2009 in Review: The Writer's Report

I have this idea of how productive I should be, and it never matches how productive I am. I always have in mind this past ideal time, a largely mythical time, where I wrote novels in the morning, sent out manuscript submissions in the afternoon, scribbled poems in between, and met with artist friends for dinner.

While my life has been like that here and there, I've usually only had one element happening at a time. I'm sending out dozens of submissions a month, but not writing much. Or I'm blazing away on a novel, but not writing anything else. You get the idea.

I have this idea that I've accomplished absolutely nothing with my writing, but can that be true? Probably not. Let's check in.

Poems Published

By sorting through this blog, it appears that I've had 11 poems published in 2009. Hurrah!

Poems Written

I've been beating myself up for writing nothing this year, but I have filled up 3 legal pads. Let's go through the legal pads and see how much of this noodling resulted in actual poems.

51 poems

And I wrote about 15 poem-ettes for the August Poetry Postcard project and several haiku for the poem-a-day challenge in April. And I probably wrote a few here and there, at the office or other places, where I worked on an idea, even though I didn't have my poetry legal pad with me.

51 poems. Wow. I've never actually gone back to count how many poems I've written in a year, so I don't know how this year compares to past years, but 51 poems is far from nothing in any year.

Will they all be published? No. Some of them aren't particularly good, and I'm not likely to have any ideas to make them better.

I keep all my old notebooks, and I have this idea that I'll go back through them some day and pick up wisps of ideas and turn them into something. But so far, I never have.

I also like the idea of being the kind of writer who works on poems every day, but I'm not. I work in bursts. When I'm not working in a burst, I always worry that I'll never write again, but I should probably work on putting that worry aside. Even during horrible times of trauma (like after hurricanes or when a loved one is in trouble, medical or otherwise), I still store away images and return to writing when life calms down.

Other Writing I've Done

Let's not count the endless accreditation reports, although if I did, I've probably written 50-75 pages throughout the year. Probably more. Sigh.

Let's not count all the e-mails I've written, although I've labored over some of them longer than I've labored over poems. Double sigh.

I spent much of September writing an academic paper on To Kill a Mockingbird. It's always interesting to flex those muscles. And it's always good to remember that willing librarians and Interlibrary Loan just aren't as good as a real research library. Nowhere close in fact. There are many things I don't miss about grad school, but I'll never recover from having access to Thomas Cooper Library at the University of South Carolina. My reading and researching life will never be that good again.

I also wrote several book reviews.

And I blogged a lot. I've been worrying that blogging has taken the place of all other writing, but clearly it hasn't.

However, I haven't written in my old-fashioned, offline, paper journal as much. Blogging has taken the place of much of that writing. I'm not sure how I feel about that.

Poems Submitted

I usually submit a lot of work in the Fall, but I spent much of September writing my academic paper. So I've been feeling guilty/slackerly about not getting that done. But let's see what I accomplished (and let's try not to compare it to what got published, and let's definitely not compute the postage cost).

150 poetry packets sent out into the world. So, I'm not as slackerly as I thought.

Manuscript Progress

I'm still sending out my first book-length manuscript (which is really more like my 3rd, but I abandoned my early ones). I also sent out some chapbook manuscripts. My submissions notebook shows I sent out manuscripts 17 times.

But in a more exciting development, I put together a new book-length collection. The poems in this book are strange and they focus on God and other religious issues. I expect that right-wing types will hate the idea of Jesus in the modern world, a theme of many of the poems, and atheists will refuse to touch it, and academic types won't know what to make of it. It might be doomed from the start. But I like it.

Other Creative Pursuits

I've finished one full size quilt, and I'm close to finishing another queen size quilt. I've made several baby quilts.

I've crocheted 10 scarves.

I've sung a lot, but not practiced any instrument.

I've been part of creating liturgies and worship services at church and on retreat.

I've done a bit of photography.

I've cooked and baked, but never as much as I would like. I haven't tried many new recipes this year. But I haven't had to resort to eating fast food, no matter how busy my life has gotten.

I always wish I had done more painting, fabric art, and collage art. This past year, I only created a piece or two.

Summary

For the most part, my Creativity Self is happy. There are days when she doesn't get to do as much as she would like, but happily, most weeks include at least some time each day (or every several days) for creative pursuits.

Some of you may wonder how I do as much as I do and still work my 40-50 hour a week job. I try to be very intentional about my time. I don't watch much television at all (I usually fall asleep when I try to watch T.V.), and I don't watch movies and DVDs like I once did. It's easy to give up on T.V. when you have no cable and the digital signal is always pixelating. I've given up on many of the ways in which our culture tries to distract and control us: I do minimal housework, I exercise enough to stay healthy but not so much as to cut into the time I have for important projects, I don't spend a lot of time on make-up, hair, and clothes. I'm brutally efficient in terms of what has to get done, so I can get to doing what I really want to do.

In short, I don't procrastinate the way that I might if I had loads of free time. I know this, because I once had a lot more free time, which I wasted with television and excess exercising and fluffy reading. But now that I have less time, I find that I get right to what's important to me. I try to be always ready for any scraps of time that fall into my day, so that I don't waste them. I try not to let society dictate my values. If the rest of the nation wants to keep up with American Idol or which cultural star is doing which goofy/criminal stuff, great. I have stuff I want to get done before I'm dead.

In the next day or two, I'll think about my writing and creativity goals for 2010.

The Future of Christmas Letters and Facebook

First, a disclaimer. When I was a sneering adolescent, I didn't understand the impulse to send out a Christmas letter once a year. In some ways, my parents encouraged my disdain. One year, my father wrote a mock Christmas letter, a stunning satire, which we didn't mail, but we enjoyed helping him revise. My dad was in a dark place, workwise, which was a strain, and I remember that composing/revising process as one of sublime joy: we could still laugh together as a family. Maybe good times would come again.

One of our family Christmas rituals was looking forward to certain Christmas letters. One of my parents' friends wrote Christmas letters that contained incredible detail, down to which Bible passages her study group examined through the year. Some Christmas letters were so brief I wondered why people bothered. Some of these letter writers also wrote or called us throughout the year, so I wondered why they felt compelled to sum up their lives in a Christmas letter.

Now, I feel slightly ashamed of my sneering adolescent self. Now I am older, and I treasure these Christmas letters that my friends write. I treasure them because I never get around to writing them--yet I'm thrilled to find out what my friends have been up to.

I sense a similar sneeriness that some people have towards Facebook, Twitter, and other types of social media. I hear people say that we're all too self-absorbed. Who could be interested in our puny lives in all its stupid detail?

Well, I am. Many of us aren't living lives that can be transfigured into long, chatty e-mails. And if we live fascinating lives, many of us don't have time to write long e-mails or old-fashioned letters on paper--and if all of my friends did write long, lengthy e-mails, I might have trouble finding time to read them all. In some ways, I miss that depth, that insight into people's lives. Yet, I'm always happy to read a sentence here or there about what people are up to. Tell me about your school and the tests you're studying for. Tell me what your kids are up to. Tell me what you're reading, watching, or listening to--I need suggestions! Tell me about your garden, your chickens, your leisure-time activities and all the ways in which you try to make your real life match your values, and I'll be inspired.

Will these weekly and daily updates some day supplant the yearly holiday newsletter? I doubt it. I still like seeing the year-end summary, and I suspect people still like writing them. If I didn't want to be flamed by all my sociologist friends, I might even hypothesize that we're hardwired as humans to be retrospective at certain times.

Or maybe I'm the only hard-wired one. I'll certainly be looking back and looking ahead, as this year (and decade!) draw to a close. I'll be dreaming: what do I want my life to look like in one year, five years, ten years? I'm always amazed to go back to read what I envisioned--and how often, my life calibrates towards that vision. It's a valuable exercise.

I'll do some posting here. I've found many valuable things about blogging, but this rather public accountability has been valuable for me.

And I'm fascinated by the lists that other people make too. I find them inspiring. I like any community, whether it be in the blogosphere or on Facebook or in person, that calls upon us to transform ourselves and our lives into our best selves, our most authentic lives.

The Future of Narrative, the Future of Poetry Collections?

I first saw hyperlinked text in 1991, in a graduate school class. We had been reading fairly traditional narratives: novels that were rooted in depictions of the family. It was the best class I've ever taken; we all read the novels, we had rollicking discussions, the novels were very good and female-authored and varied in scope and technique.

But in terms of pointing the way into the future, it was in our final project presentations, not in the novels, that I saw the direction narrative might go.

I'm still not sure how those grad students did it. We trooped down to the computer lab and watched the demonstration. These were the days before Windows took over the world, before we had Internet access on every computer--we used dot matrix printers, for Cripe's sake.

And yet, in this demonstration, I glimpsed all sorts of possibilities. I didn't anticipate every development that has happened; the information gleaning power of the Internet would have blown my pre-Internet brain. But the hypertexting demonstration appealed to the kid in me who loved the books where you made some choices and participated in the narrative process (does the main character do this? go to page 57. Or does the main character do this? Go to page 32).

It has taken longer than I would have expected for this technology to make its way to fiction, but a recent article in The Washington Post says that the future is almost here. Monica Hesse observes, "If readers visit every hyperlink, watch every video and play every game, it is possible for the experience of consuming a single book to become limitless -- a literal neverending story. It's also possible for the user to never read more than a few chapters in sequence, before excitedly scampering over to the next activity. Hybrid books might be the perfect accessory for modern life. They allow immediate shortcuts to information. They feel like instant gratification and guided, packaged experiences."

But does it count as reading? And what impact will these books have on the capacity for imagination of younger generations? The rest of the article talks about these issues.

I've found myself thinking about the possibilities of multiple medias for the way we get poetry out into the world. Various people have already started playing with making videos for individual poems; what would happen if we thought about book-length collections of poems in terms of the multi-media possibilities?

One obvious possibility is that we could hyperlink all sorts of elements that would have once required footnotes. We could have some poems that were short videos and some that weren't--or maybe we give people the option as to whether or not they want traditional poetry presentation (an approximation of words on a page or a performance/reading) or something more experimental. We could hyperlink to other poems that aren't part of the collection. We could hyperlink to earlier drafts of the poem, making life easier for future generations of graduate students who might study our work.

Of course, we might have to wait for technology to catch up with us, which is what happened in 1991. The ideas were there, as my fellow grad students showed, but the technology was still fairly clunky and hard to use, unless you wanted to learn a whole new language of computer coding. Now many of us use platforms like Blogger and website applications.

I wonder what technology is being developed that will make future collections of poetry almost unrecognizable to us, we who are briefly mired back here in this technological time.

The Chiron Review's Punk Issue

Over the week-end, I got my contributor's copy of the latest Chiron Review, the punk edition. I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but I thought I'd post the poem here. Those of you who have been following my poems will see a theme emerging--the answer to that old Sunday School question of how the world would react if Jesus returned again and what would Jesus do and how would we recognize him?

For a long time as I wrote these, I didn't even send them out; they felt subversive and strange to me. And then, when I sent them out, they often got returned immediately. Lately I've noticed that they're more likely to be accepted. And I'm gathering similarly themed poems into a manuscript, which I'll start sending out into the world in the new year (Steel Toe Books is reading in January!).

Here's the poem "New Kid," which is my latest publication:

New Kid

If Jesus came to your high school,
he'd be that boy with the untuned guitar,
which most days was missing a string.
Could he not afford a packet of guitar strings?
Did he not know how to tune the thing?
Hadn't he heard of an electronic tuner?
Jesus would smile that half smile and keep playing,
but offer no answers.

If Jesus came to your high school,
he'd hang out with the strange and demented.
He'd sneak smokes with the drug addled.
He'd join Chorus, where the otherworldly
quality of his voice wouldn’t quite blend.
He'd play flute in Band.
He'd spend his lunch hour in the library, reading and reshelving.

You would hear his songs echoing
in your head, down the hallways, across the years.
They'd shimmer at you and just when you thought you grasped
their meaning, your analytical processes would collapse.
Instead, you write strange poems
to delight your children who draw mystical
pictures to illustrate your poems inspired
by Jesus, who sang the songs of angels,
that year he came to your high school.

Movies and Christmas

It seems that any time I'm not with family for Christmas, I end up at a movie theatre. I first did this in 1987, when, after Christmas festivity with friends, we all went to see Baby Boom at the dollar movies--remember dollar movies? Do any towns still have them? Or has the quick release of movies to alternative forms--DVD, Hulu--wiped out the dollar movies? Once I said that if I wrote a book, I'd name it Everything Comes to the Dollar Movies If You Wait Long Enough. Now I'm not sure that title would make sense to anyone under age 35.

I digress.

I'm always amazed at how many people come out to the movie theatres on Christmas Day. I really wanted to see Up in the Air, and so on Christmas Day, my husband and I headed out, away from our noisy neighborhood. I love George Clooney, and he was in fine form. I don't want to say too much about the movie, so as not to ruin it--columnist George Will apparently does not share my caution, so I had an idea about the end of the movie when I went to see it--yet the ending still surprised me. It's a darkly funny movie, full of keen insight about our modern lives, and beautifully filmed.

Yesterday, my friend and I went to see It's Complicated. Again, a beautiful movie and funny. And I like the fact that it deals frankly with the complicated situations posed by our aging bodies. I commend Alec Baldwin for his willingness to expose his all-too-human flesh on film. I'm not that brave, and I was never heralded as a sex symbol, the way he was in his younger years.

Yet despite the fact that these movies were good movies, they left me feeling depressed. Maybe it's because I'd rather spend Christmas with small children. I rarely question my decision not to have children, but Christmas does fill me with longing for offspring (mine or anyone's, if they're young enough to be filled with wonder).

But both movies centered around people and our inability to truly connect, to learn from our past mistakes, to make better choices. I left each movie filled with sadness. I just wanted to throw myself down on the pavement and weep.

Of course, I didn't. I've learned to cope with my feelings of sadness, carrying on as if the world is well. I try to keep my brain focused on the meaning of Christmas, which is not the meaning of these movies. I go back to the much more ancient texts about the people who live in darkness who have seen a great light, and the darkness could not overcome the light. That's the message I need at Christmas, even if it's not gorgeously shot, well acted, or pre-scripted.

Weather Report, Christmas Morning

I have no children--why did I wake up so early? Of course, my wake up time of 6:45 a.m. might seem like a late morning to those of you with little kids in your household this morning. But I was up half the night at Christmas Eve services (for more on that, read my post on my theology blog).

I keep trying to remember when my sister and I shifted to sleeping in on Christmas morning. I'm the oldest, so it was late in my adolescence. I remember waking up at 8:00 a.m. and thinking, well, I guess we're old now. I was probably all of 17 when I thought that.

We've had a warm Christmas week, a warm Christmas month, unlike the rest of the country. I have baked no Christmas cookies, baked no Christmas bread. Anyone who knows me knows what a dramatic departure this is.

In fact, I've lost weight this Christmas season. Again, strange for me. You know those statistics about people who gain 2-5 pounds in any given Christmas season? Those people are amateurs! When I'm in my high-energy baking mode, I can gain 10 pounds, easily during the weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year's. And then the New Year's gnashing of teeth begins. So, maybe this holiday hecticness that I've experienced between Thanksgiving and this morning has been a blessing. I've been too busy to bake, too busy to eat much most days.

Strange to think that most of the world lives this way. Heck, most of the world experiences food scarcity that they can't control. But much of the U.S. spends time rushing from pillar to post, unable to find time to shop, to cook, to eat. At least I haven't done what a lot of folks do, which is to eat fast food. Blhh. I'd rather have a bowl of cereal.

Soon, I will return to my writing desk and think about my ambitions, hopes, and plans for 2010. But for today, I'll relax. Maybe I'll get a nap. If the neighborhood gets noisy, I'll go to the beach or a movie. I'm missing my extended family, but this isn't a bad way to spend the holiday. I have new books to read and Sting's new CD with winter-inspired music to listen to. Not a bad way to spend the holiday at all.

If you need a reading escape, The Washington Post is full of treasures today. The Style section is full of short essays that are nostalgic, wistful, funny--go here and scroll down to see what appeals.

The best piece in The Washington Post today is here, Michael Gerson's wonderful op-ed piece about Christmas as God's social justice holiday. I know that it's got a God theme, which may throw off the intellectuals, but he pulls it off. Here's how he concludes:

"'By normal human standards,' says theologian J.B. Phillips, 'this is a tragic little tale of failure, the rather squalid story of a promising young man from a humble home, put to death by the envy and malice of the professional men of religion. All this happened in an obscure, occupied province of the vast Roman Empire. It is fifteen hundred years ago that this apparently invincible Empire utterly collapsed, and all that is left of it is ruins. Yet the little baby, born in such pitiful humility and cut down as a young man in his prime, commands the allegiance of millions of people all over the world. Although they have never seen him, he has become friend and companion to innumerable people. This undeniable fact is, by any measurement, the most astonishing phenomenon in human history.'


Being astonishing, of course, does not make something true. The message of Christmas seems scandalously unlikely to us, just as it did to sophisticated Romans at the time. But if it is true, nothing is more important. If it is true, poverty and suffering have been shared and dignified by God Himself. If it is true, hope and memory do not end in a gash of Earth. God, let it be true."

Shifting into Christmas

I've had an unusual Christmas season in many ways, but one of the main strangenesses was that I decided not to take the usual faculty holidays off. Like most Americans, I've been working right up until today, our first admin/staff holiday.

I sort of like being at school when fewer people are there: I've got SACS reports to write, faculty annual reviews to complete or get a head start on, meetings to plan, scheduling to consider (both for the term that starts in January and those throughout the year), so I welcome a time with fewer interruptions. This year, I also needed to change offices. My former office, which I occupied as Assistant Chair, was tiny, with barely room for one extra seat for visitors. So, I moved two doors down to the Chair's office, which was vacated when my former boss was promoted to Dean and moved across the street to the Main building.

Sure, I could have waited for big, burly men to move my office furniture, to rearrange the left-behind office furniture, to move my other possessions. But who knows how long I'd need to wait? So, I decided to do it myself. I've spent the last few days moving furniture, rearranging books, sorting through all sorts of stuff to distinguish between the trash and the treasure.

This morning I got to the grocery store early, but now I feel a bit at loose ends. Maybe I'll prepare some poetry packets to send out into the world. I'm still in that exhaustion that comes with the end of the term and that comes with moving one's possessions and that comes with the holiday season. Preparing poetry packets doesn't take the same kind of creative spark that other writing projects can. I just feel a bit sparkless this morning.

If you're like me, you like to be listening to interesting NPR stories as you work on your submissions. I heard two wonderful pieces on Morning Edition. Yesterday, Larry McMurtry talked about his career as a writer, and about seeing his work turned into film. I see him as one of the great writers of our generation, but he doesn't see himself that way. Go here to read or hear the piece.

On Tuesday, P. D. James talked about her own novels and the detective novel in general; go here to read or hear the piece. I remember reading her in graduate school and seeing a link between her work and the work of other great twentieth century British female writers. I listened to her and thought about how I planned to write on of the Comprehensive Exam questions, had I been called upon to do so. But as I listened, I couldn't remember what I had planned to write, only that it revolved around female detective novelists of the early twentieth century opening the door for later writers.

I've forgotten so much, and of course, I'll forget more before it's all over. The flip side, happily, is that I continue to learn.

If you're still casting about for the perfect Christmas present, go here to read Nicholas Kristof's piece about charities that do amazing things in the third world using very small amounts of money. Most of us already have far too much stuff and far too much debt. Why not help build schools for girls in Afghanistan or composting toilets in Haiti or pay for deworming pills? His piece has links to all these worthy organizations.

I wish for us all a beautiful Christmas time, a time for contemplation and candles, light shining in the darkness, peace descending upon the planet.