Summer of the Hermit

Hello darling friends.



OMG! Sorry! I didn't mean to startle you!
I know it has been All Quiet on the OverCher Front for a while. I would make excuses but I know it has probs not been a major tragedy in any of your lives...



...and if it has I am truly sorry. Today is the first day of what I like to call my Summer of the Hermit. From today to the end of July, my life consists of

1) earning tiny wages in exchange for pouring coffee/asking "would you like whipped cream with that?"
2) sometimes exposing my tiny pale face to the sun
3) writing my thesis. it is a novel.

I am saying this publicly because what is the point of having a Summer of the Hermit if you are not going to get a novel out of it? And stating this embarrassing goal on the internet seemed like a really excellent way to make sure I do it, instead of watching True Blood every night on my futon until I fall asleep.

Because it is boring and annoying to talk too much about writing, I won't be blogging about the novel. I'll just post the word count at the end of my muuuusings. Most likely about Cher. WHAT ELSE IS NEW.




Ach. We have so much to talk about. Burlesque, for instance. Holes in the ozone layer. Aquariums. Or maybe just my emerging theory that all films would be improved by the addition of a puppet (ALL films.)

Until we meet again...

WORD COUNT: 32,824

On Convalescence

Last Friday, I contracted a sudden and mysterious illness.

It involved a lot of sudden passing out.



I would be lying in bed, thinking soup would be so nice. i will go to the kitchen. i will prepare some soup . I would have it all planned out. I would stand up, go about ten feet, and wake up who-knows-how-much-later on the floor.

I had recently been watching a lot of X Files (what...you haven't?), so I kept going, "Am I LOSING TIME??? Was I just ABDUCTED?"



This went on for some time, until my good, good friends managed to save me and drag my butt to a hospital, where the doctors gave me some kind of Grogginator medicine. When I finally regained consciousness, my friends had some questions for me:

Why are you unable to feed yourself?
Why are you unable to keep yourself hydrated?
What is wrong with you?

These were all good questions, so C and I came up with a plan, wherein I stayed at his place all week while he went to work. This way, if I was abducted by aliens again (or passed out...WHATEV), someone would be around to slap me awake. Perfect.

As I settled in, this plan appealed to me more and more. It would be my first experience as a convalescent. I had seen Little Women enough to know this was a fine thing to be.



People bring you broth! They rub your feet! You develop a rich interior life! BLANKIES!



After a couple days, when I exhausted the entirety of Hulu, I decided this would be the perfect time to write. I had tea, I had water, I had a whole silent apartment to myself. An artist's dream! I was going to be JUST. LIKE. WINONA RYDER!



It ends up that this is not as easy as it looks. In the movie, Jo dons her purple velvet hat and pulls out her inky quill and writes down a book on seal skin or tree bark or what the fuck ever. Convalescent Victorian ladies literally had nothing else to do except write.



Who has that stamina? Why is it that when I stare at this glowy rectangular screen for 12 hours a day it completely addles my brain? Why is the internet always, always more interesting than the creation of art??? These are my questions for the ages.

Right now my answers are: it's possible to write with an internet connection. You're just going to make very, very bad art.

Like this.



Or this.



Or even this.





And then, even when you turn the internet off, and face the wide, silent abyss of an entire day where you have nothing to do but write...



It's a roller coaster of feelings.

One moment, I'm sitting alone, gazing out the window, my fingers flying across the keys as idea after idea flow into my head. Everything is glorious!



Five minutes later, I get up to eat a cookie and when I get back to my desk, the whole flow is lost. Someone has stolen my inspiration!



Suddenly I am sunk into deep, existential angst. Who am I? What am I doing on this earth? Do I know anything at all? Am I, or my pursuits, even remotely worthwhile?



What will become of our writing heroine? Will she shut up and write something? Or will she doodle sad elephants in the margins of her journal, in between free verse about her feelings?

STAY TUNED.

The Writing Life: Typo Edition

Sometimes when I am writing very seriously and studiously, I begin typing random memories or events and, upon cracking myself up, type "Hahahaha" afterwards. So that I can have an official record of the extent to which I crack myself up. You might take this as an illustration of the deep-seated psychological effects of writerly solitude,



but then you would be a hater.



The point of all this is that I was typing something about this tea we used to have at my house which was ingeniously called



After typing this, I wrote "For THAT kind of move. Hahahaha." (Yes. My writing today is brought to you by my 2nd-grade self. She may be immature but she has fabulous stirrup leggings.) My computer then auto-fixed this word to "Hashanah." Which suddenly made me seem very serious about Smooth Move. Which I am. Hashanah.

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]

Turn Up Your Radio

Perusing through journals tonight I found a list called "My Favorite Songs...In my 21st Year." Thank you, 21-year-old self.

Slow Dance - John Legend
Valerie - Mark Ronson feat. Amy Winehouse
Rock n Roll - The Velvet Underground
Nothing Can Change This Love - Sam Cooke
Call Me - Aretha Franklin
The Big Payback - James Brown
Caravan - Van Morrison
Stop Breaking Down - White Stripes

Watching that performance of Caravan confirmed for me once and for all that whatever the writer equivalent of Van Morrison is, that's the writer I want to be. If it requires a stretchy purple-sparkle suit and vigorous leg kicks, this is no obstacle for me. If it requires reading poetry and humorous memoir in dive bars whilst the haters hate, so be it. I believe I will skip over the drunken slurring, however. Sorry, Van the Man.

Tralfamadore. And Firewhiskey.

I am the Mayor of Slackertown when it comes to this blog. Mostly because I lack direction, such that I find myself thinking "should I blog about the hilarious number of times Harry gets tipsy in the course of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows? Or race in the Americas? or the superiority of Barry's Tea?"

But I have been inspired by Lau's blog which remains boldly topicless and full of wit n' grit...so I shall trek on. Here's some thoughts on my....artistic vision.

Mostly I have been thinking it would be a good idea to make a cut-out-paper animation of Slaughterhouse Five. In something like this style:

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes."

I had a dream about the whole thing that was just superrrb.

In other news, I did not get into the Brown MFA. [Cue WOMP.] I am hoping that this failure will give me a certain ennui that will contribute to my writing, much like Harry Potter's parent's deaths allowed him to bellow "YOU KILLED MY PARENTS" at climactic moments and thus lend a real dramatic edge to his adventures.

Speaking of artists, here are some pictures of my mother's hippie commune. Apparently they put on these fantastic plays featuring costumes like:



My mother played Titania (she's far away, in the greenish dress):



and apparently also dressed like Rosie the Riveter:





One of my TFs introduced herself by first saying the name of her great-grandmother, grandmother and mother. I think for me too that would be one of the realest ways to talk about who I am.

Love love,
me

The Dream

I am sometimes plagued by the vague fear that next year, upon undertaking the writing life, I will look down at my typewriter and see all work and no play makes MC a dull girl written all across the page, and then Christian will have to come back from work and take the ax out of my hand.



(This is an actual photo of Roald Dahl's office.)


Luckily, I have concocted a better plan. OK, I could still maybe get into an MFA program, which would put this plan on hold a couple years, but that is boring logistical talk. As we say in the non-profit world, “let’s stay in vision space.”

The Dream: =

Me



+ A Trailer



+ A Great Paint Job



+ Some Radical Literature

+ Some Frizzle Costumes (soon to be debuted on The OverCher!)

All Equals

A Radical Bookmobile making daily stops at after-school programs around the city, driven by a Ms. Frizzle-esque educator who does dramatic readings and loans books.

More to come on The Dream.

Also appearing soon on the OverCher: Guest blogger Goomba.

Oh, I Didn't See You There

Four days until a flurry of MFA program apps are due. Clearly time to start a blog in which I write about writing. I know...you are flipping out about the wit of the title.

I'm currently in the Rustic Homeland, in the two square feet of our house that gets internet, attempting to finish what the University of Michigan calls an "Academic Statement of Purpose." Though I thought the whole reason I was trying to get into an MFA was so that I could NOT be an academic, and could instead live in a small but quaint apartment with a metal speckled tea kettle and write about life. And occasionally take on side projects such as starting a school. Unclear how this would all work out schedule-wise...instead of worrying about that I have been spending a considerable amount of time planning my future apartment design, and daydreaming about how next year I will learn to bake bread, always clean up after myself, and never drink coffee, only Irish tea that's really from Ireland. To think I was once responsible for eighty children's safety and summer learning. How the mighty have fallen.

But seriously it has been quite cool to write a statement of purpose and clarify for myself that I really DO have a purpose, which is to write, and dedicate myself fully to that, in the hopes that one day I will learn to balance some semblance of a teaching life and a writing life. How thrilling.

Currently Reading:
Best American Short Stories 2009, edited by Alice Sebold
especially "Yurt"by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum