The Beggar Maid

It's a rainy, warmish night in my neck of the woods. Warm enough to have the bedroom window open to the outside air, after months of being stifled and confined, after all that bitter cold and ice. It feels heavenly.

So I'm in my bed, eating cookies and drinking green tea out of a mug that was a present from someone I adore, which feels nice. And I'm working my way through a big, heavy, marvelous book - Alice Munro's Selected Stories. I'm not sure there could be a better way to spend a Thursday night, for me.

Every single story in this book - in any of her books, this is my third - has at least one sentence that leaps through the page and punches me in the face. But somehow, gently. With grace. She is masterful.

(I suppose this is why they gave her a Nobel Prize this year. I am so late to this party.)

I tend to be enthusiastic about things that I love, it's true. But I'm glad, now that I'm learning more about "serious" literature (although I'm always down for non-serious literature, let's not be snobs, people) that I'm learning discretion. The more widely I read, the more able I am to discern something worth truly marveling at.

When I read Alice Munro, all I can think is, this is a woman who understands people. Who tells the truth about them. Even though it's fiction, it is all lined with razorblades of truth. And it's all so ordinary, just stories about ordinary people living ordinary lives. But illuminated. My very favorite kind of stories - simple and true. If you've never read her, begin. I just read The Beggar Maid, and feel like I could read it five more times before I can even begin to discern the layers of intelligence and depth under the surface line of the plot itself.

Oh, graduate school. You're going to exhaust me, aren't you?

"This is what happens. You put it away for a little while, and now and again you look in the closet for something else and you remember, and you think, soon. Then it becomes something that is just there, in the closet, and other things get crowded in front of it and on top of it and finally you don't think about it at all. 

The thing that was your bright treasure. You don't think about it. A loss you could not contemplate at one time, and now it becomes something you can barely remember. 

This is what happens.

Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang onto it. You must not let yourself be waylaid, and have it taken from you."

- Runaway, Alice Munro

"Selfhood begins with a walking away,
and love is proved in the letting go."

- C. Day-Lewis, Walking Away

"I saw in their eyes something I was to see over and over in every part of the nation - a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any Here. They spoke quietly of how they wanted to go someday, to move about, free and unanchored, not toward something but away from something. I saw this look and heard this yearning everywhere in every state I visited. Nearly every American hungers to move."

- John Steinbeck

Contents May Have Shifted

"I am up front, next to the pilot, Halifax William behind me, a woman from Juneau next to him, our three packs taking up every inch of space in the tail. The pilot turns the plane in a tight circle, we accelerate and lift off, and before he has even pulled in the flaps the first glacier is in front of us, huge and dirty and violent with stretch marks, plunging out of the cloud cover and into the shimmering sun.

Instantly I feel that old surge come back, that seizing of my own life on my own terms. It is such a physical thing, like the time I had my forearm shattered and the nurse came in every four hours on the dot to give me a shot of morphine - that's how physical - and I look down at the glacier and the ice-ridged peaks that go on forever behind it and say, Remember this remember this remember this the next time you think it's over, because some man, or some hope, or some life takes away instead of gives. Remember this and get on an airplane, a small one if possible, because it always works."

- Pam Houston, Contents May Have Shifted

A few months ago I was at my mom's house, watching TV and absentmindedly looking up writer's workshops, to see if there were any to which I might apply. I happened upon one in California in October that would be taught by Cheryl Strayed, an author I'm obsessed with.

I realized I already had a piece, clean and good enough, that I could apply with. I realized I'd used their submission website before, and that applying would take just three clicks, a few thoughtless seconds. So I did it. Then I went to bed and honestly forgot this had happened.

Two days later, on a Sunday afternoon at an outlet mall parking lot deep in Pennsylvania, I got an email saying I'd been accepted. It took a minute to remember to what. But then I did remember and was delighted, but there was a catch. Cheryl Strayed's workshop was full. But I could have a spot in Pam Houston's. Did I want it?

I didn't know who that was. I wanted Cheryl and Cheryl only. This workshop would be on the pricey side, and I didn't want to compromise, so I didn't put down a deposit. Then I forgot about it. Again.

A month ago, I got an email from Pam Houston's private email address, following up. Did I intend to join? No, I didn't. Who the heck was she, anyway?

The other day, I read an interview with Pam Houston on The Rumpus, a lit website I follow. It was about the fusion of memoir and fiction, about how restlessness is bred into the souls of some people and cannot be stamped out, about how there are those among us who can only think when they are moving, walking, running, traveling. It was gorgeous. It was perfect. The next day I went out and finally bought her book. It's also gorgeous. It's also perfect. That sickening "I'm such an asshole" feeling crept into me.

I emailed her personal address, on a whim, to see if I could still get in. She wrote back in minutes, from her iPhone. No space, she said, but I could definitely go on the waitlist. A lot can happen between now and October, she offered up. She asked me where I lived. Rattled off a list of where she's teaching next, and when. Said she hopes to meet me somewhere along the path.

And now I sit in my bed, her book next to me, her email in my inbox, thinking about the fact that you can spend your whole life feeling a little bit weird, a little bit alone, and then one day you realize there is a whole tribe of people out there just like you, who feel too much, who want too much, who think and hurt and process too much, too hard. They're called writers. They're artists. And they were out there all along waiting for you to figure it the fuck out.

I hope I get to meet her someday. I love knowing she's a famous, successful author who answered an email from a nobody like me on the spot, from her phone, as she went about her day. Taking the time to wish me well.

I don't really care if I ever succeed at writing in a commercial way. That desire to be known, or famous, is absolutely not a part of who I am. But I do promise that if I ever am known, in that way, to be similarly kind, and to always, always reach a hand towards those still stuck at the bottom of the mountain. To haul them right up.

The Tender Bar

"How did she do it? With no education, no money, no prospects, how did my mother manage to look so fierce? She'd just survived my father clamping a pillow over her face until she couldn't breathe, and lunging at her with a razor, and though she must have been relieved to escape him, she must also have been aware of what lay ahead - loneliness, money worries, the Shit House. But you wouldn't know it to look at her. She was an inspired liar, a brilliant liar, and she was also lying to herself, which made me perceive her lies in a whole new light. I saw that we must lie to ourselves now and then, tell ourselves that we're capable and strong, that life is good and hard work will be rewarded, and then we must try to make our lies come true. This is our work, our salvation, and this link between lying and trying was one of my mother's many gifts to me, the truth that always lay just beneath her lies."

-J.R. Moehringer, The Tender Bar

(This book is fucking fantastic.)

Advice for Writers

"Be brave. Write what's true for you. Write what you think. Write about what confuses or compels you. Write about the crazy, hard, and beautiful. Write what scares you. Write what makes you laugh and write what makes you weep. Writing is risk and revelation. There's no need to show up at the party if you're only going to stand around with your hands in your pockets and stare at the drapes."

- Cheryl Strayed

"It is always what is under pressure in us, especially under pressure of concealment - that explodes in poetry."

- Adrienne Rich

On Idolatry

"What if I forgave myself? I thought. What if I forgave myself even though I'd done something I shouldn't have? What if I was a liar and a cheat and there was no excuse for what I'd done other than that because it was what I wanted and needed to do? What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn't do anything differently than I had done? What if I'd actually wanted to fuck every one of those men? What if heroin taught me something? What if yes was the right answer instead of no? What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn't have done was what also had got me here? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?"

- Cheryl Strayed, Wild

Idolatry is perhaps an unwise thing. No one, really, is good enough or perfect enough to earn someone's undiluted and intense worship. Everyone is a little bit broken.

But, if a person were worth it, that person is absolutely, entirely Cheryl Strayed. I could talk forever about the magic that she makes with words, but I won't today. Mostly because I have somewhere to be right now. But, it's coming. It'll probably be sickeningly gushy, too. You've been warned.

"You arrive after years like a broken bird.
You are finally a breath away from everything."

- Mark Nepo

"Words can sting like anything, but silence breaks the heart."

- Phyllis McGinley

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."

- Kurt Vonnegut

"You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

- The Velveteen Rabbit

"What horrifies me the most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age."

- Sylvia Plath

"I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the park through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

I've never been to a party and not felt precisely this way. Ever. Both within and without.

It's so cheesy to be madly in love with F. Scott Fitzgerald, isn't it? Cheeseballs. Big ones. But who cares? There is a reason the beloved are beloved, and I'm happy to be a part of this particular club. Imagine a life without having read The Great Gatsby? What a small, but significant, type of sadness that would be.

If that's your life, correct it. Before the (new) movie comes out, preferably. Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby! Dear lord it's perfect!

"Reading is one form of escape. Running for your life is another."

- Lemony Snicket

"Release yourself from that. Don't be strategic or coy. Strategic and coy are for jackasses. Be brave. Be authentic. Practice saying the word love to the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will.

We're all going to die, Johnny. Hit the iron bell like it's dinnertime."

- Cheryl Strayed

Blue Nights

"In certain latitudes there comes a span of time approaching and following the summer solstice, some weeks in all, when the twilights turn long and blue. This period of the blue nights does not occur in subtropical California, where I lived for much of the time I will be talking about here and where the end of daylight is fast and lost in the blazing of the dropping sun, but it does occur in New York, where I now live. You notice it first as April ends and May begins, a change in the season, not exactly a warming - in fact not at all a warming - yet suddenly summer seems near, a possibility, even a promise. You pass a window, you walk to Central Park, you find yourself swimming in the color blue: the actual light is blue, and over the course of an hour or so this blue deepens, becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades, approximates finally the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres, or that of the Cerenkov radiation thrown off by the fuel rods in the pools of nuclear reactors.

The French call this time of day "l'heure bleue." To the English it was "the gloaming." The very word "gloaming" reverberates, echoes - the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten, the glamour - carrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers slipping through the shadows. During the blue nights you think the end of day will never come. As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone.

This book is called "Blue Nights" because at the time I began it I found my mind wandering increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days, the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness. Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning."

- Joan Didion, Blue Nights

"My own kind. I'm not sure there's a name for us. I suspect we're born this way: our hearts screwed in tight, already a little broken. We hate sentimentality and yet we're deeply sentimental. Low-grade romantics. Tough but susceptible. Afflicted by parking lots, empty courtyards, nostalgic pop music. When we cried for no reason as babies, just hauled off and wailed, our parents seemed to know, instinctively, that it wasn't diaper rash or colic. It was something deeper that they couldn't find a comfort for."

- Steve Almond

Typography/Hand Lettering/Word Beauty

I didn't pay attention in school - ever. I lived lost in my own head, and spent class time writing notes to my friends, or scribbling song lyrics and quotes and poetry in my notebooks.  I loved this. I still do this, in fact. Look for me in the conference room at work, in the chair with the best view of the Hudson River, the one where the sunlight will spill just right across my open notebook, and there I'll be, actively listening to whatever is going on (because I am a grown up now and apparently I must) but with my hand busy, deep in a doodle session without even noticing. 

But back in school, I noticed that when it came to doodling, most people drew things - stick figures in compromising positions, little friendly houses, flowers, cartoon characters smoking cigarettes, that kind of thing. But when I "doodled" what came out was always words. Bubble letters, fancy scripts, big block print. Shaded in or left open, just stark outlines and white insides. I'd write the same words or phrases over and over again in all different ways and styles. Some of my friend's names had a weird rhythm to their letters, and to this day I write those names over and over again for no reason when my mind wanders. It's completely creepy to wake up after a phone call reverie to find a piece of paper with the same name written on it 25 times, of course. But something in my hand loves to scrawl those letters out, to play with their length and width and shading. 

I used to think this quirk was just me, that I was a big weirdo. I didn't know there was a whole art form around it. Lo, what the internet has brought to me. 

Now, when I do this stuff it essentially looks like no more than a goofy, manic doodle war splattered all over the page. I am physically artless and I know it. But some people make glory! Glory! Like this guy! My freaking god! 

Tell me you don't want to wallpaper your entire house, your whole stinking planet, in this kind of perfect word beauty. Words are already beautiful, of course. Do this to them, and I'm slain. It's done. Game over for this girl. 

Enjoy! 

"...if a bird with a broken neck could fly away, what else might be possible? Water may be older than light, diamonds crack in hot goat's blood, mountaintops give off cold fire, forests appear in mid-ocean, it may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of a hand on its back, and that the wind be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string.

And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery."

- Annie Proulx, The Shipping News