An end to the quarter.
An end to the Winter.
I want these last months to explode: a pyre to what has been, enabling what can or will be. Nothing seems, lately, to suffice— yesterday I found out Copper Nickel wants me to read at AWP, and that will be a pleasure after so many years of not reading any of my work, of not being seen. But still, I want I know not what. The world to light up, be riotous, absolute, electric. Bright.
I am tired of conservation, of persistence and care, of anything that reeks of the mediocre or familiar, of the crushing weight of getting by, jumping hoops, getting the job done. I am perhaps reading too much Vallejo:
And what if after so many words,
the word itself doesn't survive!
And what if after so many wings of birds
the stopped bird doesn't survive!
It would be better then, really,
if it were all swallowed up, and let's end it!
But that is how I feel: give me intensity, if only fleeting. Give me the ephemeral and perfect, and it will be sufficient. But the idea that all things will pass, that there is no such truth, no adequate meaning… that is too much to bear.
Oh, hello break! I wish there was sun. But perhaps that too would be asking for too much.
Friday, March 12, 2010
Sunday, March 07, 2010
More Cesar Vallejo
All of this whining about weather, solipsistic musing, seriousness, melancholy, foolishness concerning notes on coasters, odds and outcomes, persistence, pettiness, and so on...
Cesar Vallejo said simply:
years in the sepulcher, liters of infinity
ink, pen, bricks, and forgivings.
I think that will suffice for me. Well, that, and more Vallejo:
My God, in this muffled, dark night,
you can't play anymore, because the Earth
is already a die nicked and rounded
from rolling by chance;
and it can only stop in a hollow place,
in the hollow of the enormous grave.
Cesar Vallejo said simply:
years in the sepulcher, liters of infinity
ink, pen, bricks, and forgivings.
I think that will suffice for me. Well, that, and more Vallejo:
My God, in this muffled, dark night,
you can't play anymore, because the Earth
is already a die nicked and rounded
from rolling by chance;
and it can only stop in a hollow place,
in the hollow of the enormous grave.
The Chances
Last night, before the Davis became a club, I sat at the bar and drank coffee and wrote a list on the back of a cardboard coaster provided by Miller Lite. A blue can of Miller explodes open against a darker blue backdrop in a blast of gold confetti and coins (the beer, evidently, is illiquid), while a caption insists one “Release the Great Taste!” In blue pen, I summarized my immediate hopes: the names of agents considering my novel, the unlikely fellowships, awards for emerging writers, the names of conferences, contests, residencies. Inscrutable except to me, and shockingly brief: I failed to fill the space on a two-inch coaster. Such is the poverty of imminent opportunity: blue ink on a blue sheet of cardboard, almost illegible, insufficient for even a small space.
But to step back for a moment, perhaps enough. I may suffer from a melancholy, ruminative temperament, but I can do math. Friday I listened on NPR to my friend Hunt, NYU Economics professor, speaking about crunching numbers, and so I’ll take a page from his playbook and return to basic probability. Every one of these opportunities is based on merit, and I believe in my work. Each shot has technical odds of 1/200 or worse; factoring in merit raises the odds to 1/10. There were fifteen discrete longshots on my coaster, and so the chances of one of those lottery tickets hitting comes to nearly 80%.
Somehow, I don’t find this math as comforting as I’d like to—after all, I’ve never had faith in odds or statistics or even logic. But perhaps the takeaway here is faith: persistence finally pays off. Only one week more to stagger through before break, and I can rest, take stock, and invest in a couple more lottery tickets—because I do intend to win, and 20% is still too much risk for a Miller coaster to bear.
But to step back for a moment, perhaps enough. I may suffer from a melancholy, ruminative temperament, but I can do math. Friday I listened on NPR to my friend Hunt, NYU Economics professor, speaking about crunching numbers, and so I’ll take a page from his playbook and return to basic probability. Every one of these opportunities is based on merit, and I believe in my work. Each shot has technical odds of 1/200 or worse; factoring in merit raises the odds to 1/10. There were fifteen discrete longshots on my coaster, and so the chances of one of those lottery tickets hitting comes to nearly 80%.
Somehow, I don’t find this math as comforting as I’d like to—after all, I’ve never had faith in odds or statistics or even logic. But perhaps the takeaway here is faith: persistence finally pays off. Only one week more to stagger through before break, and I can rest, take stock, and invest in a couple more lottery tickets—because I do intend to win, and 20% is still too much risk for a Miller coaster to bear.
Wednesday, March 03, 2010
GOOD PIECE PUBLISHED
Today my short essay on Teach For America's long-term mission and impact went up at GOOD:
NOTES FROM THE FRONT LINES: How We Can Make a Difference, Why We Must
I wrote this essay as a response to the recent claims by Stanford University researchers that Teach FA 'makes bad citizens', and that the impact of the organization is negligible in creating long-term change. This essay is antidote-- it is why I teach low-income, at-risk students of color and first-generation college students: because we must offer opportunity, and because our efforts make a difference.
NOTES FROM THE FRONT LINES: How We Can Make a Difference, Why We Must
I wrote this essay as a response to the recent claims by Stanford University researchers that Teach FA 'makes bad citizens', and that the impact of the organization is negligible in creating long-term change. This essay is antidote-- it is why I teach low-income, at-risk students of color and first-generation college students: because we must offer opportunity, and because our efforts make a difference.
Tuesday, March 02, 2010
Trusting Yourself, or at Least Trusting Twain
For the last six years, I’ve been writing about my experience teaching fourth grade in the black public schools of the Mississippi Delta. Unfortunately, I started writing about the experience immediately upon leaving for the audience of an MFA workshop, which led me to two errors: first, I tried to write before I could face the experience with a clear, cold eye, and second, I let the opinions of others, their praise and criticism and ideas, influence the material and how I formed it. The entire conception of this book as a ‘novel’ came when I brought to my thesis advisor a short story written in dialect from the point of view of a child in the community of Mississippi. Compared to my other work, the piece was polished and elegant, clear in its implications for the character, whose story had more or less told itself once I found the voice. “This chapter of the novel shows the world of the children, and offers an opportunity for irony, showing how insufficient the efforts of your teacher happen to be,” my advisor told me. More point-of-view chapters followed, the workshop praised them, and so I persisted. I did what my advisor and my peers told me to do: ‘interpolate’ these chapters in the primary narrative of the novel, which was, allegedly, the teachers.
In the six years that followed, I struggled with the teacher’s narrative. In trying to move through time in a logical and coherent manner, I found there was no narrative arc, and little opportunity to achieve the sort of size or clarity I wanted. I’d be writing about one narrative line—the teacher’s obsession with saving one damaged, precocious little girl named Felicia Jackson—and lose the intensity of his interactions with other children. I wrote scenes about sitting at the bayou, scenes about watching cars pass, scenes about sitting at home eating stale cereal, passage after passage of exposition trying to deal with the linear passage of time. Here’s a typical passage from three years ago, in which my narrator describes downtown Indianola:
The buildings were marked with the signs of dryrot and ivy, the siding a mottled, stricken brown, and the vines that crawled the sills and frames essayed tendrils that entered the cracking walls, twisting feathers of paint free, so that the sparrows quick about the eaves would knock them free with a sound like broom to tile. The sidewalk was broken all to pieces, great rifts and the spreading, hairline fractures whose pattern seemed the same as the ivy above. The powerlines that ran through from the white side of town toward the black sagged near head-height, the grayed poles leaning a little from the top like old men too long on their feet. Over it all hovered the abandoned wreck of agro-industry, solid shadows of silo and mill and warehouse, though the structures themselves were so insecure as to threaten immediate fall: the corrugated tin had been scoured to paper thickness and the crumpling, holed, red-black walls were held by crossing supports so tired of weight that they gave from the edges, pushed the binding bolts free so that only rust held the roofs and walls aloft. All the wrack of past intentions, lost.
The passage is full of extemporaneous, over-written description. It is painful to read it, now. Though it renders downtown Indianola as a wreck, that’s all it accomplishes. There’s nothing happening—not in the prose, or within the narrator. For years I ground out passage after passage, scene after scene, the prose straining and false-noting as I tried to hide absence of intention with turns of phrase and wild flights of language. Intending to persevere through will, I pushed harder and wrote poorer still.
I might have outright quit, except that my writer friend Amanda asked me to the riverside McMenamins for a drink one blinding summer afternoon two years ago. The prospect of literary conversation filled me with dread, but lush that I am, I broke for liquor. A couple whiskey-sodas later, I was confessing all my woes above the fush of the Willamette below. Amanda tried not to let me figure out the thing myself. She nodded; she told me a story about how she’d boxed away her novel, and now felt free to enter the work at hand. She told me about her new writing space, a room that was hers, how that had been a kind of opening. I admit it, I made her spell it out for me. “Mike,” she finally said the third or fourth time I whined about the slack scenes, “did it ever occur to you that you need to let go of what you have, and start new?”
I heard a ringing of bells and a soar of strings and a choir’s hallelujah… but then I realized it was only the drift of music from a concert in the park across the river. Yet my heart had lifted a little for the right reasons. What Amanda was suggesting—that I write about one thing at a time, focusing on the character and the material and letting that dictate the order of scenes, the exposition, the degree of retrospection, and so on—that was how I’d started, before I’d let the well-intentioned suggestions of others alter my process. Since then, the work was, if not easy, at least possible. The first piece I wrote, which is now the last unpublished chapter of my novel, found my protagonist trying to help a little boy, and instead doing him harm—every time the narrator has called the boy’s house, he reaches no-one, and there’s no message machine. The boy’s mother has taken up with a guard at the prison, and when she sees the teacher’s number, her boyfriend beats him with a fanbelt. Finally, at the climax of the story, the narrator’s principal beats ten of his students in the teacher’s own classroom, starting with Dequarious, who isn’t responsible for the disruption the rest of the students are being punished for:
Each blow, the Reverend swung harder, and Dequarious grew calmer. He seemed to welcome each strike, as if here, in punishment, was a place he was most comfortable. It wasn’t that the blows weren’t painful: when the second boy came up, he let out a scream and began to blubber, and later, to choke on his own phlegm.
It took pain to keep standing there—I shoved my thumbnail through the skin of my index finger, stained my khakis with blood. I don’t remember the wounds, just the begging of children, the whistle of the Reverend’s swing.
A hundred licks.
Here I was, found now in the fall of a paddle, the snap of wood to flesh and a child’s cry. When the Reverend was finished he took back his jacket, slid it on and took my hand and drew me close, pounded my back as if we were brothers or teammates. His palm was wet, sweaty from the paddle. I said nothing, could neither push him away nor accept his embrace. When the Reverend was gone and the children were back in their seats I turned to the chalkboard. The surface was wet with tears and snot wiped from the boy’s hands, and the lesson was still there, angles and letters smeared to broken lines and malformed shapes, like some new and terrible language.
The children had to go to P.E., and so I walked them to the gym. Dequarious was last in line, and he turned to me as the children filed in. His body shook, but he didn’t say a word, just stared with as pure a hatred as I will ever see.
I watched him with guilty eyes until he was inside. I was glad when he was gone—it was a relief to have him out of sight.
I made my way out the school gates on foot. We weren’t supposed to leave the school grounds, but I couldn’t care. I turned on Hanna Street and walked. It was hot, the air dry and still. I had never known the smell of these streets—the school was kept clean, the litter cleared each afternoon and the concrete hosed down each Friday. That air smelled like dried grass and bodies and dust. Hanna in this sun had a baser reek: diapers folded and left on the roadway baked and baked in the sun. Garbage piled in front yards. At a corner, a package of raw chicken gone bad, a twisting of maggots at the wet center and the edges dried. Three mangy dogs fought for the right to eat it, flies circling about them as they turned and bent for each other’s necks. Three men in yellowed wife-beaters egged them on; it seemed they might have bet on the winner, or at least, it seemed to matter that the battle persisted. They eyed me but had no attention to spare, as one dog got a bite on the other’s stringy leg. The victim screamed, an urgent keening. I felt bile rise in my throat, bent over a fence and hocked and spit into a yard.
“Oh, no, you didn’t,” I heard a female voice call. I wiped my mouth and met the judging eyes of a white-haired old woman sitting in the weak shade of a porch on a couch that sank to the ground at the middle.
“Sorry,” I said.
“You gone clean that up?” she said.
I looked into the dirt yard, a scatter of cans and cardboard the only decoration.
“Well?”
There was no place to hide the spit, and soon enough it would sink into the dirt. I wasn’t going to do anything. I turned my eyes to the road and walked away, the woman hollering something at my back that had to do with China and her fitting to beat my yellow ass. The fencelines queued but never met. The dog cried and cried behind me; the men bellowed encouragement; I continued until the sound of suffering was only an echo in my ears. Now I came on two teenage boys fighting in the street, throwing punches from the hips, the muscles of their shoulders and arms rippling as they turned circles on the dusty road. One boy caught his feet, fell cursing, and the other boy jumped on him throwing blow after blow, the boy on the ground cowering with his hands about his head. He was going to be hurt. With I cry I charged in, grabbed the boy on top about the chest and tore him off. He twisted in my arms, finally threw me off with a yell. “Get off me!” he yelled, spinning away. “Get off me!”
I turned to the boy on the ground, who’d sat up. “Are you all right?”
Eyeing me warily, the boy stood and brushed his hands on the back of his pants. He was unmarked except a little dirt on his cheek. “We was just—playing.”
They backed away together, turned and jogged to put some distance between us. “Crazy fucking chinaman,” one boy muttered. Fifty yards down the road the boys stopped, turned to one another. The boy who’d fallen flexed his arms and popped his neck, lowered his chin and lifted clenched fists. Then they began again to circle, a dance of steps and harmless blows, voices echoing along the asphalt. It had all been a charade, no consequence or meaning.
Dequarious was right: it didn’t matter what you did or why. It made no difference at all.
In the novel I started out writing, I could never have allowed this material to exist, never have gone as far as to face its implications. I’m imagined a book as an unbroken narrative arc, or perhaps an interwoven series of arcs. I’d ignored the example of one of my favorite books, Huck Finn, which is tremendously episodic yet surely unified all the same. Once you leave an episode, it sometimes fails to come back into play at all except thematically—yet each episode is necessary, even indispensable to the final whole. Thankfully, Mark Twain had it right 130 years ago. And perhaps I can get it half as right someday soon.
In the six years that followed, I struggled with the teacher’s narrative. In trying to move through time in a logical and coherent manner, I found there was no narrative arc, and little opportunity to achieve the sort of size or clarity I wanted. I’d be writing about one narrative line—the teacher’s obsession with saving one damaged, precocious little girl named Felicia Jackson—and lose the intensity of his interactions with other children. I wrote scenes about sitting at the bayou, scenes about watching cars pass, scenes about sitting at home eating stale cereal, passage after passage of exposition trying to deal with the linear passage of time. Here’s a typical passage from three years ago, in which my narrator describes downtown Indianola:
The buildings were marked with the signs of dryrot and ivy, the siding a mottled, stricken brown, and the vines that crawled the sills and frames essayed tendrils that entered the cracking walls, twisting feathers of paint free, so that the sparrows quick about the eaves would knock them free with a sound like broom to tile. The sidewalk was broken all to pieces, great rifts and the spreading, hairline fractures whose pattern seemed the same as the ivy above. The powerlines that ran through from the white side of town toward the black sagged near head-height, the grayed poles leaning a little from the top like old men too long on their feet. Over it all hovered the abandoned wreck of agro-industry, solid shadows of silo and mill and warehouse, though the structures themselves were so insecure as to threaten immediate fall: the corrugated tin had been scoured to paper thickness and the crumpling, holed, red-black walls were held by crossing supports so tired of weight that they gave from the edges, pushed the binding bolts free so that only rust held the roofs and walls aloft. All the wrack of past intentions, lost.
The passage is full of extemporaneous, over-written description. It is painful to read it, now. Though it renders downtown Indianola as a wreck, that’s all it accomplishes. There’s nothing happening—not in the prose, or within the narrator. For years I ground out passage after passage, scene after scene, the prose straining and false-noting as I tried to hide absence of intention with turns of phrase and wild flights of language. Intending to persevere through will, I pushed harder and wrote poorer still.
I might have outright quit, except that my writer friend Amanda asked me to the riverside McMenamins for a drink one blinding summer afternoon two years ago. The prospect of literary conversation filled me with dread, but lush that I am, I broke for liquor. A couple whiskey-sodas later, I was confessing all my woes above the fush of the Willamette below. Amanda tried not to let me figure out the thing myself. She nodded; she told me a story about how she’d boxed away her novel, and now felt free to enter the work at hand. She told me about her new writing space, a room that was hers, how that had been a kind of opening. I admit it, I made her spell it out for me. “Mike,” she finally said the third or fourth time I whined about the slack scenes, “did it ever occur to you that you need to let go of what you have, and start new?”
I heard a ringing of bells and a soar of strings and a choir’s hallelujah… but then I realized it was only the drift of music from a concert in the park across the river. Yet my heart had lifted a little for the right reasons. What Amanda was suggesting—that I write about one thing at a time, focusing on the character and the material and letting that dictate the order of scenes, the exposition, the degree of retrospection, and so on—that was how I’d started, before I’d let the well-intentioned suggestions of others alter my process. Since then, the work was, if not easy, at least possible. The first piece I wrote, which is now the last unpublished chapter of my novel, found my protagonist trying to help a little boy, and instead doing him harm—every time the narrator has called the boy’s house, he reaches no-one, and there’s no message machine. The boy’s mother has taken up with a guard at the prison, and when she sees the teacher’s number, her boyfriend beats him with a fanbelt. Finally, at the climax of the story, the narrator’s principal beats ten of his students in the teacher’s own classroom, starting with Dequarious, who isn’t responsible for the disruption the rest of the students are being punished for:
Each blow, the Reverend swung harder, and Dequarious grew calmer. He seemed to welcome each strike, as if here, in punishment, was a place he was most comfortable. It wasn’t that the blows weren’t painful: when the second boy came up, he let out a scream and began to blubber, and later, to choke on his own phlegm.
It took pain to keep standing there—I shoved my thumbnail through the skin of my index finger, stained my khakis with blood. I don’t remember the wounds, just the begging of children, the whistle of the Reverend’s swing.
A hundred licks.
Here I was, found now in the fall of a paddle, the snap of wood to flesh and a child’s cry. When the Reverend was finished he took back his jacket, slid it on and took my hand and drew me close, pounded my back as if we were brothers or teammates. His palm was wet, sweaty from the paddle. I said nothing, could neither push him away nor accept his embrace. When the Reverend was gone and the children were back in their seats I turned to the chalkboard. The surface was wet with tears and snot wiped from the boy’s hands, and the lesson was still there, angles and letters smeared to broken lines and malformed shapes, like some new and terrible language.
The children had to go to P.E., and so I walked them to the gym. Dequarious was last in line, and he turned to me as the children filed in. His body shook, but he didn’t say a word, just stared with as pure a hatred as I will ever see.
I watched him with guilty eyes until he was inside. I was glad when he was gone—it was a relief to have him out of sight.
I made my way out the school gates on foot. We weren’t supposed to leave the school grounds, but I couldn’t care. I turned on Hanna Street and walked. It was hot, the air dry and still. I had never known the smell of these streets—the school was kept clean, the litter cleared each afternoon and the concrete hosed down each Friday. That air smelled like dried grass and bodies and dust. Hanna in this sun had a baser reek: diapers folded and left on the roadway baked and baked in the sun. Garbage piled in front yards. At a corner, a package of raw chicken gone bad, a twisting of maggots at the wet center and the edges dried. Three mangy dogs fought for the right to eat it, flies circling about them as they turned and bent for each other’s necks. Three men in yellowed wife-beaters egged them on; it seemed they might have bet on the winner, or at least, it seemed to matter that the battle persisted. They eyed me but had no attention to spare, as one dog got a bite on the other’s stringy leg. The victim screamed, an urgent keening. I felt bile rise in my throat, bent over a fence and hocked and spit into a yard.
“Oh, no, you didn’t,” I heard a female voice call. I wiped my mouth and met the judging eyes of a white-haired old woman sitting in the weak shade of a porch on a couch that sank to the ground at the middle.
“Sorry,” I said.
“You gone clean that up?” she said.
I looked into the dirt yard, a scatter of cans and cardboard the only decoration.
“Well?”
There was no place to hide the spit, and soon enough it would sink into the dirt. I wasn’t going to do anything. I turned my eyes to the road and walked away, the woman hollering something at my back that had to do with China and her fitting to beat my yellow ass. The fencelines queued but never met. The dog cried and cried behind me; the men bellowed encouragement; I continued until the sound of suffering was only an echo in my ears. Now I came on two teenage boys fighting in the street, throwing punches from the hips, the muscles of their shoulders and arms rippling as they turned circles on the dusty road. One boy caught his feet, fell cursing, and the other boy jumped on him throwing blow after blow, the boy on the ground cowering with his hands about his head. He was going to be hurt. With I cry I charged in, grabbed the boy on top about the chest and tore him off. He twisted in my arms, finally threw me off with a yell. “Get off me!” he yelled, spinning away. “Get off me!”
I turned to the boy on the ground, who’d sat up. “Are you all right?”
Eyeing me warily, the boy stood and brushed his hands on the back of his pants. He was unmarked except a little dirt on his cheek. “We was just—playing.”
They backed away together, turned and jogged to put some distance between us. “Crazy fucking chinaman,” one boy muttered. Fifty yards down the road the boys stopped, turned to one another. The boy who’d fallen flexed his arms and popped his neck, lowered his chin and lifted clenched fists. Then they began again to circle, a dance of steps and harmless blows, voices echoing along the asphalt. It had all been a charade, no consequence or meaning.
Dequarious was right: it didn’t matter what you did or why. It made no difference at all.
In the novel I started out writing, I could never have allowed this material to exist, never have gone as far as to face its implications. I’m imagined a book as an unbroken narrative arc, or perhaps an interwoven series of arcs. I’d ignored the example of one of my favorite books, Huck Finn, which is tremendously episodic yet surely unified all the same. Once you leave an episode, it sometimes fails to come back into play at all except thematically—yet each episode is necessary, even indispensable to the final whole. Thankfully, Mark Twain had it right 130 years ago. And perhaps I can get it half as right someday soon.
Away from Here, in a Year
In the years I’ve been back in Eugene, Oregon, the town I grew up in after all, I’ve grown disillusioned with the community. Part of that is what I refer to as its provinciality: a university town of 150,000 people, people in Eugene think the Willamette Valley is the world, and conceive of no greater city than Portland, no greater institution than the UO, no greater cause than the…Ducks. Eugene is not precisely monocultural—the Whiteaker and the activist legacy of the sixties gives the area a legitimate claim to modern hippieness best characterized by the organic produce and hand-made hemp products of the Saturday Market, but too vast areas of Eugene are more decidedly conservative, and out West and in Springfield, more blue-collar too. My dissatisfaction lies most of all with the self-satisfaction of Eugeneans: what more could there be than this, a hippie climber told me recently at the gym, by which he meant, safety, community (he works in the Whiteaker making biofuel), microbrew, and proximity to Smith Rock. And for him, there may be no better place.
But I am not a hippie, and my whole life, the 23 of my 29 years I’ve spent here at least, I’ve never really belonged. I dress too—city. My skin is too dark, and my eyes too slanted. And my sensibility and ability inclines me away from here, or at least, I like to think so.
I might feel differently if I hadn’t grown up in this town, if it wasn’t so tight for a native who teaches at the University. Yet I cannot go out to dinner without being recognized by one of my father’s patients or my brother’s friends or a former or current student. I can’t get a drink without already knowing the bartender, and recognizing the regulars, and that guy I played pool with one time, and that girl I took on an awful date, and that graduate student who’s best friends with my ex and is even now texting furiously to her about how I’m out. And these people who surround me are not really friends—what peers do I have here? Few. Very, very few. And so I contemplate a change.
This sense of being enclosed, caught, is heightened by my professional position: successful in these last couple years, after six years of work I am finished with my novel, “Gone,” and have hit a wall. Commercial publishing is in crisis. Agents are taking on no new clients. The few decent opportunities available to emerging writers, such as the Stegner Fellowship and the Wisconsin Residency, saw their application numbers literally triple in these last two years since the onset of the recession, making odds of 1/200 thrice as bad. My work proceeds—yesterday, the editor of Per Contra wrote to solicit work and laud me on the ‘haunting’ piece she regretted rejecting, and I now have similar arrangements at Pleiades, The Sun, The Missouri Review, AGNI, Tin House, and elsewhere. By the end of Spring, it's likely all my unplaced fiction and nonfiction will have found a home. Tomorrow, GOOD publishes my second piece on educational inequality and teaching, and more will be forthcoming. Yet if more minor success is imminent, it will only make me hungrier. As always, I want too much-- and certainly far, far more than I have in Eugene. And so again, the question of next year.
In this economy, it would be genuinely foolish to move somewhere with no employment or contacts. Begrudgingly, I have faced that reality, acquiesced to the logic that says that with no significant savings (the Oregon Literary Fellowship pushed me into the black for the first time in these four years I have worked the academic year, and then lived frugally on credit for the summer, eking out the time to write), I cannot just move without having something to go to. What I will be doing is this: saving and striving all year, applying to everything, banging all year at the doors of agents and agencies, building momentum. Regardless of whether I secure a fellowship, alternate position, or job elsewhere, I will be going in a year.
Departure could come sooner—I have a figurative lottery ticket or two still outstanding. But whatever the case, I won’t regret leaving the rain, finding a place where the past is not all about me, and I can start anew.
But I am not a hippie, and my whole life, the 23 of my 29 years I’ve spent here at least, I’ve never really belonged. I dress too—city. My skin is too dark, and my eyes too slanted. And my sensibility and ability inclines me away from here, or at least, I like to think so.
I might feel differently if I hadn’t grown up in this town, if it wasn’t so tight for a native who teaches at the University. Yet I cannot go out to dinner without being recognized by one of my father’s patients or my brother’s friends or a former or current student. I can’t get a drink without already knowing the bartender, and recognizing the regulars, and that guy I played pool with one time, and that girl I took on an awful date, and that graduate student who’s best friends with my ex and is even now texting furiously to her about how I’m out. And these people who surround me are not really friends—what peers do I have here? Few. Very, very few. And so I contemplate a change.
This sense of being enclosed, caught, is heightened by my professional position: successful in these last couple years, after six years of work I am finished with my novel, “Gone,” and have hit a wall. Commercial publishing is in crisis. Agents are taking on no new clients. The few decent opportunities available to emerging writers, such as the Stegner Fellowship and the Wisconsin Residency, saw their application numbers literally triple in these last two years since the onset of the recession, making odds of 1/200 thrice as bad. My work proceeds—yesterday, the editor of Per Contra wrote to solicit work and laud me on the ‘haunting’ piece she regretted rejecting, and I now have similar arrangements at Pleiades, The Sun, The Missouri Review, AGNI, Tin House, and elsewhere. By the end of Spring, it's likely all my unplaced fiction and nonfiction will have found a home. Tomorrow, GOOD publishes my second piece on educational inequality and teaching, and more will be forthcoming. Yet if more minor success is imminent, it will only make me hungrier. As always, I want too much-- and certainly far, far more than I have in Eugene. And so again, the question of next year.
In this economy, it would be genuinely foolish to move somewhere with no employment or contacts. Begrudgingly, I have faced that reality, acquiesced to the logic that says that with no significant savings (the Oregon Literary Fellowship pushed me into the black for the first time in these four years I have worked the academic year, and then lived frugally on credit for the summer, eking out the time to write), I cannot just move without having something to go to. What I will be doing is this: saving and striving all year, applying to everything, banging all year at the doors of agents and agencies, building momentum. Regardless of whether I secure a fellowship, alternate position, or job elsewhere, I will be going in a year.
Departure could come sooner—I have a figurative lottery ticket or two still outstanding. But whatever the case, I won’t regret leaving the rain, finding a place where the past is not all about me, and I can start anew.
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