http://www.aberrationnation.com/2010/11/holding-onto-her-hat-marya-hornbacher.html

Fun essay by Penelope Przecop plus an interview with me if yr curious... ... << MORE >>

At approx. 4 a.m.

That is what I have determined this fall. In a mad dash through an insane number of cities these last few months, I’ve decided that cities fall asleep—kind of suddenly—at 4 a.m.

I’m an early riser—a cross between a night owl and a morning person—and I generally get up between 2 and 3, when most of my night owl friends are abandoning their desks or late-night walks or easels or what have you, and head for bed. That’s when I’m making coffee and sitting down to work. So I’m a counter of stars, a student of degrees of dark, and a connoisseur of sunrise details.

So it is that I happen to be awake to determine when cities sleep. And, almost across the board, it’s 4.

Sitting on a fire escape above West 4^th and 6^th last week, bundled in a sweatshirt and freezing my bare feet, I watched the last-gaspers stagger home from bars around 3:30. The cabs came fewer and farther between. The Papaya King on the corner stayed neon-lit, of course, in case anyone should want a hot dog for an early breakfast. The all-night shouting lost energy and eventually quieted down. And at 4, New York, the city that does not sleep, slept.

Columbus, Indianapolis, Calgary, Seattle, and various other cities fall mostly asleep earlier. But there are always those who feel it necessary to shout down hotel hallways till all hours, always a few cars running red lights on streets below, presumably in a hurry to make their 4 a.m. bedtime. And then those cities, too, go dark.

Tonight Minneapolis has just fallen heavily asleep. The lingerers in Loring Park—who were particularly raucous tonight—have headed home. The people coming and going and coming and going from various old brick buildings have disappeared, and are no longer shouting on the street outside or banging on windows and doors.

All is quiet on the northern front. And the sun won’t rise anytime soon. Winter is pressing at the edges of the city. The trees are almost all stripped bare, the last color drained from the color-mad trees of a few weeks ago. Those leaves, dry now, skitter up and down the sidewalks and swirl around your feet as you walk. The lakes are silver, the sky shifting from that same silver to an impossible blue, a blue so rich and saturated you’d think it was painted onto the inner arch of whatever arches over and around this tiny planet where we spin.

It’s November. And soon the snow will “come shawling down,” as Dylan Thomas wrote in A Child’s Christmas in Wales, and cover everything as far as the eye can see.

 

*

The new book I’ve written for Hazelden Publishers, Waiting: A Non-Believer’s Higher Power, is finished. Turned in almost exactly on time, now in copyediting, and lurking in that pre-publication world where it goes through whatever mysterious machinations books go through before they hit the shelves. As I’ve told you, it was the singularly weirdest writing experience I’ve ever had. One feels one’s way along through any book, but with this one I felt like I had no earthly idea what I was going to write until it was there, staring back at me from the page. But it came together, like books do, and completed itself, and will come out this spring.

Sane: Mental Illness, Addiction, and the Twelve Steps is on the shelves as well, and I want to thank all of you who’ve written to tell me how the book has affected you. It means the world to me to hear from readers at any time, but hearing that people are able to put into practice some of the ideas Sane suggests is an enormous gift, and I’m awfully grateful to you.

So on November 1, I sat down with my notebook and returned full-force to the novel. Which, of course, immediately morphed all over the place, cut vast swaths of pages from itself, in fact decided it was two novels, put one of itself in a drawer, and left me with what is actually a clear and writeable story. Despite my irritation at its willfulness, I am elated that it has decided to emerge from the murk and tell me what the hell it wants to be. The notes and new pages are piling up, the research is being done, the voices of the characters are making themselves noisy, and I can finally sit down to it every day without wanting to scream and tear out my teeth with a pliers. In fact, I’m having a very good time.

Meanwhile, I’m preparing the class I’ll teach this winter—taking a machete to the reading list I’d like to assign, dithering about which craft point to focus on when, etc, and generally behaving as I always do when I’m about to teach. I. Cannot. Wait.

Poems, as usual, come and go. I have a friend who writes something like a poem a day. I want to hit her with a pan. I take comfort in the fact that Louise Gluck goes on wild sprees of writing periodically, and then stops altogether for periods of time. Surely this is a valid way of doing a thing.

NB: Someone recently read me Jorie Graham’s work. Prior to this, I hadn’t much liked Graham. Upon hearing her read aloud, though, I fell madly in love, and am telling anyone who will listen to read her poems. Sit in a coffee shop and read them aloud. Everyone will think you odd, but you will get to revel in her marvelous way of putting together images and words.

*

It’s now 4:20 a.m. The city is well and truly asleep. The light won’t begin to come up for hours, and even then will come up slow. People will lie in bed, half-waking, burrowing deeper into their blankets, in no mood to throw them off and dash out into the freezing world. And it isn’t even that cold yet. Our blood slowly thickens to take on the falling temperatures. Today it is only 32 degrees. Soon the mercury will drop and drop and drop, and we’ll bustle out the door in heavy coats, 22, 12, 2 degrees, -2, -10…

Winter has barely begun.

Peace,

M

So I’m sitting on the porch of my grandmother’s house (she’s no longer here), looking out at the lake and the rising light, a wash of soft pink and blue across the sky, the thick line of pines on the opposite shore cast purple-gray. And I’m thinking of the time my agent, who I worship and adore, told me that when she’s having a rotten day, she goes to the Museum of Modern Art and sits in the Water Lilies room until she’s all right again. In truth, it had never occurred to me that she might not be all right, at any time or for any reason; she’s very impressive and a little fierce.   So I liked the idea that she would be calmed by Monet. Have you ever seen his Haystacks series? I don’t even know how many there are—many—and they chronicle the seasons and qualities of light as the day and year goes by. I have seen them in New York and Chicago and Minneapolis and St. Louis (I think)—it seems like everywhere I go there is the same haystack in the middle of the same field with the precisely captured changing season and sky. I would like to see them all in one place, and walk down a very long hall watching the light change, and trying to fathom how Monet could possibly get things so right, and wishing I could describe place so perfectly as he does.

I was writing to a painter and poet friend the other day—it makes me a little cross that he can both paint and write, and more than a little envious—about the fact that visual artists are terribly lucky to have such a tactile thing with which to make art. If I knew how to paint or draw or sketch, I think I would take terrific pleasure in being able to actually touch my materials, and in having something that guides my hand and translates what I see to what I say. There are, it seems to me, not nearly enough words with which to do this. Van Gough’s sunflowers make you want to reach out and grab them. They seem to burst from the canvas into the room. Language is less evocative, and it has to invite readers into it, rather than coming to them.

The train’s whistling by. It’s the same train whistle I’ve been listening to for nearly forty years, and the same whistle that the characters in The Center of Winter listen to as they lie awake. I’ve always wanted to know who’s on a train this early. I remember overnight train rides up the west coast, from San Francisco to Portland to see my grandmother when I was very small. And I remember middle-of-the-night treks from Minneapolis to Chicago when I was older and alone and eavesdropping on the old men arguing amicably nearby.

I think writers return and return to places, maybe a little obsessively, in their work. I don’t know why they do. I don’t know why some writers are so deeply immersed in place, and keep trying to describe the place they’re in and bring the reader into it with them and show them what it’s like and make them feel the place for themselves. I’m one of these weirdly place-centric writers. It bothers me when I can’t find myself in a place in my work; it makes me feel like I leave the reader floating in midair, unable to see or sense their surroundings, and it makes me very uneasy. So I keep coming back to places. One of them is obviously northern Minnesota, and I’m not sure why; it just absorbs me and I want to take people here. Though I’m not from here originally, I spent long spells of my childhood here, driving north on Highway 10 through cornfields and fields of sugar beet, to visit relatives who were loud and a little scary but fascinating, the same relatives who morphed into characters in my novel—and now they’re doing it again.

People ask me often if the characters in my fiction are me, or my family, or people I know. The answer is no; they are people who have taken on a life of their own, emerging mostly from names that pop into my head, names or features of people familiar to me, but who walk away from their starting point and take on form and substance totally unknown to me until they write themselves down. It’s an eerie process, and I don’t particularly like it; fiction is awfully amorphous and dictates itself according to its own interior logic. Not knowing how it will go until it goes there is a deeply unsettling process, and very uncertain, and it seems like you’re feeling around in the dark for a thing, and you don’t find it till it’s found.

So now the new novel is doing that, and I wish it wouldn’t. When I stop thinking about it and trying to push it around, it’s actually kind of neat, a discovery process that’s as much like reading someone else’s work as it is like writing your own. This is rarely possible for me; I’m hoping I’ll grow into it, and by the time I’m eighty let my books write themselves as they intend to do anyway. Anyway, the new novel has returned to this place, this very porch, with the seagulls making noise and the whistling train and the Monet light. It doesn’t stay here, of course; it goes right back to the west coast, another place that consumes me and to which my stories gravitate. And its characters are doing what characters do. I began with my grandmother’s name; she then walked off, changed eras, changed selves, became her own thing. This may ...

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Hello all!

It's a most glorious summer day, and the sun through my office window is hitting the room just so, in this way that unfortunately lights up the total catastrophe of my desks and bookshelves, which seem to be piling their own selves with papers and notebooks and books and more papers and tape recorders and coffee cups and folders and reading glasses and various and sundry that I am sure I cannot have set there in such disarray myself. So I have concluded that offices breed paper like closets breed hangers, and in the exact same way, you cannot find the paper you need when you need it, nor can you find a hanger when you want one.

That's my theory for the day.

But the view from here is indeed lovely--the trees are thick and green, my lawn is in need of mowing, and my neighbor's yard is improbably tidy. The lakes are a spectacular blue, and it's strangely all very conducive to work. You'd think I'd be lounging in a hammock if I could. But I like it here, even though I will soon be buried under a pile of paper myself. My friend Pat, many years ago, expressed concern that I was going to become one of those old women whose entire house is a sea of books, and I was going to own seventeen cats, and never dust, and call him when I needed to reach a book on a high shelf (he's very tall) (I am not very tall), and wear only black. Which reminds me of Chekhov's Masha characters (he had several), who were all very bleak and wore only black and spoke in elliptical terms of the pointlessness of it all. I never did like those characters, despite the fact that I am, weirdly, named after one of them. I still cannot fathom what possessed my parents to name me such a thing. When I was a kid, I wanted so badly to be named Nancy.

I have now so completely overbooked myself with work that I have stopped feeling the raging stress I was feeling a few days ago and have slipped into some sort of meditative anti-stress state, sort of like when you drink so much caffeine you come round the other edge of it and get sleepy. It's also possible that the necklace a friend gave me, with the Sanskrit symbol for OHM, is having some kind of magical effect, and I am really quite genuinely peaceful. Go figure.

Meanwhile, the article I am writing has grown horns and a tail and has taken over my life almost entirely. In the remaining three square inches of brain space I have available to me, I'm working on the spirituality book, and am twitching for the article to get itself written so I can properly focus on the spir book and the novel. And Sane: Mental Illness, Addiction, and the Twelve Steps comes out next month! There will be a proper link to information on Sane as soon as our infamous webmaster gets a moment to make one.

Perhaps I failed to mention--I thought the spirituality book was due in February. No indeed! It is due in October. So I will not be coming out of my office until that time. I really am going to be buried in paper pretty soon.

And on other marvelous fronts! Turns out I will be teaching a graduate seminar in nonfiction at Northwestern University in Winter Quarter, 2011. That means a staggering amount of prep work this fall, which sounds positively delicious. I can't wait to be teaching again, and it will give me a solid quarter to work on the novel uninterrupted by my own dithering.

As for poetry: I have had time to work on it precisely not at all. This means I'm getting that achy feeling in my head that I have when poems are dying to come out. I even dreamed poems the other night, and to my fury I had forgotten them when I woke up.

Put it on your calendars: in 2011, I'll be one of the speakers at the Women Healing Conference, put on by Hazelden in four cities over the course of the year. It's a two-day conference for women in addiction recovery and the recovery professions. Minneapolis, Chicago, Tampa, and Portland, OR. This will be an incredible event--when I know who the other speakers are, I'll post right away.

And with that, I must get back to the fearsome article. By the time I post next month, Sane will be out--pass the word, if you would. I'm forever grateful to all of you for all your letters, your well-wishes, and your remarkable support. I hope all are happy, healthy, and doing what they love.

Be well,
Marya









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Hello all!

Apologies for the long silence--I don't quite know what happened to the last month or so--I've been on the road for most of it, and maybe a little spring-addled as well. Minneapolis was a profusion of tulips and lilacs, bursting with people who emerge pale and stir-crazy from their houses into the cool spring rains and sunshine to walk around the lakes and take in the rippling waters that just a little bit ago were a thick crust of ice. Denver was chilly but sunny, and the streets of downtown were crowded with people who looked like they had somewhere very important to be. Chicago was warm and green and I sat on the balcony of my exceedingly weird hotel looking out over the blooming trees. Columbus was rain and more rain, so the tulips were surreally bright in the gray haze. Portland, of course, poured, except for one glorious day, when the magnolia trees were heavy with blooms and I happened to be at a wedding lit up by 9,000 daffodils and my cousin, the glowing bride. The South Dakota fields were rich black and just starting to sprout tiny growing things.

But by last week, I was travel-weary and tired of airports and staying in a tiny town in a little motel on Highway 65, leaning my head on the window and watching the May rain and wondering if it would ever be summer after all, and if I would ever get home.

In fact, I did, and here I sit with snoozing dogs, and I actually unpacked the suitcases out of which I've been living for months, and now I have itchy feet, a phenomenon that strikes me whenever I've been traveling a long time. I get so used to being away that I start thinking of more places to go, and when summertime rushes in for real, as it did this week, I start plotting all the road trips I want to take and all the road trips I've ever taken in summer, criss-crossing the country and getting a sunburn on my left (driver's side) arm. So today I want to go to the desert, the coast of Maine, British Columbia, the north woods, and Savannah, Georgia. But I think in fact I will stay here in my pajamas and write a book instead.

The books go well. Sane comes out next month--spread the word, my friends--and I'm now well into the book on spirituality, which, frankly, is harder than it looked at first glance. It's not as if the subject is a little amorphous or anything, right? But I'm chipping away at it, and it's starting to look, act, and quack like a book, so I figure that's a good sign. I've been doing a good bit of research for the second half of the novel, which covers 1961-1971, and I keep being floored by how much there is to know and how strange a time it actually was. Capturing what I can of it in the novel is a challenge, and an exciting one, and, like most exciting challenges, sends me into fits of worry that I don't know what I'm doing and will never uncover this book after all. On my better days, I know I will. Writing a novel is a hell of a thing.

Chris Pureka--as you know, I'm totally fixated on her--has an excellent new album out. Give it a listen.

Someone asked on the discussion board what it was like to write Wasted. In a word, it was awful. For one thing, I had never written a book before, so I had no idea what I was doing. For another, it was very very very hard to put all that information about my deep dark stuff out there in public. It was not therapeutic. It was not cathartic. It was awful. But I'm glad I did it. Like any author, there are things I would change about all the books I've written, which sadly is not an option once they're out. But I think Wasted has been useful to people, and I'm very, very glad of that.

Lots of mail lately on Madness. Here's the thing: I am absolutely, constantly blown away by the strength of people to get through difficult, painful, confusing times in their lives, and to withstand illnesses and struggles that seem almost impossible to overcome. And you people who write to me tell me every day that you are overcoming these struggles, and are doing it with your sense of humor and a deep humanity intact. And you inspire me more than I can say.

And now it's time to go puddle about the Walker Art Center--come to Mpls and see it sometime--to get my brain stirred up and churning again. My very warmest wishes for a happy end-of-spring to all of you, and, as ever, you're on my mind.

Be well,
marya






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Hello all!

Well, it's a gray day with a soft misty rain coming down. I had my doubts about spring this year. I was pretty well sure it wasn't coming. And I was almost certain my tulips wouldn't come up. But here they come, along with the iris, and some other blooming-type stuff I don't know the name of--just their leaves so far, but every day when I come out my front door they're a little higher, scatterings of them all through the garden, not counting the one tulip shoot that seems to have escaped the garden and is coming up in the lawn. Whatever. Spring's sprung.

This week is the AWP Writer's Conference in Denver--I expect some of you will be there for the festivities?--and I'm looking forward to it. My panel should be a blast--it's on the use of humor in writing about illness--headed up by Dr. Sandi Wisenberg of Northwestern University. Plus I get to stay in a hotel. I am such a fan of hotels. Here's hoping for a proper coffee maker in the room. And then, as many of you know, the DBSA 2010 conference is coming up at the end of the month. Here's hoping I come up with something intelligible to say. (I promise I will. Really.)

Many thanks to all who wrote with good birthday wishes! I'm a whopping thirty-six. Who saw that coming? Not I, my friends. I'm a little alarmed. I made a really silly crack the other day about how I never, in my worst eating disordered days, thought I'd wind up worrying instead about wrinkles. But lo! It has come to pass, and good Lord but I'm glad to be here.

Work muddles on apace. Spirituality book coming along, the novel in spurts and starts, a couple of new poems this month, and my column for a local magazine, all lots of fun and challenging enough to have me tearing my hair as usual. The release of Sane in June is creeping up quickly--will keep you posted on media and suchlike.

The passing of winter and my semi-alarming birthday have me thinking about the way time flurries by, and I'm doing all I can to be very still and aware and attentive to each day. There are so many beautiful days. There are days that are hard as hell, I'll grant you. A dear friend of mine recently passed away, and that was a heartbroken day if there ever was one. But he'd have us all out and about in the spring rain, celebrating April and tulips that escape their bounds and come springing up in the middle of the lawn. So I'll follow his lead and sing praises to whatever's listening.

Here's a passage from Rilke that's been on my mind lately.

Tell us, Poet, what it is you do? —I praise.
But the deadly and the monstrous,
How do you bear them, how do you accept them? —I praise.
But the nameless, the anonymous,
How do you, Poet, call upon it? —I praise.
What gives you the right to be true,
In every disguise and beneath every mask? —I praise.
And how is it that both calm and violent things,
Like star and storm, know you so well? —I praise.

And I'll leave you with that on this rainy spring day.

Peace,
Marya

Hello all!

The world is damp with mist and melting snow. Every time I come up my front steps, I peer into my garden to see if there's anything coming up through the snow piles, but no luck yet--though I hear tell, from people who keep porch gardens, that the chamomile and leeks are making an appearance. In the windows of the Grand Cafe yesterday morning, great huge bunches of crocuses and daffodils caught the sunlight and lit the whole place in pastels. And today's that kind of foggy day that makes me want to curl up with the dachshunds and read a book--The Lacuna (Barbara Kingsolver) and The House of Tomorrow (by local Peter Bognanni) both come highly recommended, and if I was in the business of recommending how I spend my own day, I would recommend a long, long read.

But it just isn't that sort of day. I've got a column to write, and a chapter to begin in the new Hazelden book, and a lecture to prepare--this may not all happen today, I suppose, but a girl can dream.

Life this past month was most sluggish and slow. I had a case of the Februaries. You're familiar with these, I suspect? And I spent the better part of the month feeling like I was beating my head on my desk as if that might knock some useful thoughts out my ears. No luck, though. I think I got a thing or two done--well, I know I did, because there are things on my desk that weren't there before--but it was not one of those months where I go sailing peacefully through words. Words defied me entirely. Also, I spent the better portion of the month in a pair of ratty sweatpants. Hence, last night, when I had to go to an Oscars Party (??), getting into some fancy getup felt like putting on someone else's shoes. But I did it. And my friends, the party was a terrific bore. It occurred to me too late that I do not really like the Oscars, and a friend had reminded me the day before that I had no idea what was up for a single award. True fact. I had no business being there, so I went traipsing home to bed & a book.

On a completely different note, I had the amazing opportunity to give a talk at a women's prison a few weeks ago. It was incredible. The women had boatloads of questions and comments on everything from racial imbalance in access to treatment, to whether meds were really necessary for mental illness, to which character I most identified with in Center of Winter--they were smart, funny, and beyond inspiring. I may get the wonderful chance to be helping out with a book club there soon, and if I do get to, I will count myself beyond lucky.

Those of you who have interest--are you registered for the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance (DBSA) national convention this year? If not, get to it! I want to meet you! And you'll get the chance to hear Kay Redfield Jameson as well--do not miss!

Other upcomings: For Indiana residents, I'll be speaking at the NAMI Indiana state conference this fall (October 9). And for Canada folks--or folks who want to GO to Canada--I'll be speaking in Calgary on October 6, at the Organization for Bipolar and Affective Disorders. Also speaking at that event will be Andy Behrman, author of Electroboy. All of these should be great events.

Mist is clinging to my window screen, and I hold out hope that soon the rains will come and wash this snow away in one great whoosh. March is finally here, the Februaries have lifted, and though it's gray and dreary out, I'm almost certain my garden is under those snow piles, stirring and unfolding and getting ready to burst through. Happy almost-spring to all of you!

Be well,
Marya






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Hey everyone,

I'm noticing the discussion board is pretty dead these days, and people are saying they wish it would perk up. A couple of things:

This board is your board. You can use it as you see fit. I know that it goes through periods where people are posting frequently and offering each other a lot of support, and I think that's fantastic. So--if you want to make that happen again, it's up to you to start those conversations  again.

People sometimes complain that I'm not on there very often, and that's true. I also only blog once a month or so. I have to gently remind folks that this is really just an author site, and I'm just an author. I'm not a mental health professional of any kind. Many of the conversations that get going on the board are looking for advice that I'm not in a position to give.

And guys, I'm really busy with my current work. I can't stay focused on the subjects raised in Wasted and Madness forever; I have to keep going with my writing.

What I can offer is simply to do my best to keep up with the mail I get from my wonderful readers. If you do want to get in touch with me, please email, and I'll get back to you as fast as I can.

As for the board--if you do want to keep using it for support and conversation, and I think that's great, then by all means start some new discussions.

Be well,
Marya
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For those of you who have read Wasted, here's an opportunity to participate in an interesting survey being done on why people read eating disorder memoirs:

camsocialscience.qualtrics.com//SE?SID=SV_77pUhoMzXem3n5W&SVID=Prod

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Hello!

At any given time, the dozens? hundreds? of coffee shops in my part of the world are packed with people who sit huddled over laptops and notebooks and books and coffee, or having hushed and apparently very important conversations involving much gesturing, and I take my place among them and mostly eavesdrop and spy. No, I don't really. But the people-watching here is really particularly good, and on this snowy February day it almost seems like a person could make it through the long last months of winter simply by hiding in a coffee shop and letting the waves of chatter and laughter carry one directly over February and March and straight into April, when the tulips bloom.

Today, the coffee shop finds me alternately working on and despairing over the book on spirituality. My agent once informed me that I actually hate writing. She is not entirely wrong. As Mark Twain said, "I do not like to write. I like to have written." And so today, when I'm still at the confuddled point of the process where I'm figuring out such scintillating tidbits as structure and thesis and through line, I think it's entirely reasonable to alternate between working and despair. The only fun part of writing is when you stop thinking about the fact that you're writing, and just bloody write. But I am not the only writer I know who spends an insufferable amount of time trying to figure out what I'm doing rather than simply doing it. So to I am mostly refilling my coffee cup, chewing my pen, scribbling things which make sense until I re-read them, and putting my head on the table in hopes of a quick nap.

A friend of mine told me the other day she sometimes dreams whole poems. I was very jealous. Sometimes I dream I have figured out some particularly knotted-up part of a piece or a plot or whatever, and wake up much relieved, and then find I have not figured it out after all, and am very cross. I want to dream whole poems. In fact, right now I'm wishing I could dream whole books, and avoid this writing business altogether.

Apropos of nothing--anybody know the band Semisonic? Marvelous band, and their lead singer, Dan Wilson, lives around here and frequents this coffee shop and always looks very cheerful and disheveled.

February is a very, very, very long month in the north. That it is only February 2 is somewhat discouraging. But--as I have said in previous blogs--I am on a mission to live each day fully, rather than trying to rush past it into the next and the next and the next, and therefore this February 2 will do just fine, regardless of the wretched slush. This year is off to a pretty wonderful start. I have a new magazine column that's lots of fun, a long theater piece came out last month, the spirituality book goes well, and I'm noodling my way through the novel. Poetry continues apace, going well, I think, but one can never tell, and it might all be perfectly awful. In any case, a few new pieces coming out in journals soon. Reading A.S. Byatt's fantastic new tome The Children's Book, which will take me the next seven years or so, and Jim Harrison's The Farmer's Daughter. Harrison is one of the midwesterny sorts of fellows, and his writing is so precise and spare and gloriously imagistic it just comes alive as you read. Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road was highly silly and a jolly read.

A few notes of interest: I'll be doing one of the keynotes at the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance's annual conference, which will be held April 30-May 2 just outside of Chicago. Also speaking will be the fantastic Kay Redfield Jameson, author of many books, including An Unquiet Mind. For more information, go to www.dbsalliance.org. It would be great to see you there. (Also, there will be a podcast interview with me online sometime in late February--go to the website to check the date.)

Also--for Wasted readers, please see the next blog entry for an opportunity to participate in a really interesting survey about why and how people read memoirs on eating disorders.

And now it's back to work with me. Thanks so much to all for all the mail recently--I'm scrambling to get back to you as fast as I can!

Here's to a happy February for you all!

Peace,
Marya

Greetings to all!

From where I sit, the world's all white--white snow ground, white sky, white plumes of smoke from the chimneys on the white rooftops. It's really quite Norman Rockwell, or maybe more Robert Frost--it's lovely in any case, and a good day to catch up on this badly-belated, and sadly brief, blog.

The winter rushed in here all of a sudden one day a few weeks ago, almost overnight, and now it's teeth-chatteringly cold and very beautiful. Everyone ran inside and curled up in a blanket, or at least wished they could. I've been doing as much of that as I can, and since I'm in the research process for two new books, I can do it a fair amount--it's possible to research wrapped in a blanket, as long as one doesn't take a small nap--which is lucky indeed.

Can't quite believe a new year is upon us. Something about the year itself--2010--has me thinking a decade back, to the turn of the century (!) and how much has changed since then, in both the world at large and in my tiny life and heart and mind. We are such transformative creatures, no? We morph and change so profoundly over time, and while that's a little unsettling at times, it is also how we become--I think--who we're supposed to be. In any case, the year's end finds me thoughtful, grateful, glad at what the year just past has both brought and taken with it, and looking hugely forward to what is coming down the road this year about to begin.

Am reading New American Poets, Poets of the New Century, and God in All Worlds: An Anthology of Contemporary Spiritual Writing, the last of which is massive and printed in infinitesimal type but is quite wonderful nevertheless. All three of these collections are so packed with good material I frankly don't want to do anything but read them, and will be very bereft when they're done.

The research goes well, and on other fronts, I've just finished the first of two books for Hazelden Publishers. Sane: Mental Illness, Addiction, and the Twelve Steps will be released in May. Many of you have written to talk to me about your own stories of addiction and mental health, and I hope you'll enjoy this new book. It's very much a guide through the Twelve Steps--isn't a memoir, and isn't intended to tell a story--it's intended as a companion to recovery from addiction. Those of you who know people who might be interested in the subject, please spread the word. I'm very grateful to all of you for all the support you give!

Many thanks, also, for the flurry of letters--I so appreciate all of you who take the time to write and let me know bits of your stories and your thoughts. I know it takes me a while to get back to you, but I'll keep at it.

My warmest wishes to you in this season of dormancy and renewing. Happy New Year!

Peace,
Marya
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Greetings from the north!

A most satisfactory feeling, when you kick out a draft of a new poem. A prose poem, this time--I'm a bit addicted to the form--have you read Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (ed. David Lehman)? I just encountered it this weekend, and there's stuff in there like you wouldn't believe. Topping the list are the Mark Strand entries, one of which is a sestina. Ever tried a sestina? Beastly hard, those, and I don't think I could write one if my life depended on it,  but I intend to try soon.

The yellow leaves are nearly glowing in the gray day. I drove through South Dakota yesterday, endless cornfields in every direction, and the sparse stands of trees along the road were mostly bare. It stays dark late these late-fall mornings, and it will be winter soon. I'm working on the spirituality book, a good thing for the long winter ahead. Articulating a subject like this is most confounding, but the effort sharpens the brain.

Note: if you have not heard singer/songwriter Chris Pureka, give her a listen. I'm completely consumed by her two albums. They are perfect driving music, and her voice is a smokey drawly lovely thing.

I'm looking forward to seeing those of you who will attend the New Paltz, NY lecture on the 4th and the Skaneateles, NY reading on the 5th. This fall has been a mad dash of lectures, and it's delightful to get a chance to meet readers. As many of you are quite aware, writing is a pretty solitary business, and being out in the world is essential from time to time. I am always having a debate with a poet friend of mind about whether the generative, creative energy one feels and uses to work finds its source in the self or in relationship with others; I'm of the latter bent, and find the people around me to be a constant wellspring of new ways of seeing and being in the world. So a chance to interact with people at lectures and readings is a chance to wake up and see new things, and I'm looking forward to New York.

The year is winding down, and it's been quite something. It seems essential to me that I keep time from passing too quickly. I can't speak for anyone, really, but it seems to me we spend an awful lot of time letting time whip past without really living. Too much effort spent on getting somewhere and not enough on being in a place or a day or a moment. So I am on a mission to spend the next year savoring. There is so much to savor, so much to love about being alive. As I write this spirituality book, I'm casting about for words that describe the sense of awe we tend to forget we have. But there are no words, I think, and I'll just have to mumble and sing.

Have a lovely end of autumn and beginning of winter!
Peace,
Marya






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Hello, all!

Up at the lake, out on the porch, noodling around with the last chapter of a book...a fine Sunday in September, with big white billowing clouds that seem to hold totally still in the sky. The leaves are just beginning to scatter on the still-green lawn, and the wax begonias (red and pink and white) are starting to drop their petals -- I read this line a few hours ago: "When I bent to touch one, the cool, heavy petals fell to the ground like swooning birds." (Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World--loaned to me by my father, insatiable reader of good books and adviser in same, as well as all other things.) Also in this book (which I was reading as the sun came up through a thick, rose-colored, motionless mist over the lake): "According to the Talmud, every blade of grass has its own angel bending over it, whispering, 'Grow, grow.'"

Summer seems to be laying its head on the pillow, sighing, and slowly drifting off to sleep. (Which reminds me of the line "All endings seem to whisper, then lie down" -- the source of which of course I have forgotten, and now it will drive me nuts.) Fall--my favorite season--is almost here, and will whip through this corner of the world, gloriously arrayed in red and orange and gold, before it is ushered out in a rush one day by winter wind. The days are getting shorter. I wake early (has anyone read Mary Oliver's collection Why I Wake Early ? I wish I had it on hand--I would tell you what reason she gives), and sit for hours in a lingering night. It's when I write. Well, I write all day, in fits and starts, but those long dark morning hours are when the words seem to be most easily found.

There are writers, I've read of them, who say they write only two hours a day, or three or so, and that's that. Then they read, or walk, or write letters. I have decided these things--reading, walking, and the writing of letters--are possibly the things most nourishing to actually writing poetry or plays or prose. When people ask me how to learn to write, I tell them to read. Now I will add that they should walk, and write letters as well. Has anyone ever walked a labyrinth? I hear it's extremely peaceful. In truth, I suspect I would be just as happy walking down a street in Manhattan; I find it very meditative. Point being: motion seems to still the mind, and when the mind is still, maybe it's possible to reach a little deeper in it, and find language that's fresher and newer and more precise. But that's just a theory. And writing letters is an art that's much overlooked these days. I have complained of this here before. The epistolary form is dying out. We shouldn't let it--historically, it's our best record of intellects at work and love affairs in process and the spirit in its search. Journals and diaries aren't half as telling, I don't think. Because when we write for someone else, we work harder to express and to connect. God knows I hope my journals are burned en masse when I die--they're a wretched bore.

These days I'm buried in two sorts of books: those on spiritual matters, and collections of poetry by women. The former I am reading in preparation to write the second book of two for Hazelden Publishers, which is on spirituality for the non-believer. If anyone has suggestions for books or essays or poems that might be good food for thought on this subject, please bombard me. The latter I am reading because I have a new idea, which I will discuss when it's more than a fairly nascent inarticulate notion in my head. But between these two bodies of literature, I feel like I could do nothing but read all the time, and life would be complete. (Perhaps I would also write letters, and walk.) I wrote a friend asking for names of women poets; she obliged me with an astonishingly long list, in alphabetical order, no less, and I am reminded of how little I know, and how delightfully much there is still to read. Those of you who read poetry--who are your favorite women poets? What do they do for you, why do you read them, what makes their work work? More on all this to come.

This always happens in fall--I'm itching to travel. I mentioned upcoming locations in my last blog (Boston, Columbus, Florida, New Paltz, NY), but what I really want to do is get in my car and head out to the South Dakota Badlands. The sky there is like nothing you've ever seen. Instead, I'll hotel-hop my way from here until Thanksgiving, and then finally will get to work on the novel for a nice long spell of uninterrupted time. And then snow and more snow...

Many of you are back to school now--read much and write well--and for those of you who've long since left school behind, I say the same thing: read much, write well. And, to all, much peace on this end-of-summer day.

m


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My lord, I can't believe it's a month and a half gone by since I last posted. As usual, summer seems to be sailing past me while I scramble to keep up. The days have passed so quickly I'm not even sure what's happened--the only thing I'm quite clear on is that the Minnesota Fringe Festival just wrapped up on Sunday night. I spent ten days racing around town with all the other theater fanatics, going from show to show to show, trying to drink it all in and becoming entirely theater-glutted and dizzy with the quantity of ideas, images, good shows and bad shows, conversations, debates, and all the attendant Fringe matter. It was a fine time. I was blogging daily on www.MinnesotaPlaylist.com, and if you're interested in some mutterings on theater, art, and things related, you can read my blog there. In any case, as always happens after a long spell of ridiculously intense focus on/immersion in a single thing, I've emerged a little disoriented. I was so saturated in theater (seeing it, talking about it, writing about it, thinking about it) that I forgot what regular life was like. But here it is, being its usual regular self, and I'm back to work on my usual regular things.

I also can't believe summer's coming to an end. August is stormy and richly green in the north, and the rain has my garden gloating in its fullness. But soonish the trees will start shaking out their hair and strewing leaves all over the streets, and fall will arrive. I'm not quite ready yet. The last of summer and all of fall hold a whole lot of work for me. I'm wrapping up the first of the Hazelden books, writing and giving a passel of lectures, then returning to work on the novel and the poems. Fall and winter are good work spells around here--you sort of hunker down as the weather turns cold, put on a sweater, and focus your attention a little more effectively. I'm looking forward to it. And I'm looking forward to the smell of woodsmoke and apple orchards and to long drives to see the leaves, and to the first snows...but good grief, not quite yet.

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Events upcoming...

Boston residents: I'm lucky enough to be giving the keynote at a fundraising dinner on September 22 for a wonderful organization called On the Rise (www.ontherise.org), which provides support to homeless women and women in crisis. I'm thrilled to be a part of this event, and if you live in those parts, I encourage you to get involved with this organization. They do remarkable work, and they could use your support.

Columbus, Ohio residents: The next day, I'm giving a talk at a fundraiser for an amazing new project called Melissa's House (www.melissasouse.org). Melissa's House is in the development stage of creating a facility for adults with severe and persistent mental illness--but not your ordinary facility. This will be a home-like setting that will foster independence and relationship-building. Read Melissa's Story on their website, and see if there's a way you can get involved.

New York residents: If you feel like a road trip, I'll be speaking on the topic of eating disorders at SUNY-New Paltz on November 4. I get an awful lot of mail from those parts asking me if I've got anything scheduled nearby--now I do. I'll also be reading at an independent bookstore in Skanekteles, NY the next evening. Details to follow.

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Hello all!

The end of June here is always a sea of green. My office is up in the treetops (it is not, however, a treehouse, though I would like that), and there trees are heavy with leaves in all directions. It's a bit of a challenge to work, when what I want to do is laze about on the porch and listen to the birds all summer long and read books and do nothing whatsoever else. Books! I just finished Best American Poetry 2008 (I know, I'm a little behind), and LOVED IT. There is some absolutely divine stuff in there this year, which is a great comfort, because I absolutely hated last year's volume. Also reading Louise Erdrich's newest book, A Plague of Doves, which is positively delicious. If I could, I'd do nothing but read it all day long. I have become deeply lazy of late, and it's helping nothing at all. But so it goes.

Work goes on at a bit of a mad pace, laziness or not. I'm trying to wrap a finished draft of the 1st 100 pages of the new novel by August 1, and am having periodic annoying crises of faith about the thing, which are most interruptive and unhelpful and aggravating. I keep muttering E.L. Doctorow's very comforting quote: "Writing is like driving through the fog at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." I can seriously only see as far as the headlights on this thing, but am hoping to hell I'm actually making the trip. Also at work on the first of the two books I'm writing for Hazelden, which is great fun. And I am being harassed by four poems. It's good there's four of them, at least; this way, when one bothers me too severely I can switch over to the next, and in this fashion I intend to finish them all. At this point, it's beginning to look like an actual manuscript of poetry is taking shape. Lordy, it's only taken me fifteen years. Good grief.

Up next: I'm covering the Minnesota Fringe Festival. Do you have Fringe Festivals where you are? I know there's a great one in New York, and another fabulous one in Scotland--where else? The Fringe is a madcap 10 days of new theater that run from 10 a.m. to midnight, one after another, all over the city. The serious Fringe goers take their vacation that week, and spend all their time zipping from one show to the next, trying to hit some five shows a day, which is a major undertaking, and a little hard on the brain, but extremely fun all around. So this year I'll be one of them, and will be posting blogs on the whole experience as I go. I cannot WAIT. Some years ago, the Jfeffrey and I hosted an insane Fringe party on closing night. I think we managed to pack about 250 people into every room of our house, the yard, the deck, and the lawn, and we're thinking of doing it again, because we are crazy.

Lately I'm thinking a lot about memory. It keeps appearing as a theme in my poems, and on this windy warm morning I'm thinking about those luscious summer days I spent as a kid by the lake at my grandmother's house. Living in a bathing suit and covered head to toe in sand and falling into dead-sleep naps in the afternoon while the curtains lifted and fell on the breeze. Lying on my belly on the living room floor, reading book after book that I'd lugged home from the public library. Those were summers I fell in love with Joan Didion and C.S. Lewis--a curious pair--and wound up with a face-print of the green and blue shag rug on my cheek. Summer was a much slower time back then--it seemed to go completely still, while the heat grew oppressive and time didn't maybe pass at all. Nowadays, I'm sharply aware of how quickly summer passes in these parts--a month already gone, and me still racing to keep up with the work I need to get done. Every summer I swear I'll take next summer off, and maybe some summer I will, and then I'll go up to my grandmother's house and lie face-down on the floor and read Joan Didion all over again.

So here's hoping some of you at least can let time slow down these summer days, and savor each one. Keep body and soul and mind healthy, all of you, and write and write and write some more...

Peace,
Marya
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And it is finally here! Happy June 1, and happy summer to all. The lilacs, which bloom for about ten minutes in May, bloomed wildly all over the city--the city was sort of drunk on the purple-sweet smell of them--have wrapped up their show, and now it is green and more green everywhere. I swear the trees in these parts have more leaves, and arch over the streets to create a semi-tropical canopy through which sunlight makes its way and dapples the tables at the sidewalk cafes. Which is where I can mostly be found, trying to organize my wits into working order. They work well enough, my wits, but summer seems like the sort of time one ought to do like the sensible citizens of Minneapolis do, and grab a blanket and a book and sprawl out on the grass by the lakes. But I persevere, and work proceeds. I'm about halfway through the draft of the first book I'm writing for Hazelden Publishers, and I'm pleased with the progress. I'm sailing along on the novel, and find myself immersed in World War II and the lives of my characters during those years--I dream about them, for heaven's sakes, and wake up and scribble out whatever sense can be made of the dreams. I have a couple of new poems in the works--I work on poetry slowly, and have only two new ones to show for May, and I'm much looking forward to the time when I can focus more attention on them and see what there is to see. I am always bowled over by my madly productive poet friend Amanda, who is crabby if she doesn't kick out four new drafts a week -- a week! -- and I sigh and accept my plodding rate of poetic production. Meanwhile, I'm stewing up an idea for a new book. But no reports on that till it's properly stewed. Will report soon enough.

As for the issue of orchids: As previously reported, the winter orchid died, and I was most unthrilled. However, I got a new phaleonopsis, bright pink and full of blooms, for my birthday. This time I put it in the dining room, which gets only green filtered  light, as the windows are thickly covered with ivy--it's warm enough in there but not too warm, and dark enough but not too dark, and the orchid seems to be happy as can be. Dammit, I WILL grow orchids!

I forgot to thank everyone for their kind birthday wishes in April! So I thank you now, very much. The original plan was that, because I was feeling terribly sober and mature upon turning 35, I was going to stop dying my hair and let it all go gray. The Jeffrey bet me I wouldn't last a year. I fact, I lasted a month. It is now, once again, brown, rather than frizzily brown-and-gray. I will try again next year. These are important matters, I know. I have to say, it's sort of hilarious to me that--for those of you who've read Wasted--after all those years uselessly and insanely worrying about my weight, I failed to realize that eventually I would start worrying about looking old. And in truth, my friends, it is a much more entertaining thing to worry about! Besides, I sort of like the process. My laugh lines are proof positive that I laugh all the time. Screw Botox.

Meanwhile, now that summer has come rushing into the city, everyone goes meandering around the lakes all day long. If you want to see your friends, you have to walk around a lake with them. Today I am walking with Megan. Megan has a fine dog named Happy. Happy is a Javanese--white, fluffy, cheerful. And Happy will not under any circumstances be walked. She will run wildly around her great big yard, sure, but when Megan tries to walk her, Happy sits down and will not be moved for treats nor love nor money. So Megan bought her a stroller. Now we stroll Happy around the lake. People stare. We don't mind. The dog enjoys herself, so who cares?

So, I've got the next three months of walks around the lakes, trips up north, long bike rides, and grilled things (I do not, myself, grill; The Jeffrey grills) in which to kick out a couple of big projects. Here's hoping I can pull it off.

For those of you who are poetry and short fiction fans, I've got a couple of pieces up this month on the really neat new online journal Slush Pile (find it at SlushPileMag.com). Hope you enjoy!

Peace, and happy June,
M

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Spring has taken its bloody time getting here--and now the leaves are nudging their way out of the branches with interminable slowness--but they're making headway, and soon the lilac tree in front of the house will bloom. There's very little to report, as I'm mostly addled with the sunshine, as are most Minnesotans this time of year. I've been hard at work on the novel, and am taking a break today to work on an essay for MinnesotaPlaylist.com, an excellent theater site where I am lucky enough to publish a piece now and then. A few new pieces out here and there lately and upcoming--when they go online, I'll post their whereabouts.

Life lately has been simple and slow. I feel a little like a caterpillar trying to kick and punch its way out of a cocoon. Winter can have that effect, and when it finally breaks it's a little disorienting. There's a huge amount of work to be done over the summer, and long bike rides to take, and some hikes planned, and many walks around the lakes, but most of all just sitting back and drinking in the long sunlit days.

I hope spring has arrived with its usual aplomb wherever you are, and I'll write a proper blog soon.

Note to Minnesota readers: I'm reading on May 14, 7pm, Barnes & Noble, Galleria, Edina. Can't wait to see you there!

So at this point I've pretty much moved into a coffee shop. A couple of them, actually. I rotate. And so, it seems, does the entire populace of Minneapolis. We've all crawled out from under winter, pale and blinking, and are crowding into the coffee shops for warmth. Today the sky spat down what's euphemistically called a "wintery mix." This means it's "raining slush." Everyone looks a little cross. Meanwhile, up in Fargo, the Red River--which, incidentally, runs south to north, for whatever reason--has risen way over its banks and is flooding the town, while thousands of volunteers stay up 24-7 sandbagging and building levees to try to prevent any further damage. It's a nightmare up there, by all reports. Thus, I am thankful all we've got down here is a "wintery mix."

Oof. I'm wiped out. It's been a mad, mad couple of work weeks, and at this point pretty much all that's left in my head is static. I wrapped up a major section of the novel, and that's now in editing; wrote and edited a piece for the Boston Globe, which runs next Sunday (April 5) in the Ideas Section; worked on a couple of chapters of another book I've got underway; gave three lectures; and so what happens, when I'm working like this, is that I start dreaming I'm writing. I go to sleep, and keep right on working. Sometimes (rarely) this results in actual work getting done in my sleep--I wake up, and there it is, some new thing. But most of the time, it's just a frantic dream scribbling. So frustrating. If I could sort out how to actually write in my sleep, I'd be thrilled. But I'm taking a real live vacation soon: a week from now, I'll be in New York with the infamous Lora, banging around town, haunting yet more coffee shops and probably talking too loud. I can't wait.

Oh! Madness comes out in paperback tomorrow. Officially. The cover is wonderful. Go check it out in stores or online, and spread the word!

Yesterday a friend of mine sent me two sonnets, unrhymed, and it's got me thinking about sonnets. Do you guys ever write or read the very formal stuff? I have a certain fondness for it. If I wasn't at a coffee shop right now, I'd post a favorite sonnet. But I am at said coffee shop, so I'm leaving it to you: what's your favorite sonnet, or other formal poem? Go to!

The other thing on my mind is community. How essential it is to our health and wellness, and how when we lack it we lack something big in our lives. What do you guys do for community? Who are your people? How do you keep yourself well in this way?

And with that, I've got to get back to a chapter. Thanks to all for the many wonderful letters recently--you guys warm my heart more than you know. I'm grateful to all of you.

Be well!
Marya
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A sunny gorgeous warm weekend, coffee shops filled with blinding rays through the windows and squinting disheveled people over their newspapers and coffee and bagel and chattering in pairs or groups--the springness of it having gotten into everyone--and then this morning, 5 a.m., i set out for yoga sock-less and my windshield was covered with frost. I was most cross. Yoga did much to improve my mood, and now it's at least not fifteen degrees below zero. Just gray. Blech. The minute I got home from Florida, I wanted to turn around and get back on the plane and return until Minnesota properly agrees to be spring. My friend in Berkeley, California claims her grape hyacinths are blooming. I am dying of jealousy. I would grow them myself if I did not notoriously kill plants. I wish I were a gardener. But I seriously am not. Anyway, anyway...

I'm cheerfully drowning in work. Good work makes one feel a little better about the drowning than unpleasant work, and all this is good. I'm working away on the novel--getting close to enough pages to present it to my agent--and just had an editorial meeting with the infamous Megan to work on edits yesterday afternoon (back when it was spring). Megan is setting out on a new painting project, to my delight. Excited about that. And am plunking away on the first chapter of the first book of two I'm writing for Hazelden Books. That's a project close to my heart, and it's good to be working on it. Wrapped up that legal article, which was absurdly fun--will post when it comes out in June--and just did a little article for another magazine on Mother's Day--the assignment was "give us 700 words on your relationship with your mother"--ha! YOU try fitting that particular relationship into 700 words! But I managed something, and will post that in May. And up this week is a piece I'll be doing for the Boston Globe. That one will be a long process of working back and forth with the editor to shape it into the kind of thing that's right for the section (the Ideas Section, if you're familiar with it), and I'm greatly looking forward to that. So--with the above various projects underway--I'm teetering on the edge of not-quite-stressed-yet-but-almost, and will be heading out to the Oregon coast in April to wrap up several in one fell swoop. Can't wait to be out in the Pacific Northwest, with the misty walks on the beach. Something to be said for spells of solitude with work. They make the return to one's wonderful crowd all the more delightful. And I do have such a delightful crowd.

Interestingly, am giving a talk tonight on mental illness and spirituality. Might make for an interesting thread on the discussion board. Anyone want to take it up?

Neat news--long shots both, but I'm a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award and the Bush Foundation Award. Will find out in April. ot holding my breath, but tickled enough just to be a finalist. Feels pretty darn good.

So I'm off to work on the Globe article. Will keep you posted on the progression of all of the above. And will let you know if the one bird who sings in the bare-branched tree outside my window is joined by either other birds or, let us hope, some leaves.

Peace,
m
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Oh, ok. It's not that lazy. But it is a Florida day. We're borrowing someone's lovely house, and have escaped the positively wretched Minnesota-ness of Minnesota in February, and instead are gazing out at the blue-green Gulf and listening to the breeze through the palm trees. And ogling the boats that come and go in the marina. Jeff is hatching plots to sail the world. As for me, I'm content to amble around in my flipflops and drift in the pool every twenty minutes. You people who live in southern climates have a good thing going, let me tell you.

Like I said, not so lazy, just lovely--work has followed me here, like it does when you work for yourself. Wherever you go, there it is. Much afoot with work these days. I'm whaling away on the novel, for starters, and that's moving forward by leaps and bounds. I just got a two-book deal with Hazelden Books for a couple of recovery-related books that I'm excited about, and I'm getting to work on the first of those. I'll be teaching at the University of St. Thomas, in St. Paul, MN, this fall, and I just can't wait. Just for fun, I'm a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award for Madness. And--at last!--I finished that law article that's been on my desk for months. It'll be published in July, and I'll post a link then.

The paperback of Madness comes out pretty quick--April somethingth. The cover is completely killer. I will post more about publicity stuff in the next couple of weeks as I learn of it.

Too much sunshine has made me freckled and a little dazed. Sorry to post so briefly--promise my next post, which will be from the wilds of a never-ending Minnesota winter, will be better!

Hope all's well with all of you. Your letters continue to make my day, and I'm doing my best to get back to you as soon as I can.

Peace,
M
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Good God, people! Will I never learn? This article I'm working on has turned into a many-tentacled thing that I'm now trying to organize into a tidy bunch of words. As usual, I've gotten about four thousand sources, because it was all just so interesting I had to keep asking questions, didn't I? and now I've got about a dozen interviews to transcribe, notes to review, and an outline to impose on all of it. Meanwhile, of all the damn things, one of my sources is in prison, and I haven't heard from him yet. Don't ask.

It's slushy and awful out. The birds don't know whether it's spring or not. It's not. We're months away from spring, and a slushy yucky maze of February days to get through first. As I always do this time of year, I'm badly wishing I still lived in California. The rhododendrons and bougainvilla (sp) will start to bloom soon out there, and the hills will all turn green with ivy and iceplant. Those of you who ARE out in California--a pox on you, you lucky rats.

Meanwhile, research for the novel is coming along. I'm midway through a slash-and-burn of material I've already written to clear out space in my head for what comes next. All is starting to take shape. I've made big progress in recent weeks, so I'm excited about it for the moment. Remind me of that when I start hating it again.

The Minneapolis scene is a-hopping. The advent of Facebook has got everyone up in everyone else's business all the time, which means you can't go twenty minutes before there's another event posted. My favorite are the Thursday Night Hootenannies. Gotta love a Hootenanny. I recently managed to miss a party in celebration of John Berryman's birthday, at which his "Dream Songs" were read by a dozen folks, and at which I hear much fun was had, which I missed, dammit. The next such gig is a celebration of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" in the flat where it was written, at which we're all instructed to read poems involving motorcycles. Or, presumably, Zen. The theater scene in winter gets thick and busy. There are something like 65 theater companies in Minneapolis/St. Paul, so it's wicked to try to keep up. Just saw a production of Edward Albee's "A Delicate Balance," which my mother hated, but I liked, except for one character who was SO AWFUL I nearly shrieked. Next I'm going to see a friend's production of "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," which is staged so zanily I'm curious to see how the theater will contain it. All in all, Minneapolis is happening as usual, and does a good job of distracting us all from the Massive Winter Doldrums enough that we make it through to March without going totally berserk.

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Hello hello!

I apologize for the long silence--the holidays this year were a whirlwind, and somehow December disappeared before I knew it. I can hardly believe it's the new year. It feels like I was just on tour, and now paperback tour is already approaching. (As soon as I have dates, I'll post them on the schedule. Also have a few lectures coming up, and will post those as well.)

So it's a bloody cold day here in the north. I'm at my usual coffeeshop haunt, Spyhouse, and getting far less done than I really should. I'm dragging my feet getting back to work after all the holiday whatnot. It was a warm, good Christmastime in my corner of the world. Snow upon snow, and I meant to get a Christmas tree...but like I said, time sped past me and I find myself with a case of the post-holiday daydreamings. I have a stack of new books to read--am partway through Toni Morrison's wonderful new book A Mercy, and just picked up Aravand Adiga's White Tiger, which comes highly recommended by a friend who claims he read Candide at the age of ten. Ha! I don't believe it for a minute. ...<< MORE >>

So I have this orchid. Actually, I had two. One was a ladyslip orchid, one a bright pink phalenopsis. The ladyslip died immediately. Just shriveled up and died, bam, like that. The phaleonopsis (sp?) bloomed beautifully for about a month, and then all the flowers fell off. But suddenly it grew a new leaf. Mind you, I used to collect orchids. Had a ton of them. This was back when I lived in San Francisco, in this gorgeous tiny sun-drenched apartment with huge bay windows up on a hill. I took the collection of orchids very seriously. I had books. I put them in the right windows and on the right tables so they'd get just the right amount and quality and kind of sun--south sun, east sun, etc. Orchids are finicky and like a very particular sort of sun. I bought one orchid at a time. They are also very expensive, and gradually I had invested a really ridiculous amount of money in a variety of flower that basically exists to drive its owners insane. You are supposed to water some of them and not others; some prefer to be misted very occasionally. Some like to be fed, others not. So I had this houseful of orchids, which was totally gorgeous and tropical; I also had two towering tree-like plants, and the whole place was lovely. But then, one by one, the orchids started to drop flowers. There were papery dried-out blooms everywhere, all over the floor. So I threw them all out. It was several years later that someone informed me that orchids always do that. They go through cycles of dropping flowers. And I'd thrown out a fortune in live orchids because somehow in all my orchid-related research I had failed to learn that they do that. This made me very dejected. Hence, ten years later, with my improved orchid knowledge, I know that a) the ladyslip orchid has for sure died, and b) the phaelonopsis has a brand new leaf and therefore is not dead, though it is a really ugly tall bare stalk sticking out of its leaves. So. It sits on my desk. And since it is winter, and there's no damn light in Minnesota, and this office gets no sun of any kind (south, east, or any other), I turn on my lightbox and bask in its flourescent (sp) glow and hope the orchid blooms again soon.

That's all I have to say on the matter of orchids today.

Other than that--on the matter of light--I am sloggish for lack of it. I nap. It isn't smart; when I nap late in the day, I wake up when it's already dark, and then I am disoriented, and it's hard to go back to work. Some of you live in Alaska, I believe--how do you manage the all-winter dark? I am like a parrot, which thinks it's night whenever you throw a towel over its cage. Hence, the lightbox, which my friend Kristen calls Ra. God of Sun. It makes the room very hot, and is deeply unattractive, and ruins the look of the room, but it should keep me from the situation where I wind up napping through February. Yoga is also helpful. I strongly recommend yoga. Someone wrote me the other day and asked me, not for the first time, why I don't move to Palm Springs. It is because I like the snow. And finally there is some snow. Mark my words: in February, I will be complaining about the snow. Ignore me.

Much afoot with regard to work. It's poetry season--I wonder if everyone writes seasonally?--and I have two new ones I'm tinkering with. They should take me as long as the two I wrote last December, which was approx. forever. I am more prolific with poetry in the summer; I do the long ones in winter, and they pretty much consume me. I am also working on the novel, which is great fun. I have a big long list of novels I want for Christmas. They should get me through February, if I can stay awake.

My annual Christmas party is approaching. It is the world's tiniest cocktail party: there are nine of us, and we dress up. Trockman has joked, badly, that he will wear his Trocktail dress. People should be shot for jokes like that. I really only cook twice a year, at the Christmas party and the February Depression Party (though last year Jeff cooked for that, and may have to do so again this coming year). So this year's party is Mexican Christmas, and I am going all-out. I do love to cook. I'm really just very lazy, and rarely do it. I was thinking about this at Thanksgiving, which I spent with my dad's side of the family & various friends. It was warm and lovely and someone else cooked. I hope all of you had an equally lovely Thanksgiving, and that your holiday season, whatever holiday happens to be yours, is going beautifully. Many things to be thankful for, and much to celebrate. I wish the very best to you and yours.

Peace,
M
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...and with the first snow came the first few pages of the new book. Both settled in early this morning. The snow's melting, but the pages seem to be sticking around. As usual, I'm sure they're perfectly awful. But they're a start. Book 4 is up and running, my friends--let's hope it doesn't take off without me. (Meanwhile, I'm secretly tinkering with the novel, but don't hold your breath on that. I'm thinking it's going to take me about four years. I have to get good enough to write it.)

It's been a woolly couple of weeks since I wrote. A long trip to New York to see the Lovely Lora and work out ideas on the book with my agent--a wonderful escapade, especially since I realized the day after I got there (and slept in till the radical hour of 8) that I hadn't taken a day off in 28 days. This, I might point out, is incredibly stupid. I have been cured of such nonsense, and will be taking another day off here soon. Then a whirlwind trip to Florida for a lecture, then back, and now--my God, I think I'm actually in town for two months before winter lectures start. Ha! Take that, Northwest Airlines, which lost my luggage three (3) times in the past two months. (Also--not Northwest's fault--I broke my toe. So uncool.) But--back in Mpls--and glad to be. Winter is about to settle in, and I can't wait. I'm a little out of sorts because usually I spend November and December on poetry; this year I'm going to be working on the new book proposal instead, but am hoping to scribble out at least a few poems here and there. I've got two new ones underway I'm tinkering with, so that at least keeps the poetry section of my brain occupied. The reporter section of my brain just wrapped up edits on an article on painter Megan Rye--can be found tomorrow on www.mnartist.org--and I'm looking forward to reviewing The Necessity of Theater: The Art of Watching and Being Watched (Paul Woodruff) in a couple of weeks. All of this leaves the rest of my brain free to cram the research I'm cramming into it in preparation for the proposal. I love it when the part of the writing process where you're screaming what the hell am I doing??? ends and the part where you shut up and start writing begins. It is an enormous relief to know you do, in fact, have a more or less coherent idea in your head.

Just finished the Roxana Robinson biography of Georgia O'Keeffe--quite well done, I thought; I would have liked a little more analysis of her work itself, but reading about the woman's life was wonderful. I love this far-too-often-quoted O'Keeffe quote: "I'm frightened all the time. But I never let it stop me. Never!" Wise words to live by. And continuing with the Elizabeth Bishop fixation, I'm reading Brett C. Miller's Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It, which I like a great deal--it's got a wonderful lot of close readings of the poems, which makes the whole thing much richer. Both these women were itinerant creatures whose work depended heavily on the place they were in; they have me thinking much about travel, restlessness, and the idea of home.

I am one of those people who loves the holidays--November 1, I turn on the winter music; day after Thanksgiving, the Christmas music starts, and stays on until even I can't stand it anymore. I get my Christmas tree about ten minutes after Thanksgiving, too, and decorate the damn thing within an inch of its life, then dread the un-decorating till the tree self-immolates sometime in January and I'm forced to pack the ornaments back up. But--like I said--it's only just the first snow, and I'm tapping my foot for more. It would be good if I could find my winter jacket, too, before it blizzards while I'm traipsing around in a t-shirt. I think it's around here somewhere.

And with that, a little wintry Robert Frost...

Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Happy winter, everyone....

peace,
m
...<< MORE >>

It stays dark so much later into the morning now, and it's starting to get cold. Yesterday when I stepped out the door there was frost on the windshield of my car, and I ran back inside to get a heavier coat. Before I have time to think about it, it will be winter and I'll be crunching out into the snow on my way to yoga, huddling into my coat and looking up at the red winter sky. It really is red in wintertime. Now that I've moved, my morning perspective is different--I used to sit right in front of a window, and I've spent seven winters watching the gradual change of light as my tiny point on the planet turns toward the sun. Now my desk is in a corner of a room, and my view is of the clutter of photographs and manuscript pages and notebooks and letters that surround me. The room is painted a beautiful shade of blue, and it's very peaceful in here, but as the hours of dawn creep ahead, I go out into the living room to watch the light come up between the branches of the trees. And soon those trees will be crusted with ice, and each branch will hold its small burden of snow carefully, and the black branches will be sketched against the red sky. But not yet.

Last night I saw a wonderful production of Arthur Miller's "A View from the Bridge." A difficult play, and beautifully done--about family, broken loyalty, desperation, America, love. What play isn't about love? Maybe a few by Beckett and Pinter, and I'll see Pinter's "The Caretaker" in a few weeks. A truly strange play--if you haven't read it, do. Does anyone around here read plays? A habit I've gotten out of, but one I need to get back to--something about closely knowing the language of a play changes the experience of seeing it entirely. I recently wrote an essay on seeing theater, and it gave me a chance to really think about what it means to take it all in--language, performance, production. And last night's production was spellbinding. One of the things I love about theater is the way it follows you out the door, down the street, into your night and next day, nagging at you, demanding to be thought about and considered on so many levels of the psyche and mind. And heart, maybe most of all--maybe that's where theater hits you hardest. In the heart. Miller's plays certainly do. So today the play will come trotting along behind me like a dog, which I'll enjoy.

Articles, research, lectures, grant proposals--I'm slammed, and it's not even worth going into. It makes me feel like wandering off and lying on the floor reading poems. I'm on an Elizabeth Bishop kick these days, and I'm dabbling a little in H.D.--if you haven't gotten to either of these two yet, you must. Another obsession of late: Georgia O'Keeffe, and her mutually inspiring relationship with Alfred Stieglitz. I have photography much on my mind--I'm working on an article about painter Megan Rye (link to her work in "Links"), whose work for the last four years has focused on Iraq. Her brother, an artist and a Marine, brought more than 2000 photographs back from his tour in the Middle East. The photographs are spectacular in their own right, but Rye has taken them to a different and fascinating place somewhere between sharp realism and almost imperceptible abstraction, which creates a slightly dream-like quality that unsettles the viewer in a very subtle way; the entire body of work is devoid of polemic or even commentary, instead casting questions back on the viewer as they stand before the paintings, which are of a great and unexpected beauty. It's a pleasure and an enormous challenge to write intelligently about visual art; I find it far more difficult than writing about theater or music, and at the same time I enjoy it a little bit more, partly because it's something I'm only now learning to do. Articulating the visual is an almost ridiculous pursuit, and yet there are few great paintings or painters--visual artists of any kind, really--who don't make you want to turn to the person with you and say something. But what? And isn't it strange, when you're looking at a work alone, how frustrating it is not to have someone to think it through with you, out loud? One of my favorite things to do is wander museums and galleries with a great friend. It's fascinating to see through another person's eyes.

And that, my friends, is what has captured me at my desk with my little lamp in the otherwise-dark early morning in fall. A fine day to you all--

Peace,
M
...<< MORE >>

Hello all,

There's no news whatsoever. This is just to say (as William Carlos Williams would say) that for those of us up here in the far north, the autumn colors have exploded in all their red-orange-salmon-pink-yellow glory. The sumac and maples are spectacular. I was down in Iowa City day before yesterday giving a lecture (it's Mental Illness Awareness Week, folks--get on the NAMI.org website and update yourselves on the Mental Health Parity Bill that FINALLY!! passed), and yesterday I drove back up to Minneapolis. Heavy rains made the leaves a surreally brilliant blur of color as I flew up Highway 80 on my way home. There's nothing like the north in fall, and it got me to thinking about one of my favorite poems, by the wonderful Michael Delp (who still teaches at Interlochen):

Going north means going
into something deeper than silence.
Mist hangs for hours in the woods
and the apparitions singing in dreams
know places we will never see.
You will know you are north
by the edges of the day
and the slight aura surrounding the trees.
Something in your muscles will be trying
to remember ancient directions,
the way into old hunting grounds,
and if you died and someone
threw your bones into the water
they would swim together
and form a long arrow pointing north.

Today's one of those fall days that makes a person want to curl up in their chair and read poems. So I went to the bookshelves (which, sadly, as you know, are NOT organized as they should be) and poked around looking for fall poems. October must be the most written-about month in the year, except for the entire e.e.cummings ouvre (I've always wanted to use that word) on spring. But of the many many October and autumn poems I found, this is the one that best suits the day. It's by the Russian poet Bella Akhmadululina: "Autumn."

Not working, not breathing,
the beehive sweetens and dies.
The autumn deepens, the soul
ripens and grows round;

drawn into the turning color of fruit,
cast out of the idle blossoms.
Work is long and dull in autumn,
the word is heavy.

More and more heavily, day by day,
nature weighs down the mind.
A laziness like wisdom
overshadows the mouth with silence.

Even a child, riding along,
cycling into the white shafts of light,
suddenly will look up
with a pale, clear sadness.

*

..."A laziness like wisdom..." What could be better than that? I leave you with the autumn deepening, and the soul ripening and growing round.

Peace,
M
...<< MORE >>

So explain this to me—a dear friend of mine just wrote to announce he started smoking. He's forty-something. Who starts smoking at forty-something?? MK, if you're reading this—I plan to knock you about the ears.

That aside. I'm listening to my latest mix, and am practically rocking with glee at the Magical Fields' line "So you quote love unquote me." Hee hee! And I keep listening to The Weepies' "World Spins Madly On." So delicious. Now playing: Elvis Costello's "Deep Dark Truthful Mirror," and laughing at the time my ex-husband and two friends and I were on a road trip on a wickedly hot late-summer California day, and got into a very serious conversation about who were the three most important rock artists who ever lived. The Trinity of Rock. I believe we all agreed on Buddy Holly, tho one of us argued for Elvis (Presley). And due to our own biases, I think we said Tom Waits. But we got in a wild fight over the third, and one of the candidates was Elvis Costello. Who, incidentally, a minneapolis acquaintance of mine used to date. Which, by the theory of six degrees of separation, means I know Elvis C. Ha!

Grammar question regarding the above, posed by the fabulous Jaime: When making a name that ends with 's' posessive (viz. Fields or Weepies), do you just put the apostrophe at the end of the word (Fields') or do you add an additional 's' (Weepies's)? I am stumped.

And I just realized that's a punctuation question. Not grammar. Unless—here's another quandry—are they the same thing?

I really should know these things. Really, I should. It is a sad state of affairs that I do not.

It's 4:01 a.m. and I'm a scatterbrain. Too much to think about, and I'm just adjusting to the new house. Finally FINALLY finished unpacking yesterday, and I love it here. My office is painted a fine shade of blue, and I have new purple sheets. I confess that as I was unpacking box #477 of books (ok, slight exagg.—it was about box 16) I was in such a state of despair of ever finishing that I was considering lying face down on the living room floor for approximately forever. I did not. Instead, I began stuffing the remaining 289 boxes onto the shelves willy-nilly at random, which is unheard of. Ordinarily when I move I organize my books alphabetically and by genre. No this is not compulsive; how else can I find a book when I need it? And now indeed I will not be able to find a book. I've got religious philosophy tangled up with critical theory and modern history crushed in with Russian novels and two really awful books of love poetry bought for obscure reasons some years ago stuffed in between two books on Gertrude Stein. Not to mention the entire mess of the Surrealism section. Which, who knows, I may need to reference this very afternoon. The only disaster in the new place so far has involved (what else?) a truly mysterious coffee maker, with which I managed to flood half the kitchen in grounds and coffee at about 3 a.m. on Friday. I bought a new one. It is very simple: you push 'on.'

I am still recovering from the bizarre cruise I went on some weeks ago. As strange as it was, complete with teal carpet and green chandeliers and a chinging casino and duty free fake jewels, I liked my mornings sitting on the balcony watching the ocean glide by under a brilliant white moon. I wouldn't mind being on a boat right about now. A schooner, say. With sails all snapping and billiowing in the wind. Sounds peaceful, no?

I am reading a book you must all immediately read: a short story collection by Nam Le called The Boat. It's absolutely spectacular. Is anyone out there a short story writer? I am not. I've written only a few in my life, and they aren't worth beans. I swear it's the hardest form there is. The ability to bring a story down to its very essence, to its crystalline center, is one I don't have. That's the problem with novelists—we can't shut the hell up. If you're looking for other short story writers, go to Alice Munro and Mary Gaitskill. On the poetry front, while unpacking yesterday I re-discovered Margueritte Duras, whose book on writing I've mentioned before. This book, No More (C'est Tout) is almost not poetry; it's like a kind of diary, but the entries are so elliptical that they (like the best short stories) are broken down to their very center, with no flotsam or jetsam crowding around. And yet you know exactly what Duras is talking about. The book is a love story in just a few lines, written to an unseen subject off the page. But then she writes: "Come love me./ Come./ Come onto this blank sheet of paper/ With me."

You know, you could spend an academic lifetime writing about 'subject' and 'object' of poetry, the 'presence' of the subject or object or speaker or writer or author on the theoretical 'page,' and you still wouldn't get a couple of lines like that.

It's suddenly fall here in Mpls. Happened almost overnight. It was ninety last week; this week I'm wearing sweaters and shivering when I walk down the street to my cafe. The trees are turning faster than you can imagine, and shedding their leaves like they're shaking out their hair. It's lovely. I wish fall lasted half the year. Instead, winter does. Winter's peeking around the corner, and much as I love the snow and the shivering cold (it's bracing) and the red morning sky, I'm still wondering what on earth got into me that I settled here in the tundra. What kind of nonsense is that?

Ok. Last note—Trockman promises me he'll take the lock off the new photos so they aren't password protected as soon as the article for which they were taken ...<< MORE >>

It's something like 1 a.m, but no one has informed MY body clock, which thinks it's 3 or 6 or something; while I am here in L.A., my body thinks it's in the Maritime Zone, or at the very least East Coast Standard, or possibly Central, but not Pacific. It's been a most ridiculous week. I've made my way from a boat off the coast of Nova Scotia to a really garish West Hollywood Hotel. Culture shock. This is how it happened:

First off, I went on a cruise with Jeff's work. Ever been on a cruise? To put it gently--not quite my bag, cruising. No indeed, not quite. By the end of the week, I was hiding in my room, doing enough yoga to make me as bendy as a rubber band in an effort to make myself more zen, and dreaming of the day I'd be off that blasted boat. On the upside--Jeff and I had a smashing time on the days we docked in some little coastal towns between Montreal and Boston--and Nova Scotis is just gorgeous. I'm going to head back there to hike as soon as possible--because when visiting on a boat, the only way to see the beautiful green landscape and the silvery sea is to take a massive tour bus. Which is no way to see a place. SO:

Once docked in Boston, I had a fantastic meeting with my Houghton Mifflin editor, who is brilliant and lovely and who I worship and adore, and we hammered out some more details on the new book. I'm getting deeper into research, which as you know is one of my very favorite parts of writing--just diving in and reading and notetaking and getting the juices flowing and the ideas down on paper. So I'm happy as a clam. Meanwhile...

I'm crunched with the fall writing season, which is always busy (grant applications are always due, and I often lecture a bunch in fall), and which is made busier by the fact that somehow I've gotten myself assigned two new articles, with which I'm having a wonderful time. On the matter of journalism--those of you who know Trockman the killer photographer may be pleased to know that he and I are in a flurry of plans for articles we're hoping to do together next year. I can't wait to be working with him again. Journalism with a stunningly talented photojournalist is an incredible experience, and I'm thrilled.

Now, as I mentioned, I'm in L.A., which is truly one of the weirdest places in the world, and may in fact be on another planet. I don't mean that as an insult (despite the ongoing mostly-good-natured mutual disdain between Northern and Southern Californians)--just that there is nowhere else where the room service menu offers a whole separate menu for "the needs of our celebrities." What? So very odd. At least there's a coffee pot in the room. ...<< MORE >>

So call me crazy, but I love gray days. It's one of those where I am, cool and windy, windy enough to put little whitecaps on the lake. I'm up here in infamous Detroit Lakes, MN, home of the even-famouser Main Street Cafe and the Sunflower Coffee Shop, at which latter I now sit, and which is itself home to the single—please forgive me—dumbest girls who've ever tried to pour a cup of coffee. They're lovely, they really are. But. I am now working on a cup of coffee that I procured through the following exchange:

Me: Can I get a large coffee, half decaf and half light roast?
[I cringed the minute I said it. That's an incredibly complicated order hereabouts.]
She: [looks at the price list very carefully, running her finger up and down.]
Me [feeling helpful]: You want to just charge me for a large coffee.
She: Oh. Ok. [Pauses.] What kind did you want?
Me: Half decaf and half regular. [Forget light roast. That will only confuse things.]
She: [Pours decaf into the cup. Decaf runs out. She stops, stumped, and thinks this over. Finally, she goes over to the coffee maker and starts making a new pot of coffee.]
Me: Um. Could you go ahead and fill the cup before you make coffee?
She: But the decaf ran out.
Me: That's ok. Just fill it with a different kind.
She: But it's not decaf.
Me: S'ok. Not a big deal.
She: [Totally paralyzed.]
[Another girl comes over]: Are you waiting for something?
Me [pointing]: Could you fill that cup up? And give it to me?
She: What do you want in it?
Me: Coffee. Whatever. Just some coffee.
[She fills it up. Sets it in front of me. Carefully reads the price list.]
Me: Large coffee. $1.75.
She [keeps looking at the price list]
I [give her two dollars]
She [looks at it in confusion. Picks it up. Stares at the cash register.]
Me: You want to give me a quarter back.
She: I don't know what the price code is.
Me [gently]: Ok. Well. There's two dollars. I'm going to take the coffee. You go ahead and figure out the price code.
She [Totally paralyzed.]
[Meanwhile, the original one is trying to figure out how to put coffee in the filter.]
Me: Ok! Thanks!
[exeunt]

...So I trudged back over here to my table, which I have turned into a small office, as I'm here for the day to work. Today's project was a short article for a new theater magazine. (I'll post the link when it comes out.) I'm hugely excited about this magazine, and it's SUCH a treat to be writing about theater again. I haven't done so in several years--Madness took all my time for the last few, and I've been AWOL from journalism and the like. Feels great to be back at it. Next up today: reviewing material for an article I'm writing for--get this--a magazine called Law & Politics. Little known fact: I like law and politics. Back a million years ago, I had every intention of becoming a political reporter--was studying poli sci to do so, working at a wire service covering the 1992 (that's how old I am, kids) presidential election (Clinton v. Bush Sr.). (Speaking of elections--how's THIS one for pretty damn fascinating?? Never in a million years could anyone have said in 1992 that American politics would take this wild ride and wind up here.) So now I'm writing an article about legal ethics. TOTALLY fun. Meanwhile (at the same time--it just got extremely busy) I'm about to start an article on painter Megan Rye (known to some of you from Madness), which will be a riot to write. I get to go spend a couple of days in her studio picking her brain and listening to her talk about how she does the magic she does. If you haven't seen her work, go to her link on my Links page. Speaking of those links--Trockman and I just did a new shoot for an article running in BP Magazine, and he'll have some new photos up on trockstock.com soon. I'll post the link to that article asap.

I confess: I gave up on Best American Poetry 2007. I feel horribly guilty about it. But after I threw it across the room, I did a few calming breathing exercises and decided in a very Zen-like fashion that I was not, in fact, going to attempt to read it further. (Also, I had to use it to pick up a bat. A flying-around-my-office-in-the-dark kind of bat. Long story. I injured the bat. And am totally never going to get over it.) So, now I'm reading Best American Essays 2007, which truly kicks ass. However. My one-sided love affair with David Foster Wallace--absolutely one of my very favorite essayists, and the guest editor of BAE 2007--has come to a halt. He felt it necessary to once again--he does it regularly--rip into memoir as a form. It doesn't surprise me--lots of people don't like memoir. But he really, really hates it. And talks about hating it often enough that I kind of have to scratch my head; well, if you don't like it, don't read it, right? His argument (this time) is that most contemporary memoirs are intended primarily to make the reader think about how great the author is. Um? There is no single writer working today whose work is more self-reflexive than DFW's. You either love him or hate him, but there is no getting around the fact that he is very, very impressed with his own intelligence and wit (which indeed he does possess). You kind of take his ego with the package. But he seems unaware of this himself, or he might not be so upset by the self-reflexiveness he sees in memoir. (He also had to make the usual mumblings about how memoir These Days reflects a grotesque voyeurism on the part of the reading public. My thought is that he refers to stuff precisely like my two memoirs, which is fine, because it addresses disturbing subjects. Disturbing subjects being what ...<< MORE >>

...On the matter of poets beloved by some of you: Here's a few from Laurie, in the field of the contemporary poets...

Mark Strand (a favorite of mine)
Marie Howe (ditto)
Stephen Dunn (possibly in my top five—introduced to him years ago by the infamous Lora K.)
Billy Collins (best guy for a title ever, in my book—Picnic, Lightning, and Sailing Alone Around the Room—how do you beat THAT?)
George Djanikian (new to me...you?)

Calling for more...step up, folks.

*

Got a TON of emails in praise of Regina Specter—we are officially her fan club. Have put her on 3 recent mixes. Listening to them alllllll the time.

*

Ok, what's the story with the Best American Poetry 2007? Anyone else check this one out? I recommended the whole Best of... series last fall, BUT, my friends, I'm not at all sure about this one. Guest Ed. Heather McHugh. Her intro possibly one of the weirdest of all time--all about wordplay, and too precious by far, to my tastes. The poems veer close to the language school of poetry, and to my mind play closer to the surface of the page than the depth of the poem.

CAVEAT: it is ENTIRELY possible that I'm just too damn dumb to get the stuff. ...<< MORE >>

Well, folks, I put away my suitcase.

I realized it had been sitting open on a chair in my bedroom, in various states of pack and unpack, since March. It's what, August? It's not all tour, of course--that ended at the close of May. But my own life has taken me all over the durn place this summer. Now the suitcase is put away, and my spinning head (Exorcist-style) is slowing down, and I'm finally able to take in what's going on around me. Which, in truth, is not much--and that's just fine with me.

So I find it's a lazy late summer, hot and sticky where I am, people out in droves at the coffee shops and outdoor cafes, on their front stoops and standing on the corner, puttering in their gardens, walking around the lakes. It's a perfect time of year to grab my laptop and hit my favorite coffee shops to people watch and get some work done. Work has felt so scatterbrained the last few months--working here, in a New York hotel room, in a Starbucks in Florida, a golf resort somewhere else (don't ask), never really knowing where I am, feeling like I have to wrestle my brain to the ground in order to get it to produce anything coherent. But now, hooray, I'm back at my desk at home, and the work is coming along like gangbusters. Feels awfully good. I seem to be spending an inordinate amount of time writing notes in longhand, which I never do, and I'm going through at least one pen every few days. Either I talk too much (entirely likely) or there's a lot brewing. Who knows.

I'm reading a ton. Latest is Eat, Pray, Love--any thoughts on that one? And an old friend just reminded me of two books by the brilliant novelist Kirsty Gunn--Rain and The Keepsake. Both incredible, and if you haven't found her yet, find her now. I'm dying to start Going Native, by Steven Wright, kind of a modern On the Road (which I just reread--good grief--what do you guys think of that one? I'm mixed). Find myself thumbing through a lot of e.e.cummings again lately, and FINALLY catching up on my blasted New Yorkers. Have also been madly making mixes. Latest favorites are The Weepies, Glen Hansard, Regina Specter (lord but I've fallen in love with her stuff), and a few others.  Anyone, anyone? Thoughts on these? CALL FOR SUGGESTIONS: I'm dying for new material. Groups/solo artists I need to know about?

So that's the scoop from a place relatively near Lake Woebegone. ...<< MORE >>

WEBCAST LINK

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Hello, all!

Since the Early Show has been moved, I got to sleep in till a whopping 4:30 a.m., which felt DIVINE. Of course, in classic tour fashion, moving the show means I'll be flying back to NY after I've left for another city to do it a different day, which will entail a very early morning indeed, which will not feel divine. So it goes. I am cultivating some very impressive circles under my eyes, I have to say.

A shout-out to all the kind people who took the time to listen to the Diane Rehm show. I so enjoyed hearing your questions and comments, and I appreciate you tuning it.

So it's pub date. Weird, weird, weird, exciting and weird. I've got a couple of interviews today, then a pre-reading hangout with my dear friends who are coming to NY for the reading, and then the reading itself. I can't wait to kick it all off, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing all of you who'll be there tonight--as well as all of you who'll be at the readings across the country as I move west.

All my thanks to all you folks who have supported my career over the years; and thanks to the newbies just now beginning to read my books. I'll do my best to write you some good ones.

Big cheers,
Marya

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Hey all,

The CBS Early Show orginally scheduled for April 9 (today) has been MOVED to a date TBA (likely later this week or early next). Will let you know when I have the correct air time.

M

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Tour Blog
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It's 4:00 a.m. on Monday morning, and in 24 hours (well, 25) I will try to do something about my hair (always an effort) and get on a plane for New York. Just wrapped up the talk I'm giving at Yale on April 4th, and fear I have totally confused myself and will accidentally give a lecture on one of the many things I have obsessed about while manic over the years, like (relatively recently) basketball, which I suspect will not be popular as a topic for a Master's Tea. Wish me luck on that.

Wednesday's when it really begins: I'll be on the radio show “Writers on Writing” on the Bay Area's NPR station KUCI-FM, 9:30 a.m., April 2. It's a killer show, and I'm thinking by then I'll have organized my brain enough to actually talk about writing, rather than basketball. We can only hope. The next day I've got my first reading at RJ Julia Bookstore in New Haven, CT. I have, as of this moment, no blasted idea what to read, and have strangely forgotten the entire book. I'll come up with something.

Note on schedule changes:
-Pace University, April 1, has been cancelled.
-The Seattle Town Hall "Forum on the Future of Health," on April 22, is ON. I'll let you know the time ASAP. If you're local, don't miss this. I intend to say at least one interesting thing, and will be wearing cool shoes.

Update on media thangs: this will change frequently, and I'll keep you posted on additions as they come in. West Coast media is just barely started as yet, so you West Coasters, just keep your hats on.

Week of April 7 (pub week): Interviews in/on

• Time.com
• GalleyCat
• People Magazine
• The Washington Post
  

April 8:

• The Diane Rehm Show, NPR, 11:00 a.m. ET

April 9 (pub date):

• "The Early Show" on CBS, 11:00 a.m. ET.

• For Vermont locals: Vermont Radio (WBTN—1370 AM), time TBD

April 10:

• "Here & Now," NPR (locals in Boston area, that's WBUR), 2:00 p.m. ET

April 15, Toronto (all times TK):

• CTV Network — "Canada AM"
• CFRB 1010 Radio — "The Leslie Roberts Show"
• Rogers Cable – ‘Fine Print with Carolyn Weaver”
  

April 19:

• Live streaming video interview—podcast available a few hours later. iDream.tv, 5-7 p.m. CST

April 24:

• "Early Mornings" on KVON, Northern California, 8:30 a.m. PT
• "Between the Lines," Associated Press Radio, time TK

...So, my friends, there you have it. With the assistance of my dear friend Ashley, I have made a truly comprehensive and perhaps absurdly over-detailed list of things to pack, which is actually a list of exactly what to wear at all times for the entire month of tour, which I actually need, because when I'm on tour I get so totally sleep-deprivation-addled that I need to consult a list in order not to go wandering out of the hotel in my underwear because the options of clothes I could wear confused me too much. The media escorts will not like this. In fact, as you'll read in Madness, there was a minor incident in London while I was on hardcover tour for Wasted; I had gone more or less around the bend, and was totally bats, and at some point found myself running down a rainy street, broke a heel, and went careening into a shoe store yelling, "U.S. SIZE SIX! BLACK HEEL!" and they were extremely nice and gentle with me, which was good of them, and then I went (posessed of said new black heel) running down the street again to get to my hotel to meet the media escort to go to BBC-TV, and she was very concerned that I was soaking wet (but I had both shoes!) and insisted that no, I must have a dry suit.

The idea is, obviously, not to go bats on this tour. I'll keep you posted.

Tour blog #1 scheduled for Wednesday. Keep an eye out.

Many thanks to all of you for your continued support of my work. It means the world.

Be well,
Marya

Well, all, it's about that time: my first official reading from Madness is a week from today (at RJ Julia in New Haven, CT, for you locals thereabouts). Countdown to takeoff has begun. I leave Minneapolis bright and early next Tuesday morning. Somehow, of course, it seems like every thing I could possibly need to do has collected itself and landed between then and now. How does that always happen? You're going along, doing your thing, and then suddenly the days are packed end to end with infinite tasks that all seem equally important in the moment—buy mini deodorant, write lecture, iron black pants so that they will be thoroughly re-wrinkled by the time you need to wear them, brush up on research, feed cat. Prioritization seems to have escaped me, and I'm making every effort to stop running around like the cliched headless chicken. Ever have one of those days where it seems like the day won? Yesterday was one of those days. A variety of events conspired and dragged me back to bed. I gave myself an hour to lie there being overwhelmed. When the hour was up, I went back to my office and was overwhelmed sitting upright instead. I'm pretty sure that in the end, I triumphed over the day, at least insofar as the day, you know, ended, and I'm still kicking.

I'm going to make my very best effort to blog every other day while I'm on tour—April 1 through 25—and I can promise you those entries will be both brief and somewhat incomprehensible, as I'm anticipating significant tiredness, and am trying to train myself not to yawn so that I don't wind up yawning loudly on the radio. Note: two new radio spots for the radio listeners out there—"Writers on Writing," April 2 on Bay Area's NPR station KUCI, and NPR's "Here and Now" on April 10. I'll put these on the schedule when I get more updates on local events in a few days. There's a fun review in Elle this month, and there will be an article in People next week. For my far-flung U.K. readers, there are several articles in Irish and British magazines coming up—those have been great interviews, and the articles should be neat.

Meanwhile, all's well hereabouts. I've gotten some great letters lately, and am already starting to hear from readers of Madness—many thanks to all who've written. As you know, I'm not able to respond extensively, but I absolutely read everything readers send, and am very grateful that all of you take the time to let me know your thoughts.

I'm looking at a stack of books I'm foolishly planning to take on tour, because I have this fantasy that I'll have all sorts of time to read on the planes and before bed, when in fact I will pass out before I've even buckled my seatbelt on planes, and fall asleep halfway to the bed every night. But I will persist in this fantasy, and lug around a number of books because I like to have them near me, because maybe if I have them they will seep into my head by osmosis and I won't actually go a month without reading anything other than my own blasted book. This weekend I'm choosing the sections I'm going to read at readings—wish me luck, because a week from tonight I'll be standing in a bookstore and will have to read something, and I can't read someone else's book, which is sort of a shame, because if I could I think I'd read a little Neruda, maybe some John Donne. Sadly, this is not encouraged. So it goes.

All right—I'm into the ring to box with the day. Cheers to all, and for those of you who already have your copy of Madness, happy reading.

Peace,
M

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Crack of dawn greetings to all. What I'm doing awake is entirely beyond me. But there you have it: woke up at 1 a.m. bright and cheerful. Because I am terribly clever, I lay down last night for a wee nap at 6 pm and slept straight on through like a nitwit. Jeff was kind enough to wake me up to eat dinner; apparantly I was very chatty when he woke me up, and said all kinds of interesting things in my own personal language; I ate dinner and went dashing back up to bed; thus it is now 3 am and I forsee a nap at a totally inappropriate daytime time in my future, but of course can't sleep now. I did try. I got back in bed at 2 and had that weird experience where your cold feet hit a couple of warm miniature dachshunds, and because miniature dachshunds have no hair on their bellies and feel a little like ultrasuede, and are as I mentioned warm and since there are two of them there are eight little legs jumbled around, it feels like putting your feet on a couple of baby pigs. Milton (dachsund) was snoring, as was Jeff; Jeff is louder, but Milton is pretty loud, so sleep was not forthcoming for myself at least.

I am terribly sorry it's been so long since I blogged; I've been crazy. This is, if you ask me, a pretty good excuse, but I apologize nevertheless. I go more or less batsh*t every Feb 1 (this year it actually started Jan 31) and get sane around March 15. So things are looking up now, but I am not quite altogether there, and am still wading through the fog in my head. I am looking forward to being able to put two thoughts together at a time, yes, looking very much forward to it indeed, as thinking one random thought after another gets confusing and significantly inhibits my ability to do anything other than sit at my desk in my robe, beating my head on my keyboard, trying to think in a linear and/or even slightly orderly way and failing miserably. (I am also highly capable of naps.) I think it is positively fascinating in a seriously annoying way how the brain has its own calendar, and mine decides a couple of times a year to totally defect on a rigid schedule. "Why, here it is, February 1 (or July 20)! Time to blow up!" like a little ticking bomb. At least it's predictable. The idea, if I were a sensible person, would be to calmly say, Ah, my brain has blown up. Time to put on my robe and sit at my desk staring into space while the logic and language centers of my cortex tangle up for six weeks! And every year I swear I'm going to do it. I say, No work in Feb/July. Won't even bother. The reporter from People Magazine who's checking in on me to see how my journal is going (I'm keeping a Feb/March journal for People, which is both interesting and extremely difficult, see aforementioned language/logic center situation) said gently to me the other day, "Um, do you ever think about just taking February off?" and I said why yes indeed I think of it annually. And Ruth, when I was gnashing my teeth at breakfast on Saturday, telling her how I couldn't work and was going to lose it pretty soon, pointed out that in fact I had already lost it, just like I did a year ago and a year before that ad infinitum, and it was nothing to worry about. Ruth and I have had breakfast on Saturday virtually every week we're both in town for the last fifteen years, and I begin to worry she gets tired of telling me the same things over and over. But that's the nice thing about friends. They are very tolerant. Thank god.

SO, as for work, haha! So funny! It's gone rather slowly. But it's gone. I'm still puttering away on the new novel, and like it and hate it on alternating days. Entertaining, being a writer, with the liking/hating thing. I think there are people who consistently like writing; I am not one of them. I like it on and off. I have done much considering of giving it up entirely in the last few weeks, but have this sneaking suspicion I will not, because it is pretty much the only thing I know how to do, and a person has to have a job or at least some way to occupy themselves for the better part of the day, and I don't have kids, which is a vastly harder job, so I can't raise my kids as a job, so I have to keep writing. Additionally, every time I've decided once and for all to quit, I wind up back at my desk writing within a few weeks. Actually, this time of day reminds me of writing The Center of Winter. Well, reminds me of the last year of writing it--I was working at a magazine, and worked on the book from 3-7 a.m., and wound up very tired and then very manic, as will happen from time to time, and the upshot was I quit the magazine by moving into the hospital, but finished the book at very, very long last. Lord, thinking about writing Center gives me the willies. It took forever. The first three years were spent writing absolute garbage, in part because I was batsh*t ALL the time, rather than only Feb/July, and in part because I hadn't the faintest idea what I was doing, and kept bombarding my poor beliegured (I am fairly sure that's spelled wrong) editor with massive Kinko's boxes full of paper masquerading as a "book", knowing full well it was garbage but despairing at ever finishing the "book," but eventually I climbed out of the bottle of ...<< MORE >>

Hello all,

Here's what I realized: Every tour date says it's a Thursday, 7pm, no? They are obviously not all that. However, I don't know all the times—I will in a couple of days, and will do an actual update then.

The public events:

Tuesday, April 1, 9:30 pm: 
Talk at Pace University at eating disorder vigil

Thursday, April 3:
RJ Julia Bookstore, New Haven, CT

PUB DATE:
Wednesday, April 9, 7:30 pm
Tribeca Barnes & Noble, NYC

Thursday, April 10:
Brookline Booksmith
Boston, MA

Friday, April 11:
Reading in southern Vermont—info to come

Monday-Tuesday April 14-15:
Readings in Toronto, Canada—info to come
(Appearance on "Canada A.M." on the 14th)

Thursday, April 17, 7:30 pm:
Edina Barnes & Noble, MN

PODCAST APRIL 19: Info to come

Monday, April 21:
Vroman's Bookstore
Los Angeles, CA

Tuesday, April 22:
Lecture, part of "The Future of Health" Series
Town Hall
Seattle, WA

Wednesday, April 23:
Books, Inc. (which one to come)
San Francisco, CA

Thursday, April 24:
Powell's Books
Portland, OR

There you have it. Will update with times & locations as soon as I've got them. Hope to see you there!





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Cheers, everyone—

I'm here in Chicago, staying with friends who are kind enough to let me crash & spend the days in an urban approximation of that cabin in the woods I was fantasizing about. Quiet, quiet days in an apartment high above the city (for Chicago folks, I'm in the South Loop), looking out at the freeway and then the magnificent Lake Michigan. Up in my part of the world, I'm used to the mountain/woods sort of Great Lake shore of Lake Superiors, and the forever-seeming sweep of this Great, unbounded at least from this point of view, is awesome. Big long windows let in gorgeous sunrises and falling darks in the evening, and today it's grey and misty out, the kind of weather that reminds me of the Oregon coast, where I spent a lot of my little-er years running up and down the sand, balancing at the edges of tidepools, falling in, balancing on high wet black rocks. My mom always calls these Oregon days, no matter where you are. So a grey day that makes lots of people feel weighed down feels very comforting & cozy to me, and it's always the perfect kind of day to stay in and write.

Today's all about characters & settings. Digging around in your head trying to find these people and places so you can see them clearly and put them on the paper so they become real to the reader is always a project; sometimes they come to you so sharply that you can get them down in a flurry, sometimes they're a little further off through the fog. Today's a little of both. But I am, in fact, working on what I am supposed to be working on, which as I mentioned last week, I definitely was not.

Speaking of Chicago, there is the Art Institute, which I adore (I have probably mentioned this before), with this spectacular collection of the Impressionists. The museum in all areas is curated and hung beautifully, moving in a very clear chronology through the various periods, so that you can get a sense of how the moods and popular fashions of painting and drawing evolved over time. There's also my beloved "Paris Street; Rainy Day," by Gustave Calliebotte, which hangs at the opening of the Contemporary area, which never fails to make me gasp. As do a couple of their iconic holdings, especially Hopper's "Nighthawks at the Diner" and several others, and their holdings of one of my slightly odd favorites, Georgio di Chirico (I may have misspelled his first name) are wonderful and fairly extensive. I fell in love with di Chirico when I was in school studying the Surrealists (there were quite a lot besides Dali, and I was looking partly at the visual art of the period but also a lot of the written work; di Chirico has a few things in common with Magritte, if you like M.). Anyway, my own giant book of di Chirico prints is ragged & should be replaced, but I am very attached to it. I am going to possibly embarass myself here, but I believe it's Mark Strand who wrote a poem studying di Chirico--it's not a common one, but if you can find it, read it, and I will go find its title later anyway. Also in Chicago: the wonderful small Museum of Contemporary Photography, which I loved, and which lately had an exhibit of really fine photographs on America post-9/11.

So publication nears awfully fast, and now we're at the stage where real logistical plans for tour get made—travel dates & vehicles (planes, trains, automobiles), specific times for interviews and readings get confirmed, and there's lots and lots of email popping up all the time. It's hard not to get freaked out or overly distracted by all of it; it's exciting & nerve wracking, and time seems to have speeded up somewhat as April 9 nears. (Note to New Yorkers: I will be speaking at an eating disorders vigil at Pace University on April 1.) And every day I increasingly dread the endless airports, which I just hate. Taking my shoes off and my computer out and my way-too-many bags and coats etc. off—maybe if I packed a little lighter? Sigh.

I've oddly started listening to alt-country music, and am having a fantastic time with it. All I knew of it before was my slavish adoration of Lucinda Williams; turns out there's more. But if you haven't listened to her yet, do so ASAP.

Time for work & enjoying the foggy Chicago day.

Peace,
M


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Which also I hate, but this week I have loved it more than I have hated it, so on the balance, we're in good shape and ready to go.

First of all, I was in Florida this week. (Any Floridians out there? Is that what you are called?) Florida is good for me because there is, you know, sunshine. Which there is not in Mpls, and when there is, it somehow coincides with 20-degree-below-zero weather, which is just perverse of it. Anyway, Jeff was on vacation, and the rat lay around basking in the sun while I worked, WHICH, as mentioned, went wonderfully well. I kicked out some fifty-odd pages, a good chunk of what I'm working on, and for once there was that thrill writers get when they're pretty sure they're writing decently/not horribly/almost acceptably, because I was having such a good time I just kept going. I hit a wall Thursday and took two naps and was certain the magic was gone, over, never to come again, but Friday morning arrived and I was back at my desk. Ok, actually, I was sitting at a patio table trying to block the sun with an umbrella, because I am a bat and prefer to work in the dark (true fact--it's now four a.m., I've been up since one a.m., don't even ask).

Sadly, the bummer of how wonderfully my work week went was the fact that I was not writing what I was supposed to be writing. I was writing what I am supposed to be writing several months from now. Which means that, to my dismay, I can't just sally forth with my very entertaining spree of writing what I feel like writing, and must instead go back to what I am supposed to be writing. I have given myself one day to sulk.

On the matter of grey vs. gray, some kind poster has informed me that it is a matter of British vs. American spellings. I will continue to use British spellings, because if they started the language then I think they know it better than I do, and they are ultimately right. I will also (as I mentioned in my post replying to that post) continue to use 'deamon' and 'humour.'

Sanibel, Florida, is really a very odd place. One of those places with its own subculture so specific to itself that it seems a little surreal to me, who is/am (? where the hell is my grammar these days?) from a subculture so specific that it would seem weird to any Sanibelian. ...<< MORE >>

Sheesh, people! It's only Monday, and I feel like I'm ready to take a nap until, oh, May. Last week was seriously one of those weeks. Somehow it seemed like eight thousand things were happening, and yet mysteriously nothing got done. Well, a few things, but it's that weird stage of writing where I'm mostly doing it in the back of my head—I'm puttering around doing research, taking notes, making outlines, doing character sketches, and preparing to write the next section, so at the end of the day I look at my desk and see mostly, um, coffee cups. And indecipherable pages & pages of scribbles. This is one of those times when I hear the chorus of sages over the ages (nice rhyme, no?) saying peacefully, "Trust the process!" and I just want to kick them. Who wants to trust the process? I want results! I want instant gratification! I want magic! Sadly, that's never the way it goes, and you'd think I'd be used to it by now–I've only been doing this for almost twenty years—and if it was that much of a problem, I'd have learned how to do something more sensible. Instead, my friends, I gnash my teeth and bitch. ...<< MORE >>

Again I posted before I was done! Sorry. In truth, folks, I've been using my brain far too much this week, and as a result have run out of IQ points and become very dull. I'm mostly lying around in my pajamas looking at the gorgous day, drinking coffee, and chatting about insignificant things—an excellent way to spend a Sunday. I hope all of you have had a great week, and I swear I'll post something more interesting in a few days. Just wanted to check in, shout out, and let you know I'm glad you're stopping by the site. It's great to have you here. Lurkers, start posting. We know you're there!

Cheers,
M

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Hello all!

Shocking: A day off! It's been a nutty week, more stuff getting ready for Madness publication. Fun news! I'll be on the Diane Rehm Show on National Public Radio on April 7. Will post the time when I know it, but I hope you will all tune in. She's a great interviewer, and it should be a lot of fun. Meanwhile, I had a great chat with a reporter from Glamour Magazine on Friday—that interview will run in the April issue. And lots of work this week on the new novel, long chats with a couple of people about how that's developing, a few new scenes written. Whoosh! By Friday night, I was ready to crawl into bed with my shoes on.

So today I'm lounging around in Chicago visiting an old friend. We're (get this) going ice skating. I don't think I've been on ice skates since I was twenty, when I had a spectacular argument with my then-boyfriend about how skating was done—he seemed very certain that there was a correct way, and I needed to know it—I didn't agree. Sadly, that relationship was not long for this world, but so it goes. Thus, I will attempt to skate today without knowing the correct way—in all likelihood, it will be a grand failure, but who cares? It's a fine thing when you get to the point in your life where you really don't care how silly you look landing on your butt anymore, as long as you're having a good time. It's tragic I no longer have the fabulous purple skating dress my father gave me for my sixth birthday. Oh, that dress! Beloved purple skating dress! I was such a sight in that dress, soaring around the skating rink at the Sun Valley Mall in northern California! For the youngsters among you, that would have been, um, 1980. For those of you my age and older, how did we get so old?? ...<< MORE >>

...anyway, the opening poem in Thirst has been on my mind for days.

My work is loving the world....

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and not yet half-perfect? Let me
  keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
   astonished.



Now, back to my work at being astonished.

Peace,
Marya

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On other fronts, I continue to discover the obvious. True fact: If you are a smoker, and you quit smoking, and you have a cigarette, you will start smoking again, and be a smoker. I knew that.

So I'm sitting here, 10:12 a.m., feeling cranky because I'm not writing. This is because I have been up since 3, writing; but that doesn't count, because now it is normal work-day hours, and I am not writing. True fact 2: Writers are fking crazy. In addition to being, well, crazy.

But, yes, I WAS writing, when I was still working like a normal person, earlier today, before I became a failure and realized I would never write again. Yesterday I woke up and dashed into my office and wrote a scene that, ok, took place thirty years after the scene I was supposed to be writing—ach, so it goes. Today I returned to the scene I was supposed to write, wrote it, and wrote another one. Then I read it to Jeff, who is a great fan club, especially when he's sitting there in his robe half-asleep and nodding as if he's listening and then laughs at places where it's not funny. This is when I demand, Are you awake? And he leaps awake and says, Oh, yes! Yes, of course! Great scene! And I say, But you don't like it! And he says, I do! I like it! And I say, No, you hate it! And he says, What in the hell are you talking about, you maniac? No, he doesn't. He's very nice about the whole thing. My painter friend M. and I have husbands who are not writers/artists, and we always marvel at how generously they ignore our weirdness and just go about whistling as if we are not like living with frantic yipping chihuahuas.

On writing a novel: it's hard. It seems so easy at first onset of the idea; this idea is quickly, radically smashed, which when you are a novelist is both problematic and perversely thrilling, so you want to write it even more. On writing a novel that takes place in part before I was born: even harder, but also a good artistic stretch. It is actually a little bit like journalistic reporting; you take a subject you don't necessarily know all that well but are fascinated by (ok, sometimes with journalism, you are not in fact necessarily fascinated by it AT ALL, as in the case where I was assigned a story about "window treatments" when I got my first job in magazines, and didn't know what a "window treatment" was, but didn't want to tell my editor, and had to call my mother, and learned that in fact they are "curtains"), but anyway, with a novel, one would hope to hell you ARE fascinated, which in this case I very much am, and so my days spent doing research are delicious. My friend Lora (poet & journalist) was telling me the other day about the time she heard Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay, the recent The Yiddish Policeman's Union, and the too-rarely mentioned The Final Solution, which has one of the best characters ever, a parrot) say at a reading that he sometimes finds the spark for his writing while he is digging around in his research. I have a similar habit; I'm screwing around reading this and that, digging here and there, and without even realizing it, I'm writing scenes in my head. Of course, my scenes then show up at 3 a.m. and I go write one that takes place thirty years after what I'm supposed to be writing. I wonder if Michael Chabon does that. He's a remarkably normal person. He might not. He and David Foster Wallace are two of my favorite living writers. I met Chabon once, and behaved very badly. I won't go into it. Never mind. This is me crawling under my desk.

Fun with Side Effects! My eyes just went into their morning triple-vision thing. Herewith, there may be typos. Sorry.

Actually, only one thing left to say today. I was reading the stunning new collection of Mary Oliver's, Thirst, which I love so much I may already have mentioned it


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So today I woke up at 2 a.m. Great. FYI: Not a good idea to go to sleep at 6 p.m.; you will wake up at 2. (Hey, I was tired.) Then there you are, stuck with your middle-of-the-night frettings and nonsense for another zillion hours before the sun comes up and you return to your saner self. It is very silly to be doing yoga & meditating at 2 a.m. And of course this "meditating" amounted to said fretting. Today's fret topic: work. What else? So I arrive at my desk at normal work hours, already having worked myself into a tizzy—I will never write again! The novel will be terrible! What will happen when the book comes out? Why do I write books? Why didn't I get a sensible job? The problem with writing: you never know if you're doing it right. You sit down every day, and even when you have your scene list next to you (the list that tells me what I will supposedly write that day), you start the scene and have no idea where it goes next. It is the ultimate in uncertainty and ambiguity. And of course those are just two of my very favorite things. Not knowing—I'm just a pro at that.

And to top it off, when I woke up at 2 and felt it necessary to hit Jeff on the head several times to try to wake him up so he could have a nice chat with me in the middle of the night, the rat refused to do so. Speaking entirely in his sleep, in his own special sleep-language, he explained very rationally in gibberish that I could sit up all night by my very own self and fret well enough without him. When I finished laughing so hard I fell off the bed, I thought about how extremely cool and weird the brain is in its ability to create entire grammars and vocabularies that make sense to the sleeper but no sense to the waking world; the brain in its endless coolness, no?

I have been terrifically impressed this week with how much the folks I know in recovery are kicking ass. Notes on this in the ED board.

So this week was spent dashing back and forth between a poem that is nagging at me, the first few scenes of Section 2 of the new novel (ok, the first scene, and a really elaborate scene list for the next 12...), and various things coming up with pre-pub stuff: a couple of interviews, including one that I think appears today in People Magazine, and some plans for articles that will come out closer to April 9. Will post news of those when I know when they'll come out. As for the endless fretting about the novel, my agent has, I'm pretty sure, put me in her spam folder so I'll stop bugging her about how many scenes I should write per day/week/month/forevermore in order to write the book Exactly Right. Her only response is, Would you just WRITE? So, because she knows everything, I'm just writing.

As for endless fun with bipolar, I forgot my meds the other night. DON'T try this at home kids—not fun. I'll be bats all day today, and kicking myself for forgetting, and remembering with horror all those years I spent pretending I didn't really have it (no, really! all this chaos is just, you know, situational!) and refused to take my meds and was bats ALL the time—ugh, it just gives me the willies & the nightmares now. For those of you with any kind of mental struggle—for God's sake, take your meds. I don't want to hear any nonsense about how great crazy is, and how much it helps you "create"—forget it. Read the comments on the mnartists.com discussion on the Madness blog for some smart, insightful words on how the image of the crazy artist is crap—we need to be on our toes to do good work, and that means taking care of our wayward brains.

Weirdest thing the other night: I had a conversation with a person who thinks that mental illness is, ok, partly chemically-driven, but mostly psychological. I fell out of my chair. I am so used to being around people who know about mental illness, and know it's a brain disease, and has an entire body of brain research to support that, which concurrs with all the psychological research that is learning to develop therapies that help people deal with the psychological and emotional EFFECTS of the brain disease, that I often forget that a whole lot of people—most—really still believe it's a matter of character. Lordy, I hope that the publication of Madness will help dispell that notion at least a little bit. But it's also up to those of us who have it to talk to people on a case-by-case basis to bring awareness to the public about the medical nature of mental illness. Hey, maybe if people were aware that it's an illness, they might actually support medical research funds to find treatments that can more effectively help us MI people function well—we're perfectly capable of doing so, if our treatment works. I'm sick of being consigned to the slag heap of people whose illnesses aren't taken seriously, and therefore aren't given the research funds to help us out. I'm not asking for much, people—just some basic awareness that my illness is an illness, and as such deserves the same efforts to treat it so that I can kick as much ass as I'm capable of doing. Lots of ass, thank you very much. Much kicking ass. And I think a lot of us could do with a titch less stigma? No? Well, it's our job to make that happen.

Weather report: cold. Grey and cold. (Say, does anyone know for sure whether it's "gray" or "grey"? I always get it wrong. I have gotten it wrong in every book ...<< MORE >>

If you go to mnartists.org, you'll find a two-part dialogue I did with another artist about the role of mental illness in creativity and art. Pretty interesting, and stirring up some good discussions here. Let me know what you think!
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A week into the new year, and I'm still staggering around wondering what happened. So it goes. I've had a wonderful last month working exclusively on some new poems, which I've now worked into the ground and need to leave alone for a few days—the fabulous poetry shredders/editors are on them, a couple of my friends and colleagues who know insane amounts about poetry, read it voraciously, and are generous enough to turn their beady little critical eye to mine.

As great as that was, tomorrow I dive headfirst into the next section of the novel I'm putting together little ...<< MORE >>

Looks like I don't have a lot of space per blog. Well, get used to multi-blogs every time I post. Anyway...

The time has come: I won't be able to personally answer my mail any longer. It's gotten overwhelming to the point where it's becoming a full-time job, and I have to get back to my job as a writer. If you do wish to write, please be assured that I will be honored to receive your note, but will not respond personally. I will do my best to blog on some of the more common issues raised in ...<< MORE >>