April Showers

It is the end of National Poetry Month today, and while I wrote not a single poem for the month, I have been busy chiseling away at my memoir-in-essays, which has its own sort of lyricism and poetic turns, and that totally counts, right? I have done much to celebrate poetry in April, however, giving readings and talking enthusiastically about iambs and line breaks to ever-patient audiences.

I'm also celebrating the end of the spring semester today. There were many leaps forward made this semester in the Ashland MFA Program for me. I even have the first draft of my memoir-in-essays all saved in one Word document. This is a slight hazard to my health, because every time I make a change in an essay, I then have to go in and make a change in the book-length document, which drives me slightly batty.

I was thinking about "book-length" the other day. A few summers ago, I posted to Facebook or Twitter how daunting the idea of writing a book seemed. I told myself, better to write a sentence. And then a paragraph. And then maybe a couple of paragraphs. And then maybe an essay. And then start over. And then see what happens from there.

So that's what I did. Little bites. Just like every single other thing in the world, just take it in little bites.

More things happened this month-- I went to my best friend's Orthodox Church for a service during Holy Week that was lovely and refreshing; the kids and I tagged along with Brandon to South Bend, IN for Easter weekend; I spent a hilarious weekend with writer friends in Grand Rapids at the Festival of Faith and Writing, where I twisted my ankle dancing to American Pie; I read loads and loads of poetry to people.

And I've been thinking about a lot of things. I've been thinking a lot about bravery and bearing witness in writing and the power of vulnerability. I've been thinking about how my garden needs to be tilled. I've been thinking about how I'd really like to write some poems again someday. I've been thinking about how I'd really like to go to yoga or maybe even exercise again. I've been thinking about how I am changing to a nine-month contract beginning June 1 and what that means for our family financially and what that means for our family's health. I've been thinking about how we teach our children faith and hope and love and mercy and patience and how those methods differ from teaching them to study the Bible. I've been thinking about budgets and patience and stability and contentment and when you feel called to a place and how to tell when you've been released. I've been thinking about friends and community and large backyards and sandboxes and neighbors. I've been thinking about grilling out and being barefoot. I've been thinking about what a great winter and spring it's been, and how the tree outside my office window is sucking up the precipitation and pushing out leaves right now, right this minute, dripping and growing and greening up as if it takes nothing at all to do these things, nothing at all to recover from winter, to grow and to thrive.

My Writing Process

My good friend, Kate Hopper, has invited me to participate in this fun little blog tour about writing process. Kate is a brilliant writer and teacher who has published two books you might be interested in: Ready for Air: A Journey through Premature Motherhood and Use Your Words: A Writing Guide for Mothers. She has taught at the River Teeth Nonfiction Conference since its inception, and that's how I've gotten to know her. She is fun, thoughtful, and passionate, and I just love reading her stuff and getting to chat with her!

So, here's a little bit about my writing process:

1) What am I working on?
I am currently shaping and straightening, like a hairdo, a collection of essays-in-memoir about my relationship with my dad and my relationship with my husband. It travels from youth through adolescence and then takes a hop, skip, and jump into the tenth year of marriage. The essays wrestle with body image, temptation, love, romance, obsession, faith, self-confidence, transitions from father's daughter to husband's wife, role reversal, the objectification of women, and parenting. And everything else I can jam in, too. The collection is tentatively titled, American Honey. This is the primary focus of my writing world right now, although I have sent out some poems here and there, just for fun.

2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?
A lot of my material is rooted in faith and in doubt, wrestling between the two, and even though God might not come up directly in essays, underneath the surface he's always there. Like many essayists, I write to know more and to ask questions about what I think I know already or hope to know soon. I try to achieve what in yoga my friend, Jody, calls being "rooted and reaching" - my feet are generally planted firmly in the practical details of life while my hands are reaching upward and outward, seeking meaning beyond the physical world.

3) Why do I write what I do?
I write what I do because it is what feels most urgent right now, and I don't know of many books in which marriages survive. I wanted to write a marriage memoir that shows the nitty-gritty details of daily life, with all its challenges and compromises and promises, in the midst of living. Most marriage memoirs I know, the spouse either leaves or dies. In case you don't know yet, I am still happily married to my husband, and both of us aren't dead yet. The funny thing about trying to write these essays is that my dad kept appearing, and I decided to let that thread develop in my writing, to follow where Dad led me. This turned out to be a good idea. I have learned so much about myself and my marriage and my husband and my father by following the flitting butterfly through the field.

4) How does my writing process work?
I tend to write blathering first drafts that are horrible and ugly and resemble the title of my blog, "And so" first drafts. The lovely thing about these first drafts is that often one essay actually contains two... or more... essays that can be yanked out and shaped until they look more like something someone might want to read someday. I jam writing time into the crevices of the day - I am writing this on my lunch break while my husband plays basketball and my son takes a nap - or in the evenings after the kids are asleep. Sometimes, if a thought is really nagging on me, I'll carry my laptop around the house from task to task. It sits on the dryer while I fold laundry. It sits on the counter while I chop carrots. I usually work on more than one essay at a time because I'm thinking about more than one thing at a time. Lately it's all nonfiction, but maybe someday I'll write a poem again.

Next Up!
Here are three ladies you should get to know. They will post their blog tour replies next Monday, but check them out now!

Sonya Huber - I met Sonya through the Ashland MFA Program when she taught for us, and I adore her passion, her laugh, and her compassion for others. She is a lovely writer and a lovely person. http://sonyahuber.com/

Callie Feyen - Callie and I are social media pals. I've never met Callie in person but we've exchanged packets of writing together for over a year, and her blogs about parenting are just phenomenal. http://www.calliefeyen.com/

Yankee Drawl - Jayna and I have known each other since high school. She blogs about parenting three little people, and I think she is hilarious. http://www.yankeedrawl.com/

About "Field Guide to Resisting Temptation"

Today, a short essay I wrote appears on Brevity, a journal for brief nonfiction, called "Field Guide to Resisting Temptation."

I wrote this essay after it occurred to me for the first time that I could be the one to screw up my marriage. Even though my husband and I had talked about temptation abstractly, about bar scenes and dinners out when he’s on the road for work, I thought we were talking about him and his temptations. Not me. I felt infidelity-proof. This could never happen to me; I love him too much to ever be tempted, and who would be attracted to me anyway?

So when the circumstances of this essay came to pass, I was surprised by how easy it could be. How fast. How immediately painless. How could this happen to me? I was stunned and pleasantly surprised that someone besides my husband found me—three c-sectioned mom, married, average intelligence, occasionally humorous, recently leaner and healthier but still so not attractive—desirable. I wanted to keep hearing these things.
What scared me the most was that my husband and I had just come back from an amazing weekend away, a weekend of laughter, relaxation, vulnerability, and intimacy. We spent the weekend reminiscing over career changes, our three children, the future, the bright and uncertain and beautiful future we imagined always with us together. Married. Forever. We were in about as solid a place as we had been in the nine years we’d been married. 

Even this contented, even this satisfied in my marriage, I could be the one to drive us into a guardrail.

But this didn’t just “happen” to me. I had let it happen, and I was making a choice by allowing it to continue, the flirting and the compliments and the texts, I was letting them arrive, I was receiving them. I was a threat.

I didn’t realize at first that I had a choice, that I had the power to say yes or say no, to protect my marriage or maim it beyond recognition to the point that reconstructive surgery or, God forbid, amputation might be necessary. I could turn one way, or I could run the other. I could choose to let it keep playing and wrecking my heart, or I could turn it off even though it was crazy ridiculous hard, the kind of hard that shamed me because I felt so weak against it. 

Out of that realization, out of that place of shame and weakness, I wrote myself this essay. I wrote down the things my best friend had said to me and the things I needed to tell myself in those moments of insecurity when I felt ugly and undesirable or just temporarily lonely and wanted a quick fix. I had to write myself a way out. I had to write down what I was choosing into and what I was choosing out of. I don’t have to give in or just let this happen as if I have no control over my emotions or my fate or what pain or joy I inflict or deliver. I have a choice.

Writing this essay was shaky hand, racing heart, peeling skin back kind of work. And when I sent it to my husband, it was shaky hand, racing heart, peeling skin back kind of work. But after he read what I had said out loud to him in far fewer words, he heard me, and that confession shrunk my Goliath down to the puny little monster he is. It handed me a few stones and a slingshot.

“Field Guide to Resisting Temptation” empowered me to look for ways to protect my marriage, to own up to the truth underneath the desires, to realize that “it isn’t the full story, it’s only a moment, this moment when you are small and insecure,” and to face those insecurities head-on. Through bearing witness to my weaknesses, I found strength.

Metaphors and Me

This week I've been working on an essay about miscarriage and faith.  As you can imagine it's so uplifting and happy and plastered with joy that everyone is going to want to read it!  ...  Or, no.  The good news is that I made tremendous progress from this happened and then this happened and then THIS happened and I HATED it to something a little more artistic and a little more interesting, and I think, also, a little more accessible, a little more heart-breaking but also a little more redemptive, too.  And that's what I like about revision.  Just a little more at a time.

One of the reasons I like writing essays and poems is because of metaphor and simile, parallels and juxtaposition.  There are few things more exhilarating than to find a similar story line in some other experience in nature, or the perfect fact to buttress what I've gone through or felt.  It's probably also why I love stories, and why many people love stories - if a story (whatever genre it is) in some way rubs up against our own personal experiences or tugs at the desires and emotions of our lives, we have exited the realm of solitude and entered community.  I am not alone in this.  This feeling that I've had is not unique to me.

For me, discovering some strange parallel in nature or science or health or religion or wherever it might come from builds an even greater connection, one to the divine.  It reinforces the sense I have that all things are vibrating with a mysterious energy, rubbing up against each other to make friction and music, because they are carrying in greater or lesser degrees the same spark of divinity that resides in the hearts of men and women.  

I don't think this is just me anthropomorphizing.  Or maybe it is.  Whatever the case, when I discover a metaphor for an experience I've had, like miscarrying, or more often than not, when the metaphor pops into the middle of my living room like a sizzling 4th of July sparkler, I'm so surprised and delighted by it that I can't help but smile.  Each sentence or line feels like a gift.  I am not alone in the universe, on the planet, in this country, on this street, in this room, in my head.  There are beautiful strange delightful fantastic mysterious horrible and wonderful things all around me and I just can't wait for the next one to sneak up and say, hey, check this out.

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What I'm Reading: Wild by Cheryl Strayed (FANTASTIC, as expected)

What I'm Writing: this essay about miscarriage and faith that everyone just can't wait to read and be so inspired

What I'm Watching: National Treasure is muted in the corner

What I'm Eating: I just had a big spoonful of almond butter, and as soon as I'm done with this, I'm going to go make sweet potato fries and guacamole because my husband is coming home soon YES

Grace Notes by Brian Doyle

I JUST finished Grace Notes by Brian Doyle, literally just finished the last page and set it down on my desk and sat back in my chair and sighed that long, contented, choked up sigh of YES.  This!  

"...after fifty years, I am absolutely sure what I am supposed to do: sense stories, catch some by their brilliant tails as they rocket by, carve and sculpt them into arrows, and fire them into the hearts of as many people as I can reach on this bruised and blessed planet. That's all. That's enough."

Yes.

I've also read Leaping by Doyle, which was also SO GOOD.  These are the sorts of books and Doyle is the sort of author that makes you want to return to page one as soon as you've finished page 148.  The prose is lively and unexpected.  Conversational and intimate.  And most importantly, these short essays fire arrows into the hearts of readers.

That's all.  That's enough.

Family Research and Writing

For the last few months, I've been working on researching what life was like in Geauga County during the mid-1800s for an essay I'm trying to write. For some reason, I'm having a hard time with this.  There are definitely resources out there, detailed ones, about life in the 1850s, but when I try to imagine life then, I tend to default to Little House on the Prairie.  I've known for a long time that my parents' house was built in 1844, if not earlier, and yet all this time I've been imagining people settling in Geauga County and building little lean-to's and ramshackle shacks to live in... not the solid, two-story, more-than-a-century homes that still stand today.

My imagination can't seem to allow for any kind of transition between wilderness without roads or pathways and settlements.  I can reach out and imagine being the first to arrive in a place, or one of five original settlers, and I can imagine coming once a lot has been established, but what was it like to be the 20th family to arrive?  Did half a dozen friends or brothers or relatives decide to launch out and settle in one area of the county and then bring their families once things were settled, or were there lots of individual pioneers, setting out to make something for themselves, alone?  And when five or six fellas finally put down roots and rolled out logs for their homes, how did they receive newcomers?  Did they invite the boys from back east to join them?  Were they all strangers? 

And what drove people west (or midwest) anyway?  How did they decide to leave their familial roots in pursuit of more farmland, more wilderness?  Did they leave family behind, like we do today, in order to find wealth and success elsewhere?

These are the sorts of questions I keep stumbling over, because I haven't found any real answers yet, at least not about this particular family line.  I have names and birth dates, weddings, deaths, and I have the names of towns they left and approximate dates they arrived, but all I have for answers as to motive is hypotheses.  I don't know if that's enough to write on - I might just have to guess, develop theories for reasons they left, what they found alluring about this region, what they left behind.  And own up to the guesswork. 

When I start trying to write about these people, though, I get caught up in the details, afraid to misrepresent a date or intention, afraid to read too far between the lines.  Their mom and dad passing away a year before they left New York might not have anything to do with their decision to move to Ohio.  Just because I can only find one other brother's name doesn't necessarily mean that was the only one he had.  Just because they had babies late in their marriage might not mean they had trouble conceiving.  These are all my own conjectures. I'm using my personal experience as a lens through which to interpret their lives, assuming that because we're family, we might have shared these same kinds of experiences, thoughts, and ideas. 

But we're family.  The shape of my nose and bone structure of my face aren't the only things that have been passed down from generation to generation. Unless there's some significant effort to deviate from what came before, some dissent or disagreement, some major conflict or culture shift, there's a good chance that the beliefs and values I possess were handed down to me from my parents' parents' parents' parents.  So is it that far off to assume my great-great-great grandmother might have responded a certain way because that's how I might respond? 

These are the dangers about writing about people who are dead.  They aren't here to clear up the story.  That's also the freedom of it.  They aren't here to protest my theories.  And writing about people who are living... well, you are certain to only get them in one, maybe two, dimensions, and all through the lens of personal bias and perspective.  This portrayal of family is only family as I see it, not necessarily as my brothers might see it, or my grandfather, or my great-great-great grandmother.  Which is why it's personal essay, personal memoir.  Family and familial roots are important to me, so I want to write about it.

It's just so dang hard. :)