Monthly Archives: November 2011

Good morning and good morning. There was a rainbow outside when the pup and I went out for her first morning walk a little bit ago, big and wide, thin, perfect. Now it’s all grey and rain (almost typed rein). Also perfect. The Mr is in the kitchen, making cornbread stuffing for a big communal Thanksgiving meal we’re going to this afternoon. After he’s done, I’ll make the rolls. We’re also bringing pumpkin pie, greens, and cranberry sauce. Yesterday, I brought pumpkin-oat cookies and sweetpotato-carrot-oat bread to the Writing the Flood workshop (both of these are very good with cream cheese, let me just say). I like the baking time of year.

It occurred to me earlier this week that this is always a difficult time of year. Not only is it necessary to be more in the dark, but also these are the ostensible family holidays — who, who is a survivor of any kind of family violence, doesn’t struggle with loss and sorrow in the face of an onslaught of advertising that carries forth the mythology of the ideal American family, all those happy loving people, people who protect each other, people who are shelter from a storm?

I have a confession to make to you: the communal meal I’m going to today is at church, at the church I’ve been attending for several months. I’m alarmed to be confessing this to you, a little disconnected in the writing, but I’m tired of pretending like it’s not an important piece of something that has to do with learning how to connect in community. Still, it freaks me out to find myself getting ready for church on Sunday mornings, this same me who loved the fact that my parents didn’t make us go to church when we were growing up, so we had Sunday mornings to ourselves when all the rest of our friends had to get dressed up in uncomfortable clothes and go sit quiet in hard pews or sit in overbright rooms with cartoon Jesuses and talk about the bible. I always felt out of place when I went to sunday school with my cousins or friends, because everyone talked about Jesus like they actually knew him, and they knew the answers to the teacher’s questions about bible stories. I hated not knowing answers to teacher’s questions. (This came up again in English class, later, when we were discussing The Old Man and The Sea, and our teacher wanted to discuss its allegorical facets — why was everyone supposed to recognize Jesus and the cross when the old man was schlepping his mast around? Where did that expectation come from?)

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An evening blog today — these always feel a little strange, a little like cheating: writing at night? Who gets to do that?

A great group of writers today at Writing the Flood — I feel so fortunate to get to do this work! For today’s post, I’m sharing a write from today:

Splinter, tangle, seraphim, rage, strongthrom, wanting, abash, egalitarian, terraform, thrombosis, trombone, Rorschach, warpath, sever, spittle, single, hiss, salivate, captcha, chanter, telegraph, some days this is all I have, these words, this repetition, the joy that comes with framing and forming the syllables, making my mouth work, I forget how my mouth worked. Laughter, ostentation, cellophane, transom, calabash, septuagenarian, strongarm, there’s something living under the words, under and inside the angle of jawbone and tongue, something wanting a formation of its own. I sit inside nomenclature and rigamarole and want something different, a word with that structure but other letters, a word unlike molestation but with that flavor, a word that rolls like sanctimonious but reads more like empty. How to find these words. How to trust them. the old practice was to sit down with pen and notebook and brimming coffee cup and open hours and write it all out, thick and messy and endless and wet, until what was burning too tender for words under the surfaces of language could peek its way out between the letters. I don’t write that way anymore, no time, gotta get it done, gotta get to work. This is one of those stories.

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(begun this morning, and I’m just sharing it now. sometimes hard times mean the post comes late.)

All morning I’ve thought I’ve heard winter storms — just now, there’s a scraping, rumbling sound, and I’m imagining the snowplow pushing past the apartment building, clearing the road from the night’s storm. Last night, it was wind, and in my sleep, I heard the hard blowing from northern New England storms, the heavy wind, the push of snow and ice. It’ll be a surprise to go out this morning into the cool fog of California, and not a white winter wonderland. Something in my body is ready for hibernation, possibly.

This morning I’ve got the deep tired that comes when your body is working overtime and your heart and head are, too. I’m ready for a break. When do we get a break?

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Hello hello –there’s a deep tired this morning that’s getting in the way of writing.  Foghorns outside, no owls. Just the mechanical, human sounds.

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Yesterday, I read about two more allegations of ongoing abuse and cover-ups: at the Citidel, and at another sports franchise (I’m hunting down the link — oh, and then in looking for links to this story, I found this one about young gymnasts sexually abused by their coach.)

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Good morning! Just write it (this is me talking to the spinn-y, writing self) — just write it.

I’m sending thanks again this morning to  Karma Waltonen at UC Davis for setting up yesterday’s Conversations with Writers presentation, and, too, to Rae Gouirand, for connecting us up! It was a wicked fun presentation, we all wrote together (!) and I’m so grateful to have had the chance to think about and discuss why it’s important — yes, still important, even now, especially now, at this time of revolution — to talk about erotic writing: remember what they said about that army of lovers? Right: we cannot fail. Consider the possibility of an embodied revolution that can envision and reach for their the world they desire — that’s what I hope for.

Gorgeous group of folks there last night, and so attentive. I’m unaccustomed to folks taking notes while I talk about writing practice. Such an honor.

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Happy Sunday night to you — it’s late here, nearly bedtime (past, actually), and so this post will be short.

On Tuesday afternoon, I’m going to get to talk (at UC Davis) about erotic writing as liberatory practice — so I’m thinking about that today. What does it mean, liberatory practice? How can writing enact liberation? How can we be thinking or talking about sex, the erotic, at a time of revolution?

The real question I want to get to is, How can we not talk about the erotic at this time of revolutionary presence and liberatory engagement?

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