Connecting & Crashing Back

I waited too long to post about the camaraderie of Squaw because now I'm too sentimental about it. I miss them. I miss everything. The high points of Squaw come from the professionals and from the natural surroundings, but the sustained good times come from the other participants. We all come bug-eyed and eager. We're scared. We huddle together, and we talk. Lord, do we talk. We encourage, we critique, sometimes we're awed, and we connect. Mainly we tell each other stories. After the workshops and the lectures, after we've read the manuscripts for the day and made our notes, we merge back together. We call it party time, but my non-writer friends wouldn't call what we do partying. They don't believe a party entails earnest interest in everyone's exact progress of their novel, or reciting parts of books, or talking about which characters in literature we wished we were, or which books inspired us to become writers. We play word games for god sake, and parties usually don't include readings; funny, serious, good spontaneous student readings.  We do drink, ok, we drink quite a bit, we stay up late and sometimes we dance. We burst out spontaneously, unprovoked. Like the night I danced alone on the deck of a house that overlooked the valley. The mountains were black and the valley was blue and sparked with moonshine. I danced directly to the white moon (and Los Orishas on the iPod) while other participants sat on the deck too, talking and not phased at all by what the moon and I needed to work out. There was another time when a Russian woman, a poet, who is enamored by salsa music asked me to dance because she wanted to show off her moves. I was like, sure, knock yourself out. She led and I let her, though, to be fair, I don't know how to lead. She's was all elbows and smiles and tight curls in her hair. She was endearing, and we cut a rug something fierce. Mainly we told stories. Friends who I've known for years told me how they answered one of those spam emails from the Nigerian dude telling them they'd won $10,000. My friends emailed the guy back, knowing it was scam, and they went back and forth with the guy asking him how they could collect their winnings. The Nigerian dude, as predicted, instructed them to wire $3,500.00 so the money could be released from a secure bank account, then the full $10K would be sent. My friends wrote that they would do that as soon as he wired THEM $5,000 as an act of good faith. It went on like that for twenty emails and man, I laughed so hard at this story. I told the story of how I spent two years baking feverishly -- like a mad person -- thinking I was going to become a great vegan baker, and they said, To avoid writing? like it was so obvious to them when I haven't even fully admitted that to myself, but I did answer, Yes, to avoid the inevitable. They laughed at that and I guess I had to too. They patted me on the back and then told me their stories of procrastination and bullshittin'. I have to say that reconnecting back to the real world after being at Squaw for seven days was not smooth, and in fairness to every real relationship out there, I want to report that I had a complete meltdown on Husband our first night back together. I liken it to crashing back through the Earth's atmosphere. Husband and I hardly ever argue so when I pulled a complete outta-left-field emotional attack, the likes of which I haven't done in about a decade, he was blindsided. He doesn't respond well to blind siding. I didn't even know exactly what was welling or brewing and I just let it rip. Fuck it. I let it run its course when usually I'd be rational and thoughtful and logical. In the moment, I did not know how to articulate my own monumental self doubt. I didn't know how to tell him that I was worried that I won't ever have time to write anything of value and that's embarrassing mainly because I think that's just an excuse, and I hate when excuses fade away the things we say we love the most. I couldn't tell him in a rational way that I know I'm a good writer, and I have a lot of people rooting me on, but maybe I can't do it. I wanted to hear that he didn't think being a writer was a useless endeavor, that it is pointless and frivolous. Did he even think I was interesting (because, I was thinking, I was just so goddamn interesting to many people just days before). This was the question that pissed him off the most. It was a tornado of feelings that I don't feel now. They were feelings I wanted him to know I felt, but as I was feeling them and expressing them in incongruent and tangled ways, I was slipping into an abyss of isolation. I panicked at the thought of feeling alone in these thoughts. It's not that I mind being alone, but I don't want to be alone from him. It was like I was unanchoring myself from him and floating away and god! That's the last thing I wanted. After two hours of melting and crying and confusion, I asked him to just tell me it was going to be ok. That’s all I really wanted. He turned towards me, finally, and I could feel his energy soften. He put his arm around me and said, "It's going to be ok, baby. I love you. You're the most interesting person I know." Almost instantly, the steam released from my meltdown. The crashing back together, in hindsight, was worth the severe closeness I felt for him right then. I love this man more than any adult I have ever known. Trying to put myself on a misunderstood island was a terrible idea, but the vomiting of the rawness felt good then, afterwards, in his arms. 

Home From Squaw

When I baptized myself in the Truckee River on day two of the Squaw Conference, it wasn't a full immersion. I needed a simple promise, not a full epiphany. I needed something more relative and not so manic. A solid and sustainable promise is what I needed.

I put my feet in the water and forgave myself. I washed away the notion that I've wasted my time in regards to writing, that I've squandered my talent. I haven't. I haven't stayed focused and I haven't put in the work, but any regrets for time passed, I sent afloat down the river. Dorothy Allison told me personally that it took her twenty years to build up the courage to write Bastard Out of Carolina, and ten more years to actually write it.

Honestly, I don't know if I could have written anything complete and of real value before. I haven't been brave enough. I'm talking about the kind of bravery that allows one to edit out all the crutches and bullshit. The type of bravery that lets "the bones rise to the top" as Dorothy told it to me. Also, I hadn't copped to the work it takes to hone talent, and it takes a lot of work. Writers -- underdeveloped ones -- seem to think that natural talent will magically form into books and stories. Trained musicians and dancers don't think that way. Their lives seem rooted in practice. Why would it be different for a good writer?

Courage didn't suddenly fall upon me. It has taken years to coax myself to this point. No time has been wasted at all. Now a new promise begins.The Truckee River stayed alive for me in photos, but the valley did not. It hid its full shimmer from the camera. The valley holds out for personal visits only, apparently. The magic of the Aspen trees especially didn't come across in still pictures. In person, the leaves shake and reflect light like round, strung-together mirrors. They sounds like the shelled anklets of far away African dancers. But when photographed, they are still and flat. I will question what I saw the Aspen leaves do when I go through all the photos, but that sound -- that rainstick rustling -- stays with me.

So, the river: I think of bodies of water as protective women in my life; the Pacific Ocean, a mother. The river, an aunt. That second day, I rode my bike along the river path. The Truckee was gentle and pretty and lined in long grass. She's an intimate river. The water rolled with a soft, thick ripple when it was not speeding over scattered rocks, creating small white water.We talked this week about rivers as symbols in literature, a line dividing things: Cities, classes, past and present. I might have made up the past and present thing because maybe that's what the Truckee is for me.

There were many places to turn off the bike path and join the river, and I went to a small opening with good rocks for sitting. I flung off my flip flops and considered jumping in, but I wanted to keep it a calm visit and I decided to have the feet baptism.The first thing Dorothy Allison said to me after reading my story was, "Are you willing to put in the work?"

I had learned early in the week that my one-on-one conference would be with Dorothy Allison, of all people, and I alternated between nausea and ecstasy after hearing the news.

"Yes ma'am," I said, and not confidently.

We spoke with our faces twelve inches apart, and we bore holes with our eyes, hers into mine and me syphoning from hers. She speaks in a fading drawl which revives when she reads stories aloud. She emphasises words with a raspy, loud inflection, an almost whisper-yell.

She said, "You have STO-RY and VOICE and PAS-SION, but your mechanics are breakin' your knees, crippling you as a writer." We stared. She waited for a hint of resistance from me, but I waited, opening my eyes as wide as possible to let her in.

"First thing you gotta do," she said, "is when a character speaks, make a new paragraph. For a whole YE-AR anytime someone talks, a new paragraph! Make what they say count."

"Yes ma'am," I said.

She did not appreciate all the sentences I began with "and" and "but". She objected in general to my frivolous use of "and".

She said, "So often women are afraid of the declarative sentence. STATE. IT."

I thought, Hell Yes.

My mechanics problem stems from not putting in the work. I don't read enough. I don't read out loud enough. I sure as hell don't write enough. The basic question loomed: Was I willing to work.

She placed my story on the table. She asked me if my mother was still alive. Was I still angry? I didn't have to pretend that the story was all fiction. The conversation we had from there is a private one. She got me tearing and choking over truths. She shared a couple intimate details about her step father, but mainly she told me it was time to write the story.

"Be RUTH-LESS," she said.

Dorothy hugged me hard with her big, soft body. She told me to keep in touch with her because she wanted to hear how it comes along. I believe she meant it. Then I went outside and cried my eyes out for a half hour.

The staff at Squaw -- well-known writers, agents, editors from publishing houses --spent a lot of time erasing the line between them and us. They were generous and discerning. They were honest. After workshop, we went to panels and talks and, our favorite, readings by the staff writers. The most comforting lectures were when published writers described their intimate relationship with Self Doubt. It never goes away, they told us. It can be paralyzing, they said. Amy Tan's closing talk was all about this. She detailed how she thinks her brain is shrinking, and she fears that she has peaked, that not one more word will ever come to her. Karen Joy Fowler, who wrote the The Jane Austen Book Club, hilariously described how she procrastinates. She was on a panel called Sustaining Momentum. She leaned into the microphone and said,

"Having me on this panel is like having King Henry VIII lead a panel on the Keys to a Happy Marriage."

She described how she used to spend hours spinning her wedding ring atop her desk, going for personal bests. Her husband then bought her a ring that wouldn't spin. Karen said she had a friend remove Solitaire from her computer, but only when she wasn't present to prevent Karen from tackling the friend as she did so.

Besides Dorothy, the other staff writer I connected with was Dagoberto Gilb. I'm reading his latest book The Flowers, which is written from the perspective of a Mexican-American middle school boy from LA. The language of the book is exactly how a kid like this speaks. When I got to know Dagoberto, I realized this was his voice, he speaks just like that. He and I confessed our fears of embarrassing ourselves in front of all the MFA'ers and the college-educated people, but we both know that this doesn't keep us from telling a damn good story.

During one of my workshops, the staff facilitator of the day schooled us on greek terms. He said shit like,

"The syntax demonstrates parataxis," and immediately I thought, Whatever! But really I didn't know what that meant until he schooled us.

I came out out of the work shop and to Dagoberto I said,

"Today I learned that I don't know shit about shit."

He said, "I just LED the workshop and I realized I don't know shit about shit either."

Dagoberto had a stroke three months ago. He's in his fifties only, I think. Three weeks before Squaw, he started walking again.

He told me, "The left side of my body died."

When we were at a party though, he had me dying, laughing, about how when he was reading from The Flowers at the conference, he thought he was going to fall a couple times.

"I was reading, thinking at the same time, OH FUCK! I'm gonna fall! WHOA! DON'T FALL! And sometimes my face does shit I don't even know about. I DON'T EVEN KNOW ME, MAN!"

We laughed, near tears, and he took a drink from a big, red party cup.

"Like now," he said, "I'm fucking crushing this cup and don't even realize it. FUCK!"

We doubled over. Then for one moment, and not longer, he got serious.

"But I won't let myself fall. I'm not falling, man." He was staring passed the cup that was at his lips. I knew he could clown easily about what had happened to him, but I knew more that he was not a man about to fall because of it.

Buy his books. He ain't traditional -- I love that -- but his work is important. Though his syntax displays plenty of hypotaxis and shit.

I want to write another post about the camaraderie of Squaw, but I'll save it. I've written enough for now. I did tell Dorothy that my friends love her, you too, Trasherati. Mainly, I wanted to tell you guys that I did love the ever-living fuck out of every minute of all seven days.

Miss you.

Here's Dorothy Allison.
Dagoberto Gilb. My good friend and mentor, Lisa Alvarez (Rebel Girl). Amy Tan is behind us.
I'll post more photos on flickr soon.

Squaw's Eve

I leave Saturday morning for Squaw, the writer camp/intensive program I got into this year. As my friend Honduro says with despair, "I'm too excited about it." We're nervous about loving Squaw too much. Why does the excitement feel explosive and doom-like? Like I'm preparing to die from happiness there. Honduro says he looks forward to having conversations with the aspen trees along the Truckee River. I said, Ooo oo, I'll work on my hawk call and hope to get answers back from them. We happily surrender to our inner nature-word geek and we feel unashamed about it, though Husband looks at me with side glances as the time nears and says, "ookkaayy" a lot. My geekdome is busting at the seams. It's ok. Because during this week, diving deep to string words together well will be unobstructed. I'll get to freefall into understanding them. I will be un-obstacled by work, by any regular demands. I won't even be blocked by the self consciousness of my charged sense of observation, a trait I usually try not to put on display. And I won't be hindered by the self-consciousness of obsessively wanting to assemble words until they click together perfectly. It's safe for everything to be a wonder there.

I'm bringing Loops too, to commute to workshop in the morning, in the summer-mountain air, and for overwhelming rides around Lake Tahoe where the sheen of lake water will blind me. Wait until you see pictures of this place. I'm also going to meet one of my favorite writers, Dorothy Allison, who has been on staff at Squaw a few years now. She's going to sign my crinkled copy of Two Or Three Things I Know for Sure, and I'm going to be awkward, bursting with nothing to say. And I'm going to ask Rebel Girl if I can stow away in a back cabin room for the rest of the summer, well beyond the seven days of the intensive. Just until I can sort out my feelings and compose myself. My stomach hurts from loving too much what's about to happen, even when I told myself I wasn't going to let anything lilt too high or dip too low. But really, I just want to release it and let me feel it and pay the consequences later. Go ahead. I'm down for the ride.

I thought of something recently, about the corralling of feelings and why it's destructive. This has nothing to do with writing, but it has all to do with real emotion, and writing falls in that category for me. I was remembering how people used to tell Mama not to baby me when I was little. She would've coddled me to death, and I would have gladly let her, but the advice from everyone else deterred her. She'd spoil me, she was told. Don't baby her, they said. I didn't see her that often and I didn't know why she wouldn't just let me sleep with her or at least fall asleep with her, until my stepgrandfather would tell her to put me to bed to keep me from being spoiled, which is really exactly what I needed. Man, I ached for it. And Mama, who was not strong, didn't let me in her bed, she pulled the reins on how much she wanted to love me, but she did baby me as much as she could get away with. Then she died when I was still young. So really, what was the point of rationing the love? The absence of it hurt more after. And I kind of feel that way about anything where real emotion and love is felt. Like, why be scared to love Squaw or anything or anybody too much. Love the fuck out of it for god's sake. Love it now.

Come on. I'm ready for the ride.

Patio Farmers, Black Out and Squaw Valley

Santa Monica has a growing number of community gardens spread throughout the city. The most famous is on Main Street, south of downtown, and has been there since the 1970's. I remember staring at them as a kid and wondering how people got so lucky to get a garden in a pack of gardens in the middle of town. It didn't occur to me to call the city about getting one of them myself until a couple months ago. I applied for a plot, told them I'd take any size at any of the three locations. I'm 250th or so on the waiting list – that’s what the lady told me! It will take years. I can wait.

Mina and I drove past the Park Drive Gardens, the closest community garden to our house, last weekend. We walked all around the locked lots and tried to identify all the food coming into harvest; tomatoes, strawberries, basil, corn! They were fantastic. Some of the lots were tiny, maybe a 100 sq. feet, and it occurred to me that my back patio is only a little smaller than the smallest of these lots. I said, "Mina, these gardens are tiny, right? Don't they look the same size as our patio?" Her eyes lit up. "Yes!" And in that moment we decided to become patio farmers.

For the record, I know not a thing about the soil. In technical terms, I know not what makes it tick or what would move it to miraculously produce something so perfect as zucchini, let's say. Or a watermelon. I mean, that's nuts, right? A watermelon grows from a seed, y'all! So the thought that I could somehow coax the earth to do the same for me is a bit mindblowing. It's logical to believe that anything living needs nurturing, nutrients, love. I know that much, I suppose.

When I was 13, Mama lived in a trailer in Westlake with a bit of a yard. One spring she planted strawberries seeds in high, holey terracotta pots. We sat on the back trailer steps and waited for things to grow. Quail families ran through the yard with small bobbing head feathers. When jagged green leaves crawled out of the holes of the pots, I was impressed. But when small red berries exploded in bloom between the leaves I thought Mama was in on something godly. Of course she was, but I was not moved to try such miracles myself. I didn't think it was possible for me, in an apartment. Growing food was for people with land and with a calling.

I've been called now, or I self appointed a calling to myself. It's yet to be seen if I can lure food from the ground. I did successfully keep some herbs alive from existing plants last summer. That alone was chest-puffing for me.

Mina and I started our patio farm with some plastic planters that had been in storage or discarded.We spruced them up with good dirt, and seeds and some seedlings though these bell peppers are a bit more than seedlings.Hey, 'member I got this Envirocycle rolling composter a year ago?Yo, talk about miracles! Did you know -- and I'm really just talking to my city folks right now -- that scraps of food, over time and mixed right and rolled around in the above contraption, really turns into a dirt-like substance? It's crazy! Here's a cupful. Check it:Don't ask me how the worms got in there; I'm just a bystander in the natural ecology of things. We added our homemade compost to our soil and apparently our lil' plants are gonna eat it up and dig us for it. You know who else is diggin' the project? Patio Farmer Mina. Here's what we have so far: Tomatoes in the corner, herbs from existing plants, seedling bell peppers and sugar snap peas, and from seeds (hopefully) will come carrots, zucchini, pole beans and I have some eggplant getting started indoors. (I read the packets very carefully.) I'll keep you posted because, lord have mercy, when I see the first hint of an edible substance coming from our p. farm, I'll be snapping pictures like it was my first born.
In other news . . .Husband has been staging a bit of a silent protest. He is the production manager for a clothing line and he works really hard, too hard really. He works 11-12 hours days, every day. He works Saturday mornings most weeks and since they've added a factory in Mexico, he's had to make trips there twice a month. He is a machine. But it's too much. You know when the hardest working person just ends up taking on most of the work? He's that guy. And I tell him that they'll work him as hard as he'll let them, and he says I know I know, but still he works until the brink anyway. About a month ago, he unceremoniously started wearing only black to work; black t-shirts, black jeans, black sneakers. Every single day without fail, all black. I don’t want to worry, but I don't see an end in sight, and coworkers are starting to make comments. It's as much of a protest against the work load as Husband can muster. It's like he's telling his work, "I'm saying fuck you in my mind right now." Kinda. Poor Husband! I love him so much.

And in other other news, I got accepted to the Squaw Valley Community of Writers Program this summer (!). I've attended this workshop before, a few years ago and many, many years before that. 'Member when I was Janet Finch's personal DJ last time? Oh man, she's great. Anyway, Squaw for me has been an amazing experience and the alumni and staff are intimidatingly impressive, but really the valley itself is magic for me. Squaw Valley in the summertime is the most beautiful place I've ever seen in person. I can't tell you what staring at the velvet valley does for me. For 7 days, I will get to geek out on writing with a good mix of budding brilliance, pretentious gas bags and straight lunatics. I love them all. I applied with my new story, which is the first I've written in a while and I'll get it workshopped during the program. In the past, I've held high expectations for myself when going to the workshop only to disappoint myself even more later. After the program, I have felt huge crashes; tumblings down after hoping to retain the hope and highs I felt at Squaw. Writing good fiction takes everything from me. It's the only thing that I do that takes complete silence and full concentration. That's a tall order in my house. Anyway, no expectations this year. I'm just gonna be myself and geek out and appreciate what I was able to churn out lately. I’ll ride my bike next to Lake Tahoe and of course stare at the valley. That's all I really want, is that valley to hold me still for a while.