Here’s what’s been happening for me: I’m doing some writing I don’t like doing. This is why people decide to get MFAs, huh? I’m learning to compromise because I want to. Kind of. My dear, dear, dear friend and hero Jimmy came to visit and we went to an open mic and he…
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Kind dears, I am averaging a post every other week. I have heard your outcry, and I apologize, I apologize, I apologize (maybe go into the archives when you really need a prompt–there are years of writing back there). This thesis writing thing is sort of kicking my ass. But stick with me. Just…
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Recently, a friend of mine (you don’t know him) wrote me an email about his experience with illness, and his feelings of anger and frustration with it. It’s a strange thing, to know that you exist inside something–are part of something–that is failing you. I don’t know exactly what he’s feeling. But when I read his email, I…
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This week, a participant in a writing group asked me why I write so much. I answered with something not untrue–something like, “Because I’m really fucked up and trying to survive.” But that wasn’t the whole truth. It was like a sliver of the truth, or a version of the truth. Because while, yes, I believe…
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This week I attended an Ashtanga yoga class for maybe the second time in my life. The sequences are repetitive, you do a run through with the teacher’s guidance, and then repeat the sequence on your own three times. Every time the teacher said, “Okay, now do it on your own,” I suffered a little…
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Tell me to what you pay attention and I’ll tell you who you are. –Jose Ortega y Gasset I’ve been slowly reading and writing notes from The Life of Poetry by Muriel Rukeyser since March. It was recommended to me by my brilliant friend Renee, and I ordered it immediately on my phone from her…
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The other night I woke at 1:30, read until 3:30 and then went back to sleep. It was amazing, as it always is, to be up and feel like time belongs entirely to me. I can’t plan that–it just happens when it happens, a sort of gift from my body, however inconvenient. I have…
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This past week we were talking a little about social media and the ways it interferes with our idea of our sense of self. How through it, we can often create these really false images of ourselves that we might then feel required to live up (or in some cases down) to–so we’re literally setting…
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In a writing group this week, someone asked me what they should be writing about. They said, “No offense, but I don’t care about poetry or whatever. Writing has been one of the things that’s helped me and I want to do it right.” Well, no offense taken. Poetry is immediate, precise, emotionally honest, and…
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In the past few weeks I’ve been thinking about the common penchant for outrage, how people seem to need (or at least really like) to find something to brace against. To, in Leslie Jamison’s words “be shaped by opposition.” I see it in my kids, how they want to be angry at someone (usually the…
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