Way back in elementary school somewhere, Kieran was asked to tell the things he was thankful for. I don't remember what grade, but it was early, pre-K or kindergarten maybe. He listed two things: the moon and my body. Probably, that's all anyone ever needs to be thankful for.
A lot of the beauty of Thanksgiving is lost in all the chaos: the sales, the turkeys being pardoned, the too-early Christmas music, parades, football, gluttony.
So, really simply, here are some things I'm thankful for.
My kids. These guys slay me with beauty and sadness, with their wicked (and very different) senses of humor, their talents and their perfect faces. I can't believe I made them. I can't believe they're sort of mine. (Because really, any parent knows you are just shepherding them through. They belong to something bigger than little old you.)
My crazy family. That's right. And when I say crazy, I mean certifiable. But in the spirit of real thanksgiving -- in everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you (1 Thes 5:18) -- I wouldn't trade them. Even the really crazy one. It's hard to practice being thankful in all things, but I believe in it. That said, I'm also thankful for modern psychiatry and anti-anxiety drugs.
My own body. I hate it a lot of the time, but it works really hard for me. Tugging the dog uphill, working outside. It's sturdy, and it's healthy. And someday, I should probably send a thank you card to my liver.
Sunshine. Just that. Me, and the dog.
We love some sunshine.
This guy. Because even if we were the last two suckers on earth, we would figure it out, and it would be ok, as long as we were together. Which, also, incidentally, is why we should probably do The Amazing Race.
I was just admiring my friend, poet Jane Springer's work habits. She rolls out of bed, doesn't get dressed, sets up on the porch with her laptop, some iced tea, and a full pack of cigarettes and sets about writing. For the whole day.
I am a hub of distraction.
This morning, I slept in. Because last night, we decided to watch another episode of Twin Peaks at 10:45. And then, what's another glass of wine at 11:45? Before I went to sleep at around 1:00, I remember saying, You know what would be great? If you just shut the door and let me sleep tomorrow.
And I did. I said goodbye to my teenager, but missed the little one getting on the bus. I slept until almost 10.
When I got up, I got online, answered emails. Checked to see how many people liked the photos I posted on facebook. And got a phone call from my brother.
Cascade Mountains, WA
My mom is coming to visit for ten days. I saw her last in 2010, but she hasn't seen the rest of us since 2008. And while this should be totally exciting, it's really mostly totally anxious. Everyone is anxious. We're anxious about being anxious. And my brother's reaction to anxiety, especially high levels of it, is to talk about it.
At 11:05, I finally got off the phone, only to be called by the teenager, who was on his lunch break, and wanted a cigarette. So I drove to McDonald's, where they were all gathered, dropped of a cigarette and went through the drive-thru for a free cup of coffee and nothing else.
Because I'm also broke.
I haven't written anything yet. Or even opened up the dropbox where my writing is. Truth is, I probably can't today. Not with the anxiety hanging over me. I'll probably clean the house and walk the dog. The cleaning will be scattered and less efficient than usual. I'll flit from one task to another and the end result will be that the house won't look much different. But I'll pace around for a few hours.
Writers I know spend long days working, or reading, because that too is part of the process. My brain is like a misfiring weapon a lot of the time. Doesn't, or does, too much. Too rapid. I've been told to quit drinking, to go to bed earlier, to not answer the phone, to get help, to focus on my work, to become the asshole who can steal way, can hole up and write, as Sugar says, like a motherfucker. I've been told to man up.
But the truth is, this is who I am, and this is what has made me into a writer when I'm able to do it. I should do some of these things, sure. I should also eat more leafy green vegetables. I would write more if I could ignore the phone, if I could not be so invested in my kids.
And when I think of that, I think of when I used to go to mass with my parents, and the way my dad would grip my hand during the sign of peace. He'd grip it like it was all he had to hang onto. Us. Would he have been happier, more productive, if he could have shrugged us off a little and not clung so tight? Maybe.
I had a massage today. I love massage, and it's something I rarely indulge in, but we had a Groupon, so I tried a new place. It was great. A one-woman show. She had small but strong, blunt hands.
Normally, when I'm getting a massage I think a whole list of I should statements. I should go to bed earlier. I should drink less. I should get up earlier. I should eat more yogurt. I should do more yoga. It's a litany in my head.
I did that today, but I also had a very specific thought about what I actually need from a massage therapist. I need a witchy woman.
Massage therapy has been sanitized, made clinical by spa culture in the United States. I'm not saying I want a dirty massage. But the decor is pretty standard: light blues, grey and taupes. Soft piano music or something that sounds like waterfalls. Zen looking gardens. Rocks. No smell stronger than lavender or maybe vanilla.
I would love to walk into a dark red or purple room. With things like gold elephants and stars. Wtih a moon hanging from the ceiling. I want sage sticks or patchouli or amber, rising in actual smoke.
I want a woman draped in weird fabric, with wild hair and big hands. I want her to be older than me. I want her to spend a long time on each limb, and to notice what's there, but never tell me. To know that I work with my hands.
I want exotic music. Indian or African, nothing sterile and relaxing. NO YANNI, OK? I want to feel entranced, enchanted, and when she's done, I want her to tuck me in, like I'm a kid going to bed.
She'd make us tea afterward, and read my fortune. Not my real fortune, and nothing like You will meet a tall dark stranger, or You will travel faraway. More like, she sits me down and tell me what to do with my life. When we sit, I notice that she has little stars and apples woven into her hair and they are silver. She never doubts me and she doesn't take any shit from me. She has a scar through her lip. Her tea is wicked strong and black and when I leave there, I feel soft and altered, but charged up for something else.
That's what I want. Monthly if I can get it. If you know where, message me. I think she probably doesn't exist.
When I began homeschooling Kieran in January, one of the things he said to me was, "You should start your own school."
It had never seriously occurred to me. His point was that many of his friends were envious of his new venture, learning at home. They liked the idea of gathering around a table, talking, moving at their own pace and led by their own curiosity. Or maybe they just think I'm cool. Or lenient.
Then Kieran said, "Grandpa had his own school. You should do that. It's probably like, your thing."
My dad, on the left, with his brother, Johnny on CBS radio.
At its height in the 1960s, my dad's school -- The Joe Stanley Accordion Studio -- had more than 125 students. He made his whole living between that and performing. He had his own office downtown, saw students in music rooms there, and then eventually saw some students at home too. He was at heart, both an artist and a teacher. (For a poignant piece about what it was like to be my dad's student, check out Dennis Page's piece, The Accordion and a Boy.)
Armed with this in my blood, this week, I launched a new effort. We've been, as I told Liam yesterday -- hustling: hanging flyers, making contacts, handing out business cards, building a new blog.
You can find out more here about summer sessions, private tutorials and editing.
Recently, out of nowhere, Liam said to me, "When you lose someone, you become a different person." Probably, that's just the thing I needed to step out. I'm going to try this thing on my own. If I'm lucky, I'll live up to a small part of my dad's legacy.
June is national LGBTQ Pride Month. If you know anything at all about me, you'll know that I'm always hesitant to reveal anything about myself. I'm like a slow leak, hoping no one will notice. But here, in honor of Pride Month, I'm listing the books helped shaped my queer identity, that kept me queer company, so to speak, since I was a young teenager.
Mapplethorpe's Warhol
The Andy Warhol Diaries. No shit. I read these when I was fifteen, and I fucking loved them. I liked, too, that they were not really written as diaries, but spoken, publicly into the phone, meant to be recorded and shared, meant for public consumption -- like all of Andy's work. I like the telling, about other celebrities -- John Travolta: hello. And the pictures of Andy's boyfriend, Jed, who was a twin, and who was beautiful.
Less than Zero. I read this at fourteen. If anyone had paid attention, I probably shouldn't have, but I did. I loved the bleakness of this book. The language, the despair, the cocaine. It was confirmation of what I thought might be true about LA. That it was sunshine on the outside, and something dark and damp right under the surface, black and bottomless. I had been to southern California, had been to Hollywood even as a little girl, and felt it then, the pull of something terrible. There was the repetition of the phrase Disappear Here. The cars and pools and repeated TV screens. And tragic, doomed Julian.
Possession. I first read this at eighteen, and then a few times since, and it changes for me every time. It's probably not traditionally considered a queer book, but it's queer all over the place. Not just in the relationship between the two women, the poet and the painter living quietly together. The painter's sharp neuroses, but even the straight relationships are queered a little. The way they finally come together, the images of the empty white bed. Beautiful, cold Maud. It's a book extraordinarily aware of the body, and the body as separate, as closed off from other bodies, the body alone. So much so that the collisions are finally shattering.
Written on the Body. So sly and so beautiful. I think I read this at about nineteen, some summer in between college semesters. This book made me want to write. It made me want to write about love, and about the body, in small, beautiful, crushing ways.
Really, every book shapes you. Every book becomes what you want it to be for you. The magic of these books was the language, the emotion, the revelation, finally, of what it means to be, not just human, but a separate bubble, colliding, like Pynchon's kiss of cosmic pool balls.
The beauty of queer to me is that it's complicated. It's not either / or. It's both / and. It all those letters before and then some. It shifts beneath your feet. So if you were expecting a blanket coming out statement somewhere in this post, there it is. It's more complicated than one sentence. It's a fragment and a run-on. It breaks all the rules, of grammar, and logic, and otherwise. Like love.
The universe woke me up this morning. This is markedly different than the way I've woken up the last few mornings, gripped with panic, shaky and exhausted from not sleeping.
Yesterday, I saw a job posting that spoke directly to me. It was a two-year position, with the possibility of tenure track, for a 20th century Americanist, literature and theory heavy, a 2 / 3 load, at a small, prestigious college that just happens to be right up the street.
Where were you five years ago? This is the question I plan to ask my students today, with the follow up of where they will be five years from now. Five years ago, in 2007, I was still thinking of myself as a 20th century Americanist, still working through the coursework of a PhD. I was writing on Baudrillard, jazz and the Cold War, the birth and death of the American suburbs.
And then I stopped. I was unfunded. I was driving an average of 300 miles a week back and forth to Binghamton. My reason was simple and practical. Even if I did finish the PhD, I wasn't going on a national job market. It wasn't enough for me just to have it -- especially when I was paying for it. I didn't see the sense in having a PhD -- in hand, as they say -- only to sit around and wait for a job to open up at a local college. What are the chances of that happening?
Apparently, pretty good. There it is. The job. Within walking distance.
And me, without a PhD in hand, or even in progress.
What's the message in that, universe? The job that I never though possible is right in front of me, and it's not mine to have. Why?
Because it's not mine to have.
I talked with a friend, whose opinion and insight I trust, about the position, and about that fact that with the choices I'd made -- despite some really crazy coincidences -- it wasn't possible anymore.
Instead, he said, Work on your novel.
All panic aside, I'm going to try not to forget that. Sometimes the signs from the universe are subtle. Sometimes you miss them. And sometimes, they wake you up in the morning, after letting you sleep in, and rock your shoulder, reminding you to get to work.
The universe threw me a ball last week. Not a curve ball. Not even fast pitch. More like a lob that said, Hey, are you still in this? I caught it. Here are three very awesome things that happened at AWP last week:
The Carve Magazine Esoteric Award: This year's theme was LGBTQ. I found out Thursday morning that my story, "Angels," was one of four winners. This is huge for me. Not long ago, I told Georgia that I really wanted to win a queer award soon. As someone whose first book is maybe two-thirds queer, this is nice recognition, a reminder, and acknowledgement.
I had the pleasure of meeting Matthew Limpede, the editor at Carve, who told me in person that not only did the story break his heart, but that they were shocked to find that the story -- whose main characters are both male -- had been written by a woman. That made me happy. Not because I want to masquerade as something other, but because that balance is important to me. I like to disappear inside of fiction. So what he said reinforced that it's possible.
my very first MR
The Mississippi Review 30th Anniversary Issue. I lost sleep over this baby. I knew it was coming out, and did not know until I saw it whether or not I would be included in it. Of course, MR launched my career. Without Frederick Barthelme's complete faith in me, not only would my publishing have occurred at a slower pace, but I would have spent more time doubting myself. I know no one so gracious or inspiring.
So, before I knew I'd been included, I grabbed my old grad school friend, Barrett Bowlin, editor now of Memorious, and told him to come with me, because if I wasn't in it, tears were imminent. Barrett's tough. He's a dad and a husband. He's seen some tears. When we got to the MR table, though, editor Elizabeth Wagner handed me a copy. Take one, she said. You're in it.
No tears. In fact, it was much the opposite. This is a huge anthology, and tremendous company: Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, Raymond Carver, Rick Moody, Amy Hempel . . . to name just a few. MR's been a huge part of my writing life, so it's great to see Rick's tenure there properly recognized, and compiled into such a beautiful book.
Ocean State Review. A day after the MR 30 and "Angels" flurry, I walked over to the Barrow Street table, to see if the new Ocean State Review was out, and they were handing out flyers of recent contributors. My name was on it. I grabbed it. Wait, I said. Wait.
I just about drove the intern crazy.
Um, that's me, I said.
Oh, he said. No one told you?
We went back and forth. Apparently, not only had they accepted my story, "Knoxville," but there was, as editor Peter Covino said, a buzz about it.
This story had come close -- been named a finalist -- the year before at American Short Fiction, but ultimately lost. It's a hard story, one I worked on for over a year, hammering through the old song, Knoxville Girl -- a murder ballad so old, no one knows its exact origins -- and fleshing out the boy, Will, and the poor roving eyed girl, only to kill her all over. I love this story. It's violent, and terrible. Biblical and trashy.
Needless to say, I was thrilled.
What are you? Fiction or poetry?
poems, mostly.
Some other highlights from AWP: I was totally on about the lace tights. You couldn't avoid them. The men have begun to look less scraggly and more Mad Men. The women, influenced by Downton Abbey. Seriously, AWP fashion is a big deal. I saw more Edwardian looking buns than I have since a Merchant Ivory film.
In the meantime, I'll be home in my own lace tights, trying to catch up on writing. Of all the pins and stickers handed out at book fair tables -- including my usual favorite Lets Make Out -- there was one that simply said, Remember who you wanted to be. That's always the benefit of AWP for me.
My kids. These guys slay me with beauty and sadness, with their wicked (and very different) senses of humor, their talents and their perfect faces. I can't believe I made them. I can't believe they're sort of mine. (Because really, any parent knows you are just shepherding them through. They belong to something bigger than little old you.)
