Lofty Minded in Alaska

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.

The ceilings have been lowered and the walls are pushing in.   Even if the winds weren’t howling, if sprays of rain weren’t pelting the side of the house, even if I were warm and dry inside a silent house with no access to the weather forecast, I would feel this storm.  It’s all pressure.  It’s a dull headache and achy joints.  It’s slowing me down.

Outside everything is accelerated:  Gusts to 55mph.   Three feet of snow from Tuesday now condensed to a waterlogged foot and a half.  The driveway, meticulously plowed a few days ago to allow us access to the world, has become a southern sloping waterway; its riverbed made of ice.  Inside we sip coffee, read books.  We think of the things we’ll bake—assuming the electricity stays.  We watch water pour off the roof, wonder when the snow will reach its saturation point.  Dinner with friends across town is cancelled.

The forecasters have used the word cyclone to describe this storm.  The satellite image is reminiscent of hurricanes and typhoons.  The startling terminology aside, this kind of weather system is not uncommon here and it poses no danger to our house.  We aren’t in a flood zone.  No trees will blow over onto our roof.  We might lose our power and we might be cut off from getting to town for a few days, but even those things are unlikely.  All we really have to do is keep a fire burning in the wood stove and wait for things to get back to normal.

Several years ago a relative asked me, “What’s so special about Alaska?”  Her accusing tone made me defensive and I talked about the mountains and the ocean and the extreme weather.  I talked about the long hours of daylight in the summer, the darkness in the winter.  I mentioned the northern lights and grizzly bears.  Everything I said was true, but she wasn’t convinced.  And to be honest, neither was I—every place has something to make it special. But her pointed question and my inadequate answers have stayed with me.

And today there is no place I have to be, no thing I have to do, which allows me to enjoy this storm and whatever it might bring.  Outside, the world is a giant swirl of wind and rain and snow and muck, and as I’m writing this I can see a bald eagle from the window beside my kitchen table.  Its wings are spread. It’s coasting on the currents of this storm—rising and falling—giving in to the push and pull of the wind.  I watch it and wonder, what’s so special about children? Or coffee, or flowers or chocolate, for that matter.  What’s the big deal about the sky or stars or fire?  Why spend an hour writing about a storm or watching an eagle play in the winds of a cyclone?

No reason.  No reason at all.

Floating

I would have been comfortable
floating somewhere near medium
in the realm of muted colors, suburban
yards and lite-rock.
But with you it’s AC DC,
1975 green shag
and weeds so tall
it’d take a machete to cut a trail
back to normal.

It seems appropriate—in a full-circle kind of way—that I’m going to Montana next week.  That’s where a lot of things started for me nearly twenty-three years ago.  As a twenty-year-old I moved to Missoula “to go to school,” but the real reason was to be nearer a guy that I’d met while fighting fires in New Mexico.  He lived in a small town not too far away in Idaho and the University of Montana was the closest place where I could continue my education.

The guy from Idaho was the wrong guy—that’s something I knew even before I went there—but it turns out that everything else about moving to Montana was right.  I didn’t know a soul in Missoula and so it worked out to be the place where I started to figure a few things out for myself.

It’s where I began to pay attention to nature.  It sounds silly because I grew up in Western Colorado, one of the most amazingly beautiful places I’ve ever been, but the landscape was different in Montana, so I began to see things I’d failed to notice as a kid.

It’s where I started to question religion and where I began to appreciate literature.  It’s where I first had the idea to start writing.  And it’s where I eventually met Dean.  Three years later we were on our way to Alaska and our first child, Dillon, was on the way.  He turns twenty on Sunday.

Nothing about our journey from there to here has been what I would have predicted.  As a child I imagined a much more mainstream way of living.  But we haven’t taken the normal route:  We got married young.  We had kids young.  And since then it’s been a flurry of school and summer camp and trips across the bay (when the motor doesn’t peter out) and jobs and struggling to pay the bills and homeschool and taking classes to finish the degree and gardens and neighborhood get-togethers and dogs and chickens and bears in the yard and dipnetting for salmon and old time fiddle tunes and accidents on icy roads and gun-yielding neighbors on one side and nudist neighbors on the other and all of it has been a mix of love and heartbreak and fun and frustration—and it’s been twenty years.  And now our youngest child is leaving for Montana.

Adella was born in Alaska and has been anxious to go someplace new for a few years now and so she’s going to Missoula to live with friends for her senior year of high school. And I get to go down there with her to get her registered for school and spend a week in the place where so many things began for me.  Montana seemed pretty extreme when I moved there from Colorado all those years ago.  It will be interesting to see how I perceive it after having lived in Alaska for twenty years.

(The poem at the top was in the Winter Solstice 2011 Issue of Cirque Literary Journal.)