You, in My Arm; I, in You, Not As Robin Williams (Post-MFA Edition)

I'm back from my final residency at Pacific Lutheran University's Rainier Writing Workshop, MFA in hand. "So am I a real writer now?"

Actually, those ten days were tremendously validating. Those of us graduating discussed one another's work. We each gave a public reading. Eight minutes isn't much, but we made it count, all of us! The readings are always one of the highlights of residency, and our class set the bar high. I got to visit with my trinity of mentors--incredible writers, dear spirits, inspiring human beings all three of them. Wordcrafter though I am, I can only put my hand on my heart to express the depth of love, affection, respect I feel for them all: Lia Purpura, Fleda Brown, and Stephen Corey. I'm honored to know all my classmates and many from other cohorts in the program--great writers, special people, several friends for life.
I left the residency with a new mandate to honor my writing, and new possible contacts in my new home. (And yes, it does feel like home here in Tucson!)

But something else happened during that time. We were at residency when Robin Williams passed. Although I'm not a huge movie watcher, his was definitely one of the most ubiquitous and beloved names of my growing up. I've written a little on here fairly recently about some of my own experience with suicide, and even though I shielded myself from the media around his passing, it triggered a lot in me. I relived my own periods at and over that edge. I asked myself all over again why am I still here. I felt like a failure because I never "succeeded." 

A few nights ago I dreamed. I was with a beloved, close friend. We were so close, we could energetically enter one another's bodies and feel one another's physical sensations. Then I cut my arm--my left forearm (as y'all know, I'm left handed, so that's quite a castration) -- I cut it from wrist to elbow, deep and wide. And the instant after I'd done it, I realized my dear friend was "in" my arm at that time. She could feel the cutting and the cut, the pulsing of broken veins, the warmth of spillage. I could feel her feeling it. I was horrified.

When I woke, that moment was with me. Going forward, how can I allow myself to get back to that deceiving place of believing my actions don't affect anyone else?

You are in the veins of my arm. And I'll use that arm for writing now.

Writing Residency and Body Image/Food

About the Residency and some frank talk about me, since it is my blog. Speaking of blog: You would have thought I'd have an effective comments system well worked out by now, especially considering what a desideratum it has long been for me. I apologize for the continued woes. WordPress did not offer what I was hoping for, and the plugin I installed hoping to solve the problem has made it worse if anything. I will work on it but please bear with me, because I'm at...

The Rainier Writing Workshop's 2013 Residency--a week of intense learning, sharing, co-teaching, interacting...basically a time when even if you're an introvert you can enjoy going out at night. Morning talks crystal sharp and pealing with laughter in informal atmosphere...

Surrounded by people who also think this (picture) is hysterically funny and also took a photo of it:

...and, most of the time, we're in intimate workshops and seminars in which the most acute of critiquing or seminar-ing is compounded with the loveliest congeniality.

There have been a few times I've felt critiquing hasn't been sharp enough from certain quarters. On the other hand, my work came up for workshop yesterday and one of the two faculty leaders expressed some very serious reservations about it, the vocabulary becoming stronger as the workshop went on. But there was no gall, neither given nor taken--this was objective, if passionate, discussion of work being taken seriously. Truthfully, though, I could feel that were it not for my meds I'd have been in pieces. But I could balance that faculty member's interpretations with many thoughtful readings from other faculty and students that gave me a more hopeful picture. Any one opinion is just one opinion. Even better: knowing that my own fragile ego might have exaggerated some parts of what I heard and minimized something positive, I checked in with one of my cohorts who had been in the same workshop. She reminded me of some very positive things the faculty member had also said and that I had not paid attention to. Somehow it's easy to ignore what you're good at and only focus on the points of criticism.

I've already met with my mentor for the thesis year. She is a phenomenal writer of both poetry and nonfiction and also happens to be a great teacher. Several conceptual aspects of my work for this year fell into place so naturally at our meeting that it felt very auspicious for what's to come. 

Oh, and we both have big hair.

An epiphany that came for me today: the traditional line people draw of "fact and/or/versus fiction" is vicious both for fiction writing (cannot reflect facts) and for creative nonfiction writing (can only be the facts). So, I propose we disband fact and fiction and allow other dichotomies to emerge.

Okay. Now to Ela, Food, and Body. Last night and this morning, small groups of lovely people, it felt fine (although my guts reminded me afterwards that it wasn't fine). I confess, the food and body thing is torture. One sad thing is how similar it has been each year, although this year may be the worst for various reasons. I need to look like I'm eating but I'm mortified if I look like I'm eating. I don't want to eat anything but I need to stay functional.

We're all self conscious in some way. So. My thighs look gigantic, my belly bloated, my chin doubled. How can I even appear in public?

My belly is a beast of unnatural and prodigious appetites.

I was warned I might have unusual cravings as my body seeks iron after recent massive blood loss. And so. I have no appetite, but I'm afraid of what I start when I start eating. And I'm craving salt, which I never usually eat or desire. One day, I snuck to the cafeteria and bought a small bag of chips, as self consciously as a teenager buying condoms for the first time. Back in my room, I shook them out onto a napkin and made three piles, so that each transgression would only be about 50 calories. I put one pile back in the foil pouch and one into an old oatmeal packet, clamped the crimped edges under a book. I ate a luxurious few of the third pile just as they were, and crumbled the rest into applesauce, to dilute the craved salt.

Most of my favorite foods don't taste good. I have a metallic taste in my mouth. If I eat, it gets worse. If I don't eat, it gets worse. 

For the group meals, the catering's awareness of gluten free and nondairy has improved exponentially. Which means fewer excuses for me not to eat, or to bring my safe foods to eat. Still, every time I let them feed me it's a scary act of surrender and I always don't feel well afterwards--there's always something that doesn't agree. On the other hand, I brought so much of my own food here, but even feeding myself a lot of the time, that heap is diminishing so imperceptibly...and I thought I'd calculated it fairly well. 

Calories counting in my head all the time, the bestial belly reprimanded all the time. Grapes taste so good now, but they do not satisfy the hunger urge and meanwhile they add and add to the calorie count. Which means, help my guts to be more roilsome and noisome than any in the history of humanity.

My question for you writers out there: what could I do to the above litany of complaints so that people would be laughing along? Or are you laughing already?

If I could just be a bee enjoying the late clover...

Fragility and Friends

Welcome to the third year of Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at PLU in Tacoma. Here we are, all together again. There is such a euphoria to seeing all these people again, many of them people we haven't seen in a year, although a lot of sharing goes on via Facebook.

My flight was a red-eye, so between that and my meds I was falling off my chair for the opening night readings, which killed me as both faculty readers are wonderful writers as well as great readers of their work.

Staying in the dorm rooms, and this time we're back in the dorm of our first year, which is conveniently located half way between the places we mostly frequent. Last year it was being renovated--seems like there's always some renovation going on here--and we were in a dorm so far away from everything that you either had to sprint a lot or pack everything for the whole day.

I don't know how the students manage two to one of these rooms all year. I'm using the second bed for my wardrobe, shown above. That random scatter of clothes is quite evocative of how I'm feeling. Put together but in bits. Put together on top of something shattered. A lot of the time I'm managing to be my old excited insightful self of these residencies. But then I have to go hide for a while.

Friends, I am fragile. And buoyed and sustained by my wonderful friends in Anchorage with whom I stayed for the days before I left. They reminded me of life and life's affirmations. They shared with me the makings of good salads and the rightness of food in the belly. They took care of me.

I am fragile. The definition--true definition--of lost is as the opposite of find--. of findable, even. If you know where you last saw something, even if you never find it, it's not truly lost. Well, during the days in Anchorage, moving back and forth between people's houses, I lost my phone.My iPhone, with everything on it. At first I was in disbelief. The old Ela never lost things, let alone something as important as an iPhone. But there it was, or rather, there it wasn't. No denying that, and I lacked the very faintest notion of how I might have lost it. I remembered pulling it out to share pictures. I don't remember putting it back in its very own pocket of my vest, but the latter is such a reflex action (to avoid losing it) that I could have done so on autopilot. And it's not at that house. We looked intensely. Not a clue. But there it was--no phone, on the verge of a trip. A new iPhone was out of the question by over $600. So I'm now learning my way around an Android. I'm not especially techie and I don't want to talk about that on here because I think many of my readers also are not techie. Just that's the story. Later the same day, I became convinced I'd lost my car keys. I turned my purse inside out several times, we scoured the very short distance between my having them and not; finally Phil, who was there, scoured my purse again and there they were in the back pocket (which I hadn't checked) where I'd put them for safekeeping.

It feels a lot like how I've heard the aging process (in people's 60s/70s/80s) described...it is the aging process, just thirty years too early. I cannot trust myself. When I'm out of comfort zone, living out of car and visiting with friends for a couple nights, moving from one thing to another, I can't trust myself with the most basic of things. And I panic. I didn't with the phone, it was just too bizarre. Panic I did with the keys, though. And there's always more travel in my future. I seem to live from trip to trip.

Sorry if this sounds like a bit of a "dear diary" blog post. I just wanted to be real about fragility and how it comes to us or presents itself within us when we're not expecting it.

Another Perspective on Sharing Suffering

It's been so long since I last posted--again! That outflow onto the beach that I pictured bearded with ice a week or so ago...

...is now shorn of snow and flowing freely.

As should I be, I can't help but feeling.
I don't know what's preventing me from writing more here.
It's true, I'm not settled on where "here" is right now. I've been talking about migrating this blog and changing its appearance for months now. The superficial blogger-internal face-lift I've given it recently seems only to have rendered it buggier and less user-friendly (user-unfriendlier?) so I may undo that.
And the blog displacement and stagnating migration intent are only highly convenient metaphors for what's going on in my own life at the moment.
I did just see 22:22:22 on March 22, which should have told me it's time to get ready for bed, but it made me superstitiously happy and excited to write at least "something." I do have a pretty neat photos post almost ready to go, too.
But the truth is, I had far too much work this past week. And my faculties seem to be diminished and less than equal to overburdened weeks. Apprehension of loss of my own particular brilliance on which I've always been able to rely has rammed me further into the posthole of despair, the tunnel stopped at one end.
Manic seems such a long way away, and meds only make the posthole tunnel less deep and final.
And I confess it's been so long since I've eaten or drunk anything without accompanying punishing nausea and pain, I'm starting to drive myself crazy with the frantic mental scrabblings of what I might add in or (more likely) take out of my diet. And this without "indiscretions" or castor oil punishments for well over a week.

I can't see the woods for the words, as I am saying a lot at the moment (quoting myself from a half-written poem). But I am recognizing how right my wonderful naturopath is in emphasizing that words can be my salvation. As I've been trying to think through my creative thesis for my MFA--it really is coming to that time already!--and suffering through everything I laid out above and many other life stresses, which make it harder to focus, I found a path by meditating on words. Passion is a tense of "suffering," and compassion (from Latin) or sympathy (from Greek) mean suffering together, sharing the experience. But if you choose to be a victim of your suffering, your passion, you are christ on the cross, excruciated, a grand and solo passion that can only be venerated or turned away from in pity and horror.
In other words, I need to acknowledge my sufferings as normal for someone in my circumstances rather than thinking of them as extraordinary and specific to me (even if my behaviors sometimes exacerbate the pain)--and then I can write about them in such a way that my readers will see themselves and suffer together--sympathize. Without the possibility of sympathy, what I write will be alienating; the crucified figure left alone in a desert place, the paradox of standing out when no one can bear to look. (After I came out of my worst period of anorexia seven or eight years ago, which was beyond excruciating for anyone who had to be around me, let alone for me, some friends and colleagues came up to me and shared that they had had to look away during that time; watching me die was too much to bear. The book of my life unreadable.)
I am learning to write a book for companions (sharers of sustenance) and compatients (sharers in suffering).