Score! Double Score!

Responses from the Louisville Conference on Culture and Literature since 1900 went out today . . . I got accepted for both panels I submitted to! 

For most conferences you're only allowed to submit to one panel, but Louisville has creative panels as well as the traditional critical panels - which means I'm going to be reading a critical paper and then, at another time, reading my fiction as well! Score! 

No, Louisville isn't the greatest conference in the world, nor is it the hardest to get into. But, most of the people in my dept. who applied last year got in, so if I didn't get in this year (I didn't apply last year), I would have felt sad. And after all those rejections last school year (5!), I'm flying high over another acceptance. 

Looks pretty! 

Plus, Louisville's relatively close (though not so close that driving in the car in possibly crappy February weather while 6 months pregnant won't be a pain) and registration and hotel accommodations aren't terribly expensive (though not "cheap"). 

So I'm siked. Butcher's going, too, and I'm guessing a bunch of other peeps from my dept. who I've yet to talk to (it was a chaotic, student conference-filled day). And Brad's coming! He'll get to the be my chauffeur :). Which makes me even happier, b/c I pretty much hate having to drive. Hopefully it won't be too cold and we can do some sight-seeing. Wonder what the temperature in Kentucky is in late February . . . .

On writing, etc.

"Don't throw anything you've written away - cut brutally when you're working, but keep everything because this is the great fact. We are all strangers to ourselves. From palm readers to analysts, we try to find the way to decipher our dreams. Don't try to sort it out - make stones - make clay - a writer is a sculptor who has to make his own rock. I understand now why it's not playwrite but playwright - wright as in wheelwright - boat wright - wright refers to the craft and the craft is the method we use to make a new map to the unconscious" - John Guare, preface to Six Degrees of Separation. 

It's finally happened: I'm a published fiction writer. As of earlier this week. Still waiting for the contributor's copies to arrive in the mail (maybe Monday?!), but I've seen the back cover with my name on it online, and it's an unreal feeling. (Brad printed out the front and back cover for his bulletin board at work - what a cutie.) I'm 29 years old, and I've been writing stories since I knew how to write. So this is what it feels like to, well, achieve something you've dreamed for years of achieving. Hmmmm, I like it. 

Also awesome is the fact that my story appears in the same issue as a poem from a National Book Award-winning poet - yi-kes! 

Galleys!

No, I'm not talking about ships or kitchens. 

I'm talking about page proofs for my story that's coming out this fall. I got them via e-mail on Tuesday, and let me tell you, it's so cool to see my work that way! 

Basically, the galleys are a PDF version (they used to be in print and sometimes still are) of how my piece is going to look in the journal. The layout, spacing, font, exact wording and punctuation. Once I check it over and make sure it's a-okay, I e-mail back with a go-ahead. Or, if I want changes, I send the details of what needs to be corrected (or, in proper Pittsburgh speak, what needs corrected).

When I got the e-mail, I was in the office chatting with Butcher and some other classmates after class, and I pretty much just had to sit there in silence and stare at the PDF for a full minute. It felt like, Wow. As a writer, probably as any sort of artist, this is one of those moments you wait for. There you see it, your writing, looking just like the writing by other people that you've been reading and admiring for years. You've fantasized about what it would be like to see your name in one of those journals and now, all of a sudden, there it is! 

And, happily, this came late in the afternoon on a day when one of the creative writing professors at school read my piece (he had asked to, and of course I obliged) and sent me this response:

Wow. I mean: WOW. Just a stunning piece. People rarely get this short form right, but you really nail it here. I love the play of food and sex and violence and, ultimately, intimacy. Deeply visceral . . . Just brutal, but so perfect. Congrats to you on such an amazing piece of writing. Many more awards to come, i'm sure... 

 A serious writer treating me like a serious writer = major confidence boost!

What I Do and Don't Miss about Writing Workshops

For anyone who is unfamiliar, let me provide a quick-and-dirty version of the writing MFA (which stands for Master of Fine Arts): 

In most graduate creative writing programs, you can focus on either fiction (me), poetry, or creative nonfiction. The MFa is a terminal degree and has been for many decades - meaning that universities that require you to have an advanced degree for a teaching job will hire you if you have an MFA - but increasingly popular is the creative PhD, which exists at about 35 schools in the country. 

At the core of these programs is the writing workshop. Although you take other classes, mainly in literature, you spend about half of your time in workshops. These classes are small - usually 10-12 people - and while they include discussion of published work, the most important element is discussion of one another's work. 

The best way I can think to describe the writing workshop is as an acquired taste. An acquired taste that you still only like sometimes. And that you easily find nauseating once you've been away from it for any amount of time. 

I'm about two years post-workshop (having graduated two years ago next month), and in the shower the other day (where I, of course, do my best thinking) I was musing about the workshop experience: what am I glad to be done with? what do I miss, even if just a little? 

Sitting through a workshop of your writing is about one of the most soul-draining things I can think of. (But it does not even come close to law school.) You must remain silent while your classmates criticize, challenge, misinterpret, misunderstand, and attempt to change every last aspect of your work (sometimes, it seems, down to the name of the author). 

At the very end, you are permitted to ask a question or two; of course what you really want to do is mount a WWIII-size defense of your work and then launch a nutso offensive - flame throwers, UZIs, the whole shebang - about what careless readers your classmates are, how they're ideas don't make sense, how they're so stupid and clueless b/c they "just don't get what" you're trying to do. Etc. etc. 

Everyone has a bad workshop at some point or other, and it's not a pretty sight. Believe me, I've been there. 

That said, a workshop isn't always like that and, even when it is, sometimes something can be salvaged from the steaming wreck. 

When your work is critiqued week after week, your skin becomes thicker. It never get thick enough that criticisms don't hurt at all, but after a while you learn to filter and separate out much of the nonsense. You decide whose comments matter and whose don't. Writers whose work you respect, who are good readers, thoughtful, meticulous, open readers - these are the people you listen to. The other commentary, well, you do your best to toss it out the window.

If you can do this - keep what counts and forget the rest of it - you find that you've gotten a rare opportunity. There you sit, with people who have paid attention to your work and taken it seriously; who have the vocabulary to think and talk about creative writing; who have the skills to envision how your piece could become stronger, fuller, more powerful - there you sit, and all eyes are on your writing. It's not a perfect system, and it's always a crapshoot, but sometimes things don't turn out so bad. 

And, every now and again, you might just get a comment like this from your prof: 

"Your sentences are nearly perfect. They read like Anne Tyler's." 

As someone who values the language of writing above all else, I didn't mind reading that one little bit.

A good week for titles

Earlier this week, I came up with a pretty rockin' title for a dissertation. Oh, you've written a dissertation? you ask. No, silly. I'm still eons away from the writing phase! But last week I had the makings of an idea for a dissertation topic. And thinking up a snazzy, jazzy title has helped me to conceive of an even more specific possible direction. 

Would I write a dissertation to fit a title? Oh you better believe it, mister. 

Next in the title saga is a great title Shannon came up with today for a paper she's currently writing on Lady Audley's Secret and The Woman in White. (This chick reads everything - everything except the one thing she should be reading, which, of course, is contemporary literary ficiton!) She's already got the paper going and certainly didn't need the title to make it happen, but I'd put money on the fact that she's got some extra steam now that she has that little title in her brain (like most titles of critical work, it's actually not little at all, but never you mind). 

The final installation of this week's successful title-age (though it's only Friday - who knows what titles tomorrow will bring) comes in the form of a title for a story that I just started writing tonight (and admittedly, on which I have not yet gotten very far). I spent the week conjuring up the idea for this story, and in thinking of a title, I was trying to find a word that meant what "orphan" means regarding a child who loses a parent, but applied to a sibling who loses a sibling. Well, no one I asked had any such word, and I got distracted and started thinking of other things and then the perfect title popped into my head today when I was musing about the story's projected thematic concerns. 

Not only is this title on-the-money - I'm sorry, but I refuse to be modest about titles; they're simply my fave part of writing! - but it even led me to a character's name! And naming characters all kinds of layered, allusive, symbolic, yet seemingly average names is probably my second favorite thing about writing. It's so darn satisfying! 

Why is a good title so important to me? Well, for lots of reasons, not the least of which is something I tell my students all the time: it's the first impression your reader has of your piece; it's the first chance you have to pull her in and the first opportunity for you to lose her. But, even more than that, the title sets a tone, a mood, even an expectation, for me when I'm writing. It helps me to know the piece as I craft it, to understand it, to feel where it's going and what it's going to become. I know that sounds awfully intangible, and I guess it is. But when I've got an awesome title facing me from the top of the page, I write always trying to do it justice.

In the Trenches

Tomorrow I will begin teaching The Hours to my class of freshmen for the second half of our fiction unit. The above title might at first seem more applicable to the first part of the unit - for which we read The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien's classic, 1990 National Book Award-nominated collection of short stories about the Vietnam War, memory, and storytelling - but I assure you, it's not. 

My students loved O'Brien's book even more than I hoped they would. And it makes sense: I was their age when I was first introduced to his work, and over the years he has come to be possibly my favorite author (though there's a strong case for the award going to Hemingway). 

While for me and certainly those generations older than me (read: those who were alive during the Vietnam War or its immediate aftermath), the potential stickiness of the topic is obvious. But these students are too young to have any investment in Vietnam and, to a large extent, anything more than the most superficial knowedge about Vietnam. And so, while the book's stance (anti-Vietnam Wat, though decidedly not anti-American soldier) is surely contentious to me or you, none of them seemed to interpret this as a political issue and, therefore, none took umbrage with it. 

Michael Cunningham's 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hours (which was the original working-title of Virginia Woolf's 1923 novel Mrs. Dalloway), however, is a littttttttle bit of a different story. 

Some of you may have seen the (very gripping) movie with Meryl Streep (love her!), Nicole Kidman, and Julianne Moore (who I could totally do without). It came out when I was a junior in college, so, 2003 or 2004. If you have seen it, jog your memory a bit. Yep, there you go - now you know why I'm anxious to see how teaching this book will go over with a group of freshman. Two of whom are in seminary. Many of whom have probably never interacted with a person they knew to be gay. 

Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf 

Basically, the novel follows the lives of three women in three very distinct historical time periods - the 1920s, 1950s, and the very end of the 20th century. One of these women is an open lesbian, another (a fictionalized version of Woolf) suffers from debilitating mental illness that leads to suicide, and the third contemplates suicide b/c she feels suffocated by her role as a 1950s suburban housewife. Oh, and did I mention Richard? He's a gay man suffering from AIDS, which has basically eaten away a large part of his brain. 

Yesterday, after they finished their peer workshop on their papers, I put a few of the book's "thematic concerns" on the board for them to consider as they read. My list looked something like this: 

Gender - questioning the traditional definitions and roles; questioning the relations b/t genders 
Sexuality - homosexuality, heterosexuality, bisexuality 
Mental illness/"madness" - how is it represented in society? in fiction? what are the effects of its being stigmatized? 
Performing "roles" - what does it mean to be a "wife," "mother," etc. 

There were not a few wide eyes when I mentioned "homosexuality." I was impressed, however, that when I asked for the difference b/t sex and gender (which, interestingly, we also talked about in my theory class later in the day), someone actually had an accurate answer. That, if nothing else, seemed promising. 

After a book focusing on all male characters, I'm glad to throw some female in the mix, but this experience might end up being one minefield after another. However, if I don't expose them to these issues, who will? I guess we'll see how this goes . . . .

Big Freakin' News!

The moment that probably, well, none of you except Brad have been waiting for . . . . 

I'm going to be a published fiction writer!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

Scream with me! Ahhhhhhhhhh! I'm so happy! 

And it gets even better - there's $ involved! 

Here's the scoop: two months ago I was flipping through Brad's Poets & Writers and I came to the contests page. Well, I says to myself, Self, you might as well enter this one and that one b/c they don't sound so bad and they ain't so expensive. So I enter this one (but then forget about that one) - I pay my $15 and send off my short-short (usually 1000 words or less) through the online system - and then I go on my merry way . . . 

My celebratory flowers, courtesy of 
my hubby 

Yesterday, late afternoon, I get the most unbelievable e-mail: I won (!) and my story will be published in a print journal (!) and then on the website of the group that sponsored the contest (!) and . . . the prize is . . . $1000! 

!!!!!!! 

I don't know if I can possibly convey how exciting this is for me. The profs that I told today seemed actually impressed by the journal my piece is going to come out in - which was awesome since I know about 15 journals (the biggies - Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, Threepenny Review, Tin House, Epoch, etc.) and am generally clueless about the others, many of which are very good. And, not only am I getting paid for my writing, but I'm also going to be a real, true published author! I can finally say I'm a fiction writer and not feel like a fraud! 

The scholarly article publications are exciting, of course, and I'm not denigrating their importance and value at all. But I am a fiction writer at heart, and fiction is my love, and beyond all that, fiction is art. And art is what I love. So, this is HUGE for me. And, it's amazing motivation to get back to work on that novel this summer and send out my darn stories!

I think I've found my calling

Every day is Women's Day. Or at least it ought to be 

Okay, that whole calling thing is a bit of an exaggeration, especially b/c you most likely need to have a lot more energy than I do to respond to a calling, but I do think I've found something (finally!) that I like re: literary/critical theory. 

It should surprise, well, no one that what I'm talking about is feminist theory. It doesn't surprise me, as I always figured if something was going to interest me in terms of theory, it would be feminist, but even so, it's a pleasant revelation b/c I've definitely got no love for deconstruction and the rest of post-structuralism nor for reader response theory. 

And, as it turns out, this year in my papers I've actually been using some of these fem. theory concepts (and even some of the theorists) without knowing it. And, just as interestingly, the little that I've read so far is ridiculously applicable to my own fiction. It's making me think about my own work and its preoccupations in a whole new light. 

Talking about the prevalence of illness in women's fiction/poetry, for instance, Susan M. Gilbert and Sandra Gubar (whose Madwoman in the Attic I read part of - and loved - last semester, having no idea it was feminist theory) explain, "the woman writer feels herself to be literally or figuratively crippled by the debilitating alternatives her culture offers her, and the crippling effects of her conditioning sometimes seem to 'breed' like sentences of death in the blood shoes she inherited from her literary foremothers." Um, yeah - like, this kind of stuff is all over my work. Who knew I was writing in some kind of tradition (albeit - and I have to say this - one hindered by the patriarchy)? I kind of feel empowered. (Brad is now officially wary of my taking feminist theory this coming fall - and to think, not two days he was encouraging it.) 

Just the other day, one of my classmates asked me if all this theory stuff is affecting my creative writing. I responded, "That's such a cute idea - like I have time to write creatively right now." But had I answered her seriously, I would've said, No, I think most of the stuff is either nonsense or it's interesting and has no place in practical discussions of creative work and no place in actually doing that work. Now, I'm not so sure about that. 

As for a theoretical stance apart from my own fiction, this fits me pretty well; it's in line with my interests, my politics, and my concerns (even while Kristeva and surely a host of others seem like idiotic nonsense to me). To end, an oh-so-true thought from Simone de Beauvoir's brilliant The Second Sex: 

"Thus, as against the dispersed, contingent, and multiple existences of actual women, mythical thought opposes the Eternal Feminine, unique and changeless. If the definition provided for this concept is contradicted by the behavior of flesh-and-blood women, it is the latter who are wrong: we are told not that Feminity is a false entity, but that the women concerned are not feminine."

Another writing reminder to me

More happy writing news! (And no, I didn't get a story picked up by a literary journal - although that would be, like, the happy writing news of the century in my life. I don't even have any pieces out there for consideration right now. I know, I know, isn't there a book-long master's thesis full of short stories sitting on my computer? Yeah yeah, tell me something I don't already know.) 

Turns out the prof. who was supposed to teach the summer intro. to creative writing class (fiction, poetry, nonfiction) had a change of plans, and . . . the head of my dept. asked me (!) today if I want the class! I'm like, Heck yes! 

Doris Day, rockin' the chalkboard 

There's a chance the course won't run due to insufficient enrollment, which is pretty much always a possibility with summer classes. But I'm just jazzed that she asked me and that the class might happen. And of course, my c.v. could definitely use another creative writing class on it. Plus, the $2500 summer teaching pays wouldn't be too bad either, esp. since I don't get a paycheck from mid-May through mid-Sept.(yikes!). Score!

Reminder: I am a writer

Sometimes it's easy to forget that. Sometimes it's easy to not be - to just, well, stop doing what I love, which is writing fiction, and feel completely disconnected from it. 

Me and good ol' fic-ti-oni, we've got a love-hate relationship one-third of the time, and the other two-thirds we're like cousins who live on two different continents and every now and again one of us (me) thinks either fondly or snarl-ly about the other (who does not think and, therefore, does not think about me) in a sort of far-off way. Like, I remember that one time when . . . 

Grad school is draining, and it's hard to keep the creative writing going when all your mental energy's being sucked up by writing critical nonsense, but I don't need an excuse even half as good as that; I'd spend most of my time not-writing even if I weren't slaving away. It's what I do all summer while I sit on my hiney. In fact, I'm so good at not-writing that one might accurately label me a fiction not writer. 

But alas. This is supposed to be a happy post. And it will be. As of now. 

Okay, so I usually use a computer - but 
this just looks so much nicer! 

Last week, a writing professor at my school asked if I wanted to read in the department's reading series next year. It's not some big thing - usually just Pittsburgh writers or lit. professors who write creative stuff on the side, that sort of thing - but it made me feel really, well, good. And excited. 

It's not too often that somebody who actually writes and publishes fiction gives a darn about mine. He's never read my stuff - though he's offered to, which is really cool - so for all he knows (and all I know), I'm terrible. But the fact that he took me and all that darn MFA hard work serious reminded me that I am a writer. And it got me re-siked (def. not a real word) for working on that novel I've been fiddling with for not a short amount of time. 

To be a writer, all you need to do, I remembered, is write. It's not about how many pages you produce, it's not about if the piece gets published, it's not about what other people think about your work.

It's about writing. Pen to paper, fingers to keyboard, brain bouncing along. And that's a kind of freeing thing to think about.