Post-MFA Writing: Doubt, and Exhilaration

During the MFA program, right around now is when people are starting to pull together their first "packet" to send off to their mentor. An agreed-upon amount of creative work (so many poems; a chapter; so many pages of prose; an essay or three); three responses to books read during the "packet period."

So, what about now?

A good friend of mine, and one of my inspirations, has continued the "packet" structure by herself since she graduated a couple years ago, and she's so inspiring both because of her commitment to art, literature, and poetry and because of her commitment to herself as the wonderful poet she is. At least a couple of my fellow graduates this year said they were planning the same.

Just as when I was a serious oboist in my teens, I realized upon passing with distinction the top "grade" that this was just a beginning, not the be-all end-all it had seemed before its achievement, so graduating the MFA seems much more the beginning of a writer's life than any sort of acme or culmination. Which is great, right? Because it means we get to continue, leaning, making mistakes, interacting with others...And yet, it's a whole new challenge. Most of us entered the MFA in the first place seeking the structure and validation it provided, the "official stamp." I could justify to myself that I was "working," on a very expensive degree, where without that I might have felt I was just playing around when I could be racking up hours of editing/translating time.

So what about now, student loan payments and all? One thing that differentiates post-MFA from MFA life is that we now have a carefully curated body of work--the thesis--which is an entity in its own right, separate from ourselves, birthed. This is true, even granted that by the nature of the MFA theses themselves are often works in progress--part one of a novel; a poetry collection that is still growing--or, in my case, an interweaving of poems and essays that begs the question whether it should go out into the world so conjoined or if in fact it contains the central nervous systems of two collections, one in each genre.
I feel that sense of obligation deeply. People have responded to my work, and more people should have the opportunity to do so, both for the people's sake and the work's sake.

Nonetheless, I feel like I've mostly been "playing around" so far, and mostly that's seemed appropriate--pressure off, and in the context of making revisions, open mind, openhearted listening all over again to what the piece wants to be. 

Then this afternoon a new poem started to come. And it was just like the first time ever. Sh**ty first draft coming out onto the page, focus, love, delight...and then doubt. What if I can't do line breaks? What if the material is either hopelessly trite or impossible obscure? Is this telling too much about me, under the surface? Etc. etc. etc. 
Worse yet, I'm one of the rare birds who actually enjoys writing critiques and has published book reviews, and has been encouraged by mentors to continue to write them (another habit I need to pick back up). I'm supposed to be a serious critic of other people's poetry. But I don't have a clue how to evaluate even this shi**ty first draft. What if everything I thought I knew is wrong or forgotten?

And my other self answers, CELEBRATE! Be in the unknowing! Being a critic [cognate with "discern," "discriminate," "crisis," (yes, and "crime")] means being very openly observant and being willing to draw distinctions based on that observation, which is far different than being an arbiter who determines how others should think/judge.

So, as a real live post-MFA writer, I'm a bit scared. But I'm also really excited. Will you join me for this dance?

"...and your life is in your hands."

When I get a line of poetry going through my head, it's usually for a good reason.
Lately:    voi ch'entrate, and your life is in your hands. -- the final line of Robert Lowell's "The Exile's Return." 
"Voi ch'entrate" is elliptical for Dante's lasciate ogne speranze voi ch'entrate, better known as "abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

And the truth is, I'm staring down a precipice.

But aren't we all, always? I take my life in my hands with every breath. That part was clear. But I didn't understand why I was getting the "abandon hope" part of the quote. Maybe it was just along for the ride.

Thank goodness I've been listening to all the self-empowerment and personal development audios. I listened to Roz Savage, the English lady who left behind her corporate life to follow passion, and has rowed solo across oceans. One of her lessons from aboard boat was don't indulge in hope. My ears pricked up. In the middle of the ocean, in a storm, with a broken oar and a waterlogged radio. hope may lead to paralysis, apathy, and a feeling of disempowerment as you try to replace your initiative and responsibility with wishing and longing.
So, actually, Robert Lowell (and little miz Ela), abandoning hope and acknowledging that your life is in your hands are two arms of the same embrace--embracing personal accountability.

My life is in my hands as I stare down a precipice and as I check my hope at the door. 
I'm learning so much right now, rediscovering my urge and delight in creative writing and translating, and throwing myself down the rabbit hole of a whole new endeavor, learning and being coached to run a business. In my ripe old age, I'm finally learning about finances! I'm finally bringing myself into participation (one of the reasons I first started this blog, participation) in one of the most potent and ubiquitous means of circulation.
And it's uncanny how well what I'm learning about business fits in with many of the spiritual/personal development changes I've been working on. I'm looking forward to sharing more detail on that.
But there is also a demand for unflinching honesty. If you're going to lay out resources you don't have, you'd better be very clear about where you're borrowing it from, and on what terms. Things have to match up. 

I have a mismatch. I'm excited, optimistic, engaged. I feel really good. And/but--I feel really good despite... When I say or think x is really good despite... is usually when something's about to go awry. But really, I feel okay. And yet, it was wisdom to decide not to go to the writers' conference at the end of this month because I'm not at the top of my notch. But I'm feeling okay! But objective markers of measurement would insist I'm not okay. And there's such a mismatch, I can hardly believe it even standing on two different scales, even getting feedback from people I trust.

Now would be an extremely inconvenient time to have to go away to treatment. But I'm back at the point of being told it's go away by choice or else I'll lose the choice.
I'm finding this pretty difficult to digest. It makes going off and studying up on LLC paperwork seem relatively easy.
And my life is in my hands.

Wisdom versus Adventure: How I Decided Not to go to AWP

Finally I get to write this blog post! Last Friday, both my computers developed problems. Yes, on the same day. You'd think having two computers would mean a backup plan. I spent hours trying to fix things myself and hours on the phone with Microsoft, and hours stuck with configuration failure reboots. Given the almost unique ability of computers to get the calmest person banging his/her head on the wall, I am so grateful for all this attention on wisdom and personal development audios of late. Some deep breathing and mindfulness practice helped get me through yet another configuration failure (and hence hours of lost work time) this evening.

Yes, returning to the breath, focusing on the breath, as a perpetually available meditation, is one commonality among all the different sources of advice.

It helped me more too, eventually. I mentioned agonizing over a decision and finding it extremely hard to settle one way or the other. I was hoping to go to the enormous AWP Writers' Convention in Seattle at the end of February. So enticing! Especially being enrolled in a low-residency MFA, with all my cohorts scattered all over the country, I have many beloved fellow travelers and mentors whom I only see once a year. Add to that the opportunity to meet many of my "writer crushes" and inspirations. Add to that a mind-bogglingly rich array of panels, talks, readings, for over twelve hours of each of the three days, so that at every session there are probably at least four you don't want to miss. An opportunity to learn so much, be so stimulated, in such a short space of time. Even the possibility of catching up with friends in the Seattle area who are not at the conference. I had free admission as a student in my program (although of course the flight down and hotel are far from free). How could I not go?

Well, on the other hand. Stability. My eternal frontier. Still settling after a two-month trip last fall. I've submitted my Critical Paper (yay! Early!) but still have a Creative Thesis to finish revising and make as good as possible for an MFA! Two new job projects both of which require an initial learning curve. Good habits under installation (instillation?)
And, as I confessed, I'm the smallest I've been in a very long time. I really think I'm doing okay, but I must admit I'm not brimming over with excess energy. If I have a 9-5 day in town I generally have to spend most of the next day on the couch. And that's a 9-5 day of mostly one-on-one interactions in a small town. AWP would be three consecutive twelve-plus-hour days around 11,000 writers!
My healthcare providers voted "don't go." As did friends.
I asked for a dream, and got a clear "don't go."
I asked explicitly in my soulful journaling practice, wherein I connect with my spirit guide /subconscious/angel/what you will. She said "don't go."

And yet, there I was searching for a flight, all ready to go!

And I agonized. Why did I ask for guidance if I wasn't willing to heed it? Was I asking for guidance in order to do the opposite? This went on for almost two weeks, hanging in the balance. I didn't want to abuse the guidance I'd been given. I didn't want to abuse the hospitality of my program by turning down the conference ticket. I didn't want to admit to being physically weak.

I think many of us are rebels, or are inexorably drawn to risk as opposed to wisdom. There must be an evolutionary balance there. It wouldn't be called "wisdom" if it weren't advantageous. On the other hand, if no one pushed out of their comfort zone, how would we ever evolve? On the other other hand, since my tendency is always to push beyond my comfort zone, my eventual decision not to go was actually an evolution beyond my status quo. 

With all my recent talk of paradox, this is the sublimest paradox of all, that taking a risk/pushing beyond the comfort zone would have been staying in my comfort zone, doing what I'd always done (Einstein's definition of insanity).

So, if I wish to, I can feel a sense of adventure as a result of having chosen not to go. Staying where I can continue to nurture these good new habits and practices, and not putting myself in an environment and schedule that would surely bury me, is adventure of a new kind; is evolution. 

This decision is also recognition of the magic that is receipt of guiding dreams and channeling of guidance from beyond in my journaling practice.

That sounds new and adventurous to me!

I'd love to hear others' learning stories like this. Thank you for letting me share. 

Edited to add: here's another really cool connection that came in the decision process; I can't believe I forgot to mention it. Someone made the point that to 90% of people, if you serve them a meal and tell them it's "healthy," they will immediately have an expectation of "yuck/joyless/unsatisfying." The point, in that context, was obviously that it's important to describe food in aesthetic terms that engage the senses alluringly--beautiful, vibrant, delicious, succulent. But the parallel with my difficulty in making what I knew was the right decision was striking. "This would be the wise thing to do." "Yuck boiled kale." Yes, I was being a brat.  But no more so than anyone who thinks healthy and delicious don't go together. There's more to be said on this; in fact, it's one of my biggest life lessons. We shall return to this.

Book Review: Mary Karr's _Lit_

It's ironic, or at least self reflexive, that I should come across and read Mary Carr's Lit, which chronicles, amongst other things, a sojourn in a mental hospital, while I was in such a place myself. I'm not dodging this issue, by the way: I just need to write a review of this book while it's still fresh in my head, having read its 385 pages over two days between groups and appointments and involuntary meds-induced naps and not having access to a copy of it for reference purposes.

Given those circumstances, this isn't going to be a review like reviews I submit to literary magazines. It'll be more of a quick-and-dirty. It's important for me to be reading memoirs like this, since memoir is going to be one component of my MFA thesis on which I'm embarking, and dealing with stories around health and soul-health is an important aspect of what will be memoir'd.

Lit is plastered with rave reviews, including one from no less than Michiko Kakutani on the front cover. Given this unanimous ecstasy, I was distinctly underwhelmed. In fairness, though, without that billing I wouldn't have been disappointed. The memoir is very readable, sometimes funny, sometimes poignant, reflective enough that it isn't just a me-me-me (although of course it is that too).

I learned both some how tos and some how not tos from reading this book. Number one: Get a better editor! Of course that's always my pet peeve; how many books have I read, sympathizing and loving the book, and thinking about every three minutes "Can I be your editor and have you do this again?" Seriously, though, throughout the book the use of em dashes and commas is so erratic and often so ill advised that where it doesn't actually distort the meaning (which it does) it often made my eyes hurt. This being the case, it's not surprising that the whole panoply of pet peeves is out in force, from gerund use to comma splices; from sentence structure to sequence of tenses.The word "scrim" appears thrice--too many for such a word. I saw the word "Ziploc" spelled three different ways; the name "Spencer" spelled differently twice in as many lines.

The latter leads me to the biggest how not to I learned from reading this. Karr uses present tense as her main narrative tense. It's been popular to do this, the last thirty years or so, to impart a sense of vividness and immediacy. I've always been suspicious of the device because I've always loved the richness of time relationships language offers us. How wonderful, for example, that the present perfect allows for us to be in a present state as a result of a past action (I have arrived~I came here and am here now). But in this book, the present tense for narrative really doesn't work. It's not just a matter of making the narrative feel one-dimensional, lacking time relationships. There are many sentences structured something like "A few days after the funeral, she is walking down the street..." This may not look too bad out of context, but the first part is past tense solidly, and the present tense right after can only be unnatural. I don't have examples from the text, but there were many that were jarring indeed.

Some of these jarring instances, however, were created by what's probably the biggest how to of the book for me, which is that Karr reflects as a present time writer on the narrative of her past and inserts these reflections into the narrative. Present time writer and past time experiencer really requires past tense narrative. However, these reflections are probably the most special thing in the book, especially when she gives glimpses of the process of writing the book: not wanting to spend too much time on an episode, wishing a character had signed off on her version of events, choosing a pseudonym or pseudonymous location for an event. These reflections show that the author has her reader in mind and understands what a reader might want to know about, but also is aware of herself both as writer and experiencer--her privacy and the ways in which she wishes to present information are part of the relevant material.

I haven't read Karr's two earlier memoirs--and what's up with THREE memoirs?? But I was at a disadvantage for it. In at least one place, Karr summarizes material from an earlier memoir, but even apart from that there were enough untied ends that it was clear that material presented elsewhere was being assumed. Editorial and present tense problems aside, this may be the biggest problem with the memoir: it doesn't stand alone. But calling this a problem may be simply a matter of perspective. What single work of any writer stands alone? I still wish there weren't so many untied ends, though. 

Their presence prevents me from knowing whether a lack I see in the storytelling would be solved by supplying it from an earlier memoir or if it really is missing. The problem is this: The memoir is dealing with Karr's finding sobriety after years of drunkenness and depression--specifically sobriety via Alcoholics Anonymous, with a kicking-and-screaming arrival at trust in a Higher Power which finally leads her to Catholicism. Now, the book contains plenty about the wretchedness of being a desperate addicted alcoholic trying to claw her way out of an unbearable life situation, but precious little depiction of the earlier phase where drinking alcohol provides a high, exhilaration, a sense of invincibility. Even the younger Mary is at best verklempt. And yet the exhilaration and fun and adventure is referred to as something lost. Except that alcoholism runs in her family and she has pain to get away from, I just didn't feel like I got to know enough about why she became dependent on alcohol in the first place.

If I were to be writing about agreeing to take meds to control bipolar mania, I would want to talk about how mania was making life unmanageable and leading to ever deepening depressions for sure, but I would also want to talk about the experience of the manic high and why it is so hard to give up.  

One last comment, which sort of fits under the information not disclosed rubric: Karr sure makes an awful lot of comments about weight and thinness. She even lists thinness as the number one reason for why she's not the most suffering of afflicted people--ahead of being white, intelligent, HIV-negative... She mentions her own weight going up and mostly down, repeatedly, and depicts herself denying herself food and forcing herself to exercise. The anorectic in the mental hospital is the only one referred to as beautiful, consistently.  So what next? A memoir about her eating disorder? Not meaning to be mean...but it seems like there's something there and she's playing it coy.

And now I'm going away to think more about why this was such a quick and easy and even compelling read for me, even though aspects of the crafting drove me crazy and I didn't especially care about the character. If I could figure that out, I'd really know something about the intangibles of good writing. Answers in the comments, please! (As well as please tell me what to do about the 13,907 comments waiting for me here, all of them likely spam save maybe a half dozen?!)

I love you

This time, two weeks since I posted. And the 4,395 tally for my comments folder is beyond my ken or forbearance. The real comments from real people are so precious I can't just delete everything, but that's some golden needles in an enormous haybarn.

Okay, start again. Welcome to my space! I'm so glad you stopped by. I love you.

What a wild and freewheeling time this is. On a genuinely hot day recently, I stood at a high window, enjoying the warmth, puzzled by a brownian dusting of snowflakes, where were they coming from, what were they portending (harbinging?). I stared for a while and eventually recognized they were seeds. Dandelion and other wind-borne seeds, lifting and dipping like the sparrow flight I keep coming back to in my writing.

Even the sparrow makes a difference when it falls.

I think it's a sparrow. What's fascinating to me is that when I first found it, splayed almost symmetrically between the two apple trees in the lush greenhouse here, I thought perhaps it had been laid there as a sacred act (also known as sacrifice). I thought it looked iridescent, the bluish under-feathers gleaming against the dun.

WARNING: If you are squeamish or easily grossed out, please scroll fast past the next picture. I'm sharing it to share my point that everything is beautiful and that life breeds life, spirit continues.
Come to find out, as I did with my bare left hand, approaching the corpse as gently as if to nudge a sleeper awake, this bird had been lying between the two trees for some time. As luminous as the feathers up top had appeared to me, in some sort of meta way, the underside was a teeming of a different ordering of ensoulment.
Scroll past if you're squeamish, and I'll leave space between, but please hear me on this, with William Blake:
EVERYTHING THAT LIVES IS HOLY.


















EVERYTHING THAT LIVES IS HOLY

One of the key pieces I'm working on for my thesis centers on Bede's allegory of a sparrow flying through a hall from the darkness before and back into darkness beyond, representing a human lifespan. Isn't it ironic, or bizarre, or freaky, or encouraging, or worrying, that I have just reconstructed a version of this allegory where the sparrow flies into a greenhouse, flies through, and finds no open end at the far side, slams into it, and falls down to become an offering to a pair of apple trees wed for life by their pollen, to become a nurse for life forms about whom we know so little but who have such vigor. Air to earth. And into the ground.



Yes. Rest there. But you'll be so busy, you soon won't remember the bird part of you that's doing the resting--the rest of you, the new, teeming part, will be so busy. The rest will take care of themselves. And your sweet dreamy rest will take care of itself.

Odd, too, that I'm so totally unsqueamish, especially considering that I'm about the last person you'd want around in an emergency. But when it's 'gross' stuff (except vomit), I'm your girl. One year in college, there was an outbreak of horribly wounded hedgehogs, still alive but actively being taken over, evidently had been side-sliced by a weed-whacker or something. Neighbors would come find me if they found one and ask me to deal with it because they just couldn't. I stockpiled small boxes and walked many poor hedgehogs to the vet to be euthanized, having done what I could for them first.

If everything that lives is holy, and everything that exists metamorphoses...I can lie on my back in the middle of the driveway and listen to stacked layers of birdsong and feel the crosshairs of the universe shift away from me awhile. Feels good.

Ooh--my final challenge just as I write this: I can hear a rodent gnawing in my room, very close to me! I can't find it--I have no sense of directional hearing so I can't tell where it is. Let's keep that unsqueamish face on...

Talking, Pictures

The willows are budding...

..and Bidarki creek falling to the beach is making icicles of cathedral grandeur...

I sent in my fourth of the five packets for the second year of the MFA program. Can scarcely credit I have only one more to do. This one was delightful to me, as I'd had the space, with Phil gone, with the house-sitting, to focus and get excited about my work. It feels somewhat like the picture above--falling, falling; but with such a sense of uplift. A pointer to my new life. I also read a poet about whom I'm excited in a full-blown epiphanic way, more than I have been even about my very favorite poets. His name is Andrew Joron. He writes speculative lyric, and he is auditory! I get it! And he did things around words and alphabet that I'm doing in my work right now, so there were lots of spooky coincidences. I'm in awestruck admiration, and also avid to make a connection with the poet and share enthusiasms. Now, a day or so of busyness, and then back to the writing and work...until an Anchorage trip next week.

"Why is Roxy barking so ferociously?" one morning when I'd let her out. Here's the view from the bedroom window, what she was reacting to. Moose's butt. She thinks moose are for barking at, which is scary at times. 

Do you see the moose in this one? Bedded down. They are everywhere at the moment.

Sometimes all you need to do is show someone a picture. I always seem to have all these auras and epiphenomena (ephemera?) I need to include radiating from the picture. See how monochrome all these pictures are. See how each of them is subtly colored, each with a different shade and cast. Oh, and I try to speak that, in real time talk. No wonder I stammer and backtrack.

Siri is teaching me to speak, it turns out, far more than the other way around. I'm surprised by how quickly I can type on that tiny iPhone keypad with one or two fingers, but it is awkward, put mildly, and makes everything sore very quickly. So I dictate my texts and dates and to-do lists almost exclusively. Even with the time correcting Siri's mistakes, it's quicker. I'm learning to speak slowly but not too slowly--this is a speech recognition system that recognizes words in context and too much space will lose that context. On the other hand, I have to leave more space between the words than I would ordinarily, not run words together; I have to be precise about my front and back vowels, avoid affricating t's and d's at the ends of words...Not only is Siri teaching me to talk; also making me even more self-conscious about my own pronunciations. 
But if you're saying something to a speech recognition system that's going to start anticipating the next thing you'll say, accurate transcription will be more likely if you say something predictable. Yikes, what does that say about our communications with one another? Do we WANT to be predictable? I think I need to stop this right now. Sometimes when you go through and correct, Siri will offer its own correction. And sometimes this alternative would be more predictable than what it originally offered. I was dictating a text saying that I was booking Roxy to get her hair clipped (so she wouldn't have icicles in her eyes all the time), and this was transcribed as "I'm f***ing her to get clipped..." I was horrified. Yes, there's a bit of prude in me, which is why it's so scary for people when I actually curse. How did Siri come up with that in the context? When I went to fix it, I was sweetly offered "booking." Siri, you're a twit!

The dogs are teaching me to talk, too. Alone (otherwise) in this big house, I'd rather not talk, but I talk to them, and some of it they definitely understand, good things like "Wanna come to bed?" and "Ready to load up?" as well as things like "Lay down!" (they understand that better than "lie down," which shows that this verb "lay" has extended its meaning in contemporary English). They are keenly tuned to body language, but because they have certain biases, they anticipate (like Siri), not always accurately. They are very very biased toward outings and food. 

Back to the bluff as envoi--some of those icicles are at such interesting angles, especially toward the top left. A frozen weeping mane... 

Seven Lessons from a Visiting Writer

Last night (Wednesday night--as the light palpably returns, it's easy to burn the candle at both ends), Boise based fiction writer Alan Heathcock gave a reading and informal talk at the college. It was the easy informality of a small town's dedicated community of writers who all know each other; also the special intimacy of a small audience. The roads, rain upon snow upon ice, prohibited many from venturing out. 

From Alan's website. He doesn't really look like this at all. He has much more beard, but also a bigger, more expressive mouth. Different hat and glasses too. He looks much younger than this photo.

From finding out about the event to showing up to the event itself to the bar afterward to going home, working late, and digesting, I felt enriched. Aside from Alan's engaging candor, immediate sincerity, unabashed passion, which produced an easy familiarity of conversation despite the fact that I believe none of us, Alan included, are particularly gregarious people...aside from feeling like we'd been gifted a new friend, I felt I'd gained some important lessons.

Lesson (1): Pay attention to news sources in the local community. I heard about Alan's visit from my friend Lynn in Anchorage, and that's not the first time she's tipped me off to a Homer event. Because I'm the round-up coordinator for the literary blog 49 Writers, I tend to presume, nay, expect that people will feed me any literary happenings in town to put in the round-up. Turns out many people in town consider 49 Writers a source for statewide rather than local literary information. "Well, it's advertised on the radio, it's in the newspaper, there are flyers up at the Library," they say. I don't listen to the radio or read the newspaper; some days I don't make it out of the cabin and its immediate surroundings. I'm woefully disconnected to local newsfeeds, and I should have my feelers out for events to post, rather than assuming I'm at the center of the web and will be fed announcements, neatly cocooned like flies. Speaking of the web, the local newspapers are well represented online, so there's really no excuse. A new habit for me: pay more attention to what my friends are doing. So, be where you are, and pay attention.

But, lesson (2), be willing to expand from your "local" zone. Alan was raised in urban South Chicago, but he says that during his MFA, he received consistent feedback that his stories set there seemed inauthentic, largely because of reader bias insisting that he was not from that demographic. "Write what you know," they would always say. Alan performed his marvelous full-body face-scrunched-open shrug--well, it is what I know... But, he listened, and began setting stories in rural Indiana, where his mom was raised, and things began to fall into place in terms of audience response.

But (3) insist on your own sense of what is right--he gave some examples of instances in which he would not compromise, particularly in the context of a movie adaptation of a story, and also underscored the importance of knowing who you are, including your family of origin (he read some stunning excerpts from the journal of his great-great-great-great-great grandfather); of getting to know the pulse of your own creativity, the way things come out of your mouth.

Therefore, (4) be proud of what you send out into the world! He said it was easy, during his MFA,  to feel like he was in a race, with huge pressure to rack up publications. So, he sent something off, and the thing got accepted, but when it came to galleys he was horrified. He had no pride in the story whatsoever, didn't want anyone to see it ever, is still ashamed of it, says "don't read this." Thereafter, he published just five more stories over the next dozen years. And now his collection Volt is out (and has won a Whiting award, which is no small thing, but which he barely mentioned). If he's going to publish a story, he wants to be so excited about it that he'll be standing up (again, with one of his wonderful physical postures) and proclaiming, "You gotta read this story!"

To get to that point, (5) when he's starting work on a story he tries to get all the words down asap, all the bare bones structure and start-to-finish through-line, and then he goes back and does the hard work on it so that every single sentence feels "correct." He doesn't analyze in great detail this sense of correctness; he keeps going back to instinct, which is also belief in and respect for oneself, which is about developing the most finely tuned ear, and a gut response to your own voice. 

At the bar, we talked with more hilarity and less restraint about his writing habits and our own, and one additional message that struck me (6) was the value of getting into the piece of writing (no matter the genre) with your whole self. Full body, more than chewing a pen or scratching a hole in your head. As I've suggested a few times, one of the most impressive things about Alan is his full-bodied self, especially when he talks; even more especially when he reads. He moves with the narrative as if miming a map of the story. When he reads, it sounds like he's singing the Blues--his voice so melodic, the cadences of his phrases so much the theme and variation of a Blues riff--bo daa daa daa-bo daa daa -- bo daa daa daa-bo daa daa -- -- -- bo daa daa daa daa dabodabodaboda bo daa daa. 
Yes, he said in explicit words that we're all "eggheads" (guilty giggles) but that we need to get into it in a more felt way. But the fact that he not only said it but did it was the amazing thing.

One final, wonderful lesson, (7), and this is about parenting, but is also hugely inspirational to anyone, parent or not. Alan shared that he has a sixteen-year-old son who is an extremely talented musician--jazz piano and singing, already somewhat in demand, likely to be competed for by the top music conservatories rather than the other way round. Family members are asking what his "fallback" career plan is, because music should just be a hobby, of course. Alan told (miming with his body, of course) of his absolute insistence that there is no fallback plan. If his son wants to be a musician, that's what he is aiming at, full body, full mind, full spirit, and that is what he is going to believe in, and that is what he is going to do. What are you talking about, "fallback plan?" He is, and is going to be, a musician.
I restrain myself from further comment, and offer, simply, a standing ovation.