Sunny day in June
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
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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