one down, nine to go

I've just submitted my papers, so one class is done! Screenwriting starts tomorrow. Hopefully, it will be less academic than this first class was. It's also a two-month class, so I'll have a little more breathing room.

For the rest of the evening, I'm sinking down into Eat, Pray, Love, which I started reading in my acupuncturist's waiting room (it was on her coffee table). It's awesome so far, although while reading the first section, I keep getting hungry for pasta.

minor improvements

Finally, finally, those of us in the downstairs annex office moved upstairs this week. I'm now sharing an office with the technical writer. We get along fine - both drink tea, both need quiet to write (which we don't get upstairs, ironically), and both read a lot. We've shared the office for two days, and we've already exchanged book recommendations and decided the door stays shut and the space heater stays on.

I also finally have an office phone, which is good because I have a habit of forgetting to bring my cell phone with me when I leave for work in the morning, and I don't see that I should have to use my cell phone for work anyway, since the company isn't paying for it.

Unfortunately, my work responsibilities are beginning to get on my nerves. When I first arrived, my initial task was to clean up the message library. I was told to do any editing and re-writing necessary to get the messages in better shape. Fine. Makes sense. I can do this, and it's a good way to get familiar with the content. Finished that task. Now I'm editing the writing that the freelance writers send in, and tracking things on spreadsheets. So I'm a staff writer who isn't writing, and they're paying me a writer's salary not to write. Basically, I feel like an admin copyeditor, a huge step backward. I've been told that they want to get a traffic coordinator to take over some of what I'm doing so that I can focus on writing, but now it sounds like that might be on hold. Indefinitely. If that's the case, then this job as it stands now isn't for me, and I'll have to start all over again finding another job. I give them until January at the outside before I give up entirely.

When I first signed on, I couldn't shake the feeling that this company was a bit scatterbrained, and didn't quite have their act together or know what they wanted. Given how I left my last job, I put my misgivings about this job down to wariness after being burned, and should at least give it a chance to show its true character. I'm not sure I like what I've seen. Hence the six-month deadline, which I think is reasonable for things to get straightened out and/or for me to find a new job. I don't know what else to do.

My saving grace is this grad program - at least I get to write all over that. Speaking of which, I have two papers due on Sunday, so the weekend will be spent finishing those. At the moment, it's the only thing making me feel productive.

sniffle and read

I've been struggling all day with a sinus-ey, cold-ey, headachey thing, and am temporarily worthless. I was going to go to a horse show tomorrow, but I may not if my head still feels like dead weight. Fortunately, I did my class reading and homework early, so I can afford a day or so of doing nothing. (Update: my writing portfolio was accepted, which means I'm a full degree candidate. Yay! I have a research paper due at the end of the month for my current class, and then I start a screenwriting class in October. Yay too!)

To medicate and cheer myself, I've consumed a hell of a lot of tea, and I made a double batch of spicy noodles to clear my sinuses. I also found a cute book called Sorcery and Cecilia or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot. It reminds me of Jane Austen's teenage writings.

I've also been reading Stephen Fry's first blog entry, and what a debut it is - all about iphone killers and written with his expansive good humor. Sick as I am, I still managed to get the washpot joke (I read his autobiography). I think I'm going to use his Ode Less Travelled as supplemental reading when I take the poetry writing class (I'm actually dreading that class - I love reading poetry, but I have little desire to write it). If you haven't seen Wilde, you should; it's a beautiful film. Fry's portrayal is amazing. The scenes with the kids are cute, and the prison scenes near the end made me cry.

Right. Another helping of spicy noodles.

marmalade vs marmite

From Reuters news service:


Author stands by bear facts on Paddington diet By Jeremy Lovell

Paddington bear has not given up marmalade for Marmite, and that's official.

The announcement came on Wednesday in a letter to The Times from Michael Bond, creator of one of the world's favorite bears, after Paddington appeared in a television advertisement tucking into a Marmite sandwich instead of his usual marmalade.

"I have to report that although Paddington found the sandwich interesting, bears are creatures of habit," Bond wrote.

"Besides, Squeezy Marmite may spread well, but it doesn't have any chunks."

While marmalade -- at least the type favored by Paddington -- is made from fresh fruit and sugar and contains chunks of peel, Marmite is a by-product of the brewing industry and has a distinctly tart flavor.

The advertisement prompted a flood of complaints by Paddington's fans who were outraged their favorite bear had changed his quaint dietary habit of living on marmalade sandwiches, often stored under his hat.

There were dark rumors Bond had been persuaded to alter Paddington's tastes in exchange for large amounts of money.

"It would require a good deal more than the combined withdrawals from Northern Rock to wean him off marmalade, if then," Bond wrote, referring to the run on the bank in which depositors withdrew more than 2 billion pounds ($4 billion).

It was Bond's daughter Karen Jankel, who controls all Paddington merchandising, who approved the ad ahead of the launch on October 8 of Paddington Bear Goes To The Movies on DVD.

The film includes the irrepressible bear's interpretation of Gene Kelly's "Singin' in the Rain" dance.

That in turn is timed to coincide with the 50th birthday of the bear from Peru who, like Britain's Queen Elizabeth, has two birthdays a year -- on December 25 and June 25.

Bond, a BBC cameraman at the time, had his first book, "A Bear Called Paddington," published in 1958. Thirty million books have since been sold and the Paddington stories have been translated into 30 different languages.

Paddington was named after the London train station where he was found on his arrival from Lima with a label round his neck with the words "Please look after this bear. Thank you."

It appears Paddington will celebrate his half century in style after Warner Brothers announced last week the blue duffle-coated bear is going to Hollywood to make a film with Harry Potter producer David Heyman.

***
By the way, Stephen Fry does a great reading of the Paddington Bear stories.

meditation with a crochet hook

Yet another writing assignment (let me know when you get sick of reading these). This was a listen-and-write exercise, a sentence-by-sentence approach. Listen for a sentence. Write it down. The next sentence will already be forming as you write the first one. Listen for the next sentence, write it down. Keep going in this manner. What I learned from this exercise: the listen and write, listen and write format is a rhythm. Rhythm showed up in the piece I wrote - a memory, then back further into another memory, then forward again to the first one I started writing, then back again. I'm not known for rhythmic writing, and I thought it would be something I'd have to force. I also did very little editing as I wrote, also unusual for me. The piece has a better flow as a result of not doing so much editing-while-writing. Lots of sensory detail showed up, too. Anyway, here it is:

I finally learned to crochet properly. My mom and her mom and her mom's mom could do it disgustingly well, and my dad's grandmother, Wanda, could do it too. My attempts were always clumsy and uneven, and my wrist clicked. I'd give up quickly. But I figured it out this past Christmas. Mom showed me how to do it once again, and I haven't stopped. I'm addicted. All those yarn colors, all those crochet hook colors. I've finished a scarf that I'm sending to Mom. Crocheting is a form of meditation, I think. The repetitive motion lets your mind wander. I think of my grandmothers when I crochet. I especially think of Wanda and when she left us.

Wanda died on a Saturday night of a combination of old age and despair and anger over ending up in a nursing home. I don't blame her if she decided just to give up rather than face countless more days in a shabby, dimly lit, musty-smelling place where the attendants park your wheelchair in front of a random window and leave you for hours at a time, and where there are so many other people, moving slowly, suffering pain, or fatigue, or boredom and either waiting to die or waiting for someone to die.

I had seen Wanda the previous Christmas. We wandered around until we found her, parked in front of a window, with a thin pale pink blanket thrown across her lap. Her clothes were too big for her, she'd lost so much weight. She moved her mouth but didn't speak. She wouldn't look at anyone. She acknowledged nothing, just stared straight ahead. Half-gone already, her body slowly finishing the process. Was she talking silently to Myron, my long-dead great-grandfather?
In her more active days, she had looked after a sheepdog named Peter (after St. Peter) that was bigger than she was and had learned how to lie on the floor with his paws together while Wanda said her morning prayers. Every time I visited her, she'd make waffles or pancakes or grilled cheese or hand me a box of sugar cookies she had made – always with red and green sprinkles on them. She constantly reminded me that she had bathed me in the sink when I was a baby. I'd make a point to go upstairs during my visits so I could walk past her sepia-toned wedding portrait hanging on the stairwell wall. It was taken in New Jersey in 1927. Wanda wore a knee-length dress with a long train and flapper headband. She held an enormous bouquet of flowers with thin ribbons trailing down. Myron was a handsome fellow with classic 1920s movie-star good looks, emphasized all the more in his tuxedo, with his hair slicked back.

The viewing the following Monday evening was noisy with talking and hugging and tinny muzak. Wanda looked quiet and relieved in her silver-blue casket - she had picked it out years ago; it was the same color as the car she used to drive. The flowers I had sent were the only white flowers in the room. I worried a little over that, and felt guilty for worrying.

I gave and received so many hugs. I was reminded of a similar scene when my grandfather died years ago from his third heart attack. I was four. We arrived at my grandmother's house in the middle of the night. It was dark and chilly in the breezeway. The family was lined up to give hugs. I felt wet cheek after wet cheek next to mine, my grandmother's the wettest of all, her hug the longest and tightest of all. I shouldn't have gone to my grandfather's viewing, my mother says. I was too young. I got up to the casket, saw him lying there, sleeping in the big box. I reached out to touch his hand and wake him up. His hand was cold and heavy. I understood just from that touch what everyone had meant when they said he was gone. I screamed. Mom escorted me out. No one seemed put out by my reaction, Mom says. Maybe they all wanted to scream too, but they were too old and wouldn't have gotten away with it.

We said the rosary at the end of Wanda's viewing, and as I began to go into that trance-like state that happens when you say words repeatedly in rhythm, my seven-year-old cousin leaned over and asked why we kept saying the same prayers again and again. Trust me when I say that trying to explain Catholic traditions to a seven-year-old is one of life's ultimate challenges. After the rosary, the priest, Father Arco, our favorite, said a few words. He is the type of priest who can quote Shel Silverstein in a sermon and make it sound so right, and he is the type of priest who tells me and my sister that we bring sunshine with us when we come to visit. He said that because we had sent Wanda to God with faith and love, we didn't really lose her at all. This was not a loss, just an ending, and naturally, Myron would look after her.

Mom told me the story of Wanda and Myron. They met when they were five years old. Myron insisted he'd marry her someday. He followed Wanda around for twenty years before she agreed. He called her "babe." Wanda was devastated when he died. He died in her arms, telling her "Babe, I'm sorry. I have to go now." She prayed a lot after that. She was so lonely and depressed. When she prayed, she asked how she was supposed to keep going without him. Once, after asking this question yet again, she distinctly heard Myron say, "Babe, look to your children."

Somehow, a bunch of us ended up at my grandmother's house for an impromptu late-evening dinner after the viewing. More noise, but punctuated, thankfully, with stories over pizza, stew, and ziti. I stood at the sink washing dishes with my sister while two of our cousins stood behind us and chatted with us. I never remember their names. They don't seem to mind.

The service the next day was at the church where my great-grandmother had been a member since the 1930s. Saint Mary's, the tiniest church, with the fastest service, only half an hour, and the most beautiful statues - my favorite is Saint Terese, dressed in browns, her arms full of red roses.

Six of Wanda's grandsons served as pallbearers. I sat next to Aunt Carol, the tiniest of women, with the most arthritic of hands. She only has half an ovary. The doctors told her and Hank they'd never have children, so they adopted two boys and two girls, and then proceeded to have six more children of their own. Hank is the healthiest sick person I know – he has leukemia, asthma, and heart problems. You can't tell when you look at him and talk to him. I suspect he takes after Myron, his dad. When he talks to you, he focuses only on you, and you feel special.

Father Arco appeared again, and led the service. Val, who had refused to wear black, and wore a colorful, flowy dress instead, delivered the eulogy - a list of Wanda's favorite things, and a list of our favorite things about her. Wanda loved family, crocheting, dogs, grandchildren, blackberry brandy, and faith. We loved her pierogies, her cookies, her sense of humor, her mannerisms, and her habit of blessing herself and saying a prayer before she drove anywhere.

My grandmother gave me a pair of Wanda's earrings, a smaller version of Wanda and Myron's wedding picture, and two table runners Wanda had made with crocheted edges. I'm crocheting a blanket with heavy, dark blue yarn and a hefty purple hook. I can still only do the single stitch pattern, but I'm damn good at it. The stitches and the edges are even and perfect. Next time I see Mom, I'll ask if she can show me how Wanda did the zig-zag pattern.

hey, but I don't care 'cause sometimes I hear my voice

Another homework assignment - it's amazing the things I'm revisiting in this course. The writing prompt was "In the past, have you ever felt 'silenced' in a class?"

My first experience with writing silence was in 10th grade English class. We had to exchange papers with a classmate and review each other's papers. I can still clearly see the boy who reviewed my paper walking up to me to hand it back. He opened his mouth to say something, shut it, shook his head, handed me my paper, and walked away. I had never seen anyone have such a visible, negative reaction to my writing. I remember thinking, "Is my writing really that bad?" For the rest of the school year, I struggled with all the writing assignments, no matter what class they were for. I spent unnecessary hours re-writing papers and making myself sick with worry after I had turned them in and waited to find out the grades.

I learned to be ashamed of my own writing because I loved reading, I loved the words other people wrote. I wasn't arrogant enough to want others to love the words I wrote, but neither did I want to cause such a visible, negative reaction in someone who read my words. I concluded I no right to write because I obviously hadn't been granted the privilege of knowing the secret of writing. As Haake says, "There is a whole world of people who feel more a desire for language than entitlement, or even ease. For them, 'language' – especially literary language, or any other discourse of power – is like someone else's secret code. It is a simple feeling of exclusion: 'real' writers, have it, or own it, and they don't" (65).

I was lucky, though. I got my writing voice back, or chose to take it back, the following year (ah, how resilient is youth). The school offered the option of taking the traditional English class or an advanced composition class. I decided that since I was such a bad writer, I should take the composition class, even though I expected to fail it. Instead, I unlearned and re-learned the English language. I learned the mechanics of writing in a new way, and then found topics I was interested in on which I could practice using them. I read and wrote about Sylvia Plath, Emily Brontë, and Kate Chopin (The Awakening, ironically - the first book I was not able to put down until I had finished it). I wrote the required journal entries every week - those were a bitch, facing my own head twice a week, but whatever else is tough love? I worked my way through A Brief and Lively No-nonsense Guide to Writing, which was so much better than the dreaded Warriner's English Grammar.

I discovered I could almost always quickly find the angle or perspective I wanted to pursue in an essay, and spent my time rolling the words around on the paper until they reflected what was in my head - editing and revising were no longer chores but meaty projects. I learned the power of writing was in expressing my ideas as clearly and originally and precisely as possible. The best lesson I learned in Mrs Messer's Advanced Composition class was to ask "Is this what I really mean?" when I'm writing.

I learned what Haake learned: "What I had always experienced before as a kind of difficult and painful translation had become…something more open-ended and fluid, a continuously unfolding site of surprise. Palpable, material, and with its own economy, logic, and music – language…does not just get written but also somehow writes the writer, who is inscribed, being-written, in the moment of writing" (64).

I will always be grateful for that class, and I am (grudgingly) grateful to the boy who shook his head when he handed me my paper. He sent me where I needed to go.


Haake, Katharine. "Begin by Beginning Again." What Our Speech Disrupts. Phoenix: Premium Source Publishing, 2000.

burrowing

I just had a fun little writing assignment, so I thought I'd post it here. The assignment was to choose one of the critical terms in the course textbook and in 350 words or less, dig into it, using any outside references you think support it. I chose "burrowing" and a favorite book from childhood.

Burrowing. Haake describes it as "working your way into the words, like an animal or archaeologist, with dirt under your fingers and a sense of perpetual discovery, and yes, accomplishment" (248). The reference to "animal" reminded me of the opening scene in The Wind in the Willows: "Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing…Something up above was calling him imperiously, and he made for the steep little tunnel…working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, 'Up we go! Up we go!' till at last, pop! his snout came out into the sunlight" (9).

In creative writing pedagogy, this is a rosy metaphor for how students and teachers may wish the burrowing process of writing would work – tired of plodding along with what doesn't work or is irritating or stale, finding something new to try out, gathering determination to pursue it, going for it, and being rewarded.

Sometimes, it works just like that, but most of the time, it is harder. There can be as much frustration burrowing into new ways of thinking and writing as there is in wrestling yet again with the old ways. And yet, sometimes, after a trial with new theories and experiences, a writer burrows back to her old ways again, but with new (and sometimes reluctant) eyes.

Consider Mole finding his home again after adventures with Rat: "Home!...his old home that he had hurriedly forsaken and never sought again… Shabby indeed, and small and poorly furnished, and yet his, the home he had made for himself…Mole…related…how this was planned, and how that was thought out, and how this was got…and that was a wonderful find…how much it all meant to him, and the special value of some such anchorage in one's existence" (77-92).

Perhaps creative writing pedagogy should also teach revisiting as a form of revising. As we learn and experience more, burrow back into what we learned and experienced before and see the old in new ways.

Haake, Katharine. "Critical Terms for Creative Writers: An Easy Reference Guide." What Our Speech Disrupts. Phoenix: Premium Source Publishing, 2000.

Grahame, Kenneth. The Wind in the Willows. San Diego: Harcourt, Inc., 2001.

mystery, history, and bleeding nuns

Life got very busy suddenly, which I guess is what happens when you decide to take up a degree after you've been out of school for ten years. I spend eight hours at a computer at work, and then another two or three on a computer at home working on this degree every day. My first grad course is a month long, with a new module every three days. There's an assignment for every module, plus a final paper. I only have two other courses that will be this intense. The other seven courses are two months each.

The reading has been intriguing so far, and not a little ironic. This first course is pedagogy of creative writing - there's a lot of argument in the readings about teachers imposing their own views on their writing students so that instead of finding and strengthening their own writing voice, students are writing in imitation of, or to please, the teacher (I wonder how this will play out when I get into the heavy writing for this degree). My dictionary has been getting a workout from all the jargon I've been wading through, too. Polyvocal is my new favorite jargon word.

I'm still waiting to hear what they think of my writing portfolio. That's making me nervous, although one of the stories I submitted I quite liked, and I hope they like it too. I'm also still waiting to hear from the other program I applied to. The plan is that if I end up not liking this university, and I'm accepted at the other one, I have a back-up plan for transfer and hopefully not lose too much time - gotta maintain the momentum of my enthusiasm for this endeavor for as long as possible. So far, things seem to be going okay, but it's early days yet.

My elective choices are amusing, and possibly unbelievable. Vampire stories of the 19th Century, Gothic literature (the blog title is the title of the course), Shakespeare, medieval literature. I wish I had time to take them all.

My next course is two months of screenwriting. Who knew that Script Frenzy would come in handy so soon?

Highlights of the week:
- possibly moving upstairs into the new work suite in a week or two and was informed that I've been upgraded to an office, though I'll be sharing it, which is fine because I actually like the person I'll be sharing with, and she's the tech writer, so she needs quiet as much as I do (and did I mention that I still don't have a phone?)
- listened to the Christopher Marlowe Mysteries on BBC7 this week while working - campy and cute (The Curious Case of the Curs'd Quayside, The Perplex'd Plot of the Perilous Plague; I mean really!)
- found an MP3 version of Possession; the only other audio version available is on cassette, audible.com doesn't even have it; and not a bad price for nearly 23 hours of listening. This is the book I go to when I need a slow and detailed read. You can't read this book fast, don't even try, and don't bother with the movie version - it doesn't do the story justice, although Jeremy Northam is yummy as Randolph Henry Ash
- got a new cookbook: The Hippy Gourmet: the mocha mousse and the apple fig compote sound extra yummy
- since I'm in a brainy mood, I also got In Search of the Modern Myth
- managed to get the chirpy sound device out of Lyra's mouse toy, thanks to Lyra mauling it to the point where the stuffing is coming out
- had an amusing time watching Lyra play with a cricket last night; I feel sorry for the cricket

Just read that Madeleine McCann's parents may have had something to do with her death. Also just read that Madeleine L'Engle died. Sad. Sad. Sad.

Paper to write. Due tomorrow night. Bye now.