November 14, 2010
Sunday
I’m heavy and slow, gravid as the fog
sweeping out of the river: what could
change me may stir within it, without me.
. . .
I’m filled with restlessness, an edge of longing.
         — Sandra Kohler, b. 1940
              American poet
              from “Novembering”
I’m not really as unhappy as my Facebook status reports, some whiny e-mails to friends, and yesterday’s sighing in French (soupirs au bord des flots) might suggest. I’m coming up on the last week (four days and breakfast, actually) of my stay here at the Vermont Studio Center, and I’m feeling a little anxiety about what I want yet to do and about how to make the transition back to my regular life, a transition that will be made all the more confusing because it will coincide with that time of dislocation and alteration known as The Holidays. I have to have my picture taken tomorrow (high anxiety) and meet one-on-one with Antonya Nelson, moderate anxiety, since the ten pages (the limit) I sent for her to read and remark on are so very not-what-I’m-about now, especially in light of what I’ve learned this week about revision and reinventing a piece.
In the pattern of the other progress reports I’ve made, here’s what I did this week in Johnson:
1. I wrote 24 pages in my journal/notebook. These page counts are very important to me. Many pages indicates much thought devoted to my work, much material to draw on. When I was in Dublin the summer of 1994, a poet staying in the same residence observed me for several mornings as I drank what passed for coffee there and sat with notebook open and pen in hand. “Do you write like that every morning?” she asked. When I said that I did, she said, “Oh,” as if to do so were the strangest thing in the world. I’ve wondered what became of her and her career.
2. I wrote 5 blog posts, including this one, with notes for two more. I’m still displaying the NaBloPoMo logo, but I’ve really lost interest in that community. (I think I said that last year, too), and I’m not posting notifications on my page there. It’s just not Holidailies, that’s for sure, but it does push me to scribble scribble in November.
3. I added a third portion to the two episodes I wrote this summer for an essay about food memories bound up with memories of sin and transgression, and read the piece at the Resident Reading session on Tuesday night.
4. I worked on revisions to “Brothers,” a story first presented in workshop in 2007. It was triggered by the memory of a confrontation with a student in about 1992 whom I had been haranguing out in the hall about his not having a critical essay done. He exploded at me that I didn’t know anything about his life, that he spent his whole damn weekend driving his half-brothers around, that I had no idea the problems and stresses that he had to deal with.
In this course of revision I learned a lot more about my character, saw for the first time that he has been rejected/abandoned by his mother, three stepmothers, and a pseudo-stepmother (a woman his father didn’t live with). I also learned that I have two similar characters named Stacey in two different stories, that a turtle gets help crossing a busy road in two different stories, and that I use “the last of the Mohicans” to refer to the youngest child in a family in two different stories ( a line I lifted from Sunrise at Campobello, a movie about Franklin Delano Roosevelt).
And I wrote “I wish I had some cookies or something” in the middle of a page where I am listing places I can insert a sentence or two that indicates a character’s motivation. It’s in black ink instead of purple, so I think it refers to me and not my characters,
4. I re-read a short story by Eudora Welty that I’ve always loved, reading like a writer for the first time, a story by Jhumpa Lahiri, and four short stories by Antonya Nelson. I saw that 5 of the 11 stories in her collection Nothing Right begin with dialogue, a technique that Robert Olmstead thoroughly discouraged in the work he saw in the classes I took from him in 1995 and 1996 (it’s a purely subjective take on the matter, but I now feel confident in defying him and reinstating my dialogue openings, if I ever go back to those long-stored manuscripts). I attended a craft lecture by Antonya Nelson in which she outlined her process of revision that spoke exactly to what I am about these days. And this morning, she sat down beside me at breakfast, after first asking if it was all right for her to sit down beside me at the table.
I’ve had a big week. I need some rest before I join my character Raymond on the parking lot tomorrow, where he is directing parking for a funeral, while I wait for the photographer to come. I already know that there is no character named Stacey, no turtle trying to cross a road, and no references to any Mohicans in this story. But maybe, considering the ways in which I have been surprising myself with my work, one of those things will appear.
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