Here's the deal, blog fans: Someone tweeted a blog link from a piece I wrote a while ago, meaning new traffic on the old blog. So here I am with a poignant update to capture all that new traffic.
This is my PowerBall, and you, dear reader, are my billion dollars.
The problem is I don't really know what to write.
I can't put up the poetry I'm working on, because then journals won't want to publish it. Not that they really do anyway, but a boy can dream. It would be fun to wrestle through some poems in real time, mess with line and meaning. I guess there's no real money in poetry anyway, so if I do that on here or in some journal, what's the real difference?
I don't know. Philosophically, is it better to share and invalidate a piece for traditional publishing, or withhold and hope for traditional publishing? I guess that's what I need to wrestle with. What my value is in writing, at the moment, and if this blog is a piece of that. Or I could just dribble on about my latest obtuse theological leanings (my latest journal entry more or less creates a God complex on behalf of humanity. You're welcome, godhumans) but I'm not sure I'm ready to take that plunge yet.
Either way, welcome to the blog. I've got about a couple of good pieces and a whole bunch of meandering in between. Good luck!
Thoughts and things.
Nothing makes sense. Everything is the worst. Everything is the best.
Friday, January 15, 2016
Thursday, September 24, 2015
Check check check it out #2
Want another website to while away some literary hours, until you feel bad for not writing?
Check out Brain Pickings. They post a lot, and I just can't keep up with all of them, but it's great to peruse through and see what strikes your fancy.
Also, happy birthday F. Scott Fitzgerald. Thanks for the good words.
Check out Brain Pickings. They post a lot, and I just can't keep up with all of them, but it's great to peruse through and see what strikes your fancy.
Also, happy birthday F. Scott Fitzgerald. Thanks for the good words.
Labels:
check check check it out,
resources,
writing
Tuesday, September 22, 2015
What Mary Brown Taught Me: Art as Community
Nine years ago I met Dr. Mary
Brown. And I thought she was the most self-rightous bitch. You
know the professor who thinks that her class is the only one you’re taking? The
work load for Creative Writing, a simple 200–level class, was overwhelming. I
was an athlete. I worked, I paid rent. I had other things to do.
At
mid-terms of that particular class, Mary and I had a sit-down meeting. I had
missed over half of the class periods up to that point. I told her that I was
sorry and that I would do better, and I mostly meant it. I was also dealing
with a defeating case of post-breakup depression, a pretty consuming party
schedule, life as a year-round college athlete. In my mind, I had a lot going
on. A 200-level writing class wasn’t particularly meaningful in the scheme of
my priorities.
In
fairness to my immature self, I only
had so many hours in the day. I decided that I was more interested in what I would
learn from a class than what grade I would receive, so any level of “jumping
through hoops” (including participation/attendance grades, which I summarily
dismissed at the time) I just rejected. This wasn’t necessarily all-out belligerence,
although that cropped up at times. Really it was a decision that experience and
learning trumped feedback and grades. I still mostly stand by this value, but at the time I misunderstood the
relationship of feedback to learning. Still, I lived according to a certain degree of individual value judgment.
Mary
Brown, however, would not fall in line with my assessment of academic life. And it drove me
crazy. She was this uptight, rule-driven taskmaster who insisted that doing
things properly was better than doing them well. She insisted that class
attendance was importance, which reeked of ego. Oh, yes, Mary, I must be in
your class, to gorge on your endless wisdom?
Life
has, as it does, continued its onward march. Nearly a decade of it, and I’ve
grown up a little bit. Even by the time I graduated, I had learned that Mary
was more or less the opposite of all I had assumed: her approach to writing and
teaching was humble, and yet ambitious. She encouraged readers and writers to
dare, to buck the rules and to create great works rather than good assignments.
She rapidly became one of my favorite professors, and her faith, her approach
to work, her belief in the power of literature is one of the prevailing
theologies, ontologies, foundations of life that I hold to. It is mystical and
spiritual and hard to peg down, but it’s so very real, and so very foundational
to how I approach the written word.
Mary Brown did not care that I was there to hear her lectures. She cared
that I was there to engage in the sacred art of literature. Writers cannot
exist without readers, and readers cannot exist without writers, and a class
setting cannot operate without both in ample supply. I believe that what she
was interested in was not blind obedience, was not simply the rules of
attendance, but rather steeping students in the two-way, multi-dimensional
act of creation.
I have
come to believe that a work of art is not complete when it is finished. A
written piece is not complete unless it is presented to a reader, who continues
the creative work through interpretation. A work of art is presented by an
artist and interpreted through viewing, reading, engaging. What creates a work
of art is not simply what the artist brings, but what the viewer brings as
well; these two things fuse in a mystery not unlike marriage, or sex: two
become one, amplified. What makes an enduring work, a classic, an eternal gesture,
is a piece that resonates with readers, with consumers, infinitely. Thus, it never stops creating, which is a sacred act. We are still moved by Shakespeare’s characters, or the enduring, ancient struggles of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Faulkner, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, talked about the necessity of
tackling enduring themes rather than topical situations. It is these themes
that continue to resonate throughout humanity, throughout time, throughout the
experience of interaction and interpretation that round out what a piece of art
can and ought to be: infinitely creative, infinitely holy.
Mary
Brown understood this. She understood that creation doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
She understood and taught me—not aggressively, but through the seeds of her
convictions, that took years to bloom—that art is a collaborative effort.
That art is a mystical experience, that art builds on the history of those who
have come before and weaves into the creative work of a creative god, that art requires
us to live in community, to both engage and shed our loneliness, our
disparate value judgments, and instead live the vulnerable and terrifying life
of an artist: a life that is lived wide open on the page, that cannot exist
without some great and mysterious other
reading, viewing, engaging, and creating alongside us. This is eternity: the endless rhythm and rhyme of creation mating with creation to offer something
new and beautiful to the world, something that, at its best, resonates across
space and time and continues to create long after the work of the artist is
done.
Labels:
art,
literature,
Mary Brown,
narcissism,
sorry I was a jerk back then,
writing
Friday, September 18, 2015
Check check check it out.
If you're looking for a cool website, and I know you are, check out Advice To Writers. Or follow them on Twitter. Really. It's good.
Have a good weekend, kids.
Have a good weekend, kids.
Labels:
#ff,
amwriting,
good websites,
literature,
writing
Thursday, September 17, 2015
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, ladies and gentlemen.
Do you ever read something and you just think, "I'm so happy reading this that I'm angry about it." Garcia Marquez keeps me trying to make my brain bend in different ways, to describe things in new and confusing and illuminating ways.
"...but he allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves."
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Love in the Time of Cholera
If you like that, you should read how he describes a phallus. It's so good. Maybe next time, lit nerds.
"...but he allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves."
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Love in the Time of Cholera
If you like that, you should read how he describes a phallus. It's so good. Maybe next time, lit nerds.
Labels:
literature,
quotes so good I'm mad about it,
writing
Wednesday, September 16, 2015
Wedding Bells are Ringing
I was going to write a different piece for today, but life
happens, and it changes the way we approach art, right?
My sister got married this weekend. Eckhardt weddings are
wonderful, but there’s also this underlying tension. It’s one of the few times
that my mom and dad are in the same place. There’s a certain irony in what
brings us together: the backdrop of re-entering the hum and thrum, the
incessant background electrical noise of all that has been unspoken since their
divorce in 1990.
My parents are divorced. My grandparents were divorced, on
each side. Two thirds of my parents’ generation (i.e. them and their siblings)
are divorced. I have a cousin who is divorced, and his brother who has divorced
and remarried more times than I can keep count of (3 or 4? 5?). It’s messiness.
So it was a palpable moment come together. My brother and I
officiated, and there was this moment, as my dad is walking my baby sister down
the aisle, and she’s such a woman, grown and beautiful. And we had this family
moment at the front, this belief that we can be better than our past. This incredible
sense of hope within the fear. Our family history is a constant, an unchangeable
pain. And yet we keep trying, through that pain and heartache and fear, to make
the story better for the next generation.
Dearly beloved, we are
here together today to celebrate the joining of two lives we hold dear: Caleb
and Bethany. This union is the joining of two lives under the banner of a God
who defined himself as love, and as we witness the fusion of two lives we point
to a Creator who became one with his creation, to know and to be known, to
serve in the mode and miracle of love. We join these two in an incarnational
love, where they become one another, to know and to be known, to serve their
united whole in the mode and miracle of love.
Lots of tears were shed (classic Eckhardts), and I think
there was healing available in that moment, and hope for a future that gets
better. We can’t change the past, but we can shape the future. In the face of
the awkward tension of us all in one place, we can see the resurrection of new faith,
hope, and love.
Two lives never join
in a vacuum. In this space we are joining two families, and pulling together
your upbringings, your histories, and your understandings of life. Bethany, as you
become a Figg, you carry with you all of the weird and wonderful things that it
means to grow up an Eckhardt. And both of you will quickly realize that Eckhardt
norms are not quite normal at all. I suspect, as well, there are some quirks on
the Figg side too. So your goal becomes carving out a new normal, to be patient
and loving and kind, and to learn to choose the best in one another as you
continually define this newly forms space, this nation of two, this Caleb and
Bethany.
Congratulations, Caleb and Bethany. Do better. We believe in
you.
Friday, September 11, 2015
Dear Poetry
“Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all,
but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as
necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.” Mary Oliver
Dear poetry:
I'm in. I'm trying. I'm going to give it a go. I've been skeptical, because there is so much silliness in your lines. I've been cynical, of the esoteric walls you build. The truth is, if I'm honest, I love you: your laughter and your cascading doubts, the nebulous cotton of your walls, the metaphor that is truer than facts. I'm going to give it a serious go. I hope we can make this work.
Pat
Dear poetry:
I'm in. I'm trying. I'm going to give it a go. I've been skeptical, because there is so much silliness in your lines. I've been cynical, of the esoteric walls you build. The truth is, if I'm honest, I love you: your laughter and your cascading doubts, the nebulous cotton of your walls, the metaphor that is truer than facts. I'm going to give it a serious go. I hope we can make this work.
Pat
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