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i had a puppy. his name is sebastian.

i wasn’t going to write this post — i was going to think out loud about why critiquing student essays is such an onerous endeavor. but i do that a lot, and it just is what it is, so going on about it isn’t going to change that.

i wasn’t going to write about bash for some of the same kinds of reasons. he’s gone from our family, and going on about it isn’t going to change that. it just is what it is.

we had to get rid of bash because he had gotten erratically violent. he would attack his puppy-housemates sometimes for seemingly no reason, other times because he felt some resource of his was being threatened. like food — he felt he owned all three bowls, and so would attack the other 2 dogs if he felt he didn’t get to own them all. sigh.

or when i was brushing him, and another dog was within three feet of him. then there were all the times we couldn’t figure out what triggered him — if we could figure the trigger out, we could take steps to minimize or eliminate it. but if we couldn’t, well, yeah.

he was getting more vicious in his attacks, and would even redirect his attack to boi and i when we tried to break it up. last straw was him landing max in the doggie ER with major puncture wounds on his front left leg. max could’ve lost use of his leg.

max is ok, healing like Wolverine, hating is conehead life right now. but what bash did to him was too much. max and sammy were always afraid of him, skulking about the house, trying to avoid him — and boi and i had become afraid of him, too, uneasy around him and always on guard to stop things before they happened, whatever they would be.

this is no way to live.

giving him up was one of the most painful things i have ever done. i couldn’t even speak coherently to the poor intake associate at the Humane Society. but she listened, deeply, when i told her both what he was doing, and with whom and in what kind of home bash might be able to be ok. i didn’t feel she judged me, and she really took to sebastian, who can be charming and adorable.

if he hasn’t tried to eat his kennel mates or gone after the HS workers, they will keep him and try to train him and see if he can get placed. if not, well…

he’s gone, either way. it hurts, but there is also a huge sense of relief. all 4 of us are more relaxed than we’ve been in a long while. i hope it ends up being best for him, at least eventually, too. the decision needed to be made, but i don’t have to like it. i will always wonder if there was more i could have done. i will always love him. i will always remember the sweet times with him. i will always miss his face.

This Isn’t Easy As It Looks…

…this daily writing thing.

Obviously, my 3.1 readers say – you have not exactly been blogging everyday.

What has held me up the last few days? Why am I behind in my NaNoWriMo daily quota/promise to myself and my beloved readership?

I teach – you all know this. I teach face-to-face, in a bricks and mortar set up at the University of Arizona, and I teach online to younger kiddies – junior and senior high school mostly – through a program at Johns Hopkins University. So, this fall, I have a total of 27 + 19 + 9 = 55 precious young minds and writerly souls I am responsible for guiding along the path to fruitful self-expression and applicable academic skills development.

There are many deadlines and requirements for responding and fussing over mundane details like tracking attendance and emailing students who don’t submit required and important exercises and assignments on time and answering emails that are cute because the student is actually engaging intelligently with the work and wanting to talk in more detail than the course requires about her writing process and the ideas she has for her next essay…

I get a bit caught up in it all. Both the crappy parts – like acting like a cop, policing late or recalcitrant or otherwise disengaged and at-risk students – and the good parts – like answering the enthusiastic student emails and having real conversations about what this student learned from our last unit and what that student wants to do for his major – and I totally live for and so draw out and sacrifice a lot of my own stuff to experience all that good energy and exploration and growth and relating to real people stuff that makes my FRIGGIN JOBS WORTH the shitty pay and unrealistic commitment of time.

Yeah, hmm. So that’s my excuse. I’m busy nurturing young minds and souls, dammit.

The irony is not lost on me here. I nurture these other minds and souls, encouraging them to take time to find their voices and express themselves…. And do it by sacrificing the time and energy I need to do the same for myself.

My relationships with my students – when they’re good – do some of that for me. They are an outlet for creativity and expression, and they challenge me as a human to be more open and flexible in how I live and think about the world an how I classify and judge my fellows 2-footeds on this planet. So it’s cool that I allocate time and energy to Teach Well. I love it, it makes me feel alive, and it is Good Work, both for me and the world.

Excellent. BUT… This is all still no reason why I should not be putting my foot down on the time suck that is my teaching life and just write.

It is sel I almost wrote that it is selfish. How revealing. Time to write is time not working, so it is selfish. No wonder it is so easy for me to NOT write. I don’t value it like I do all this teaching stuff, even the hideously mundane and annoying crappola that comes with the exciting and energizing relationship parts of working on writing with students.

Hmm, another revealing turn of phrase: “working on writing with students.” Do I really? I do work with students, and we focus on their writing, definitely. But I don’t work on writing with students – they are the writers, and I work with them. I am not a writer working on writing with other young writers. We do not write together. I do not work on writing with anyone – I write alone, if I do, and then I go teach it to other people.

Ok, so maybe I’m pushing it as far as parsing the implications of my wording there, but I think you get the idea. It all gets back to me not being a writer, not going through what I ask my students to do – and thinking that this is ok.

It isn’t. My writing is a vital part of me as a teacher. If I don’t experience it, how can I guide others through the difficult and often crazy process that is the composing of a text? I f I don’t do this thing that is hard and challenges me and – even if I suck at it, which I suspect I do – what kind of a teacher can I be? Because I am denying myself the same things I encourage in and for my students: free time to play, the permission to play, the belief in the value of play and self-expression… The insistence that moodling around in words and ideas is a worthy expenditure of time and energy, and not a waste, not a selfish act at all.

It’s not just about teaching, either. I am less of a partner and a sister and a daughter and a friend if I am not living as I need to. I may classify it as selfish, to take time away from these people to “just” sit here and write, but it is not. Right? I want to ask – still not sure of my own answer and feelings about this. Silly – because I do all I can to encourage those I love to do their own things – write, play guitar, take pictures, whatever it is that they love, whatever they love to do to play – and I insist that they deserve this time and that it will make them better people and thus better partners, siblings, children, friends…

Teacher, teach thyself.

Seriously. I should put that on my mirror, so I see it everyday.

I could get all caught up in how my little line graph thingy on my NaNoWriMo page tells me I won’t meet the 50,000 word goal for the month until the end of Jnauary. And I could then try to dissipate that stress by declaring loudly how busy I am with Important Things like my teaching obligations.

Or I could just shut the eff up and write. And know I am happy if I write every day, and not that I meet that word goal. I wrote a poem draft today, and did this blog – a bit self-indulgent, to be sure, but it is a good pep talk and what the hell? I want this month to challenge me to get back into a writing habit (or just “get into” – not sure I was ever IN a steady writing habit before) – and learning to quash the shit that gets in the way of that.

I have been disengaged from my teaching the last several years. I am burnt out on the mundane details of it, like the drudgery of grading and of tracking attendance, but more importantly, I am also lacking in passion. I used to believe this work I did made a difference – now I am uncertain if I have any lasting, positive effects on my students and the world through what I do in my classrooms.

I have lost a sense of purpose for my work – a conviction that what I am doing matters.

I teach the same stuff over and over:

Yes, you need to have a point you can articulate to make your essay effective — it’s called a thesis.

No, you can’t just tell me that you loved the movie – you need to analyze how it works, how it made you love it.

If you make a statement about how that song gets a message across to its readers, it helps to have evidence from the song to back yourself up. Quote lyrics!

Yes, you can break grammar rules, but an academic essay peppered with fragments, run-ons and misspellings isn’t likely to win you any points.  Break the rules on purpose and for a specific effect! Not because you didn’t know the rules.

It gets old.

Especially since I no longer believe that… hmm, let me just be blunt: I don’t believe in the academic essay anymore. Not one bit.

Yup, I said it. Out loud.

I am a teacher in academia, working in a course sequence that has as one of its goals the preparation of students for the writing they will do throughout college, and I do not believe that the kinds of essays we teach are useful.

That said, I do still believe in everything I listed above – writing is about communicating, and it really does help if you know how your readers will react to sentence fragments and if they produce a cool rhythm in your prose or are just annoying, it is important to have some sense of purpose for your pieces, being able to really look at something and talk about how it works is cool and keeps you from being taken in by the oodles of silly shit out there on the Internet, and being able to back up the things you say if you’re arguing something is pretty key to your ideas being entertained at all by anyone.

The problem is, is that the “academic essay” is completely lacking in context. It is a sterile exercise in purposeless analysis. And no one writes this kind of thing anywhere else but in undergraduate coursework.

Because this kind of essay is used by instructors across the disciplines as away to get students to prove they know things – that they’ve read the chapters assigned with some sort of critical attention, that they memorized the facts and dates and theories and can do some minimal assessment of them, that kind of thing – I feel obligated to make sure my students can do this kind of writing. And I have seen students’ abilities to do basic textual analysis get weaker over the years. Blame it on underpaid and overburdened high school teachers, blame it on having to teach for tests like AIMS, blame it on the Internet or texting or whatever (which I don’t frankly buy into) – but the lack of preparation in this arena is real and definitely more profound that it was when I first began teaching.

Anyhow… So I feel obligated to “get down to basics” or something and teach basic analysis and expression of said analysis. Not quite the 5-paragraph essay deal, but it’s feeling more and more like just that with every class period I spend focused on thesis statements and body paragraphs that have claims and evidence and explanation and that tie back to said thesis statement.

I have watched my teaching move to focus more and more on these aspects of writing and less on writing as communication, as expression of a self, as playful exploration of ideas and experiences. All because I have felt guilty about wasting valuable class time on that kind of thing – those more intangible aspects of writing – when my students so very much need practice with academic essays to survive college.

In so doing, I’ve killed the joy in teaching I once had, because frankly, teaching like this is boring. Like I said before, it’s writing that is almost totally removed from reality (except for the “survive school” reality), and so lacks passion and engagement for any one – students, me…

In a moment of beautiful synchronicity, an article was passé don to me by a colleague: “Language, Power, and Consciousness: A Writing Experiment at the University of Toronto” by Guy Allen. Allen describes a curriculum he developed, a bit by accident, while teaching a course called “Effective Writing.” There is a lot to his article, of course, but it boils down to this: he discovered that by teaching personal essays he improved his students’ abilities to write effective expository essays. Direct teaching of expository essays did not improve those abilities.

Let me reiterate: direct instruction in expository writing skills didn’t improve students’ expository writing abilities, but teaching them personal essays did.

Well, COOL.

This guy ended up teaching an intense regimen of personal narratives, combined with direct work on craft (exercises in eliminating wordiness and clichés from writing; how to replace passives and forms of “to be” with active, concrete verbs; being detailed instead of vague; building strong, parallel phrases, sentences, and paragraphs – that kind of thing). Students applied the craft exercises to their personal narratives, revising them throughout the course. All of this was driven by a focus on communicating – these stories were shared with others, and so demanded that the authors have a clear goal for their work, and that they utilize the craft skills to get it across.

They got it. They wrote and revised and were passionate about what they were writing because it was their lives and ideas and experiences being communicated to real people. They could get distance on their writing and analyze it and the experiences they were trying to convey because they cared that readers get what they wanted to say – so they were invested in the entire revision process.  They didn’t just tell stories – they crafted them, imbuing them with energy and purpose and the power to actually reach and touch readers.

These skills then carried over to all their other writing, even the “academic essays” they had to write in some classes.

There is a lot Allen had to say about why this worked – the power of narrative to engage us and help us think more deeply about everything and help us make the world make sense… About the power of treating students as writers and working to improve them as writers – rather than improving their writing… And I will write about that in detail in a future post. But right now, I just want to say how FREE I suddenly feel. Freed from this life-sucking teaching focus that I’ve fallen into over the last few years. Freed from the guilt that if I teach something aside from basic academic writing (whatever, really, that is), I will be failing my students.

I want my students to feel they have something to say, that they are writers, that they can convey ideas effectively to readers, and that writing is so very much more than regurgitating course content or proving mastery of grammatical conventions for a grade.

If I can teach them that, I will have done something real in the world, I believe.

Warning: rant ahead!

George Takei responds to Clint McCance. Go Sulu. Where did they find that McCance guy? How in hell does anyone think his resigning and “regretting” his choice of words is enough? Amazing. Just fucking amazing. How do you apologize for saying, “I enjoy that they sometimes give each other AIDS and die”?!

And wow. People say this kind of shit out loud? On purpose?

And then there’s the little boy who went as Daphne from Scooby Doo for Halloween, and some of the mothers at his Christian preschool came up to him and his mom flipping out about it and worrying about how his choice of costume would make him gay. Read her blog post here. These women felt it was ok to come up to a 5 year old and his mother in public and say whatever they wanted to about how damaging his choice was.

He is 5. It is a COSTUME.

And that dude from Arkansas — I don’t even know where to begin with that. I don’t think I will. Takei is right — he is and ever will be a douche-bag.

I am not sure what to say here. More than anything, I am dumbstruck by this kind of thing. That people can say things like this about others and mean it. Feel justified in saying it. Believe it. Are supported by others who also believe it.

I simply don’t get it. How can you hate someone so much simply because of who they choose to love? How can you judge someone by the Halloween costume they choose to wear? People really believe that allowing a 5 year old boy to go as a female character for Halloween will “make him” gay? What kind of intelligence is that? What kind of logic? Do these people read? What kind of closed, stunted and narrow mind does it take to feel that any of that is a good thing to do or say or believe about the world?

I’m sorry, I’m not being very accepting and understanding here. I simply cannot wrap my own head around how someone could think this way.

Words are powerful. They have a direct, physical impact on the world. Look at all the teenagers recently who have committed suicide because of bullying — anti-LGBTQ bullying specifically. You say something like McCance did, and you could contribute to the ending of a life. Do people GET that? I mean, really?

Because if they do, I don’t, I mean, I can’t… Seriously?!

What makes people hate another group of people so deeply? It’s a more than a little flippy to think that someone out there would feel free to say things like that about/to ME. And I look at my life, and wonder how the heck anyone would ever be able to conjure up that kind of intense hatred for me. Seriously, folks, my life is pretty bland. What do I do that is so terrible, so threatening, that that kind of response would ever be understandable? I work too much at a job that doesn’t pay me well enough, but that makes me happy most of the time despite some of its random B.S. – and that does pay the bills. My partner does the same. Evenings, I come home to my partner and our three dogs, make dinner, watch some TV or a movie, read a bit, play with the dogs, talk with my partner about our days… If we’re not too tired or stressed, we have sex — like most couples, we’re often tired and stressed and simply holding each other and relaxing is enough or even all we can do some nights. Weekends, we fix things around the house, go grocery shopping, clean the house, maybe get out for a bike ride or hike. We call our mothers regularly, hang out with friends when we can carve out the time, and try to squeeze in some creative time — he, to practice guitar and write spoken word; me, to write and learn how to use my camera.

Wow. Reading all that, I can TOTALLY see why someone would find me threatening. I have a stable life, a loving relationship, I own a home and pay my taxes and bills, and I drain my brain every semester to teach your children how to write so they can succeed in their college classes and jobs.

Damn, I am evil, aren’t I? I must have an FBI file somewhere. Ninjas following me around to make sure I don’t do anything to undermine the very foundations of society, like, you know, giving my partner a hug.

I keep trying to find a way to “get” people who think and feel that way, and just can’t. I don’t know why I need or want to — maybe it’s that I’d feel safer if there was some rational explanation for that kind of thinking, which would allow me to believe that there might be a rational means of combating it.

But the point, I guess, is that there is no reason for the kind of actions and statements I reference above. I love, I live, just like anyone else — I just happen to do both with a queer partner. That’s it. That’s my crime. My partner was born with the same genitalia as mine. My partner is genderqueer, daring to live as the man he is despite what those birth genitalia were. People who love someone of the same sex as themselves, or who realize that their genitalia are not an accurate determinate of their gender, by those simple facts, no matter what kind of people they are and what good they might be doing in the world, deserve that kind of reaction, according to some. By simply changing who my partner is, I became one of those deserving of that kind of thinking and judgment and hatred. People just like me are getting attacked by these hurtful words — and are being attacked with fists and knives and guns, too.  It is so arbitrary, so random, so… unjustifiable. It can just take my breath away sometimes.

The Dead Dad Club

On an early episode of Grey’s Anatomy, Christine tells George that she’s “sorry he had to join the club.” She’s talking about the dead dad club, which you don’t even know exists until you join it. George just had to take his dad off life support, and Christine’s father had died when she was nine. George tells Christine that he “doesn’t know how to exist in a world where my dad doesn’t.” Christine nods and tells him that this never really changes.

I wonder if this is a club you can join even though you just spotted your dad shuffling around Trader Joe’s last Saturday morning. (I mean, I really saw him – flesh and blood and misty breath on the mirror if we put one in front of his lips. I’m not seeing ghosts. My dad, as far as I know, is very much alive and kicking in a medically verifiable kind of way.)

When does a father die in the eyes of his child? When does a daughter feel her dad is really gone from the – well, her – world?

Mine was dying, on life support, for many years. He was never really what you could call there in any real sense – he seemed to find my brother and I messy, loud, and annoying. We were something to be handed to our mom for care and attention, and then trotted out when we were clean and quiet and doing things like getting A’s in school.

Once we moved to Tucson, when I was just 11, and dad’s affair with my mom’s best friend came out (we had actually moved to Tucson as a way for him to follow her out here – her husband had been transferred out here), he got mean. I know now what to call what dad did: emotional abuse. I think the only reason it never turned into physical abuse was because my mother went all fierce mama bear and threatened to kill him if he ever touched us. Dad, rightly I believe, didn’t test her.

But he was mean. He was cold, emotionally unavailable, and was critical more often than not when he spoke, rather than loving or open or supportive. He would withhold touch and eye contact, turning his back on us, literally. He began drinking a lot, becoming what professionals would call a functional alcoholic. He didn’t miss work, and managed to be charming and polite in public. When we all went out, he would show us off, which could look like love and a true parental pride, but from my point of view – born of the stark contrast between this public performance and his home treatment of us – was nothing more than him working to bask in some reflected glory.

Case in point here: After working my ass off in high school to get great grades and make myself attractive to Big Schools, I got accepted to some of those Big Schools. For whatever reasons, I set my heart on Wellesley. I earned some big scholarships due to my hard work, and the school offered me decent money, such that my family only needed to provide about $3000 a year total for me to go there. We were not poor. This would not destroy us. I knew dad was pleased with my acceptances there and to Yale and Barnard and Williams and Mount Holyoke. Of course this would be ok.

He said no.

I fell completely apart in the living room, literally collapsing on the floor. After some tense words from my mom, in that same tone I imagine she used when ensuring he would never hit us, he relented. After all, how could he explain how his daughter, accepted to all these great schools, ended up at the UA?

So, yeah, anyhow. I worked for years, with mom’s encouragement (“he’s your only father” she kept reminding me), to build a relationship with him. And we had one of sorts. Polite, comfortable enough most of the time, never really deep. But there.

And then there was this Event. I screwed up, owned it like a good adult does (I was 36 at the time), apologized. And got told that was no good: “it’s broken and it can’t be fixed.” Now, there’s a lot more to the story, but I need you to trust me here: what I did was not as traumatic as all that. It sucked, and I was stupid, but it’s not like I emotionally abused him for years or had cheated on his mom and had planned to leave the family and never apologized for any of that (yes, I have some unresolved anger here). That was 7 years ago. After years of me apologizing when he and I would fight, and him never apologizing for his role in any of it or for anything he had done to hurt me, I. Was. Done. I told him he could not treat me like a child anymore, and I apologized again, asking what I could do. He repeated how broken it was. So I blinked, went a bit numb, and responded, “Then call me when there’s something I can do.” I then turned on my heel and walked out.

For 7 years, my dad woke up every day and chose not to call me.

Sometime over those 7 years, my dad died for me. But then again, he was there in Trader Joe’s, breathing and talking to his wife and buying wine.

Then again, I walked right past him and he didn’t notice. Then again, I am not even close to the person I was the last time he saw me, and he has no idea – doesn’t know my ex and I had bought a new house, doesn’t know the ex is an ex, doesn’t know I came out, doesn’t know my amazing partner and that he and I were parents for a while and will be again and that I have a cool 4WD truck and that my career is really really cool now.

Then again, I did learn to live in a world where he wasn’t – and that was actually long before he and I stopped talking. So. Welcome to the club, Chris.

What’s in a name? Or, am I still gay?

Almost three years ago, I came out. I was obviously in a bit of denial for a long portion of my life, having gotten married to a boy and living as a straight woman until that point. Not many people were surprised when I came out – I seemed to be the last to really get it.

When you come out, labels are really important. They are your way of sharing your new identity with the world, of getting a grip yourself on who you are/are becoming, of separating yourself from what you were before. Since I came out and left a boy, it seemed obvious that I was a lesbian.  And since I was indeed interested in pursuing relationships with women, that made sense to me, that label. It let people know I was not heterosexual, gave me a community and identity to be associated with (like a secret handshake, a label can let you into a previously locked room), and helped me see myself as different from the woman who had been married for 16 years to a biological male.

So, there it was: I was a lesbian. I even cut my hair, thinking that somehow made me more gay – when my hairdresser cut it too short once, and I ended up with what I learned was called a “dyke spike”, I guess I did at least look more gay.

But then I began dating my partner. We had been friends for years, and she had an interest in me, but we were both with other people – and yeah, for many of the years of our friendship, I thought I was straight and so wouldn’t have considered her as dating material even if I wasn’t married.

So far, so good, label-wise. I was a biological female dating another biological female. Lesbian it is!

Hmm, not so fast. My partner, while born in a female body, had long known that she was not a she – he was definitely male, and was at the point in his life where he was beginning to be ready to live that way. I was there the last night he went out all femmed out, in heels and with delicately painted toenails; I watched him go through his closet and drawers every couple of months, giving away more and more of his female clothes; I heard when he first started talking openly about wanting to go on testosterone; I was at the doctor’s with him when he got his first shot, and was with him when he gave himself his shot for the first time.

He began working out differently, consciously building a more male body, helped along by the testosterone. His body changed and is changing as the testosterone influences him more and more – he has more muscle mass, is beginning to grow facial hair, and his voice is almost unrecognizable from how he spoke before.

He has trained himself to walk, stand, sit, and talk differently. He has changed his name legally, officially removing his old identity from his life.

And we are still together, I am in love with him and he with me, we are planning on getting married and adopting a couple of boys, we share a bed and a whole life. I call him boi and my man and we joke about being husband and wife.

And that makes me… a lesbian?

Not so much, eh?

I came out. I declared myself not heterosexual. I turned my entire existence upside down and destroyed a marriage and hurt a good man to be able to say I was and to be gay. And then I fell in love with and committed to… another man? What does that make me? Am I still gay? A lesbian? What am I?

I worried for a while about my identity, as I had invested a lot in separating myself from my heterosexual life. After all I went through to set myself up in a gay life, to be seen in the world as a gay person, if I was now with someone who identified as male, was I negating all that work and struggle and change?

It’s all a lot more complicated than the binary system we are taught to divide the world by, I discovered in a very visceral and undeniable way.

I go by queer, if anyone asks. So does my partner. Some people dislike that word, considering it a label with too much hatred attached to it.  For me, it is freeing – I am not heterosexual – as my partner is not a biological male, and we can’t partake in the social and legal privileges and benefits that automatically come with heterosexuality. But I am not a lesbian either, as my partner is not female. My partner is genderqueer, choosing not even to identify as transgender, as that does not describe how he feels about himself. He is male, comfortable with being effeminate, liking being fluid in how he experiences and expresses his gender.

I have learned to let my gender expression slip around a bit, too. I never used to go around all femme, in heels and low-cut shirts and, occasionally, make up. I was brought up to be a “good feminist”, which meant I rejected all those girly things – they were just tools of the Male Gaze, there to keep me subservient to men. Real women didn’t give in to what society was trying to convince us was the “right way” to be female.

But what does it mean to be female? To be male? Does it matter? Am I not queer because I identify as female and use female pronouns, while my partner identifies as male and uses male pronouns? Am I not a strong, independent, modern woman because I choose to wear frilly bras and matching underpants, and I let my partner open doors for me and carry the groceries? Is my partner not male because he was born female? Is he not male because we don’t identify as a heterosexual couple?

I know I’m happy. I know I am amazed at what I’ve learned about myself and how complex people are. I feel lucky to be where I am, with who I am, experiencing life the way I am. That’s all that really matters.

Something I Don’t Usually Tell my Students….

Writing terrifies me.

Writing makes me feel naked and flabby and weak.

Writing is one of the most difficult things in the world for me to do. It hurts, mentally, emotionally, and yeah, even physically a bit.

I will do just about anything to avoid writing. My brother calls it cat-waxing – when a writer cleans her house, takes out the trash, weeds her yard, washes the dogs, re-organizes the papers on her desk… waxes the cat… anything, anything, ANYTHING but just sitting down and facing/filling that empty page.

How ironic then that I am a writing teacher, and hope to inspire college first-year-students year after year to write and find their voices and to get comfortable with writing… and to see writing as powerful and positive and a force for good in the universe.

I preach day after day, week after week, that writing is an important tool for us all. That we all have the right and need to speak out, express ourselves.  Writing is a way to process whatever horrible things we’ve gone through, to work out how we feel and think about how the world is run and how we are treated by others. Humans make sense of the worlds they move through by creating stories – we narrate our own lives, tying everything together in neat plots with clear motivations for all the actions and reactions our main characters and we engage in. Then, we tell those stories out loud, in some fashion, even if it’s only over drinks with our closest friends, and validate ourselves in the world.

I believe all that. I really do. I can get all teary-eyed and emotional about the subject if I let myself really go on a rant about it – and if I’ve maybe had a glass or two of wine to loosen me up.

And I love it when students get it, when they find something they really want to say, and then work and work and finally discover a good way to say it.  And it works. The essay they write may not get an A, but it does what they want it to – for the first time, maybe, they wrestled with words and WON. They got the little buggers to do what they wanted – to say something at least reasonably close to what they hear in their heads when they think about something important to them.

It’s kind of cool to see their faces when they have that success. There’s a self-satisfaction and quiet power that they start exuding when they hit that point – like they actually believe they can make an impression on the world.

So, yeah, back to me and my writing… If I believe all this, if I feel it on that level, why don’t I jump joyously out of bed every morning and run first thing to my journal or laptop and start laying down those word bricks, thrilled to be building yet another…

Something. Crud. The metaphor died on me there. But you get what I mean.

I don’t jump up and write because it is HARD. Trying to find the right words to put into the right structures to say what I think I mean when an idea is floating around in my tiny pea-brain is HARD. It’s sooooo much easier to just let half-formed thoughts cruise around in my head – I mean, I know what I mean, so why go through all the drama of making sure you all do?

And then there’s the freak out of wondering what everyone will think about me based on what I write and how I write it. As a writing teacher, I feel particular pressure to be “good” at writing.  God forbid if my students see me writing incomplete sentences or not punctuating correctly. Or rambling. I might sound like I don’t know what I’m trying to say… My internal editor goes crazy when I know my students might be reading blog entries. I kill ideas before they ever leave my head, worried that they might open me up to – GASP – responses from readers. I fret over how readers will judge me – if they’ll think I’m an idiot or not qualified to be teaching writing to 18 year olds or just a menace to society in general.

With my entire reputation and self-worth wrapped up in the words I drop onto a page, is it any wonder that writing terrifies me? That I do not jump up and dance my way over to my computer to lay down my thoughts for the entire world to read?

Sigh.

It’s just easier to not do it. It’s hard work, and it scares the crap out of me to put my ideas and reactions out there.

But hiding like that – from the hard work and from the interaction with other humans – actually does not end up being easier. Oh, it feels like it at first, when I’m sipping some Cabernet and watching “So You Think You Can Dance” instead of slogging through my thesaurus to find just the right word, or struggling to articulate a feeling that simply refuses to be concretely defined.

But I die a little every time I don’t write. Part of me withers a bit more, gets weaker, fades away.  The thoughts I don’t express, don’t capture in words and put out for others to see, simply disappear.

Lately I’ve been feeling pretty insubstantial – empty, invisible. I’m cranky, tense, irritable – my poor partner has had to deal with me being insecure and generally pathetic – and I spend a lot of time feeling inadequate as a teacher, an administrator, a mentor for my tutors.  How can I spend my weeks encouraging students to just let go and experiment with words if I’m not doing it? How can I profess to believe so strongly in the power of words and how they can help us heal ourselves and change the world if I don’t participate in that process?

Talk about hypocritical. And just kind of dumb. Time to get real again.

everything has changed, a rough draft

coffee filters, leg warmers, and the lesser of two evils

i dump fragrant grounds into the filter,

while dogs mill about my cold feet,

and i stare out at the pre-dawn gray of my yard

thinking over her words.

49 of them

after 7 years,

7 times 7,

hers, not his

because “it’s broken and it can’t be fixed” were his last ones.

what could he say after that?

after deleting,

with just 7 words,

one per year,

30 years

of me apologizing to him for what he did to me?

of me trying to say what would make him love me?

so she speaks for him, fishing for words from me.

coffee steams the window, and dogs settle on my feet,

and my fingers, weighted with responses,

reach for the keys.

but instead, just one settles

the cursor on delete

clicks

and I choose silence.

for my students

Cycling breathes air into my lungs, and opens up spaces in my brain that let me see the world more clearly. Today, as my legs spin my pedals, my head becomes all potential and quiet, like the nano-second between lighting and thunder; as the rain tickles my skin, my eyes stop their usual shifting about and settle into a focused, steady gaze. My heart rate slows, ironically, as I bike stronger and faster the less I think. I am not a mulit-tasker or worrier or lesson planner right now – I am my breath as it blows through my nostrils, my legs as they carve small circles in the air with my pedals, my arms and abdomen and back as they hold my bike tight and straight.

I am not my tutors’ mentor or my comments on students’ essays or someone’s daughter or any of those fragments of activities that alternatively cohere and shatter to make up my self in any given moment. I just

Am.

did i grow within my shadow?

it is fall. i find it interesting that for many, spring is the time of anticipation and growth — for me, it has always been fall. there is power in the growing dark, a safety and comfort in colder air and longer shadows, an energy in the chill wind and shorter days and gentler sun that allows me space to breathe and expand.

my brother and i both grok on autumn — maybe it’s genetic. i do know we both tend towards faith and the muse-type music and black and white horror films (where’s my copy of nosferatu?) a lot, but never more so than once the nights start getting longer and that ineffable (at least in tucson) shift in the feel of the air and sky happens…

why do you think people prefer different seasons? what is it that makes us yearn for, revel in, rejuvenate in different seasons? it’s like travel — when you ask people here they most want to go in the world, most people have these regions or countries they have always wanted to visit, always felt a need to go experience, places they already feel a home connection to even though they have never been there. why is that? what does where we want to travel, and what season most energizes us say about us?

probably nothing profound. i’d love to imagine past lives or particular spiritual powers/gifts that tie us to places and types of weather, but, yeah. that makes fun sense emotionally, but my vote is out on the more supernatural aspects of those ideas.

i just know that i love my dying season. i wake up with a thrill in my stomach, and can’t stop staring out at the crisper blue of the sky, the softer edges to the sunlight. I can’t spend enough time outside, feeling cool air tighten my skin, watching delicate grasses grow golden and brittle, tasting the charcoal spicy bite of roasted green chiles on my tongue. i ache for chili, thick potato soups, and heavy red wine. my desire to sit in front of a fire at night on my porch borders on the obsessive. and the wind swirls around my house, pulling odd creaks and groans from the structure, twisting trees into ghoulish forms, and generally making me uneasy in that bone-deep, “what-if-there-really-are-spirits” kind of way.

i totally dig how thin the veil feels this time of year. human, dead, things dying only to resurrect later, light giving way to dark but always with the reality of light coming back… so what if it’s all about my and my deeply embedded, unconscious western mythological heritage?

i like living surrounded by the swirling unknowns of the dark. some kind of sick thrill maybe — that primal danger of not being able to see what’s out there… so human i am when i don’t have the light to reassure me of the edges of my world. risk, wonder, total and unequivocal awareness. never more awake.

pardon me while i incubate in my shadows for the next few months.

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