particular apartment - finding happiness in things like this balcony, which is small and directly faces my neighbors' balcony across the way, which theoretically means they can watch me at my desk all day long, but which has brought me so many little mental rainbows with its morning sunshine and afternoon hummingbirds. The surprising amount of storage space here, presently full of disorganized life-stuff which I will eventually put to order. The teeny-tiny kitchen, which is kind of like adventuring in a houseboat. The seriously cool space-saving dining room table and chairs I bought at Ikea, despite the moving guy's well-intentioned comments amounting to the conclusion that our stuff is cheap and shitty. And my new address stamp, which has a swirly bird on it.

Life is good.

PS: I am falling far behind on correspondence, including thank-you notes and e-mails. Please forgive me if you're waiting for something from me.