One of those moments

My boyfriend was looking over my shoulder while I was working the other day and came out with, "That's clever! Your blog title is an allusion to 'An Idiot Abroad,' isn't it?"

Apparently he'd never heard of Twain's book. It's a good thing he's pretty.

Dissertation Period

On the calendar it looks like a lovely blank block that one can fill with all one's heart desires. In actuality it consists of meetings and stomach acid. Lots of stomach acid.

Even though nothing else is due until the beginning of September, we are supposed to be drafting our dissertations. And to make sure that we actually are drafting our dissertations, we have dissertation supervision meetings until everyone breaks up for the summer. After the second week of June or so we're on our own, presumably to finish that dissertation while not abusing our livers too much. I don't know how everyone else's meetings have gone, but mine usually follow a cycle similar to that of the workshop: A few days of buoyancy and drafting, the handing in followed by a few days of utter lazyness because there's no point in doing new work if you're going to change it all in light of anticipated feedback, the meeting in which your spirits sink lower and lower as your supervisor points out everything that's wrong with your piece, a day or two of despondency as you wonder if you're really cut out for this, then the intrepid return to the blue-soaked page to see if there's anything salvageable. In my case, the greatest relief is that the finished piece is only allowed to be 15k words, and is not expected to have a completed narrative arc but rather be the three chapter pitch for a novel; I keep thinking about it in relation to my 90k word undergrad dissertation and then try not to laugh when we're given generalized advice about pacing ourselves and not getting overwhelmed by the word-count.

There are also weekly seminars on research methodologies, which we are regularly reminded are mandatory but for which no one ever takes attendance, which have consisted so far of powerpoints with blocks of text and no pictures, professors reading aloud from their own blogs, and random anecdotes, so as the weeks have progressed it's become much easier to find a seat.

After the research seminars we are allowed to catch up with each other for an hour before getting to meet assorted agents and publishers out of their native habitats, where they answer questions and give general advice. Then we get to chat with them while consuming free wine, hopefully getting loose enough in the process to pitch our half-finished books. We all seem to agree that the agent bit is the best bit so far, as they are generally helpful and friendly, and when they aren't we have free wine and each other.

Also, it looks like I'll still be around next year: I've been offered a place on the PhD, and since I don't have a share in all that student debt that everyone else in my generation is suffering under, I've taken them up on it. It feels less like having been accepted and more like being engulfed, as if I were a food source for amoebae, but I'll take my research opportunities no matter how they are offered. Though the next STEM student who says that of course I've been given funding because everyone gets funding no matter how insignificant their possible conclusions will be throttled.

Containing some questionable terms

While Ali Smith was at UEA this year I had the chance to ask her about what she thought of our responsibility to living people, whether she ever pulls her punches because of the people involved in her stories, and if she thinks that we should refrain from telling certain stories because they involve people we know, flesh-and-blood people, that may have some objection to seeing themselves reflected in paper – or on a screen, as is becoming more common.

She said, essentially, that we can’t – that we have a responsibility to the work to let it happen as it will, without self-censorship. Not that it always will. Some people (Joyce Carol Oates may have been mentioned) seem able to write fearlessly about personal experiences, personal relationships, so that it is quite impossible to imagine them sitting at their desk in their fuzzy bunny slippers (or at a moonlit window with fountain pen in hand) having hacked out a line or a page that cuts so close to the bone, that so starkly reflects a face they know with all of its warts, that they feel compelled to hold down the backspace until it disappears in favor of the clean white page.

A friend in my cohort linked us all to a page that admonished us each to ‘write like a motherfucker,’ which sounded like sound advice, except I wasn’t entirely sure how a motherfucker should write. Did that mean to write quickly, or intensely, or to smash my instrument in public after I was finished? Did it mean to shock, or to meditate, or to get blind drunk and invent a fairy language? Did it mean to transcend gender? 

About the same time, I was reading Stacey Richter’s Twin Study, and came to a point where one of her characters describes a group of cavemen as ‘motherfuckers.’ His girlfriend responds by saying yes, they probably are motherfuckers, in the literal sense, because they have no taboos, and that is what makes them abhorrent to him.

So, the takeaway is, write like you have no taboos. Go for the dark place, the tight place, the place that would make your best friend wince and say, “I do not talk like that and I don’t drink that much.” Go to the place that you can’t talk about but can’t stop thinking about, that might make your family upset and your friends upset and your grandmother worried, not for the sake of upsetting them but because it’s true. Write what you can’t ignore.

This is probably some of the hardest advice for me to take personally, because I’m still a tad worried about my family’s opinion. When my parents read the first story I wrote to win an award, (and, coincidentally, the first story of mine that they’d read in a decade) they found themselves everywhere in it. More recently, (last month) my Aunt found something that I’d written and wanted to know why I was so angry with my dad that I would make a character kill her father. A lot of the things that I haven’t written go closer to the bone, to places I don’t want anyone I’m related to connecting random dots and seeing proof of illuminati intervention, but those tend to be the places my mind wanders most often on its own, the places I know too well and really ought to write from.

If it all turns out too sordid, too personal, too real, there is plenty of space for taboos in the revision process.

Workshop Bingo

Yesterday was the last workshop of the MA, for the full time students, at least. Which felt strange, since it seems like we haven't been at it for very long, but at the same time welcome, because I've been in workshops for seven solid years now and at some point you get really tired of the process. Cava was bought and poured around, which led to the decision that everyone should drink at the mention of Point of View, because Henry reliably picks on P.o.V in every piece we read or discuss.

Which, of course, reminded me of my undergraduate workshops.

There seems to be a bit of a tradition at old R(MW)C involving English majors, their senior year, and large, opaque water bottles, specifically in relation to Senior Seminar. You can take a drink whenever the lecturer says something you think is moronic, or you can choose cue words that your classmates use frequently; in my case it was 'Jane Eyre,' 'A. S. Byatt,' 'Boy Band,' and any assignment that didn't apply to the ten Creative Writing concentrators in the room because the seminar was geared to Lit majors, of which we had one in the class, and so calculated to make the rest of us rend our garments in frustration. It was a three-hour study in frustration every Thursday night, when I was supposed to be fencing but was instead discussing critical approaches and research habits for a theoretical project that I would never actually conduct because it wasn't pertinent to my concentration. You would have drunk, too.

I'll blame Honors for causing that bit of fun to spill over into other things. Mandatory departmental readings? We all sat in a row, chose a key word based on the author's interests, and had ourselves a good old time. Except for the evening we chose 'um,' because none of us knew the visiting writer's work. You'd think that professional word people would have excised that bit of filler from their vocabularies when they were toddlers, but the introduction alone contained enough 'um's to drain half the volume of my Nalgene.

But the best place to play the game was Workshop. Workshops are tough when you're first starting out and don't really know what you're doing. They're tough in a different way when you're months away from graduating and are surrounded by students that are still figuring out plot arcs and grammatical sentences. My response was to toss about six shots of vodka (I'm not really sure, I free poured that shit in proportion to the pain I'd felt while reading the pieces earlier that week), filled it up the rest of the way with Mountain Dew from the dining hall on the way to class, gave it a shake, and started sipping. One gulp every time someone I knew was written into a sex scene. Every time boy bands were mentioned. Twice for metaphysical bullshit. And a nice long chug whenever the professor drastically misinterpreted my work or when one of the other students correctly explained the entire piece to him. There were other cues, but they varied from week to week. It was a good way to curb my temper: the more reasons I had to be annoyed, the warmer and fuzzier I felt. When the session was promising to be really bad, other people joined me, or borrowed my water bottle in the middle of class.

Which leads to a bit of confusion I think needs to exist, but is too specialized to be mass-produced.

We heard 'point of view' in every workshop. In undergrad it was some variation on 'metaphysical bullshit.' And everyone contributing to the workshop has a handful of private buzzwords that get whipped out every week. 'The writing is very assured.' 'Tropes.' 'It reminds me of Z. Z. Packer/Ali Smith/Raymond Carver/whoever you choose.' 'Structure.' 'You should read...' There are words and phrases that come up over and over again, not so much because the concepts recur in peoples' writing, but that the participants have pet ideas that get trotted out every week.

Bingo cards.

They'd be different for every workshop group, and would have probably made me pay more attention than my drinking game. Of course, anyone that won would have to scream 'Bingo!' in the middle of workshops. But most workshops could stand to be a little more surreal. Someone out there has to do this. If I never get the chance to do it myself, I'll find a baby MA to corrupt (if I'm still around next year) and revel in second-hand shenanigans.

Brain fluff and an anthology.

This time there is a trifecta of reasons for my absence: a hellish journey to France for an international fencing tournament (no legionnaire's disease this time), one of those long illnesses that lays you out flat for weeks, and a directive from Ali Smith to go write a novel and the accompanying discovery that when I begin a novel everything else ceases to be important - a trick of psychology or a flaw of personality that Henry assures me is pretty common.

February is over, but it still feels like February. The return of marked coursework resulted in loud dissent in the ranks, for assorted reasons. My personal annoyance stems not from my marks but from the conflicting commentary attached by the markers, which makes me wonder if anyone really knows what they're doing when it comes to the rough side of fiction. There seems to be a great element of chance in producing a piece that 'works,' and even more chance in getting it published. Or perhaps that is just what I tell myself to lessen the sting of rejection letters.

Speaking of publication, Cruentus Libri press will be birthing a horror anthology next week selected around the unifying theme of the sea; The Dead Sea will be on Amazon US, UK, for Kindle and on Create Space. My contribution to the collection was one of those instances of incredible chance and the vatic voice; it was written in one breath (after an extended debate with my partner on the monsters of Celtic mythology), came out exactly as I wanted it to, and found a home immediately. Which is not typical of my writing or publishing process.

Doesn't that just look precious?

Two more anthologies should be poking their sunny heads through the snow along side the daffodils this spring, though if the present trend continues they will be excessively delayed. By the time the last comes out I hope to have found an agent for some longer pieces that have been sitting in the closet for a while, or at least have enough rejection letters piled up to show that I've tried.

And breathe!

And somehow four months slipped past while I was somehow not paying attention. This either has to do with the amount of work that's currently up in the air and never seems to be entirely cleared away, or one of my favorite truisms: regardless of how much or little you have to do, it will expand or contract to perfectly fit all available time. I keep thinking that after the next project is due I will have a space to breathe, collect my thoughts, and maybe do something for pure enjoyment, but there is always a next project.

Last year, I tried rock climbing (again), because I wanted to get over my fear of heights. And even though I was quite proud of myself the first time I managed to get six feet off the ground without getting dizzy and refusing to move, I quickly realized why the sport is such an apt metaphor for life. It's fun to scramble up and down the easy routes that you've done before. It reminds you that you can actually climb. But if you want to improve at all, you have to push yourself. And when you're really pushing yourself, especially if you're a muscularly-challenged female that gets faint on balconies, each new handhold feels like the most impossible thing you've ever done. And when you do manage to swing yourself in just the right way so as to progress a few inches upward you can only be proud for so long, because the next handhold will now be the most impossible thing you've ever done. And so it will continue until you run out of places to put your hands.

We discussed in Theory and Practice of Fiction last week how the present moment, and therefor our enjoyment of the present moment, only lasts three seconds. (The assigned reading was on neurobiology and physiology and its relationship to consciousness and time.) Three seconds is about as long as my overwhelming joy at grabbing the next hold while ten feet up lasts, and about half as long as my acceptance letter happy dance lasts, because acceptance letters are rare and I try and savor that feeling as long as possible. But after the moment, there's the next handhold to grab, and the next piece to write - or, if I'm really courageous, the next PhD application. 

Frequently I forget, as I'm scrabbling to read assigned material and make deadlines, that I'm making any progress at all. And though I can't quantify what I've learned, or when I've learned it, I can feel its influence. When I look at the pieces I wrote last year and before I'm quite embarrassed, which apparently happens to most artists who consistently work on their craft, but unlike before I now know what to change in order to fix those old pieces, to make them into something I can be willing to acknowledge as mine. 

And, for the sake of pure self-indulgence, an example of a handhold made where elation lasted beyond a single moment: UEA hosted a women's fencing tournament yesterday, and I beat all three of the sabruers on Oxford's women's team. That possibly made up for never having been able to go to school in Oxford. If you can't join 'em, beat 'em with a +10 aggregate indicator and gloat quietly while flexing your nearly nonexistent biceps. Now if only they'd let me fence on the men's team...

Impossible Dreams

Everyone has them, or at least ought to have them: goals that they want to reach that are just on the other side of believability. Not the ones that involve conquering a country or elaborate revenge, though those are probably doable for some people. I mean the things that seem out of reach now, but might be possible if the dice fall the right way.

I used to think that living in England was one of those pipe dreams, along with royalties (of any amount) and getting into a Master's program. And now I'm here. Other pipe dreams have taken their place:

• Walking the coast of England for mental health research and awareness.
• Getting into and through a PhD program in one piece.
• Living in a country where the official language isn't English.
• Telling my dad to go buy a copy of the New Yorker so he can turn to a specific page and see my name.
• Selling a novel. Heck, selling three novels and being able to buy food from them. 
• Going back to the home I dream about. 
• Living without medication. Or mandatory doctor's appointments. 
• Not having to worry about visas and length of stay while I'm in the UK. 
• Fencing in the Olympics.

Ok, maybe the last one is a little far-fetched, but the rest could possibly happen, if I make them happen. Which makes me wonder, how many dreams have I let die because I couldn't see how to get there from where I was standing? And how many dreams have others let die for the same, or similar reasons? And the biggest question: Why?