A Geography of Reading

"It is by reading novels, stories, and myths that we come to understand the world in which we live." -Orhan Pamuk

Revisiting Art & Fear in a Time of Crippling Self Doubt

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art and fearIt feels like a long time since I reviewed anything here. It’s been even longer since I wrote anything I consider creative or good that isn’t a blog post. There are lots of reasons for this–things like marketing a book, changing a job, and getting my life in order all take time. But the big reason, as I’ve come to realize this weekend, is fear. So I turned, as I have so many times before, to this slim little volume called Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland.

Identifying the Problem

When I was talking to my husband this weekend, trying to figure out why I sometimes feel lately like I am hollow or don’t have a voice (wow, that looks so much smaller, more manageable in type–I should have started blogging earlier), the conversation inevitably turned to fear. Fear of failure. Fear of success. Fear of being seen for who I really am. Fear of not being seen for who I really am… the list continues.

I should have known (by now) that fear had become a problem because I was feeling paralyzed in a somewhat similar way to how I feel when three salespeople flank me at Best Buy (BTW, if we ever happen to see a war, I might not be the best person to have your back), except for much, much bigger. And I’ve been flailing. I’ve made some big declarations about what I’m writing on social media. While they often sound self-congratulatory (which I hate), they are for me–to remind me what it feels like to believe I can do good work.


I’ve been making equally big declarations about not writing. Because I need to admit to myself that I’m not.


Note that those tweets are from the same day. The ups and downs for me is a symptom of the fear. This is how I am when I don’t feel grounded in myself–which means my work.

Art & Fear

Of all the amazing books my husband brought home from art school (Motherless Brooklyn, White Noise, City of Glass and more), Art & Fear has to be the most useful. It’s written by two artists and it’s written for practicing artists (as opposed to the genius-types that we like to put on pedestals and assume they have no struggles). It delves into the feeling of creating work and, more importantly right now, the feeling of not creating work. They write simple phrases like, “There’s a painful irony to… discovering how frequently and easily success transmutes into depression” and “tolerance for uncertainty is the prerequisite to succeeding.” They remind me that “Art happens between you and something” and that it is only by producing quantity that a perfectionist like me has any hope of producing quality.

Art & Fear covers fears you might feel about yourself and your work. It covers fears you might have about others and the art world in general. It’s so comprehensive and concise. And it’s insightful. And I think everyone should have a copy for the harder days.

The book is 122 pages and I read the whole thing over again in just over an hour last night. It has to be the third or fourth time I’ve read the book and I’ll go back again when I feel this way. Because it always gets straight to the heart of what I’m feeling and why. It reminds me that the very things that make it hard for me to write are the things that make me a great writer (writing that I’m a “great” writer was a bit of an exercise for me there and I want to delete it but I’m leaving it).

One of the many things I love about being married to an artist is that he sees this struggle in me and he can relate. I hope I won’t wait for him to point it out next time before turning back to the book, but any way that this gentle reminder of the fact that the fear is both normal and motivating makes it into my hands is a gift and I’ll take it.

So What’s My Deal?

“Artists don’t get down to work until the pain of working is exceeded by the pain of not working.” – Stephen DeStaebler

Now that I’m coming out of this funk a bit, I can look at what the causes are and see what, if anything, I can do to avoid it next time.

Starting Over

“The depth of your need to make things establishes the level of risk in not making them.” – David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear

I made a book this year! I made two! And then I was empty. I’ve written a little about this in the past few months, but I spent so many years honing Polska, 1994 that I cannot remember what it is like to start a new project. That’s been really, really scary. And I’m trying to push myself even farther with the next book, which makes it scarier still.

Starting a New Job

“Lesson for the day: vision is always ahead of execution–and it should be.” – David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear

I was recently hired at this really fantastic company (Moz) that deeply cares about my success and me as a human being and they want to pay me to write. That’s both an enormous gift and a whole lot of pressure (especially for someone who trucks in hiding behind her work–something that’s already been noticed and mentioned to me in a helpful way). I’m trying to live up to it because I know how rare this opportunity is. But aside from the exhaustion that comes from learning all the norms of a new culture, I’m also terrified that the faith they have placed in me is mislaid. I guess I feel a little like an imposter about to be found out. For my first big project, I’m investigating some things that are deeply exciting for me, but the farther I stretch, the more concerned I become that the work isn’t good enough or right enough or right for the audience. And despite the fact that I’m working inside a framework where it’s safe (and encouraged) to talk about these things, I haven’t yet opened myself to that process.

“The seed for your next art work lies embedded in the imperfections of your current piece.” – David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear

So this week my homework is to talk with this wonderful group of people about how I feel. It’s to be brave about what I think my failings might be and to ask for help. It’s to accept that I will fail (if I’ve gone far enough) and to trust that I can get up from that and do better next time. That all looks so good in type…

Approval

“Courting approval, even that of peers, puts a dangerous amount of power in the hands of the audience.” – David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear

Putting my books out into the world is part of their natural life cycle. It’s also exposing them to judgment. That’s hard, but I can man up and accept it’s part of the deal. Starting a new job is putting myself out there and it’s exposing me to judgment as I worry I can only disappoint.

I am smart enough about myself to know that changing jobs right after putting my artwork into the world was going to be treacherous. But this opportunity was too great to pass up. One of the things about me that works as an artist is this insane ability to get deep inside myself and my work and only care about what I think. But I don’t get to do that right now. Instead, I’m presenting all my fingerpaintings to the world and asking for them to find value in them by buying my book or signing my paycheck. It’s okay. It’s normal. But it’s going to take me a little while to find myself in the process and find the comfort zone where I am in charge of my own judgment again. Where I feel strong enough to open up and receive the kind of feedback I need to grow without it feeling like my underlying worth is being challenged.

Postscript

After writing the bulk of this blog post, I had an epic conversation with one of my closest friends. We talked about a lot of things I’ve written about here and about some of the ways they manifest in our lives overall. I’m lucky in my life to have a few of those people (including my husband) who intrinsically get me and whom I trust to challenge me. They help me be stronger and more myself in the world at large. I just want them to know how grateful I am for that.

Growth is hard, but it’s worth it. And it’s easier when you have a good support system. I feel very lucky in that regard.

Oh, and I’ve re-started my second novel. That’s what the first tweet was about. I’m scared as hell but I won’t let that stop me from making good use of the notebook I’ve put into my purse just for that project. Wish me luck!

If you need some help navigating Art & Fear, pick up a copy from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Reflecting on The Dismal Science of Fatherhood

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the dismal science - peter mountfordEven before I opened The Dismal Science by Peter Mountford, I wanted to share it with my dad. The main character, Vincenzo, is an economist and vice president at the World Bank. My dad is a forest economist who’s worked for USAID and spoken at the UN. Kismet, right? As I delved deeper into Mountford’s wry humor and brilliantly aware look at the world of an economist, I got closer and closer to ordering a copy for my dad for Father’s Day. It reminded me so much of him and the things he’s taught me that wanted him to share this book with me.

And then I realized he already had.

Art Imitates Life

Because what I loved about the book, aside from the re-immersion into the world of economics (for a brief few years I thought I’d go into International Political Economics and work at the World Bank), was that I felt closer to my dad while reading it. Mountford’s portrayal of a man testing the boundaries of his career as he jumps into a midlife crisis felt very real and very personal. It brought back all kinds of memories of when my dad’s career took a sharp left turn. Vincenzo is sick of being told what to do by the administration so he pushes back and ends up jobless (despite several attempts by colleagues to get him to save himself). My dad pushed up against his own administrative constraints as he battled with an unreasonable dean and ended up an independent consultant (which is when the really interesting work began).

All the while Vincenzo is battling with his college-aged daughter over her vision of who he should be. My dad was battling with teenaged me (okay, I may have been battling with him) over, well, everything.

Flexibility of Thinking

“‘Any good economist knows how to read the data in a way to get a favorable result'” – Peter Mountford, The Dismal Science

Sometimes I think having a background in Economics is a curse. It’s also a crazy blessing. What my dad taught me is that economists have this amazing ability to pull back and view the entire world as a game with rational actors behaving in their own best interests. If the game pieces (people) aren’t behaving the way you think they should, then the model is wrong and you go and reassess your parameters. This flexibility of thought is the most amazing resource for a writer and I think Mountford (whose father is also an economist) must have benefited from the same education because there’s an openness about this book and the possible results that arrange themselves in front of Vincenzo.

But the thing is that Economics is also the opposite of Creative Writing in a lot of ways. It’s creative all right (see openness of possible results), but the best books create a sense of deep empathy that’s missing from the (dismal) science of behavior. I’m not saying empathy is missing in economists, but I do think that for men like Vincenzo and my dad, operating at the level of the intellect in ignorance of their sweet hearts is what causes their breaks.

You see, my dad the academic is probably also the biggest softie on the inside that I’ve ever met. But something about the combination of the generation he was born into (men will be Men) and life with his father made my dad think he needed to hide all those feelings. (It’s actually a family thing my cousin was just in town and the phrase she used most often was “have FEELINGS about” which is the perfect way of showing exactly where my generation of McKettas is in the struggle to integrate our intellects with our hearts as we earn more graduate degrees than I can count while learning that it’s okay to cry at least occasionally).

I don’t know if it’s Mountford’s wonderful sense of empathy or his clean reportage that let me get so deep into Vincenzo’s crisis, but The Dismal Science is both deeply human and intellectual in the most wonderful ways.

Breaking to Build

“When Leonora called fifteen minutes later, she was rapturous, beginning: ‘Oh my fucking God, Dad, what did you do?!’ He hadn’t heard her sound so pleased with him in years. In fact, he couldn’t remember a time that she’d sounded so pleased with him.” – Peter Mountford

Vincenzo’s break may in part be caused by seeing for a moment his life through the eyes of his daughter, Leonora as she asks him how he’d feel if she protested in front of his office. I don’t know if daughters really have that kind of power, but I think we do, and I’ve often felt like my dad’s touchstone. After Vincenzo goes off the deep end, he meets up with Leonora again for another check-in, he realizes how much she admires this new turn he’s taken.

I don’t know that my dad has ever had that aha! moment where he gets insight into how much I admire him. Our nonfiction relationship is more complicated. We commiserated once about an Econ professor we’d both had, but I don’t think I ever told him I considered going into IPE. And when he’s shared his deepest feelings with me, I’ve probably been in reactive “Let me be a kid” mode. But I know where my dad comes from and as much as I brag about his forays into the Khyber Pass with USAID, his visits to Afghanistan and the Philippines, or his testimony before Congress, what I am most proud of are the moments where he lets the world see his incredibly caring heart. It takes a lot of work to break out from our collective McKetta Intellectual Shield and share your FEELINGS. It’s messy and it hurts (and sometimes feels like you’re inside Garden State). Worst of all, it’s imperfect.

Screw that. BEST of all it’s imperfect. Because it’s human. Because it’s the closest any of us can be to Baba–my grandmother who we all deified because she was kind, gentle, and caring–the woman who we knew we didn’t have the courage to be.

The Art of Imperfection

I’ve had a very imperfect year. I’ve been really busy with a lot of important things. I’ve made new connections and leveled up on the career ladder (in more than one career path). But I’ve neglected the people who make me feel human. And although I wanted desperately to send my dad a copy of this book, I was worried he’d see in that some sort of impugning of his human side. So instead I sent him nothing this Father’s Day–in a year when I think he could most use my admiration and love.

So here it is, Dad. This is your Father’s Day gift. I read a book that reminded me so much of you for exactly the opposite reasons you’d think. Instead of the “failure” you remember, it reminded me of your courage and your sweet heart. It reminded me that you are more Baba than you’ll ever know. It’s not an easy road, but it’s a rewarding one. And if you choose to continue following it, know that I’m looking up to you along the way.

What We Read into Books

There is so much more to The Dismal Science than Vincenzo’s career suicide and his relationship with his daughter. Some people might relate deeply to his relationship with Walter or the ebb and flow of his libido. You might rejoice in his willingness to throw politics aside and end up embroiled in new politics in a third world country. The art of what Mountford has done with this book is to create one gorgeous story with multiple entry points. You can see how it sucked me in. I’ll be interested to see how it reads from your point of view.

If you want to participate in the discussion, pick up a copy of The Dismal Science from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Nuance and Culture in A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea by Dina Nayeri

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In an age of easy jet travel, very little of the world seems inaccessible anymore. But some places, because of their extreme location (the peak of Mt. Everest) or the political boundaries we’ve set (Tibet), retain their exotic flavor. For me, Iran is one of those places–so remote and inaccessible that I hadn’t, until recently, even explored it through literature. The couple of films I’d seen–Persepolis and Argo left me with very specific impressions–but it wasn’t until reading A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea by that the richness of the Iranian culture began to open for me.

Through the story of one girl, Saba, and her twin sister, Mahtab (who may have emigrated to the US), Nayeri unfolds the complexities of post-revolutionary village life in Iran. The book is so gorgeous and thought-provoking that I was still looking for excuses to bring it up in conversation even weeks after turning the final page. This book reminded me of work by Micheline Aharonian Marcom and Diana Abu-Jaber in its layered insights into a foreign culture and I can’t stop thinking about it.

I thought I was reading this book because like my novella, Polska, 1994, it’s about a girl looking for the truth of what happened to her mother. But it was so much more…

Juxtaposing Cultures

Part of the magic of the book is in the relationship between Saba’s reality and the imagined world of her twin as she navigates a new life in America. Because the communication between the two countries is so poor, it remains plausible that Mahtab is living it up in America like Saba’s twin sense intimates. But it’s equally plausible that Mahtab is a vehicle to describe the stifled desires of Saba.

Because we are seeing two worlds at once, we learn more about both of them. Saba buys tapes of American TV shows smuggled into the country and Mahtab lives the life of an American TV show. Clothed in a headscarf, Saba dreams of escaping to a foreign university where she can study anything she wants–a path that may involve marrying and then getting the consent of her husband. Meanwhile Mahtab the free attends Harvard where she Americanizes her name and experiments with dating. Saba’s dreams in many ways seem very small, but in comparison to Mahtab’s life, each tiny detail rings with importance. And Nayeri imbues each small desire with such sweet innocence that it’s easy to crawl inside of Saba’s life and begin to understand the complexity of the world she lives in.

Literature of Exile

“The moral police don’t hate indecency as much as their own urges.” – Dina Nayeri

Of course in many ways the writing of this book must have functioned in reverse. Nayeri, an Iranian exile who emigrated to the US at age ten. So while she is writing of a sister in Iran dreaming of life in America, in reality Nayeri is living an American life and projecting back to what life might have been like if she stayed in Iran. It’s a complicated relationship, particularly because Nayeri easily could have used this book as a chance to either throw potshots at the revolutionary government of Iran or to wax nostalgic about a homeland lost.

What I love and respect about this book is that she does neither. Instead, A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea is a nuanced and loving look at the people of Iran that deals with the strict Islamic government as thoughtfully as it considers the relationships between village women. Each time I wondered whether the peek into Iran I was getting was politically biased, Nayeri would once again display her love of the underlying culture and I don’t think I could have picked a better book to begin to understand Iran.

But of course when you’re dealing with two countries in political opposition, there is always a slant and I did wonder what an Iranian woman would think of this book. My hunch is that whatever she would think of the politics, the daily life and human experience would ring true.

Resisting Expectations

“Women always do these kinds of jobs–cleansing each other of filth and sin. It is a way of showing the world that it is not by the standards of men that they are judged and found lacking.” – Dina Nayer

Because there is such a tortured political history between the US and Iran (and because my understanding of the situation is so limited), I did come into this book with some baggage. I expected total subjugation of women. I expected tight control and arbitrary regulations. I expected to come out hating the revolutionary government. But Nayeri deals more in human truths than political ones, which is a far better tack, and when given the opportunity to fulfill some cliche or other, she turns the cliche on its head and teaches the reader about thinking beyond the normal expectations.

For example, when Saba consents to a marriage with a man she does not love but who might offer her freedom in the future, I honestly expected (as she expected) for her to be raped on her wedding night. Instead what happens that night and throughout the course of her marriage is infinitely more nuanced, thoughtful, and (at times) heartbreaking. And when Saba’s beautiful but poor (and therefore powerless) friend Ponneh is attacked in the marketplace for revealing too much (or because her beauty is heartbreaking), Nayeri reveals some of the human frailty that goes into terrorizing others. It’s not always a comfortable look, but it’s an important one.

Our Global Village

“Now that she is older… with her own home and family, she considers all the mothers she has been offered, each good for a handful of things: Khanom Basir for household tricks, Khanom Mansoori for mischief, Dr. Zohreh for educated advice, Khanom Omidi for wisdom. Together they have failed to replace her mother, who was good at none of these things.” – Dina Nayeri

One of the highlights of this book is the relationships whether the triangle of love and friendship between Saba, Reza, and Ponneh or the chorus of village women who both enforce and thwart norms in ways that are infinitely interesting. Their relationships are complex and as much as they have their own lives and desires, there is also an underlying level of support and love.

As I was reading this book, I was feeling very lonely. I nearly cried when I read about the women in Saba’s village and how they gathered in her home after her marriage and “showed her how to store her spices, and bone her fish, and every other mundane thing they could think of”. At the same time, my American friend who is an expat in Singapore wrote a blog post about the village of people she’s finally found to support her. And another friend, a Romanian emigrant to America, replied about the instability of an adopted community. I realized that one of the things I was most attracted to in this book was that feeling of connection and community. I grew up in a small town that I yearned to leave, but now as I get older and am thinking about starting a family, I wonder where my support system is. I have a global network of beloved friends who can speak to my soul, but here in Seattle I have only a few people I would burden with requests to help build a deck or babysit our theoretical children.

I could relate to Saba’s pulling away from her home and I also saw in this book the way the women around her were trying to teach her what they had done to survive and to show her that she is part of something greater. By opening up in a comment to my friend’s post, I let myself see what I was missing. I also let others see what I have been missing and I’m realizing that my village here in Seattle is stronger than I thought.

Now that I’ve tasted a bit of Iran, I’m excited to learn more about her people and culture. Maybe I’ll sneak down to Portland for a sumptuously relaxed dinner at Persian House (I have a wicked craving for doogh) or just cuddle up on the couch while streaming The Patience Stone.

If you want to experience this gorgeous look at Iran for yourself, pick up a copy of A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Ambiguity and The Effect of Living Backwards by Heidi Julavits

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Confession time. I have a crush on . I’ve never met her and can’t really conjure up an image of what she looks like–no, it’s her brain that I love. I adored both The Vanishers and The Uses of Enchantment because they opened up a whole world of literature for me that exists between science fiction and conventional narrative. She delves so deeply into the complex ways that our thoughts shape us, that her stories almost become alternate realities. Anyway, I was casting about for something to read this week and when I saw The Effect of Living Backwards on my shelf, I knew I had to read it.

Casting About

Unmoored, lost… all these words come up a lot lately in my reviews. I’ve been searching. This has been a really crazy year for me as I’ve published two books, started to write for the LA Review of Books, and most recently as I’ve accepted a new job. A really wonderful year, but also one that’s upended just about everything and I find myself seeking balance, consistency, and stability. None of that is likely to happen in the near term and I’m trying to embrace how wonderful change can be. Maybe that’s why I sought out The Effect of Living Backwards this week–because I knew that Julavits would force me to think deeply and in new ways.

Alice, the protagonist of The Effect of Living Backwards, is in the middle of her own mind fuck. So much so that I don’t know why I questioned for a second if her name was a Carroll reference. She’s at The International Institute for Terrorist Studies and she’s being asked to question everything about her life. Not just the events themselves–most importantly a hijacking that she and her sister were involved in–but her perceptions of those events. She’s asked to flip everything on its head and try and uncover what’s really real.

“After four more bewildering sessions with Clifford, my autobiography lay in penciled tatters on her metal desk. I admitted to the possibility… that the Moroccan Air plan on which my sister and I were passengers had never been a proper part of the Moroccan Air fleet. The pilots on Flight 919 were part of the hijacking, as were the other passengers, as were the police.” – Heidi Julavits, The Effect of Living Backwards

Crazy as this is going to sound, I could relate to this complete and total deconstruction of her life. At this point I don’t know whether it was having a professor for a father or being raised around a bunch of gifted and talented kids, but the impulse to take every aspect of my life apart and look at each component from all angles (including the “it was all a dream” approach) is ingrained in me. Sometimes to a paralyzing degree. This kind of flexible, deep thought is part of what makes me a novelist (for which I’m grateful), but it’s also something that leads me to watch shows like Alias and Orphan Black and start to develop (paranoid) theories about my upbringing.

Part of the mastery of The Effect of Living Backwards is that although Alice is going through this process of casting about to see what is (or might be) real, the story of the hijacking (which occupies much more of the book than I anticipated) feels deeply real. It takes real craft to be able to portray indecision and confusion on the part of a character in a way that feels concrete and relatable. This is not a comfortable book to read. And I’m so glad I read it anyway.

Ars Poetica

“Because we were our father’s daughters, I continued, which was to say because we were attracted to the justified manipulation of the scientific method, we decided to initiate our own secular Shame Book project” – Heidi Julavits, The Effect of Living Backwards

Alice and her sister Edith concoct (or do they transcribe?) stories of the shame experienced by people in their lives. Alice recounts tales of her entire life for Dr. Clifford. The hijackers and hostage negotiator create conflicting narratives about what’s happening with the plane.

This book is, on one level, about the art of storytelling. Alice’s questioning and unraveling of characters and actions and motivations felt very much like the process of writing a book. As I was hunting for the significant detail in the hostage negotiator’s calls, I was remembering carefully selecting these types of details in my own writing so that they would give my readers the information they need to ground themselves in time. And the same happened when I encountered a repeated passage, or, more interestingly, a passage that was slightly torqued in its repetition.

“People do not tell accurate stories about themselves when they are given the chance. They tell, as Miles Keebler called them, ‘representative anecdotes.'” – Heidi Julavits, The Effect of Living Backwards

Reading this book, I realized that I use fiction to create stability and comprehension in my world. I narrow the threads of the narrative down. I eliminate nonessential characters. I seek the themes and also the wonder so that the book is coherent without being didactic. By reading about Alice’s “childhood of theoretical decision-making,” I was starting to understand what an asset all those hours of brain games were. As uncomfortable as I was in a narrative that did not have a concrete reality, The Effect of Living Backwards upended my thinking just enough to see the bright side of having he ability to see–and ultimately parse–all the possibilities.

Ambiguity Done Well

I still don’t fully know the truth of this book. And I’m fine with that. I think on a second and third read, The Effect of Living Backwards would continue to unfold. It’s the type of book I could write a dissertation about. Creating those layers of nuance and potentiality is a true art. One I appreciated even more this week when watching the season finale of Hannibal. Although at first I really loved that show, I’ve begun to feel more and more like even the writers don’t know what’s happening next. And in the final scene of the season (which I will not reveal here), I was left with yet another moment of “what the hell, why?”

As much I don’t know which version of reality to trust in Julavits’ book, I trust Julavits to have embedded the right details and motivations to make the story ambiguous rather than arbitrary. I may never read deeper into the book and get beyond the ambiguity (turns out I might like living in this state more than I thought), but I love knowing that the possibility exists.

As I’m working to delve into my next writing project, I’m also living my life a little backwards right now. I’m so glad I read this book at this time. I needed to see that ability to first see and then winnow all the factors as a strength rather than as the instrument of paralysis it can sometimes seem like. I don’t know what I’ll publish next (or when), but I hope it’s at least a tiny bit as transformational and intelligent as Julavits’ writing is.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The Effect of Living Backwards from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

My Writing Process (A Blog Tour)

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I’ve been tagged in the My Writing Process Blog Tour by Ann Hedreen, filmmaker, soon-to-be author of Her Beautiful Brain, and all-around great human being.

What am I working on?

My first novel, Polska, 1994 publishes this Thursday and I want to be able to tell you about the gorgeous next novel I have queued up and waiting for the masses to demand it. But I’m also realizing that there isn’t a lot of conversation around the postpartum slump that some authors (me!) experience.

I spent six years perfecting that book and it’s based on ideas I’ve been mulling for almost two decades. I’m not saying I don’t have another book in me, I do (more on that in a second), but the transition from gorgeously polished work to starting over with a blank page is flat-out brutal. And I just wanted to acknowledge that for a minute before telling you about projects that are so nascent they are basically ephemeral right now. They may well take the shape I describe and they might morph and change into something else entirely. My challenge is to not get impatient with myself and force them into being something they either aren’t or aren’t ready to be.

There are two projects I’ve been playing with since finishing Polska, 1994. One is a second novel entitled Hungry Ghosts. I sometimes say this book is about the way we change ourselves to be loved. I often believe this book is my final embrace of feminism. Right now it’s 50,000 words of starts and ideas. I’m hoping there are some gems in there, but it’s not fair to call it a novel yet. I have a structure in mind, but I’ve had many structures in mind in the nearly four years I’ve been mulling the idea. I think it will be an experimental book that draws (somehow) on the style of Alain Robbe-Grillet, but it’s really too early to say.

The second project is a book of poetry entitled Port Townsend Elegy which investigates my unfurling as an artist (and human) in grad school as well as my deep personal connection to Port Townsend, WA. This book is actually a lot more formed in terms of drafts (thanks to a lovely writing residency at The Whiteley Center in Friday Harbor), but it’s my first foray into poetry since high school and I don’t trust yet that I have the craft to pull off the book in the way I want to. So I’m learning about poetry as I write and rewrite the poems in this book. I don’t know when I’ll be comfortable to let it fly, but I do know this book is far from ready for the public eye.

I’ve also been considering writing a memoir about how living abroad changed my life. That sounds much more pat than it is. Maybe? That project is still just a glimmer in my eye.

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

This is actually a really good question, because the way we write tends to determine the genre we write in. I write in what I consider to be a literary style, which means I pay a lot of attention to observation and the language that observation is expressed in. Plot is never the first thing I think of when writing (though it’s something I focus a lot on when editing because it is important to a certain extent). I find the writers I am most closely drawn to are novelist-poets, so I hope I don’t differ from them all that much.

But saying that your work is just like someone else’s rankles, doesn’t it? I suppose my unique “blend” comes from the fact that I read so very widely, I pay so much attention to the language (the various languages I’ve spoken over the years has taught me a syntactic flexibility that I’m proud of), and also that I’m deeply interested in culture and how that affects a character’s circumstances. That last bit is most often expressed as an obsession with oppression which leads us naturally to the next question…

Why do I write what I do?

Micheline Aharonian Marcom once said, “Write into the heat.” She also talked a lot about obsessions. After putting the final, final edit on Polska, 1994 this weekend, I can’t see how people write literature about things they aren’t obsessed with, because to work that deeply in a project for so long, you’d murder the writing (or perhaps a family member) if the story wasn’t something you needed to tell.

My obsession is oppression–both political and personal. I’m a quiet person which means it’s often easy for people to run themselves right over me (intentionally or not). I don’t usually push back too hard because I have a strong sense of who I am (and am not all that concerned with what others think). But still, over time you want someone to notice who you are and acknowledge that you matter. I especially want some sort of shared purpose and understanding and I’m learning that in order to get that, I have to assert myself more.

And I’ve lived in both Chile and Poland–experiences that changed my perspective–helped me see how governments and corporations sometimes run right over people. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how oppression also happens on a gender level.

I write about becoming. About rising up and blossoming. I write about creating the world that I want to live in and the ways I can and cannot help others live in that world too.

How does your writing process work?

I could tell you about how I split up my day to get the most writing time possible while still holding down a full time job. I could write about the hour of writing time in the morning I too often sleep through or the hour in the evening I often give up because I just want to see my husband before I pass out on the couch.

Instead I want to write about ideas and how a project comes about. A poem or story starts for me with a nagging question or feeling. Something that isn’t sitting just right either because it’s something that feels wrong or even simply alien (without judgment). Oftentimes I’ll mull it over for a significant period of time (though not always decades) and fuss about it and read about it and talk about it. But nothing ever feels resolved until I finally sit down with paper and pen. It’s funny how even a few minutes can make everything feel all better or more comprehensible or manageable. I don’t solve the problem there in the first few minutes or in the first draft (or really ever), but each time I sit down and write about one of these rubs, I learn more about it and how I feel about it. I keep digging and learning and often discover that the “problem” is something entirely different than I even imagined. Eventually I have a narrative or a pretty good capture of the feeling and then I edit, edit, edit. The honing of language and shaping of elements that happen during the editing process are very important to the end product and with Polska, 1994, I went through over twenty drafts to get it just right.

By nature, a blog tour should have a “here’s who’s up next,” but it’s been a crazy busy month and every chain letter has to end somewhere, right? Instead, here are a few of my favorite bloggers (besides, Ann, of course):

SILENCE & HONEYSUCKLE by Gwendolyn Jerris
PEACE & CENTER by Natasha Oliver
PURPLE HOUSES by Nikki Kallio
REWRITING HISTORY by Roxana Arama
A LITTLE ELBOW ROOM by Kim Mayer

They may not be answering this same set of questions directly, but their work nourishes me all the time and I think it will do the same for you.