The Desire to Be Desired

A couple of weeks ago was the River Teeth Nonfiction Conference, and leading up to that were lots of long nights getting ready. I've been feeling frustrated with my ability to make time for writing, here or anywhere else, but now that the conference is over and I've given my brain a little break from evening writing duties, I am ever hopeful that I can return to writing. I guess it's a season of scribbling notes on my iPhone notepad to get to later.

Well, I am writing, two blog posts a month for Off the Page, and I have a series of heron poems that keep coming to me like little mercies. I've been enjoying the blog posts I'm writing for Off the Page, but it is a different kind of writing than essaying. It's the essaying I miss right now. When I was whining about this to my friend Tania a couple weeks before the conference, she told me, "What, you can't write for the next 14 days? Big deal!" and grant yourself the space and permission not to write for now. I'm pretty sure that's what she said. So, okay, stop whining. There are worse things in the world than not writing for a small stretch of time.

Watching the Cavs game

In other news, it's SUMMER and baseball season. We spend a solid four to five nights a week at someone's baseball or softball game right now, and I loooooove it. There's nothing like sitting outside in late summer afternoons, the pace of a ballgame, an excuse to do nothing but enjoy the evening... ah. I love it. Have I mentioned that I love it?

We're also letting the kids - especially Elvis and Lydia - stay up a bit later now that it's summer, and they've been staying up to at least the half for the Cavs games the last two weeks. It's been fun spending that additional downtime with the two of them, even though it's intruding on my alone time with Brandon, which is always so guarded. Lydia sat on my lap last night for part of the game and now stretches out almost as long as I am. They are amazing people.

What I've been listening to:

I just finished up two books by Bill Bryson - At Home and In a Sunburned Country. I almost started One Summer and then changed my mind. There's only so much of the same voice reading to you that you can take. I loved both books. They were engaging and funny and informative. Before that I listened to Small Victories by Anne Lamott and LOVED it. I'll probably go back to Lamott again soon because she's so funny and tear-inducing, and I like that kind of writing.

I shifted gears and started listening to Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. For some reason it isn't at all what I thought it would be, but I also don't know exactly what I was expecting, so there's that. I'm really enjoying the switch to fiction for a spell, and I love the narrator's voice, the epistolary nature of the writing, and the gradual unfolding of the story. It's no wonder it won a Pulitzer.

What I've been up to:

If you are into Jo Ann Beard or you want to be, you might enjoy the presentation that Jill Christman and I did at the River Teeth Conference: "Negotiating the Plasmapause: Patterned Images, Delayed Revelation, and Sheer Awesomeness in Jo Ann Beard's The Boys of My Youth"

The series for Off the Page I mentioned in my last post, The Desire to Be Desired, has wrapped up. Here they are in summary with links to the full posts:

The Desire to Be Desired

I ran as fast as I could through the wood chips and up the wooden steps and beckoned from the highest point of the playground equipment. “You can’t catch me!” I shouted, grinning and staring down into the faces of Nick Germano and Jason Ream, and when they motioned for the steps, I squealed and giggled, sliding half-way down the stainless steel slide, its hot metal burning my hands and thighs. I stopped and waited to see which way they chose to go so I could make my break-away run, away from my chasers.


So went every day on the playground in first grade, then second, then third, sometimes different boys, eventually new playgrounds, but always the same game. Tag, freeze tag, TV tag, hide-and-go-seek tag, You can’t catch me! No one wanted to be caught, not really, anyway. What would you do when you were caught? That was the end of the game, the end of the chase. The thrill was in the running, the pursuit, the simple and potent knowledge that someone sought to catch you. Read More...

What Good Guys Do

One night, my husband and I were out at a country line-dancing bar. He got up to pay our tab and I watched the couples waltz on the floor.

“Hey, how ya doin’?” a voice came up from behind. I turned on my barstool and grinned at a guy obviously looking for a dance partner.

“I’m fine!” I said cheerily. He glanced down at my hand resting on the bar.

“Oh, you’re married!” he said, his arms flinging up in the air into the “I surrender” position. “I’m sorry!”

I nodded, still grinning as he walked away and Brandon came back. They exchanged glances, the guy smiling meekly and my husband giving him a nod of acknowledgement.

“Ready to go, Tiny Dancer?” Brandon asked.

“That guy was trying to hit on me!” I said with astonishment.


“Yeah, I figured,” he said, wrapping his arm around my waist and guiding me toward the door. I continued grinning, the warmth of admiration and the heat of my husband’s palm on the small of my back making me glow faintly on the way to the car. Read More...

Empty Houses

It has been three years since I sat in a dark bar on the dark side of town alone with a colleague, out for a drink to talk about writing and family and his failing marriage. It has been three years since he confessed to having a crush, his hand flitting like a fly on and off of my thigh. Three years since I laughed and blushed, stunned to be so openly admired by someone other than my husband. I didn’t know how to handle this advance, how to stand and stare down disaster before it could take root.

Instead, I wanted to be nice. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. My “no” was mushy and clouded with desire—not for this other man but for this other man’s words, this other man’s advances, the unabashed expression of his desire for me. Me! Goofy and ridiculous me, flabby around the middle me, mother of three, me! “But I love my husband,” I said, again and again, with a grin, because I also loved to hear how beautiful this other man found me, how lovely, how smart, how good.


I would like to say that I stood up and slapped him. After all, he had just shook hands with my husband in our living room, just stood in the presence of all our wedding pictures and smiling faces of our children. I would like to say that I insisted he drive me home, immediately. I would like to say that every email conversation and text message from there on was strictly professional and never slid slyly into flirtatious, that I reported his advances to my supervisor and ended it, ended the confusing, terrifying, anxiety-inducing friendship and work relationship. But I didn’t. Read More...

The Directions Desire Can Take Us

It’s tempting to conclude this series on desire with the pattest of pat answers: If I were truly holy and pursuing God, this fire would be quenched and I would never again face the dichotomy of flesh and spirit, as if my body is evil and my spirit is good.

Except God made me, body and spirit. Adam needed a helpmate and so he was given Eve, before the Fall, before separation from God. Sarah needs a helpmate and so she is given Brandon.

We are made for connection, with God and with others. This connection is rooted in two things: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind; and love your neighbor as yourself.


If God is love and we learn to love God by watching Jesus, then loving our neighbors as ourselves is one of the only ways we can express and experience that love for ourselves. It’s a give-and-get kind of relationship, a pay it forward, a pouring out to be filled again and again. Read More...

Back then --
2014: Holiday Greetings from Nine-Month-Contract Land
2013: Why Do We Need Men?
2012: Corrective Lenses and Parenting
2011: In the Center Ring: Motherhood vs. Work
2010: Maybe She's Born With It...
2009: Potty Training Adventures

Westbound and Down, Rollin' Up and Truckin'

"we gonna do what they say can't be done. We've got a long way to go, and a short time to get there, oh westbound just watch ol' Bandit run!"

Yeeeee hawwwww!

Tomorrow morning at the wee hour of 4 a.m. I'll be zooming out of here to the airport for another year of AWP, this year, all the way in Seattle. I am so happy that I am not in the state of mental breakdown that I was in at this time last year. I have not been dreaming about flies hatching out from underneath my fingernails, and no one in my immediate family has suffered from a kidney stone this week. Given those two things, I'm in paradise.

I am reading my work TWICE at this year's conference - first as part of the River Teeth 15th Anniversary Reading (I'll be excerpting "Country Boys, City Boys") and then later that night as part of the WordFarm/Rock&Sling/and someone else poetry extravaganza (planning to read "Making the Bed" from PBB). It's going to be a busy conference, with two dinners/parties for River Teeth and the MFA Program, plus readings and signings and meetings galore. PLUS I am staying with two of my favorite writer friends! We will be... Sleepless... in Seattle.

This is the first time in recent history that my children have been sad that I am leaving. I feel a little bad because... well... I'm not sad that I am leaving. ha ha ha. I AM sad that they were sad at bedtime - Lydia even cried. I held her for a long time until she got sleepy. Henry told me, "Don't go to work, Mom," which darn near broke my heart. Why don't they do this when Brandon leaves? He's gone ALL THE TIME. (Well, not all the time. But, he certainly travels more frequently than I do.) Of course I'll miss them. Of course. But MAYBE, it's time for mama to get out of Ashland and see her writerly friends.

At any rate, three little love letters are waiting on the counter for them when they wake up. And there will be Skype sessions ahead for the three little people, too. I will get my fill of writer egos, black clothes, books, and bars, and happily return ready for hugs and kisses from the sweet ones.

My husband, on the other hand, I will miss terribly, miss him already because he's working tonight in Cleveland. Sigh. Excuse me for one second, but how good is it to be loved and to love? It's a good kind of missing happening. I already can't wait to see him on Sunday.

And now I am off to sleep as much as I can before 4 a.m. Egads.

Building Community

This past weekend, I spent some time in Indiana with about a dozen other writers who mostly met about three months ago at the Festival of Faith and Writing.  We decided to come together because we're all at similar places in our careers, like-minded in ideology and vision for our poetry, and we're all outrageously funny.  At least we find ourselves to be.

I think it is unusual to find and make fast friends with people, but especially other writers. There is a competitive air that surrounds most writer gatherings (except for the River Teeth Nonfiction Conference and the Ashland University MFA Program, but then again, I'm a smidge biased...), a chance to name drop, a chance to prove your superiority or make yourself feel better by pointing out the faults in well-known poets' work, a chance to spread your feathers and strut about with one's accolades ablaze.  This is of course a generalization; not all writers are this way, and not all retreats and conferences take this tone, but we all know those writers who seize any opportunity to establish themselves, sometimes at the cost of other poets.

This retreat was not that way, though we leaned that direction a time or two, mostly in good fun.  What we did was laugh a lot, share our passion for language and poetry and our belief that words have the idealistic power to change people.  We talked about ways we might collectively use our words to make an impact within groups of people who are not as inclined to buy a collection of poems or pick up a literary journal.  We shared meals and drinks together.  We got to know one another and traded stories from each other's lives, and we left eager to meet again, hopefully soon.  And then we began emailing and Facebooking each other to continue the conversation.

That is what community is about--taking the time to feed each other with laughter and truth and common concern for each other's well being.  Community, even across state lines, is sustained by the simple, "Hey, I was just thinking about you and..."  I am ever so grateful for having found this particular set of friends to mutually encourage and challenge as we work toward our personal and collective goals.

In ten days, I get to participate in yet another writing community, this one in my own backyard.  Sixty students and about 20 visiting writers and faculty will descend upon Ashland, Ohio for the annual two-week summer residency (writers' boot camp), and I can hardly contain my excitement to see students and faculty that have become more than colleagues--many are friends.  Even though it is a stressful two weeks involving a lot of administrating, it is also one of the highlights of my year. 

AND, I get to read from my new book for the first time.  Insert several smiley face emoticons here.