Lofty Minded in Alaska

     It’s a dark and stormy day…  Outside the wind is howling.   (A perfectly true cliché on this October day!)  A constant rain is pouring from the sky and on occasion is sounds like someone is tossing buckets of water at our windows.  I’m sitting down to rewrite one of the stories that will be part of my thesis.  It’s a hard story.  I’ve been thinking about how to proceed with it for days.  And the word I keep coming back to when I don’t know what to write is “honesty.”

     This particular story (the one I’m just about to get to, when I’m done here) is personal.  In it I’m exploring the myriad of emotions I’ve felt and situations I’ve encountered over the years as my spiritual beliefs have changed away from those of my family of origin.  It’s a topic I’ve thought about for more hours than I can count.  The potential for misunderstanding is great.

My hope with this personal story, though, is not to tell my own story.  My hope is to transcend my own story.  My story is small.  In a world of billions, it is a speck in time and history.  But the truth I’m trying to get at is relevant, and will be for as long as people exist.  My challenge is to get out of my own way, to move beyond my own experience, to reach beyond my own hang-ups and fears.

Early in 2012, I wrote a blog post in which I was fretting about whether I should be writing fiction or nonfiction.  (It’s about scary stuff, which seems relevant this week since it’s Halloween and I’m writing about religion.) At the time, fiction seemed terrifying.  Now I believe that the idea of choosing one genre over another is kind of a silly notion.  My job as a writer is to explore the human experience and I’d be limiting myself if I allowed myself just one avenue for exploration.  My constant work, my never-ending hope as a writer, is to find the best way possible to tell a story or articulate an idea, an emotion or an experience.

In the case of this story I’m rewriting, fiction is the tool that’s helping me get the job done.  It’s the tool that allows me to wedge in, from a safe distance, to one of the most consuming topics of my own life.  With this tool I can pluck out morsels of truth from my own history and plop those truths down into the lives of characters that are nothing like me, who may behave very differently than me.  With its help I can dig deeper into those hidden corners of my own understanding and pull out surprises that I didn’t know were lurking in the background—like my own biases and my own tendency toward intolerance.

In this way, I suppose writing fiction is something to be feared.  Not because it’s impossible (although it does feel that way sometimes), but because it can lead you to dark places within yourself.  And when you see those less than flattering things that live inside your heart you have to make a decision.  In my case, it’s do I acknowledge my biases and try to overcome them, or do I ignore them.

And isn’t that just like writing to go full circle on a topic?  You sit down to explore religion and its role in your life, and you find that the writing itself is a lot like religion.  It’s a way toward empathy and truth.  It challenges me to be a better person.

  It’s fall equinox weekend, and suddenly everything points toward winter. Just a few weeks ago, everything was brilliant green—but now our yard is layered with gold, brown and maroon.  The color for today is orange:  flames in the wood stove, pumpkins from the farmer’s market on the kitchen table, my favorite wool sweater pulled out of the closet for another season.  Summer ends in a hurry here.  I know this by now, but every year it seems worthy of comment.

Just a little over a week ago I was in Colorado, sitting on my mom and step-dad’s deck, feeling the deep heat of the sun on my arms and legs for what I knew might be the last time in many months.  I closed my eyes and turned my face directly toward the sun and thought about how in February I will dream of a moment much like that one.  It was a good visit home.

I went by myself on this trip, and my mom and Stanley were excellent tour guides.  I’d mention something I’d like to see and they’d make it happen.  We tromped through the remote territory above Steamboat Lake, near the Wyoming border, where my step-dad’s father lived as a young boy.  They drove me to Dinosaur National Monument where we viewed petroglyphs that looked like aliens and picked grapes that have gone wild at the old homestead site of Josie Bassett.  They took me to their cabin and pointed me in the direction of a trail that harbored messages engraved on aspen trees by lonely Peruvian sheepherders.

The whole time I was in Colorado ordinary things seemed extraordinary: The smell of ozone during a lightning storm.  That damp, earthy odor of beaver dams and aspen trees.  The way the wind kicks up dust in the evenings when a storm is blowing in.  Tumble weed, antelope, deer.  Mourning doves perched on power lines.  Fresh cut hay and sheep on a hillside.  Stars up close through a dry sky.  Ranch houses, cows, birds of prey.  Dinners of elk steak, sliced tomatoes, ripe peaches.  Rabbit brush in yellow, spindly juniper trees, sagebrush.  Grazing horses and sheep dogs keeping watch.  Back roads in all directions, blue heron fishing on bends in rivers.  And every once in a while, a cleansing shower that quells the dust.

One definition of nostalgia is the pleasure and sadness that is caused by remembering something from the past and wishing you could experience it again.  So even though the word ‘nostalgia’ kept going through my mind when I was back in Colorado, I suspect it was something different that I was experiencing.  Is there a word for appreciating things you couldn’t appreciate when you were younger?

I left Colorado for Montana when I was twenty-one years old.  Then I went back for seven months a couple years later, but that time it was with one foot already firmly out the door and headed toward my new life in Alaska.  I go back there now and I see things I’ve seen a hundred times, but it’s as though everything is in sharper focus.

And so now I’m back in Alaska and I’m thinking about the notion of home.  As is usually the case, I have more questions than I have answers.  What is it that makes a place a home, really?  Is it familiarity?  Is it where the jobs are or where the beauty takes your breath away?  Or is it simply where you put your energy into fostering love and comfort and friendship?  Does it change over a lifetime?  I’ve heard it said that home is where you make it, but then what do you call that place your senses yearn for?

For me, for now, I’m thinking of a place with plenty of open spaces and mountains, where summer afternoons are hot, but mornings and evenings are cool.  There, you might have winter days that dip below zero or storms that dump a lot of snow, but the sun, it still manages to shine most days, and it has the potential to warm your skin any time of the year—sometimes even in February.

It’s already well into August and I’m looking at the date of the last time I posted here. Where has my time gone?  In June it went to Montana for twelve days.  For a good portion of July it went to the University of Anchorage for my third MFA residency.  As it goes with employment, plenty of my summer time has been spent at the library.

Thankfully, some of my summer has involved soaking up much-needed sunshine and hanging out with friends and family.  Some of my time was even spent running, after a very long (read twenty-some years) hiatus.  Nearly all of my summer was spent mentally and emotionally preparing myself for my daughter’s departure to school on the East Coast.  And almost constantly, my time was spent thinking about writing, which is what I do when I’m not writing.

The high summer days are gone now and it’s time for me to get some words written down instead of letting them swim around in my brain.  It’s getting dark again at night and the rainy season is back.  Adella left a few days ago.  Time isn’t as elusive as it has been, and yet I’m finding it hard to know where to begin.

I’ll guess I’ll start with an admission:  I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few months questioning myself mercilessly about my reasons for continuing to write here on this blog.  I’ve thought about bringing it to an end.  I’ve wondered if I should change it up, make it into something more professional or more in tune with marketing myself, which seems to be the whole point of having a blog according to the million or so writers’ advice articles I’ve read on the subject.  I’ve fretted over what I named it, after all if a person doesn’t know the story behind the name, it does sound a little egotistical.  Worrying, fretting, second-guessing myself:  apparently I have those parts of being a writer figured out.

Then I thought about the things this blog has done for me since I started it nearly five years ago.  It may need some updating as far as formatting is concerned.  It may seem to have no identifiable theme, (which is another certain no-no in the blogging world.)  It may have no predictable schedule for new posts.  Clearly, it is an imperfect blog and being that I’m an MFA student entering my thesis year, I should spend my limited writing time working on my critical essay or on fiction.

But through questioning my motives and wondering if I should continue here, I’ve realized that this blog has been, and can continue to be, an important part of my becoming a writer.  It gives me a small but diverse audience.  It gives me a chance to write something besides fiction.  It challenges me to write with precision.  It does all of those things, but it does something even more important. Let me explain:

I think the best writers, whether they’re writing fiction or poetry or nonfiction, are those who are honest—honest with the story they are telling or poem they are creating, honest with those who will read their work, but most importantly, honest with themselves.  And honesty is hard.  It means putting yourself out there, opening up, making yourself vulnerable.  And could anything be scarier?

Last October, I posted a very personal story on this blog in reaction to something that happened in my town.  I had never told a soul that particular story and yet I wrote it on here for all to see.  I hit the publish button and started shaking.  I shook for almost a week afterwards as it was passed around the web through personal emails and Facebook.  I shook as friends and acquaintances stopped me in town to talk with me about it.  I took a huge risk.  It was terrifying.  But it ended up being a connecting experience.  People shared their own stories.  People expressed to me their gratitude for having spoken up.

It was hard to share that story and even as I was doing it I questioned my motives for doing so.  I wondered what it meant that I could tell such a secret publicly.  But then I remembered that I’m an aspiring writer and writers are supposed to tell stories.  We’re supposed to write about what it means to be alive even if it’s hard and, sometimes, even if it’s personal.  If nobody wrote the hard things, I think we’d all feel alone.

And so Lofty Minded in Alaska is not about marketing myself or about selling anything.  It’s not about perfection or keeping up with trends.  This blog is about connecting with other people.  As long as it seems to be doing that, I’ll keep at it.  Also, there are things I want to write about that are even harder than what I’ve written so far.  Some of it will best be written about in the form of fiction, but some of it needs to be the straight up truth.  And since I still hold back, I think I’ll keep this blog as a place to practice being brave.  If I’ve learned anything from keeping this blog it’s that writing fearlessly takes practice.

I was born to parents who were known to strike up a conversation with just about anyone.  In my family a typical exchange with the grocery store clerk might have gone something like this:

“I haven’t seen you here before.  Are you new to town?”

“Yeah, I’m from Helena.”

“Oh, you’re from Helena?  Well my cousin’s uncle is from a little town just outside of Helena, his name is Jimmy Jackson and his daughter is probably close to your age.  Her name is Mindy.”

“Oh, I went to school with Mindy Jackson.  She dated my older brother for a little while but they broke up when my brother joined the service.”

“Oh your brother’s in the military!  Where’s he stationed?”

“Germany.”

“Oh, my neighbor’s son and his wife are at the base in Germany right now.  As a matter of fact, my neighbors are going to go there next month for a visit.”

This was how I was raised—and still I find it hard to refrain from asking questions when I meet someone new.  “Where are you from?”  And their answer—no matter where they’re from—typically causes my brain to do the mental equivalent of spinning through a Rolodex looking for some way to make a connection—even when it seems fairly absurd.   “Oh you’re from Hong Kong?  My husband’s cousin once visited Hong Kong.  Kolkata?  My daughter’s boyfriend’s dad lived there for a while and I’ve always wanted to visit.”

In Anchorage on Thursday evening I was wheeling my small suitcase down a sidewalk toward two taxicabs parked in front of the Hilton Hotel.  The drivers, both men with olive skin and thick dark hair, were engaged in an animated conversation with each other and neither seemed to notice me.  When I got so close that they could no longer ignore me, the one driver who looked to be a few years older than the other nudged the younger one my direction, giving up his chance for some business.  Then they embraced.  When the younger man turned around his eyes were watery.

“I have not seen him in ten years.  The last time was in Albania,” he said as he was loading my bag into the trunk of the car.  “I did not recognize him, but he recognized me.”

There was my opening to chat.  I asked him what it’s like in Albania.  “Beautiful,” he said.  “We lived very near the beach.  But there I worked eighty hours a week and even with that many hours I could not make the rent.”

I asked him more questions and he proceeded to tell me that he’d only been driving a cab for two days and he was still learning his way around Anchorage–but he was happy to have a third job.  Before he landed the cab-driving job he worked at two different restaurants. “I was working fifty hours a week, and this job will add twenty more and it is above minimum wage.”  He was responsible for paying the rent on a two bedroom apartment he shared with his mother and he was sending money back to Albania in hopes of bringing his brother and sister, still in their teens, to the US.

I asked him if he’d had the chance to get out of Anchorage yet.  “Oh no,” he said.  “Maybe in the summer I will take a day and drive down the Turnagain Highway.”

He was quiet for a few blocks and it crossed my mind that he might be making this story up about working three jobs and sending money to his siblings in Albania.  It would be a good story for a cab driver to tell in order to get a bigger tip.

But then we drove past the bowling alley on the corner of Minnesota and Spenard and the young man shook his head and looked directly at me through the rear-view mirror.  His dark lashes were damp again.  “How is it possible that I found an old friend on the streets of Anchorage?”

For the whole ride I’d been asking him questions and he’d been answering, telling me about his life since leaving Albania, his time in Chicago, his learning to drive on icy roads.  He told me about his family spread around various European countries and the United States, about his trying to make ends meet.  All across town I was doing my part to connect with my Albanian cabdriver, but between the street in front of the Anchorage Hilton and the intersection of Spenard and Minnesota he’d been to Albania and back again.

It’s a long way to travel in such a short time.

Just twenty years before my Grandma Ross was born, the average life expectancy for a woman in the United States was 45 years.  Coming across this bit of trivia this morning—this day of my forty-fifth birthday—makes complaining about getting older seem ridiculous and downright ungrateful.

Statistically speaking, there’s a good chance that I’ll have at least another thirty-five years or so on this amazing planet, and that’s something that women in their forties couldn’t say in 1879.  Seriously, I could spend this birthday pining for the days when my hair was more brown than gray, or for a time when I could fit into size seven jeans, but I’m thinking that since this is the beginning of those extra years that modern life has potentially granted me, I ought not to squander this day on pining.  Instead I’ll make a list of positive things about turning forty-five:

• My hair started turning gray about ten years ago and I’ve spent a lot of the past decade self-consciously feeling older than I am.  But now that I’m in my mid-forties, a few of my same-age friends are beginning to sprout a few gray hairs of their own, and while I wish I didn’t care about such trivial things, there is something nice about no longer being alone in this particular category.

• I will never make it into one of those 45-Brilliant-Writers-Under-45 anthologies, so that’s one less thing I need to worry about.

• When I was thirty-five and my hair was turning gray and my children were ten and seven years old, I sometimes questioned my decision to have children before establishing a career or traveling the world.  Now that I’m 45 and my children are nearly grown, I can see the advantages of having had kids early in life.  If I am indeed granted an extra thirty-five years or so, then I’ll get to enjoy my children as adults for a much longer time than if I had waited to have them.  And after I get done paying off the debt I’ve accrued in raising them, I may still have time to travel the world.

• My life so far has been divided into lots of parts, but the most defining of them have been 1) my own childhood and 2) the raising of my children.  Right now I’m on the cusp of the Next Big Part and it’s exciting to consider the possibilities.

• At forty-five I’ve already done so many of the things I’d hoped to do when I was just starting out.  Now I have this distinct feeling that the future is less about serving my own needs and more about finding a way to be of service to others, it’s humbling and hopeful all at the same time.

• And on a lighter note, hitting the quintessential birthday that marks the potential halfway point of life left me feeling completely justified in buying myself a new pair of gorgeous leather boots, and in that way turning forty-five hasn’t been all that different from turning twenty.

     What fools call “wasting time” is most often the best investment. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

     This week I’ll be facilitating my first Creative Writers’ Roundtable discussion at the Kachemak Bay Campus.  The topic for the first of the three-week series will be on developing a writing practice.  It’s a funny subject, developing a writing practice, because what works for one person doesn’t necessarily work for another.  And a routine that works beautifully for a certain period of time doesn’t always continue to work as life circumstances change or as the writing itself evolves.

When I first decided to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing I imagined that I’d make a peaceful corner in my house that would be solely devoted to my writing.  I thought I’d carve out a very specific schedule for myself: two hours before work every Tuesday morning, three hours on Thursdays, another big chunk of time on Saturday afternoons… you get the picture.  But the reality of my writing practice is something much more chaotic than this.  The truth is that I don’t have a quiet corner in my small house.  Oftentimes family obligations get in the way of the time I’ve set aside for my writing.  How is it, then, that I continue to get things done?  How do I meet my deadlines?  This is the stuff I hope to talk about at the Creative Writers’ Roundtable.

* * *

I’m lucky enough to live with a man who, in an effort to keep our family eating nutritious meals in the midst of a busy workweek, has taken it upon himself to make a big pot of soup or stew every Sunday afternoon.  It’s usually a long, slow affair.  He spends a good amount of time looking through recipes, making a grocery list, shopping, soaking, chopping, sautéing, simmering. And then there’s the clean up.

Some might say that Dean’s Sunday soup productions are a waste of time, and it’s true that if time were the only consideration we’d be better off buying a case of Campbell’s Soup at Safeway.  But with the extra attention Dean gives to the food he prepares, we get so much more than canned soup.  We have more time in our week because we don’t have to scramble through the kitchen on weekday mornings to make ourselves lunch before we leave the house. We don’t have to drive across town during our mid-day breaks in hopes of finding something satisfying to eat.  And ultimately we have delicious, sustaining food that gets more flavorful as the week progresses.

* * *

Writing is more than time spent in front of a computer or a notebook.  Like the making of a slow soup, writing requires assembling the right ingredients, processing, organizing, simmering, filtering and cleaning up.  Some of those things can be done even when I’m not in front of my computer.  In fact, many of my problems in regards to a story or a plotline are solved when I’m doing the dishes or going for a walk.  Important revelations have come to me when I’ve been playing my banjo or been in the middle of a yoga session.  And so for me developing a writing practice is about practicing to be a writer—all the time.  It’s about never turning it off.   This is not to say that every moment of my time is organized, in fact it’s just the opposite.   My best writing is done when I’ve had a fair amount of time to dawdle.  If I don’t take the time to stir my ideas around and let them settle, my writing sounds canned, like it was pulled from a shelf.  It’s a little too bland or salty. It lacks originality and flavor.

So I guess part of developing a writing practice, at least for me, is learning to embrace the slowness of the process, the thoughtful moments that can’t necessarily be accounted for.  Part of it is letting go of the false belief that productive writing can be  measured with something as simple as a word count.

“I mean I truly believe there exists some combination of words—there must exist certain words in a specific order that would explain all of this…”  – Walter White,  from Breaking Bad

Here’s my confession:  I have an MFA packet due on Tuesday and I’m not even close to having it done.  This packet is to include one new short story, one revised short story, four pages of transcription, three reader’s response papers and forty pages of freewriting.  So one would think that the logical thing to do would be to set aside this blog for a while and get to work on the required writing, but doing things in their logical order isn’t necessarily my strong suit, and so here I am, composing a blog post in hopes that by getting this out of the way I’ll be able to focus on the tasks I need to complete by Tuesday.

I’m not going to tell you what parts of my packet I have done and what parts need to happen between now and January 15^th, all I will say is that I need to put on my superhero cape or my bionic woman costume and get on with it because I’ve waited for the damn stuff to write itself and clearly that has not been my best tactic.

You see, I’ve had a hard time writing fiction lately and I’m not entirely sure why.  I’d rather write poetry or essays or memoirs or songs.  I’d rather write letters to friends or make lists.  Right now nothing sounds more daunting than sitting down in front of blank page on my computer screen and creating a story out of thin air about people who aren’t real.

When I was accepted to the MFA program two years ago I had to pick a genre for my course of study.  I could have gone in any direction:  poetry, fiction or nonfiction.  At the time I had this grandiose idea that I should choose the genre that I’d find most challenging and so I chose fiction.  That didn’t seem to be so much of a problem last year, but this year something has changed.  This year I have a bad case of fiction fatigue.

I’ve been trying to figure out what is causing this little fiction problem I seem to be having.  I think it has to do with the gap that lies between being able to recognize good fiction and being able to write it myself.  I’ve experienced similar gaps with fiddle playing.  Sometimes I can recognize when something I’m playing doesn’t sound right, but I don’t yet know what I need to do to fix the problem.  Then there is another gap that comes when I know how to fix the problem but I don’t yet have the skills to make it happen, for example my fingers might not be trained to reach so far, or the bowing technique is something I haven’t yet learned.

So I suppose my job for this second year of my MFA is to work on bridging that gap between where I’m at with my writing and where I want to be.  I have to keep on writing marginal fiction and trust that I’ll recognize when something in it doesn’t seem right.  Then I have to figure out what to nix or change or tweak in order to make it better.  And I have to keep reading great fiction and thinking about what makes it great in the first place.  It’s like putting together a complicated puzzle, but with pieces I have to hand craft myself.

Someday I’ll be glad I set myself up for this challenge, but between now and Tuesday night it’s going to hurt.