FREE LRG COFFEE WITH POST

Alas I have been absent!!! This here MFA program is in full swing. I've been writing, writing, and reading THE stereotypical book to read if you’re a young aspiring writer -- and let me tell you, it’s a thrill.



I’m literally writing in the same library that Annie Dillard wrote this book from, so I'll be reading her descriptions and going "I'm sitting there! Annie, I'm sitting RIGHT THERE!" Very Sixth Sense, with me being Bruce Willis, obvi.

Other than the location, though, there are some key differences to our writing lives. I list these with no judgement as to which are worse or better...nay, I would not do that.

1) During the months she wrote Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie reports that she "subsisted on ... dinner, coffee, Coke, chocolate milk, and Vantage cigarettes." I have been subsisting on pints of KozyShack pudding.

2) When Annie can’t focus, she procrastinates by doodling cow skeletons in her margins. When I can’t focus, I procrastinate by writing short, inane poems such as the gem that came to me this morning which I shall call: “Refill in Roanoke” (based on a true story):

FREE HONEY BUN WITH LRG COFFEE
And your gas pumped by a man
Who will tell you he has a steel ball
pierced to the top of his penis

3) While writing Pilgrim, Annie's husband was also writing and joined her for an evening walk and dinner. I see my dearly beloved on the weekends, after driving across state lines in a Volvo with a bowl of ice cubes in my lap in lieu of air conditioning, making up rhyming ditties to pass the time because the car also lacks a stereo. If you have never driven through North Carolina with an ice cube down your shirt, searching for a rhyme to "monster truck," I highly recommend it.

But oh me oh my...I'm a fool for you, baby.



Either way, my days are full of inspiration. A current sample of my influences:






[Inspiration from the top: The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall, Alice Walker (her fiction, her essays, herself), Lisbeth Salander, Spike Lee and just doin' it in general, Will and Willow/whipping my hair back and forth]

Sunday Poetry

In my new writing program we are encouraged to write in as many genres as possible, including poetry. Since my poem-making machinery has not been oiled since I was in high school, I've been trying to write poems in my head while I'm driving. Here is the one I came up with between Charlotte and Roanoke.

To the Drunk Girl Who Won't Stop Hitting on My Boyfriend

I am not going to shit in your backpack.
I am a lady.



P.S. Confirmed: I am in Virginia (It's for Lovers!) and more posts on this turn of events are to come, once I get a card reader that works (damn you, young upstart at the Radio Shak!) and can upload some pictures onto this whatchamacallit.