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...

In-Person Visit! Happy Solstice

As hinted at in my last post, this past week has begun a change that I would have expected to be dreadful, but has turned out to give hope that breaking down is also building up (and perhaps "Ecclesiastes" meant that all along). It's no surprise that the situation (about which I'm not yet comfortable being more specific), and its attendant message of a silver lining-and-coating, should arise around the Solstice of what's been a year of piercing upheaval, and often destruction, for most people I know. But the Solstice is also a natural bringer-together of people; an opportunity to rest in the beauty of what-is, and of the special people with whom to share both the beauty and the what-is-ness.

We love each other in my MFA program, the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. At last count, there are three(!) Facebook groups for us, and any time I go into Facebook, the majority of posts in my feed are from RWW-ers. There are several with whom I have a special connection, and we email as frequently as our schedules allow, usually in great depth and length. I am lucky enough to have two RWW alumnae right here in Homer, whom I love and admire and somewhat heroine-worship. But otherwise, the fact remains that Facebook and email contact is not the same as face-to-face sharing of air. I know. I'm telling you something really surprising.

So what a treat it was that Meagan, who now lives in Olympia but was raised in Soldotna (just 72 miles north of Homer, a third of the way to Anchorage), came home for the Holidays!

 I broke my journey in Soldotna and stayed over (thanks again to her so gracious parents); her dad took a look at the Warthog's barely functioning radiator (having noted how cold my hand was on the initial handshake!); her mom ensured I slept cozy and peaceful; I got to meet her beautiful daughter...it felt special to laugh so hard with people whom I'd never met before, the family of someone I wish I could see more often.

Special, also, to hike the beach at Kenai, the lunar landscape with 3pm alpenglow of sun sinking in the south, being with Meagan as she exclaimed in excitement, awe, fascination--variations of "Wow, this is so cool! This is so beautiful! Unique!" The sea ice with its various textures, its flattened snowflakes like feathers a cell thick, its texturing with pools and ponds frozen just as solid as the rest but with a translucency like an observatory, really is a poem-puller.

There is something so elemental about it. The temperatures were hovering from 3-9 degrees above zero, depending on which thermometer you were looking at (this morning, Anchorage at 16 degrees feels balmy by comparison). And yet it still seemed perfectly natural to lie down on this ice rock, to be against the earth's extra skin.

But even with two coats and many other layers on, that was still a rapid chill!
With gratitude and best intentions for this Solstice...

Word Search, Word Find

No one's taken my vitals and tut-tutted over my low blood pressure, or drawn my blood, or pulled me in for a surprise weigh-in, for a week now.
No one's made me drink gatorade after my pulse jumped sixty points upon standing for over a month.
Now that I no longer need to be furtive about exercising, I'm finally too tired to do it, except for the eight flights of stairs to the dorm room and early morning walks.

Being at the residency is wonderful beyond telling, and yet there are still moments when the proximity of my recent abodes is more tangible than odor. I tumble into fear, or become convinced that I've 'lost all my spark'. Time really doesn't move directly forward; the impulse of those many weeks in treatment pushes and pulls. I take desperate comfort from this as the graduating cohort, containing several of my very favorite people in the program, move toward moving on: all I can trust is that we will come back around to each other; that there are reasons why I feel such connection with them. Meanwhile, for what should be no surprise, the new crowd is composed of wonderful people, as are my own cohort and the one above that. Stunning.

As always, my brain is full of ideas, anxieties, germs of poems and essays, and my plate is full of assignments, people I need to connect with, and the bar where everyone is hanging out right now and where I should be heading. Let me step away from the MFA residency and all thoughts of Sandwich Academy and Foie Gras Farm, and try this metaphor on for size.

In my last post, I told the story of my carefully planned trip to Whole Foods, which turned out to be a case of mistaken identity, leaving me unable to check off my carefully conceived shopping list. To assuage my annoyance over the whole thing, I bought a book of Word Finders for the long wait for the bus, and the long bus ride. I hadn't done one since I was a preteen kid, or even thought of one until--ok, I do mention it--people at the Foie Gras Farm used them as distractions.

Where I grew up, these puzzles were/are called Word Searches, not Word Finds. I like the more positive attitude symbolized by calling them 'find' rather than 'seek'.
For no big surprise, I was good at Word Searches as a kid. It turns out I'm very good at Word Finds now. I complete one in less than five minutes. Even the number ones, where there aren't words to jump out at you, I can do pretty swiftly. There are some 'techniques' that I didn't even realize I had. As a kid, I knew that big words were easy to spot and that any word with double letters in it would be easy to find. I realize now that in addition to those pointers, when I was a kid I already knew not just to look for the initial letter of a word, but to look for any interesting juxtapositions of letters anywhere in the word, which is why I often start circling the word from its middle outward. 
This is a case of learning to recognize something from its interior parts, perhaps even from its ending, and not to be overly focused on the first impression, the first letter. You can know something from the inside and work outward from there.
But when I was a kid, I was sometimes impatient to 'know the answer'. As quickly as I found words, there would occasionally be a word that remained elusive. There was nothing in particular that these 'hiding' words had in common, but there were times they simply didn't appear to my eyes. I would go through the whole grid in a frustrated letter-to-letter search, and when I still didn't see it, I would go look at the solution in the back, to get over my irritation at not knowing the answer, to validate to myself that the word was actually in the grid, which I had come to doubt.
Of course, I'm still very impatient. Of course, there are still times when a word doesn't pop out for me. However, when I get to the stage of disbelieving that the word is even in the grid, I slow down. I check the instinct to go frantically looking. I don't even consider looking in the back, even if I've gotten to the point of thinking they forgot to put the word in the grid. I let my focus soften, circle all the other words that inevitably pop out at me when I'm stalking the hidden one. I trust it is there. I do the letter-to-letter search casually. I usually find the hider pretty soon; the slower I go, the sooner I find it. 
And the majority of the time, the hard-to-find word is going diagonally backward from the initial letter, either up or down. It seems to me there's a metaphor there, that when the tail is behind the head, it's a little harder to process. When I'm trying to be perfect before I even have my parts together, it's hard to see the whole picture. 
Perhaps this is the perspective someone needs on something in their life. Perhaps it's the perspective I need as I worry about what I'll be working on next year, doubt my abilities as a poet, and wonder whether I've learned anything. Perhaps, dare I say, it's a metaphor for recovery--a word I dislike. Perhaps I need to look backward and a little to the side to find a new word.

So...Am I "Better"?

Sinking back into the bubble and bubbling awesomeness of the residency--how can it feel so familiar and comfortable when a whole year has passed since the last time? Welcoming the new cohort with equal delight to getting back together with my favorite people here, and getting to know better some other folks too; diving into workshops and classes: yes, we're getting into our writerly bubble, but it really is also a ferment of productivity and connection.

It's tempting just to submerge, immerse, forget and scar over my life experience of the past ten weeks. Additionally, my preference is generally to talk about things that pertain to more people than just to me. However, since family and friends are reading this blog and, no doubt, wondering; since there's a pretty horrendous price-tag attached to the experiences of the past ten weeks that places a burden of responsibility, I should briefly address the question: 

AM I BETTER?

Starting with the most superficial: I haven't weighed myself, but judging by how my clothes fit, I'm not a whole lot bigger than when I started at the Sandwich Academy, although that's still a very lot bigger than when I went to Foie Gras Farm. A bit smaller than I was at the residency last year, and some comments about that. I don't think this is a problem at all: my energy is great, my focus is good, I'm not obsessing or compulsing, my pulse stays steady if I sit up suddenly...everything feels good.

I carefully planned my raid on Whole Foods for when I arrived in Tacoma, scoping out which food items and non-food items I wanted to get, planning bus routes--all while still in Bellevue. I took the long bus ride and discovered that in Tacoma, "Whole Foods Market" is a tiny little hole in the wall 1980's-era healthfood store with a few ranks of supplements single file, and a few overpriced allergy-friendly products, some of which I bought out of sheer disappointment and mortification. There was a Fred Meyer close by too, but a ghetto Fred Meyer, half of the natural/allergy-friendly products of a normal one. Nonetheless, even with the smaller selection, I shopped.

I tell this story because it shows two significant ways in which I'm better. First off, I didn't totally freak out at the thwarting of my well-made plan. I did beat up on myself a bit for assuming that "Whole Foods Market" was the chain and not verifying it from their website, but I still went ahead and did my shopping as best I could under those circumstances, whereas many times before I'd have bought nothing out of sheer embarrassment and frustration. Second, and here's a way I'm likely considered "better": I bought products I'd never have dreamed of touching before these last ten weeks. Gluten free baked goods? Why yes. Whereas before I would read the ingredients list and find several reasons they were not 'healthy' enough or overly caloric, and would insist on buying only 'raw material' ingredients, which I then didn't eat; now, I've accepted that in situations like this, food that's easy both to eat and in terms of zero preparation are wise choices, even if they do contain some evaporated cane juice or safflower oil.

I'm better in the sense of keeping on my radar the need to be well fueled, and making plans to ensure that, even if I feel it's weird or awkward. So far, I've also avoided the burning the candle at both ends behavior that made the last residency so luminous but also so exhausting.

Best of all, a few people whom I trust have told me I don't seem to have lost my 'spark'. These stronger medications definitely allow me to be more even and less crazy, but I feared they might damp that spark down too, and was waiting to be around people who know me and can evaluate whether I'm 'altered'. This is a huge deal.

In summary, I'd say I'm not 100% cured and perfect, but who is? I am pretty sure I won't ever need to go back to treatment yet again: I've put a lot of thought into how to ensure I avoid that. I did meet some great people there whom I hope will continue to be my friends hereafter, but that's a very welcome side effect; not the stated goal of the exercise.

I'm still having some odd confusions--around the unmonitored bathrooms, the cafeteria sans latex gloves, the dinner buffets with no plate laid out showing the portion sizes in terms of grains and proteins, no mandate to plate the food wearing rubber gloves and display the plate to a monitor before proceeding; the ability to walk off down the hall without an escort and to sit in a workshop without suddenly being pulled out for a therapy appointment...These are welcome absences. People--these simple freedoms are so valuable!

Sound good? Any questions? If so, I'll edit to add...

No Longer a Patient--Aftershocks, Heartstrings and Playing with Food

This is the first day for almost ten weeks that I'm not in treatment. Today is many other things too, but it's hard for me not to see it mostly in terms of that milestone--except for the fact that it's also the day I head over to PLU for my MFA program residency! How's that for a transition? From Foie Gras Farm to Sandwich Academy direct to my beloved MFA program...


I confess, although I've been eagerly counting the days until the squeezing of this constricting experience plunge me into the light and sound and freedom of regular existence, I have some apprehension as well. When I arrived here, straight from the desert isolation of Foie Gras Farm, it was like emerging into the light after being down a mine. Streets with cars driving them, buildings, the experience of going into a store, a new program organization to get the hang of--all these were overwhelming. But even here, we're not quite on the loose, and I suspect that being on my own cognizance around food, medication compliance, and various other issues, will offer some similar overwhelm if only to a lesser degree. And that's without the glad ecstatic overwhelm of being at Residency.


Add to the ambivalence the fact that, as always, it's the people that make the program. Because we had evenings and weekends free, and many people went home at those times, we didn't get quite as intensely close as at Foie Gras Farm, where we were all squished up against each other 24/7. But for those of us out-of-towners who stayed at the Annex, there was the opportunity to get to know one another better, and there were a couple of wonderful people I got to share space with there, with whom I'm looking forward to continuing friendship, and whom I'll be missing right in my heart these next days.


Am I ready to be out on my own cognizance? I hope so. I certainly have 'treatment fatigue.' There's little danger that I'll fail to take my meds, because I don't want to be crazy at the Residency and it would be a bad time to play doctor. The food? Granted that's always a challenge for me in this kind of situation, my intention is to take better care of myself in that area, including smarter shopping later today in preparation. My metabolism is chugging along right now, so there's no way I'll go back to my previous patterns.


Just a couple random thoughts about the food thing. I haven't been very forthcoming in my descriptions of what went on in the institutions where I've spent basically my whole summer, partly because there are some folks who read this that might draw adverse conclusions from what I say. However, there are going to be communal meals at the Residency, so let me say something about the associations there. The hardwood floors and black tables at the Sandwich Academy represent excellent planning, as both of them make any of the throwing food on the floor/trying to hide it on the table-type efforts instantly obvious and thus futile. On my first day, there was such a mess all around me, very obviously around me, not blending into anything--just embarrassing. However, those hardwood floors are also an excellent acoustic device for amplifying the clomp-clomp-clomp of feet in heels as the 'meal monitor' patrols the tables, alert to pounce on someone to correct their behavior. Behaviors deemed worthy of correction were not only things like hiding nuts in your leggings or attempting to purloin plastic cutlery with ill intent; there was also a strong emphasis on 'normalizing' food behavior, both choice of food and how it was eaten.


So, don't eat that with silverware; eat that with silverware; don't eat the bits that fell out of your sandwich--eat the sandwich first; no, you can't eat that open-face, you have to put the whole thing together, even though gluten free bread doesn't stay together and what's in there isn't typical sandwich fare and the whole thing's going to implode as soon as you pick it up; don't take two bites off of the spoon; don't eat that with the spoon; no, you can't have sauce with that rubbery tofu and dried-out rice: that's not normalized... Very frustrating, very stressful. There were days I'd break out in a sweat every time I heard feet clomping; times when every time someone made a move toward me, I'd jump, wondering what I'd done this time. My thought, of course, was that if their main concern was to get me to put the food inside me, they should let me do so in whatever way worked for me. Looking back, though, why was it that the person getting corrected for trying to lose excess food was also the person doing the 'wrong' things with her food? It's hard to find dignity in one's 30's and being corrected for table manners and sneakery.


Where that leaves me, going into a situation where we eat together a lot, is very self-conscious indeed. Relieved that there will be no clomping around and embarrassing correction in front of everyone; anxious as ever about seeming weird/not normalized if I bring some different food to a meal because of my allergies; worried about making sure I don't play with my food in weird ways or put weird things together; mortified to think of some of the weird ways I ate at Residency last year--one favorite lunch that I recall was salad drenched in hot sauce, covered with spirulina I'd brought from home, which stayed powdery and painted my face green because there was no dressing to damp it down. My face is red now!