Something clever, pithy

Leo London's "Waiting for my Ship to Come In"

2012-01-31T15:18:00.001-08:00

For the last two weeks, I have been haunted by Leo London's latest song, "Waiting for my Ship to Come In," a rough recording of which can be found through this link.

Since I met Leo London, I have admired his songwriting and phrasing. He has the ability to capture, through understatement and the simple repetition of simple phrase, the ways the mundane and expected sorrows aggregate and become, finally profoundly large. In his best work, there is scene and narrative, but each line and event becomes metaphor, too, making more of the small gesture than any contemporary songwriter I know. There is an effortlessness to the work that belies the considerable craft of its creation. His best songs have an integrity, an inexplicable gravity. His life is not mine, but I am indeed waiting for my ship to come in, literally and metaphorically, and I know full well that the waiting is laden with small regrets, just as there is no ship, no fucking harbor, no passage at all. No escape.

So it is here. "I bought a pair of sunglasses at Cash Kings/ waiting for my ship to come in.... we made plans to leave together/watching the buses leave the bay/ but our old lives won't get better/living in our old ways."

So the shipping out is actually the bus-stop, the grayhound of getting away, the matches have all run out for the last cigarette in the last pack, and you can't count on the weather or the flight not being delayed. Again and again, the refrain, "waiting for my ship to come in," repeats and takes on force. So it is that we will always be waiting for the opportunity that isn't coming, wearing cheap sunglasses to hide our faces, wishing for a brighter, easier life. And so it is Leo captures that duration, the long endurance, the greater longing.

Sunday

2012-01-15T19:50:00.000-08:00

Today, I walked with tongue out and my face turned to the whited sky, catching snowflakes, watching the sheet of single crystals falling all at a different speed for a different place, trying to pick out the descent of a single flake that might be caught given a generally forward trajectory. This pursuit looked as stupid as it sounds. It was lovely.

Finally, the snow failed to stick; now, with the cold of night come down, the sky is mostly clear, an occasional sprinkling fall of white like thrown glitter here and there and then gone, and I do not think it will be a white morning tomorrow. Black ice will suffice, anyway, as far as hazards go-- people will think, no snow, and cars will skid through intersections into lamposts, water mains, unlucky pedestrians.

I believe I will rise late.

I woke to my cold apartment at eleven, Saturday night a blur of pool with friends, the dance club with the ballerinas and my friend who is dating one of them, me dancing badly to hip-hop, not so good with the 4/4, and finally the final cold walk home through the long unlit alley that is a shortcut that I often take but that unsettles me with a couple drinks in me late at night, my white breath before me in the dark, the overhanging trees and the fences and unwindowed walls a long queue of shadows.

My apartment was cold-- I had forgotten to turn up the heat. Out my 11th floor window the Coburg hills were dusted white and the falling flakes fell the length of the window in their greater fall, and I stood and watched for a long time the snow in downward path and the cars crawling the square streets and my own dim reflection in the glass, a man looking down and past and over and through, and after a time a feeling came over me, and then a phrase, intolerable clarity, and I grinned at the overwrought narration of my own life and went to shower.

I have become a poor observer of my own habits. Too much navel-gazing and liminal space. Too much of the bar and of the sorrowful nature of longing.

Tonight, I had dinner with my parents and my brother's family and my sister-in-law's grandparents, an affair that as usual involved hours of entertainment from my nephews of four and six who remind me an awful lot of my brother and myself. Watching them in their madcap capers and mayhem, hamming it up, banging knives to glasses to announce their next trick, turning cartwheels and flips and shooting toy guns with lasers, requiring endless management and in their energy too filling my brother's living room, I thought of the morning, of my still cold apartment, of the life I have now which speaks as much to absence as anything else. I would not make my brother's choices, to have started a family at twenty-two, but I would not make my own choices either, to have stayed too long in one place enacting endless circles. I need-- more.

And to find it, I will have to seek. In my dreams the shadows too often close, the child cannot be saved, the clock ticks toward some dreadful imminence.

But I am writing this story, and so can change how it ends.

2012-01-06T17:41:00.000-08:00

The winter has settled in, finally-- for most of December, it was clear and cold, New England weather displaced onto this valley of rain and constant cloud-cover. Now, the weather is back in form, drizzle and an unbroken ceiling of gray, and with the unrelenting drear comes too the stir-crazy wanting, the need to break loose and light up, to get beyond. I have felt it some days, waking early and pacing, or scrolling cable late at night, watching reruns of Iron Chef on unending queue as if in culinary battle there was something to be found. On my facebook page today, a local bartender posted the status "Isn't it about time for a good old fashioned make-out session," I nearly posted "Yes," before realizing that might be taken as an offer. Offers are out there at the bars, that much is sure-- last night, in town for an evening, a Hawaiian lass named "Baby girl," a given name in fact, seemed ready to go anywhere. The tall, likely crazy Barbie who has been pursuing me for months but who never remembers my name because she only sees me when drunk approached yet again, told me yet again how she likes mixed-asian men as a result of the time she spent in Hawaii, and it is too bad that she works retail and is clearly not too smart; there is some justice, at least, in the tall, hot blonde having a thing for stocky Asian men. Because it is in the air, last night I literally lost my glasses, and if there ever was a metaphor, losing for the looking, there it is. I fled Baby Girl to go by John Henry's, the best dive in town, and ran into a fellow who works the bagel shop who I sometimes play pool with, and he introduced me to his girlfriend, blonde and cute, a sophomore English major whose whole face lit up when she heard I was a writer and taught in the English Department. She told me she wanted to blow her adviser. She professed an interest in 16th and 17th century poetry, and though I could think only of names including John and somehow came out with John Locke when I meant of course John Donne, she was convinced of my authority as a writer of prose and nodded enthusiastically concerning the philosopher. She suggested that we "Get out of here right now, together," and when I protested about her boyfriend, she said, "He's not my boyfriend. I just wake up on his bed now and then on nights I need a fuck," and the coldness of the young debutante terrified me-- the bagel shop guy is awfully nice. The best line I could come up with to leave on was, "The world needs more English majors." Really, it needs more of everything, right now: more light and heat, more heart, perhaps even more poetry. More to find and be found, and less hapless seeking.

New Work In Progress

2012-01-05T16:08:00.001-08:00

This is exposition-heavy for now... but it is going, quite literally, down a canyon and nearly off a cliff.

The Summer I graduated high school, my brother and I took our parent’s Toyota minivan on a camping trip through British Columbia. Newly eighteen, Stanford-bound, convinced for what seemed like sound enough reasons of my own invincible merit, I had spent my high school years working hard and staying out of trouble. Only as graduation came on did I finally loosen up a little, drinking at parties and kissing an occasional girl, taking chances here and there.

My brother Jeremy was already the reckless rebel, his entire identity predicated on not being me: he insisted on attending a different high school, didn’t care about his grades or what our parent’s thought, had already dropped out of competitive sports, took up surfing, BMX racing and smoking weed. His friends were the bad boys of the school, hoodied and perpetually slouched to walls, cutting class to smoke cigarettes behind the gym, most headed nowhere good. But we were tight and had no secrets and never fought, had been that way since I was ten and he was eight and the two of us, talking between bunks in the dark, had decided that it made no sense to fight each other when we could buck our strict parents by presenting a united front. We could meet eyes as our parents laid down some mandate or rule or schedule and know not just what the other was thinking, but how we could collude to make things tilt our way. When we were young, that was as simple as a shared protest or agreement, numbers at the ballot. Later, I would note that a family trip we didn’t want to go on would interfere with my wrestling schedule or study session, when really I didn’t care, but knew Jeremy had a party he wanted to be at; for his part, knowing me, he’d take the rap those rare times I fucked up, like when our parents noticed that the liquor cabinet had been raided-- I’d taken the Cutty Sark for graduation night, but when they assumed it was him, he didn’t set them straight even as they yelled and carried on. The favored older son, my accommodation to the hand I’d been dealt was to perform perfection and so avoid censure, while Jeremy, stuck with inevitable comparison, refused judgment entirely.

Yet the truth was that we were pretty much the same, nice quiet kids, half-Japanese and so never belonging in white suburban Oregon, short and bookish and overbright, sensitive and a little awkward. If Jeremy admired my dedication and achievement, I admired his willingness to defy the expectations of the known world. As August’s heat came on and plans were set for me to leave for college, it was clear that our partnership was coming to an end. This trip was to be our last hurrah. I convinced my parents to let us take the car on the basis of my long record of responsibility—I would watch after the kid and stay safe, I promised. I thought I was breaking us both free into the heady independence that I thought of as adulthood.
We strapped my brother’s mountain bike to the back of the van, took removed the rear seats for room, filled a cooler with sausage, hot-dogs, eggs and marshmallows, borrowed the down sleeping bags and campstove, stowed in kindling and wood for campfires, took a couple old newspapers for tinder, made sure we had the rainsleeve. We took the inflatable two-man kayak, a pump, lifejackets, and two paddles, imagining wild rivers up there and still giddy with our skill: we’d run the wild and scenic portion of the Rogue that July in the two-man without flipping once. I hid a fifth of Absolut in the bottom of my clothes bag. We could do anything at all in the deep Canadian woods, British Columbia beckoning like a tundra Mardi Gras, sure to allow us to become more than boys.

We left early on a Monday morning through a cold dawn, taking turns driving, rock overloud from the tinny speakers, I-5 a long fast flat run through Portland and past Seattle, the land the long flat fields and a tunnel forest, familiar, an automatic green blur. We gassed up just before we hit the border in Washington, pass the Canadian guards with a grin and a wave, only to have the guard wave us back to tell us we had no gas cap, that we’d left it back in the States. The US Border guards detained us for a full hour questioning us and looking for contraband, unsympathetic to our explanation we’d been in Canada for five minutes, leaving me sweating about the Absolut. They were looking for drugs, fortunately, and didn’t find the vodka. By the time we’d retrieved the cap and come back across the border again, our enthusiasm was undulled, but our confidence had been a bit shaken. The highrises of Vancouver ahead, however, sparkling in the high sun of afternoon braced us and renewed us. We were at any moment going to find our future, or at least, see something we had never seen before. We made for the cheapest hostel of Watertown.

Who They Imagine I Am

2011-12-30T15:41:00.000-08:00

Short of stature, small in talent, reserved and reticent, over-dressed in blazer and black sweater, ambiguously ethnic and generally without flourish or flair, I somehow have a strange way of causing others to admire and imitate my habits. A barback asked after my brand of white v-neck, and the next week turned up in Polo, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was because I have no money that I buy discount three-packs to get by for the summer—they go easily with my one threadbare blazer. The German PhD students I sometimes play pool with, who I call the Germans, have taken to ordering my drink, which they call “the Copperman,” and I gather that they don’t understand that I drink Monolopowa and soda with a lime because the potato vodka is the best I can afford, cheap here by some accident of tariff or supply, not because there is some magic in the drink—it is simple and clean and tastes like citrus, and it isn’t sweet, but they would do better to buy microbrew or any of a dozen better drinks than the one I fall back on to keep from drinking myself broke. The old, bright, solitary machinist who once was a regular at the bar I went to when I was a graduate student regularly writes me cryptic Facebook messages at late hours, asking me odd questions about William Blake and punctuation and the inevitability of despair. The Contractor I often hang out with at the bars, loudspoken and brazenly skirtchasing, for some bizarre reason asked after the make and material of my one scarf, as if there was anything stylish in burgundy and cotton blend, and as he makes a lot of money and buys only designer I cannot really conceive of what it is he seeks to know. The best bar pool player in town insisted I was his first choice in forming a pool league team, and that too makes no sense: he is far, far better than I am, both accurate and possessing of cue control, while I dally with a little English and play best the less hard I try. All of them seem to think that I possess some quality they wish to acquire by proximity or imitation. And though I am more self-aware than Singer, the mute of Carson McCuller’s great novel “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter,” whose attentive silence was construed as comprehension of and compassion concerning the secret longing of others, I have the sense that my own odd accommodations to this town I don’t belong in has caused some similar misconceptions.

People mistake my constant standing as a sign of vigor and energy, not understanding that sitting for more than an hour like a normal person makes my back hurt. They mistake my solitary habits in this town my close friends have all moved from for self-possession, a fundamentally insular confidence they wish to acquire, when in fact I am mostly lonely, and encounter those people out in public venues I have come to in order to be near to others. They mistake my reluctance to try to take home young girls from the bar for decency and honor, not understanding that I am as lustful as the next fellow, but stay away from hot and 21 in the spirit of self-preservation: experience has taught me that I will apparently forego all sense for a beautiful woman, and surely I don’t need to deal with such immaturity all over again. They mistake my general kindness for some larger virtue I surely do not possess at all—I have my weaknesses, and god knows, my regrets. I have my shameful secrets, no worse than those that all of us harbor, but surely no better. Yet despite the truth, it seems that others require me to possess some ineffable merit, to be inhumanely excellent, and that expectation has become a burden also: more people I may finally disappoint. I do not want to be the end of their faith anymore than I want to be the repository of their hopes and secret longings, but I fear I am both—for they seek me out, too, to reveal what they want and need, and because it is my nature to find the flat bottom of narrative, so it is that I know that the contractor takes home the young girls with the platinum hair and fake breasts because his heart was broken by a woman he made a house for, and so now he looks for sex where there is no risk of falling in love. I know that the barback was cheated on by his last girlfriend, and that now he lacks the courage to really go after the women he wants, so that he spends his late nights perusing the internet’s endless queue of porn until he passes out and wakes feeling sad and ashamed. I know that one German is secretly OCD and will not come to the bar on weekends when he might actually meet a woman because the bar does not have a bathroom that locks and he cannot piss when anyone else is in the room, and so he has gone a year single. I know that the other German is secretly a little in love with a friend who has a boyfriend, that once years ago they kissed and he is filled with guilt and lust every time he sees the girl and her boyfriend, just as he is filled with guilt and dread every time the young girl he dated in Germany texts him about their love, which is not love but devotion, which he knows is unreciprocal but allows to persist because it is comforting to think that there is at least one person in the world who holds him dear. I know that the pool player has never really thrown off his origins in trailer park and small stature, at the bottom of it finally still a scared boy who was endlessly backed into corners, and much of what he struggles with is his tendency to self-sabotage, him willfully forcing out more proof of his inadequacy when in fact he is a good man. I know that the machinist, who is in his forties and looks older from hard living, went to Reed for a year, where he took up mastery of pool at the college bar and failed out in a year despite having a genius level IQ, and I know that he falls in love with every female bartender who is kind to him, knowing full well that they are nice only because it is in their interest but unable to keep himself from wishing, from wanting to be touched by a woman, which he hasn’t been in years. What I know is—too much. Or too little, and not enough, to misparaphrase Vallejo.

Bearing all those stories, and having all of these sad men look to me for inspiration and answers, I do not know what to do, and so I say only what I can.

“Have another Copperman,” I tell the Germans. “And go talk to that girl.”

“Buy cashmere, and for fuck’s sake, call a cab,” I tell the Contractor.

“Talk to my friend the ballerina, and be your best self,” I tell the pool player.

“Blake has no answers, but asks the right questions,” I tell the bar regular, knowing that there is little else I can say.

One day soon, I will leave these people, and they will all be alright. That is what I tell myself, anyway--- that they will be fine.

That we all will.

Barry Hannah, Willa Cather

2011-12-27T15:48:00.000-08:00

I told myself, last night, that I would write even if the result is only self-indulgence and absurdity, empty poetic language and redundant melancholy longing. I have been stuck museless and mute for the last month, except for the occasional bout of satire, reading Barry Hannah and Willa Cather and wishing for more inspiration and certainly more talent. Hannah is loud, explosive, transgressive, pitiless, and often brilliant in an entirely original and unreplicable way. Cather’s prose is lyric and graceful and precise, weighted with the authority that retrospection can bring, and her narrators face what time has made of memory—what was important and beautiful, what we cannot have back.

Both I admire an awful lot, but I find myself finally more taken with Cather than with Hannah—I am never bored in reading Hannah, but I am only moved in his occasional quiet work that has a feel of looking back through time (“Testimony of Pilot,” for example, and his fishing story about a boy dragged into the surf by what took for a moment his line, and how he held onto that story and that time in his youth). I look to Hannah and his talent with awe; I aspire to the clarity and size of Cather’s work at her best, which has—resonance? Heart? – a sort of purity of gaze, as if what she wrote and kept was only what was at the bottom of something she cared deeply about. Hannah is punch-drunk with language and the intensity and acceleration of what mad and absurd collision he has imagined and realized, and so I am endlessly entertained. Cather is singing quietly to herself in the dark with the voice she has, which she doesn’t herself think of as beautiful but which is better still for that lack of self-regard, and hearing her, I want to write.

2011-12-26T13:45:00.001-08:00

Christmas has come, and gone, and now it is the day after, all artifice stripped from that most commodified of holidays in the frantic aftermath of exchange and supersale, the malls teeming, the only imminent change now the onset of temporary hopefulness proferred by the night of greatest inebriation, which will be followed by the morning of greatest hangover. And so perhaps I can be forgiven for a lack of holiday enthusiasm at the moment, though my Christmas was merry enough, a day of parents and nephews and needed winter coats, and then finally the sort of feast that oversates and ensures the need for New Year's resolutions regarding waistline. Not a bad day, but I couldn't shake the sense that the world is moving while I stand still. In the morning, before I went to my parent's house, I went by Starbucks, the only open coffee vendor, and ran into an old friend from high school who lives now in Oakland, a loudspoken and assertive Jew who's the daughter of the local Rabbi.

"Are you visiting?" she asked. "What are you doing? What's new?"

Because I have come past the point where I can use the line about doing the same things the same ways and expecting different results, one of many definitions of insanity, I shrugged.

She went on to offer some good advice concerning single-minded pursuit of success, perhaps not really realizing that single-minded pursuit is the one thing I do well. She meant well. She was right to suggest I move South to sunnier climes. What I most took away, in the pre-coffee blur, was her energy and conviction and the sense that she, at least, was away doing while I stay, sustaining. Not her fault or intention, but the way I feel nonetheless. When I went out last night with my brother, the one open bar was full of people he went to high school with who'd come back for the holidays, but there was not a single person from my high school years-- people in their thirties have begun to establish their own families and to have other obligations beyond the town they were born in.

"Come to the Bay," my friend said, "and I'll set you up with all my single friends."

I smiled and thanked her. Not an offer I'm likely to take up, but she had one thing undeniably right: the need to move, the inevitability now. There is only so long I can afford to stay still, to walk the same streets bound the same places, knowing already the way the hours will pass. As my friend Leo London asks in his saddest song, how long? How far?

2011-12-20T15:49:00.000-08:00

In the paintings hung here in the café, made by the climber known for reckless Smith Rock free-soloing, all is somber and rich and receding into darkness. All is the inability of light to illuminate. Figures whose bodies can be seen are all faceless, moving away into the bleak night, while all eyes are colorless and stare off into void; always, faces are pale but also rouged at the cheeks, as if blood has been forced free, all turned inside out. The work is a fearful anatomy of the human condition, as if desire were to be considered as mechanism only, and all energy and life could be reduced to gesture, as if there was only gesture, and the only adequate response is a wistful acceptance of mortality. It is haunting and at times beautiful, but it is also lifeless, rendering all that lives alien and doomed. It is not bad—Adam’s work has after all been lauded in the New Yorker, and he shows all across the nation, making a living at painting, no small success—but the work is not to my taste at all, and when I try to write, the still, sad boxes bearing arrested figures, expiring heat, seem to close about me, oppressive and demanding. I would say they ask for me to enter their world, but perhaps what is worse is that some days I feel I already live there, held wan and cold, moving away into the greater dark.

I should find a new café. You can rearrange the letters in café to spell face. I am looking for a new mirror, a new hope, anew--? Reify, from the latinate root reis, to make anew. If there were beautiful girls to sidle up to at bars who would know the word at all I would lean in, warm breath to the swanline of neck, lips almost touching the fine bones of the ear, and whisper: “Reify me.”

Now what is hotter than that?

Oh, I would not whisper it.

Better to look out the window. I have been here since late morning, drinking coffee and pretending to work. Now the day is gold with sun, the sky not blue but lit almost to white. Orange and brown and yellow leaves are spun in the wind like thronging birds, winging over sidewalk and street in ever-shifting flutter, bright in the richness of the light. The winter chill is a welcome absence. The telephone wires which arc between poles sway a little as if brimming with voices, and surely there is some meaning here, in the bare and interwoven branches of the oak, in the sound of distant laughter and beyond a thrum of engine, steady but receding, and in the passage of a sparrow overhead so quick that it is the blurred ghost of wings already gone and out of sight beyond the high pale buildings on which the stark, thrown shadows of the shifting telephone wires and the branches and leaves move still. The meaning is: be here. The meaning is: beauty can be, will become. The meaning is: forgive even yourself. Be carried and bourne through, not bound by what was; walk in the direction of the sparrow’s flight, into day. Into light.

I sound like an addle-brained poet, nattering on about darkness and light, mortal ends and forgiveness. The meaning is, waste not, want not. The wanting is the human condition, moderately universal. The universal is infinitely indefinite.

Ya-dum-dah-dah. Nonsense and bullshit.

Yesterday I wrote a holiday op-ed and sent it off to the local paper, my once-yearly opining somewhere in the key of hope in spite of all that might make us despair; I covered national and international politics, Tim Tebow and Oregon football, materialism and public education, and for good measure made mention of Langston Hughes and my two young nephews. An incoherent paean to all that is good in all of us, despite all of our doubts. As true as it is, finally, still inadequate to expiate melancholy, or save us from ourselves.

Out of sight in the front of the café, a child’s laughter can be heard. Out the window, the clouds have reclaimed the sky. The paintings close about me, and it is true that my black sweater and burgundy scarf are in the appropriate color palette to take their place on canvas. I have in my pocket a beautiful girl’s number from the bar last night, lottery ticket in the game that is not a game, and in a few hours I meet my friend the NYU economics professor, for dinner. He is practical, and so I won’t mention anything regarding new physics or metaphysics, oppressive art or the self-indulgently bleak landscape of the soul. He will tell me he is dating a model. He will tell me to call the number soon. He will not know that if I did, I would not give my name, and might only say, “Reify me, darling,” before hanging up.

A Glass Raised to Christopher Hitchens

2011-12-17T14:47:00.000-08:00

It is cold and damp here, last night freezing fog, whited air and a feeling of stillness about the town even on a Friday night. An uncelebratory end of week, people hurrying to the downtown bars with their heads down, dutiful, headed toward expected inebriation but secretly already huddling beneath blankets in bed. I was similarly uncommitted-- a few hours out with a bunch of writers at a bar I never frequent, a couple games of bar pool back in the familiar digs downtown, no real competition, shots taken casually, no need for concentration and so no moment when the game itself began to come to me in a way that exceeded my own talent. Nothing to play for. And finally the blur of late-night television and my own warm bed.

Out with the writers last night, who are all imminently bound to their actual homes and families, all transplants who came here for the MFA and are soon enough bound back or elsewhere, we spoke of the smallness and provinciality of the town, its comfort and its embrace of mediocrity. I am not sure that such criticism is fair, though I am often the first to level such charges; this is a college town, but not a bad place to live, beautiful in the summers, comfortable and easy and cheap. That it is a poor place to be thirty-one and single and perhaps a bit more cosmopolitan than most is not the fault of the town, but of the fellow who stayed here too long. If there is too little to sustain a life and you stay, starving slowly of spirit, whose fault is that? I have been waiting for something or someone to save me, but there is nothing from which to be saved. There are choices ahead, and I will need to find a path, or make one.

___

A couple years ago, I saw Christopher Hitchens speak at the Arlene Schnitzer in Portland. I had won a fellowship from Oregon Literary Arts, and they were honoring us before Hitchens read. The Heathman is across the street, and I had fond memories of the place-- years and years before I stayed there with my longtime college girlfriend for a night, and we ate dinner there in the restaurant and then had cocktails at the bar, and though I can remember little except the warmth of liquor and the happiness of the night, our future lives before us and the adultness of a fine restaurant and hotel exciting and easy, free of any intimations of the greater burdens of responsibility and disillusionment that lay ahead. We were in fact rarely happy, trying to maintain a long distance relationship at different colleges, our actual chemistry poor, all that was between us a mutual respect which finally was not enough to last. That night we forgot the struggle for the fineness of luxury and comfort.

And so with an hour to kill before Hitchens, I wandered into the Heathman, which was still nicely appointed, if less grand than in my memory, and sat by myself a table and ordered a scotch well beyond my means and looked about the restaurant and bar for-- well, myself, or who I had been. I was not there, nor could I find any couple like I had been, but I did spot Hitchens in a smart three-piece suit, his tie loosened and a little askew, his voice carrying to me, unresolvable except in the strident tone of conviction and confidence with which he was holding forth in speaking to a woman who leaned toward him, rapt and worshipful of his brilliance or fame or both. He was a little red in the face, and as he spoke, he lifted his glass to drive home his point, nearly sloshing his drink from the delicate glass, and watching him, a little paunchy, his hair gone to salted gray, almost absurd but also unapologetically-- alive?-- there at the bar, punch-drunk and chasing skirt only minutes before he was due to speak to a sold-out hall on what would be his final tour, it seemed to me that there was a lesson to observe, and I watched him there until he finally left fifteen minutes before he was due to perform and then followed him into my front row seats. He spoke, without notes, for an hour and a half, and was delightfully uncompromisingly polemic, and when I left that night, I had changed my mind about him. Hitchens was bully for war, explicitly misogynist, irreligious to the point of prejudice, and also, in the rigor of his rhetoric and the cleverness of his invective, among our most interesting writers. He did not bore, and he did not go softly; there is nothing faint-hearted or simpering in Hitchens. His death this week, from hard living that he never regretted and said he would not take back, is a loss indeed.

I do not write like Christopher Hitchens-- my interest in politics is personal, and as for my artistic aspirations, I do not wish to make arguments. But in the vigor of his pursuit and his embrace of life, Hitchens provides an example one could only-- pray-- to match.

2011-12-10T13:55:00.000-08:00

In the coffeeshop today, the furnace is too low and the cold outside too bitter, and so my fingers keep going numb and I blow on them to restore feeling and stare out the window where the day is a study of leafless trees to backlit clouds, no blue evident but here and there whited cracks limn the gray sheet of sky as if all were burning beyond in a dull winter forge, faint of fire and all but heatless. Behind me, a young woman in a faded teal wintercoat and triple-wrapped yellow scarf, blonde hair pulled back with a red bandana, sleeps with her head to the table, her mug of coffee no longer steaming beside her nose; earlier, she was sobbing into her cellphone, raising her voice only once to say, "No, I'm fucking not all right." Now, she is asleep, exhausted with hurt, and while she looks to be deep in the respite of dream, soon enough she will wake again, with still too little, too sad, too much to bear. If the empathy of strangers was not its own burden, I would tell her that this too will pass, but who am I to assert platitudes, knowing nothing of where she has come from or where she is bound?

I know this much: that my fingers are cold and stiff, that the words come haltingly, that there should be more that can be done than to stand in a dim room staring out a window at an empty parking lot lined with leafless trees, the street empty, only a single raven winging overhead and then gone. This morning I woke to a message from a past love I've been unable to let go, calling my choices 'admirable', noting that "few people that can sustain a single-minded pursuit of something that will likely not bring wealth or a traditional notion of success." She sincerely means to compliment, but there is an unconscious edge, too-- how I didn't pursue her with the same dedication, how I let her leave without objection or attempt to follow, and though she doesn't know it, she is more right in her implicit reproach than in lauding the purity of my choices. So I have chased art down a rabbit hole into darkness-- all of us will end up underground. I should have chosen happiness, which there are only so many chances at in this life-- instead, terrified of trying and so losing, I lost more. I know that now, and will not make the same mistake again-- yet there is little comfort in the wisdom of past folly. Instead, there is the long still afternoon, and the melancholy of regret, how it unwinds through memory: how did I turn down a laughing girl who drove her old car too fast on the backcountry roads, stopping only when the engine billowed smoke to add more oil? Who ran, laughing, ahead of me on a snow-locked March trail so as to ambush me with a barrage of snowballs thrown so inaccurately she missed entirely, who jumped from tree to tree crossing a waterfall, exhuberant enough and tough enough not to care when she slipped and put her leg in the icy water to the knee? I spent those hours anticipating her gone instead of appreciating her there, just as I sit now watching the day, infusing the shifting sky with arrest, longing for what I cannot have instead of seizing what might be.

The sad girl has taken her cold coffee and gone, and there is no profit in mourning misery you have made. Time to leave this window for warmer rooms and wider windows, to go out into the day; if my heart is heavy, I know too that there are limits to what can be carried, that finally we must forgive even ourselves. That does not mean we must forget, but we can dream, and hope we wake having become better.

Camera Obscura

2011-12-02T08:31:00.000-08:00

The fine journal of literature and photography, "Camera Obscura," which was one of Library Journal's top magazines last year and is distributed nationally by Barnes and Noble, has accepted my story "True Conditions," for its Winter issue due out in January 2012.

It is one thing to be pleased with placing work that I know will go quick, like "Reading the Water," which I placed after only five months-- creative nonfiction is an easier market, and work which is moving and concerns fathers and sons and whitewater kayaking is not a hard sell. "True Conditions," is another matter entirely, though it remains the single piece of fiction that is closest to me. Hard to sell fiction about a composition teacher at a university with an acid tongue who reluctantly and bitterly attends the (troubled) birth of his younger brother's son, and is forced to recognize all he has lost to his own inability to commit to love. Harder still to place such a story in market that demands shocks and explosions and easily explicable outcomes, that rewards rote competence and relative conformity and acceptable oddity (we like narrative like narratives we have seen before, with a 'twist!'). After some fifty rejections over five years, many personal and laudatory and nonetheless reluctant to embrace a story which is finally sad and austere and subtle in its implications, I am glad to place a piece I have always believed in. After so long, I feel less vindication than relief-- at least one orphan found a home in the end, I found myself thinking last week, before chiding myself for imagining stories to be motherless children, wandering the literary world in search of shelter.

Thanks

2011-11-22T13:48:00.000-08:00

I am glad to be able to say that my essay "Reading the Water," was accepted by The Sun earlier this week.

When I was in college, the older sister of my girlfriend at the time bought me a subscription to The Sun for Christmas, and renewed it each December for the next four years I was in that relationship, and so The Sun was the first literary magazine that I ever subscribed to or read regularly. That experience may have spoiled me in many ways, especially in the quality of their nonfiction-- reading many of the nation's leading literary magazines now is too often a disappointment, rote competence and popular subject-matter too often rewarded over risk-taking and honesty. The Sun has always sought work that defies easy expectations, privileging the felt over the cerebral, the unflinching and difficult over the glib and comforting. I am honored to be able to come full circle and place a piece with so fine a venue.

In a few days, it will be Thanksgiving; Literary Arts, which awarded me a fellowship in Literary Nonfiction in 2009, wrote a few days ago to solicit a few lines describing what I was thankful for, and I found myself thinking of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving some three years ago, when one of my best friends was in town. We went to a party celebrating the bottling of the latest vintage of a local winery, and it was some fellow's fortieth birthday, and somehow my friend and I ended up taking the guy to a strip club along with a number of girls who worked at the winery. There is no sadder place than a strip club on the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving in a sleepy and provincial little town, the club a squat, windowless warehouse way West where the town gets gritty and industrial, smokestacks for the last lumber and paper mills in the town still spitting clouds of steam and smoke. The birthday fellow was drunk and clearly a little lonely, and the over-made up girls in their tall plastic heels, tanned orange and not precisely chubby but really not women you'd look twice at in their clothes in normal light immediately had him hooked, his eyes following them with a look of such abject longing that it was all I could do not to avert my eyes. My friend, who had had a hard couple years, his hopes for a record dashed and his relationship of four years recently ended, had a hard smug look of satisfaction on his face from the moment we arrived, as if this bleak and tawdry club was final proof of the ugliness of the world.

Soon, we put the drunk birthday fellow into a taxi and left with a couple of the girl's from the party, including a girl who was the younger sister of a friend from high school who I'd become friends with being back in town, and who I'd always liked for her unapologetic optimism. We went to Shari's to sober up, a group of late twenty-somethings in peacoats and cocktail dresses stumbling through the diner door at two am, the girl's weaving in heels they now regretted, my friend even more pleased now to see our group in the overlit booth, voices loud and slurring as we struggled to order. When I met his eyes, he raised his eyebrows conspiratorially, and I smiled-- he had indeed had a hard run of years, and if anything, I understood how he felt, that the world was too small in its joys and too frequent in its disappointments. There was no way to speak of the nuance he missed his judgment, how it was no-one's fault that life had disappointed, especially not these kind punch-drunk girls. The food came, and was as greasy and bland as could be expected, and we choked it down anyway, all except my friend, who took a bite and pushed back his plate in disgust, perhaps his fault for attempting Eggs Benedict at a place known for the frequency of food poisoning. And that was when it happened: my high school buddy's sister tapped her fork to her glass, and said: "So, everybody. What are you thankful for?"

My friend snorted, choked a little, and on seeing that the girl was earnest, eyed her with a barely restrained sneer. "You're-- thankful?" he finally said. "Thankful? For-- this?"

The girl smiled serenely, looking on my friend with a tenderness that might have been pity were she less well-meaning; she was the driver in the group of girls, and so was now speaking clearly:

"I am thankful to have a job I like, and a car to drive, and a house to go back to with a warm bed to sleep in, and friends and co-workers to celebrate with. I am thankful my parents are both still living, and did the best they could to raise me, and I am thankful I have an older brother who calls every couple of weeks to see how I am. I am thankful I was born in this community to middle-class and not poor parents, and I am thankful I was born in this country and not in the third-world or in a country where many people, and especially women, are not allowed basic freedoms and rights. I am thankful I'll get up tomorrow and know my day will include a fire in the fireplace, and turkey and gravy and stuffing and even mashed potatoes and likely, luckily, apple pie. Yeah. I am thankful."

My friend opened his mouth to say something, and then shut it-- he knew when he was done. And I think about that night each imminent Thanksgiving, which has at its root the whole troubled question of how 'thankful' those early Indians were given all that would be done to them, and which has surely become as commercialized and commodified a holiday as any other American tradition. It is true: injustice and suffering are common, and sometimes there does not seem to be enough to sustain happiness. Yet Thanksgiving remains a day when you gather with family and friends, and eat until overcome with tryptophan and cranberry sauce, and if we are honest with ourselves, it ought to be a day when we remember that most of us have something to be thankful for. Today my friend has a smart, beautiful girlfriend, owns a recording studio in New York, and tours in London, Shanghai, and Tokyo playing his music before sold-out houses, and though his life is not simple or easy, he is lucky for what he has. And though I often lament the small failures and sorrows of my own life, I am fortunate too, if I pay attention to the gifts I often take for granted. And so I wrote back to the folks at Literary Arts:

"I'm thankful for the privilege of teaching writing to bright and deserving students, who fill a cold classroom with the clamor and energy of their opinions, well-considered and ill-considered alike, and for having Langston Hughes' "Theme for English B," to teach them the proper spirit with which to turn in a paper: Teacher, this essay will change you. And I'm thankful for my two nephews, silly, wild-haired boys of six and four, who called me in the third quarter of the Oregon-Stanford game to tell me that the Ducks were the best, while the "Cardinal" (my alma mater) have a mascot that "does no push-ups, and doesn't make any sense."

And I'm thankful too for much more still; for all that my friend's sister so wisely said, for the delight of being in The Sun, for the leisure of this afternoon to think and write.

2011-11-12T15:30:00.000-08:00

I spend my evenings in all the wrong places. Too frequently, I walk downtown to my favorite bar to be for a few hours a part of the life of night with its open riot and vigor, rising voices, brayed laughter and staggering hope, all the immediate intimations of something good being bound to happen soon, now, whether realized lust or the temporary invincibility of being beyond one’s own doubts and awkwardness, the sweet liquor freeing the heart’s sorrows and longing and need so that for a time there is, only, just, that which is heard and wanted, felt in rising. And many nights, the music stops for a moment, and the clink of glasses and the conversation resolves to dissonant voices, banal conversations, and me blurry and lost and displaced, at a bar in a small town where nothing particularly good ever happened to anyone. Some nights I stay through that moment of clarity, when the spell has been broken, and other nights I finish my drink and leave even as the music starts again, the charm broken and the small and tawdry moment too much to bear. Another night at the bar; they say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing the same ways and expecting a different result. Yet I would rather be out in the world than at home in my apartment watching cable or wandering the infinite internet, even if the bar is all but empty and bartender is sullen and the only music playing is a song for the broken-hearted. At least I’ve sought—life?—and in finding its absence on a weekday night ensures the imminence of bodies and voices come Friday night.

I am not a drunk, and never drink to incoherence, though I can hold my liquor; mostly I play bar pool, a game which has honor and requires skill but favors luck, and I love the sound of cue to ball, of balls striking and the welcoming thud of the back of the pocket. I have friends who also play, graduate students in German and Physics, barbacks who like to speak of mixed-martial arts, acquaintances from the climbing gym, and too there always the regulars who have come in early afternoon and are still there at ten, unsteady on their feet but still swinging the cue, and I play, drink, watch the unwinding from the vantage of the partially involved but uncommitted. And I pretend I am different from the men red-faced and uncertain on their feet, their voices overloud as they approach the girls who perch on barstools in groups, pretending to talk and mostly casting about for the right drunken fellow, and truly I am just as lonely as anyone else; it is only my carefulness that sets me apart, for though sometimes I do talk to a debutante who approaches or get drawn into a group of women whose eye I have caught, and though sometimes I am even attracted, I don’t take girls home from the bar. Sometimes I think of love, its absence or loss or my longing for it, but I know better than to seek it in a place so simultaneously irreal and unrestrained. I am patient. Or perhaps it is really that I want too much and am not so foolish as to imagine the answer is at the bottom of the glass or in the pants of nearest girl who has applied make-up and perfume and gone out grasping desperately. And those rare nights when the liquor burns too bright and the longing gets too acute, I am fortunately a prisoner of habit—the beautiful girl does not go to the quiet fellow who carries himself with such concentrated calm, and that too is for the best: I am too old to commit again to hot and mean, or hot and selfish, or hot and crazy, let alone the terrible triumvirate all in one.

No, give me a game of straight eight, gentleman’s rules, and a stiff Beam and soda so too many don’t need to be bought, and turn the music loud and let the voices rise to a roar while the balls drop as if each were meant so that for a moment the night seems so large that small sorrows recede! And maybe still in that moment some woman sidles up, and shatters all my assumptions of the possible. If not, well, the evening will end like any other, just as another night it all will begin anew, an infinite imminence, the universe realized in a dim and well-appointed watering hole. And one night I will not go to the bar, having sought solace elsewhere, and if you seek there you will not find me; perhaps you will see me some other place, and we will nod in passing, and put our heads down and walk on.

The Joys of Flight

2011-09-05T17:55:00.000-07:00

The flight was bad before we boarded the plane, the gate area small and dingy, the once white ceiling panels Van Goghed with some brown leakage, and the Labor Day Monday return crowd milled moodily about, the explanation for the wait that the cleaning crew was taking time, though we could all see the maintenance van on the tarmac, warning lights blinking in the steady downpour of a storm that had not existed when I landed three hours earlier, the layover a building of ominous gray, lightning blinking in the distance. When they finally cleared us to board by zone, crowds rushed the ticket counter, wheeled bags trailing like rotors, taking out the elderly at the ankles, people willfully ignoring the called zone and then smacking shoulders and elbows making their angry way out. I was in the last zone, and waited until the end, where my ticket made a buzzing sound and the agent craned her chin worldlessly to the side, signaling I would have to wait.

“I’m confirmed,” I said. “I’m sure!”

Heavy-bodied and spectacled, her ruddy skin and severely bunned hair giving her the look of an Irish Aunt Jemima, she examined me with the pitiless gaze of a woman with protocols to follow, me now a hopelessly human obstacle to her getting the plane in the air. When everyone was past she ran my ticket by the console at the computer, and tight-lipped, speaking words under her breath which could have been prayers or curses, she began to type, the computer beeping and buzzing intermittently. It was never clear to me what was wrong or if it was fixed; instead, she called the plane closed and then pointed and said, “Hurry before they close the doors.”

In the plane was humid chaos, the ducts attempting to cut the still hot air and so pushing white steam ominously from the wall vents, a man of fifty with spindly arms and absurdly white knees protruding from ill-fitting khaki shorts punching an overstuffed bag into an overhead bin, his pathetic, forceless blows falling frantically, while a line formed behind him in the aisle and a voice came over the loudspeaker that we were to be seated for immediate departure. An attendant swooped in from his free side and took the man’s bag to be checked while he looked on with his hands open, protesting that they never checked it through right, watching her retreating back as if he thought his appeal might take hold through persistence. When I passed him I said, “I know, they made me check my bag in Denver on the way out and lost it,” which was entirely true, the full version that I’d had to attend a wedding meet-and-greet and breakfast in my sweated-out t-shirt and jeans, that he had no chance at all of escaping the fate he knew was coming. When I finally reached my seat, I was inside and everyone had to stand to ensconce me; the woman I was next to had the sour, pinched look of a weary traveler who was a misanthrope on the first sunlit day of Spring, and I didn’t even attempt to speak, just settled into my seat and looked out the window.

I was returned to the world of the plane by the rising voices of the children behind me, their voices loud in my ears. There was an obnoxious boy of three or four who told his mother what to do: “Get my Daddy’s Blackberry,” he declared. “No. Get me my drink. My toy. Now!” His missives were interspersed with kicks to the back of my chair that shook my neck. Meanwhile, wordless grunts and screams, rising in volume, emitted from a toddler who evidently could not speak, or wasn’t willing to try; I glanced back for a moment and saw the poor young mother holding the child, hair bedraggled and makeup smeared from the abuse of the toddler, who tore at her face and hair as the tantrum came on. I met her eyes for a moment with sympathy I both felt and wished I didn’t—hell is surely other people’s children—and then I turned back and realized that we had taxied and now were still, looked out the window to see a line of jets stretching eight deep, waiting for a single runway, and I wondered how it was that man had deemed flight superior to other modes of transportation, that we paid for the privilege of suffering in small spaces, packed overtight, unfed now, our luggage extra, trusting an under-rested pilot to guide an ill-maintained machine over land and sea, that we called such excursions ‘travel’ and referred to it fondly, saved up our time and money to subject ourselves to such torture.

The loudspeaker crackled, and a disembodied voice spoke. “This is your Captain. We don’t know when it will be our turn for take-off, but turbulence can be expected.”

Behind me, kicks thudded into my seat, the older child yelled and the toddler screamed piercingly. The engine idled, and out the window lightning traced the sky, though it was too loud in the cabin to make out the thunder.

The woman beside me tapped my arm, glanced meaningfully at the armrest where I’d set it. “Do you mind?”

I shook my head, cradled my arms at the elbows, and settled in for a pleasant flight.

Standing and Writing

2011-08-16T12:07:00.000-07:00

The coffeeshop where I work is a high-ceilinged, black-painted, converted warehouse lit with antique streetlamps to give a sense of its size. Commerce in Eugene, Oregon, has fallen on hard times like so much of the country, and so in the last couple years this place has twice been opened as a bar and restaurant, retracting to coffeeshop again when the bottom line cannot be met. The spot I like best is at the bar in the back, where the bottles of liquor glitter amber, umber, green and gold in the light from the high square window above the mahogany bartop worn smooth by martinis and elbows, and the abandoned wine glasses dangle on racks in sorrowful rows, consigned to disuse and emptiness. I arrive mid-morning, when the sun casts a retreating block of gold onto the seat by the window, and I settle into the corner of window and bar, pushing aside the seat because thanks to an old back injury, the price of past athletic inglory, I stand when I write. I unfold the laptop with the battery that no longer charges and that I can’t afford to replace in these Summer months when I make my money with my hands, open to the last page of whatever I was working on the day before, read to find the feeling and rhythm and intention, taking long pulls of a stiff Americano. If I am not immediately into the work, I listen: The best feature of the coffeeshop is its acoustics, no one sound ever resolving to clarity, but the hiss and clank of the espresso machine and mugs on counters and orders called out and conversations whispered and a child’s laughter aggregating to echoic clamor that is dialectic restrung, not the pedestrian day to day but affirmation of being and becoming, of living. I listen until I hear something I can imagine-- not a discrete noise or conversation, but a voice from a distant room I can enter.

This listening, standing at the bar, speaking the words I write aloud (no doubt looking thoroughly unhinged), happens because I write to rhythm and the textural feel of words in a way that has less to do with their sound in terms of rhyme or meter than with the way words follow one another, the shapes and structures they string out. It may sound contradictory to say I am not capable of lyric, but I am so musically disinclined that an early piano teacher gave up on me (and so of course I love music more for my inability to realize it), and so I don’t strain for song, rely entirely on instinct and natural inclination. When I am working, I ignore everything I’ve ever read or been told about writing, the opinions of teachers and peers and critics irrelevant to the process of creation. Recently I found a box of comics my mother had saved from my childhood, and tucked in one was an essay in careful cursive from the September I began the sixth grade, the lined notebook pages yellowed and brittle. I’d written about the only person I’d known who’d died, my Grandpa Thorold, noting:

"He had snow white hair, and always wore black-- at least, that's what I remember, and I could be wrong. He was wrinkled and you could tell he must have been very thin once, for his face never got a double-chin like most old people...The only other time I really remember him was once-- I think it was just before he died-- and he was sitting in a wheelchair, thoughtfully, and I think he was thinking about something important, something he had loved, for suddenly he seemed but twenty and young and spry again.”

The rhythm of the prose, endless dashes and asides, the substance and tone and global observation, the voice itself, even, haven't changed at all-- I'm still grave and reflective, dumbstruck by loss and the meaning and scope of other people's lives, still distrustful of what memory makes of what actually happened. This has been a year with more funerals than weddings: a friend went too far seeking peace, lost to infection after seventy days of exposure in a pilgrimage to the deep jungle; another man I knew from high school and the pool hall, who had long been homeless, decided one drunken night to go up in flames, as easy as fluid and a match, and then the excruciating days until a last end; another friend ‘s battle with leukemia ended abruptly, small mercy that he went quick and painless, little comfort that because he never made thirty, he will always be young. And inevitably, there were many lesser losses: love flaring up and gone for lack of courage, friends leaving town for good, rejections of my novel (a labor of seven years) mounting, the clouds keeping the sun even through June, so much darkness and absence to be mourned slowly and with care, the finally daily of life in the town I was born in a haunted endurance, the past overfreighting the present. The writing this year has been dark and slow, the openings and gifts too few, the clamor inadequately inspired.

Still, all afflictions pass; it is high August in the Willamette Valley, the sky so broad and bright some afternoons that no sorrow can claim the heart, and the opposite ends of everything seem inclined to touch, so that evenings as the sun goes down and the day settles into the orange well of dusk, the ghost moon over the distant hills heralding the emergence of stars, it seems that the words to name the world are there on the tip of the tongue, that all is imminent. And so, each new morning in this abandoned corner beneath a window bright with day, there is again the setting out and recursive return, the immanence of negative capability: to try again and fail better. And standing here with the sound of so much life, is the joy of it—in the seeking that is writing.

Letter to a Writer and Friend

2011-07-02T14:57:00.000-07:00

My letter to my friend A., concerning writing and publishing and how to overcome doubt and retain the integrity of the process, has just been published at Luna Park.

New Pages Glowingly Reviews "To Cut" in Gulf Coast's 25th Anniversary Issue

2011-06-15T11:01:00.000-07:00

Gulf Coast nonfiction editor Thea Lim was kind enough to alert me that my essay in their 25th Anniversary issue just received a kind review. They said:

"Michael Copperman's non-fiction, "To Cut”, is a stark look into the world of "cutting weight." Here, extreme wrestlers lead a joyless life of deprivation and dehydration for the sake of winning, attempting to avoid the 1998 NCAA Weight Class policy. Wrestlers wrap feet in plastic to lose fluid and pounds, or run wildly in wilting heat, covered in wool. When pounds fall by the hour, lives are in the balance, always. The author informs us:

The truth was that wrestling itself was easy, at least for me. Yes, there was the jittery anticipation of the match, and the demands of competition: instinct and execution and all-consuming focus. But I had natural ability and agility and balance. The training and the actual matches didn't demand half the will and devotion that cutting weight required. Cutting was the essence of the sport.

The author, at twenty-one, nearly goes too far himself. Luckily, love of the sport is finally dulled by bodily pain of every kind: “I couldn't go on. I stood, stripped off the plastics and went to the water fountain and drank.” He loses, and wins, as he swallows. The reader is horrified by the many ways these men find to weigh less, to acquire acclaim or purpose. This is a unique view of a life few would want. The writing is matter-of-fact, graphic and replete with horrific unforgettable detail."

Luna Park and Travis Kurowski on my work at COIN

2011-06-10T13:56:00.000-07:00

Travis Kurowski, editor of Luna Park, wrote about my dialect work at COIN in "It," and "Race, Authenticity, Culpability," in an essay called "Writing the Other: Michael Copperman and the Ethics of Representation," today. He said:

"So what did I remember about lit mags from reading Copperman’s story? Sort of what Emily Dickinson got when reading a poem:

"If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?"

Lit mags have, historically, been the home of the avant garde, or at least a good portion of the best avant garde we’ve got. What many of us hope to find in their pages is, if not the Poundian new, at least something distinct, different, maybe even problematic. Something amarketable, if that’s even a word. Something hard to pin down. And, if that is combined with a great deal of literary panache and empathy, than there is often nothing better.

But, more than just moving me, than just having “the top of my head were taken off” reading—which specifically happened in the last line of the piece—Copperman’s story and complimentary essay engaged my intellect, as reader and writer, forcing me to confront the basic notion of representation in creative work. And this, all the above taken together, the moving alongside the problematic, the new and the empathetic, is, I suppose, what I’ve long read lit mags for, have read them for since I first picked up a copy of Paris Review in the Southern Oregon University library and read Shepard’s “Climb Aboard the Mighty Flea.” It was Garcia Marquez’s Kafka moment. It was “Awesome!” combined with “Writers can do that?!”

Along with a great story, lovely writing, and compelling characters, what is interesting about “It” is its direct engagement with the core element of creative writing: imagining others (even if that means imaging our past selves."

Read the full text for yourself at Luna Park, but I can think of no finer reader for my work than as fine a writer and thinker as Mr. Kurowski.

Work in Gulf Coast; After so many clouds, Summer

2011-06-09T13:47:00.000-07:00

Please do go to the newstands, and pick up Gulf Coast's 25th Anniversary issue, which contains my essay "To Cut." The issue is beautifully produced, and the company in the issue are the sort of writers I'm accustomed to admiring from afar.

What other news from the front? Well, there's the staying in Eugene another year, which I'm attempting to embrace as opposed to mourn. I have a job that I love, and ahead the free expanse of summer to write, and how many people have that-- meaningful work, time to pursue art? It's not likely I'll be accommodating to the humdrum ease and provincial pleasures of Eugene any day soon-- I fit in less well here every year I stay-- and so, to seek I stay, seeking finally to get away. How's that for addle-brained poetry. But at least the sunlight is finally here!

And barely soon enough-- it was an early, wet Fall, a long bleak Winter, a sunless, dreary Spring. My birthday is is two days: let the Summer rise in a glory of heat and light, and let us turn our pale faces to the sky and look there, to paraphrase an old Hawaiian proverb, for wisdom.

The debut of Coin

2011-03-01T10:34:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, Copper Nickel launched their e-reader, "Coin," featuring my essay "Race, Authority, Culpability," accompanied by my dialect story "It," which they have nominated for the 2012 Pushcart Prize. In that essay, I discuss the difficulty I've had placing work from my novel "Gone," and finding literary representation. I go on to make an argument about race and publishing and craft:

"Every story fails in representation if it is concerned with being representative. Every narrative reinscribes the problematic past in terms of the present. Even writing attempted humbly, with a mastery of craft and an excess of lived experience, cannot be equal to the world. The aestheticizing impulse is fundamental to narrative: to order and make beautiful. Yet what narrative is adequate to human suffering? What are the aesthetics of Vietnam or Hiroshima? What meaning should be made from the Holocaust? Narrative is not exculpatory, nor should it be.

The only way to grapple with the irresolvable is to recognize that we are culpable for what we say and how we say it. That does not mean we shouldn't consider the difficult or contested--unless we seek an art less easy, we will fight the same battles, encounter the same barriers. And so I hope we have the courage to earn authority rather than assert it, to attempt knowing that though we're likely to fail, we have a responsibility to try."

At HTMLgiant, Kyle Minor was kind in response: "The inaugural issue includes poems from Dan Albergotti, Sandy Florian, Ed Pavlic, and Ginny Hoyle, Snezana Zabic’s essay “Meet Satan,” and, most interestingly, a portfolio of work by and about Michael Copperman, whose story “It” is written, as he describes it, in “black Delta dialect, not reproducing African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) so much as depicting a particular boy speaking it,” although the story’s author self-describes as “a Japanese-Hawaiian Russo-Polish Jew” in his essay “Race, Authenticity, Culpability,” which appears alongside the story."

At Big Other, Amber Sparks reacts to my essay, asking:

Amber Sparks at Big Other also weighed in, asking: "Well, so, what if Mike taught for years in these schools and knows these kids better than, say, a wealthy black person living in Park Slope, Brooklyn? Or not? Who bestows authority? Who has it and who doesn’t? What about race and class? What does it say about who we are that we cannot answer these questions but become so uncomfortable, and sometimes so defensive when we try to?"

Good question, is what I find myself saying. Occasionally I have tried to respond to such questions after pieces about these issues by Roxane Gay at HTMLgiant, who I quote in my essay, and I find myself inevitably lecturing some twenty-three-year old mfa who believes it's much better to be a writer of color or a woman, and that America is surely post-racial. My position, as I note, is simultaneously that it's difficult to write about unmainstream experiences, and too, that 'experience' or phenotype alone are not adequate means of conferring authorial authority. This conversation is a difficult one, and a personal one, as for me, the stakes are the success of work I've spent seven years on. I hope the conversation continues, however, as it's both necessary and important.

Beginning to piece I'm working on now

2011-02-26T16:09:00.000-08:00

For the last seven years, my father and I have kayaked the thirty-six mile Wild and Scenic portion of the Rogue River each August. The trip is part father-son bonding experience, part test of physical capacity, especially in the last five years, as my father has reached his mid-sixties and his arms, once corded with muscle, have begun to betray him with the inevitable frailty of age. He has come full circle: when my father was fifteen and a hundred pounds soaking wet, he signed on to a Rogue Whitewater guide for a summer as a pot-boy, weak and pale with lazy adolescence; two summers later, he was a seasoned young boatsman, muscle thick across his tanned shoulders, and he’d learned to read a rapids for the safest path, to make his own choices free of the direction of an older boatsman. He grew up on the river, beyond the judgment of his domineering father, learned how to survive in a dangerous world.
Since I was thirteen, I have been down the Rogue a dozen times. We run the river each year in an inflatable two-man kayak, him reading the water and me at his direction, the muscle to drive an overburdened boat through the world-class whitewater. For him, it's freeing to have only the immediate danger of the water and his own judgment of the way through, the river pounding through the slick-rock canyon with such velocity and force as if to make indisputable nature’s dominion over man. The glory of river is as close to religion as my father comes, and it is as close to my father as I allow myself to be-- I do what he says without comment, do not question his decisions. On the river, what is between us is less important than what courses under us: we are in the same boat, subject to the same danger, and we must arrive together or be upended together: divergence is impossible.

Last year, he kept asking me to call the path. “Should we cut in by the big rock, inside there?” he’d say, and actually pause and wait for my answer. “Or would it be better to the chute on the outside?”

I’d grimace behind him in the boat, clear my throat. “Can’t see without my glasses,” I said, which was not really true. “You call it.”

“Someday, you’ll need to be able to make these decisions yourself,” he said after the fourth or fifth time he’d solicited my opinion.

“Sure,” I said. As if I was going to ruin the river with the possibility of criticism-- choosing the wrong route, misreading the current, overlooking a hazard was all too easy. I knew it full well from the rest of my life, which my father had qualified opinions on, his actual judgment clear in his carefully chosen words. When he noted my bachelorhood given my younger brother’s wife, children, mortgage, business, I knew when he said, “When you find the right woman and change your circumstances and commit,” that he meant I’d better find a woman unconcerned with my choice of writerly poverty and find a way to make a life more financially stable than adjuncting to steal time to write uncommercial work, that I’d have to leave off the frivolity of nights shooting pool at the bar, do better than my tiny, cheaply furnished apartment with more books than shelves, that he still couldn’t understand why I hadn’t married my high school sweetheart whose parents he and my mother still have monthly dinner parties with. When he said, “Congratulations on the fellowship,” or, “Nice work placing that piece,” it was with such reserve that he might has well have said, “You know that’s small money and small success, and still doesn’t mean anyone wants to buy your novel.”

I can run the Rogue on my own, though not as well as my father—I would likely make a mistake or two, but I would never miss the fishladder at Rainie Falls or fail to start river left and cut left with the eddy behind the canoe-shaped rock at Blossom Bar. On the Rogue with my father, I have no desire to demonstrate this capacity and so be capable of error. The river is no place for argument.

The Difference Between AWP and The University

2011-02-07T10:45:00.000-08:00

It has come to my attention, this morning as I struggle to reorient, that the primary difference between the AWP conference and teaching at the University is that because I have actual responsibility here, I can't blow off what I should be doing and go drink bourbon instead.

But that is not precisely right. Because AWP consists largely of writers, established and aspiring, and here at the University of Oregon I teach mostly college students, and so the main difference I encounter is really that eighteen-year-old college students are more pleasant, more thoughtful, and drink considerably more. I do not mean to imply that there was a lack of drunken debauchery, because that would be a lie, and of course, I don't engage in drunken debauchery with college students, at least not those under twenty-one (and if I did, I would not admit it on the interweb). But I suppose one of the things I most took away from the conference this year was a marked distaste for the sort of activity that occurs at AWP.

Here's what I mean: take the panels. I only attended a few. Some of the panelists were knockout, but often, what I most took away in the end were the unending comments from the wings, where people would ask self-important questions they'd scribbled on little notepads, or make 'comments' that were really their own personal platforms or were meant to aggrandize them, or-- and this was my own favorite-- they would actually SUMMARIZE the panelist's own presentation back to them to show they understood.

And there was the large hunger, everywhere. And the lack of whatever it is people believe will sustain them-- publishers, publicity, recognition. Too many voices and not enough microphones; too many egos and not enough ego-boosters; and of course, there was the intensity and scrum of it, the flow and ebb of bodies bound for readings, panels, parties. The scrum of it. And as I guess I tend to do everywhere, even among writers I mostly stood back watching writers talk about writing, drink about their own writing, try to get laid to forget their bad writing or celebrate their good. Some of that was my fault, but I guess I have, finally, too few 'ins', too few friends who could afford such a long trip.

I still had a good time, and as I anticipated, I was pleased too to see so many people who care about writing and literature in one place. And I did see some good friends, and make a few good new ones, most notably the lovely editors of Gulf Coast where I have an essay forthcoming-- they were so kind and welcoming, so glad to speak to me about jobs and the experience at the University of Houston that it made up for the obnoxious interactions that occurred some elsewheres. I had a great conversation with Thomas Williams, who published my first story back when he was editor of The Arkansas Review and who has a novella forthcoming-- with him, we talking about how to keep integrity given ambition and all the pressures to accomodate to commerical pressures and outside influence. Beyond those fine folks, I mostly hung out with some non-writer friends in from New York, and some friends who live and work in D.C., and all of it was fine. DC is a beautiful, bustling city, but I don't think it's my style.

Not that Eugene is, either, but even so, I wasn't unhappy to make it home.

Immanence

2011-02-01T13:32:00.000-08:00

Tonight I cannot sleep for the distances and spaces, the isolation, today the fever of wanting, or of affliction (what is the difference?), the certainty of failure, the large expanse of night when I ponder such things and can't sleep, and I am aware that these are finally ephemera. There's a line that Ann Beattie uses in a short story, this great big move in this small subtle story about an old man who is generous enough to support the lives of his whole family-- his wife and grandchildren and all they do and try to do-- but who wants something that is his alone: a part of him that is personal, beautiful, essential only to him. And in trying to explain his need, he says: "Imagine a day at the end of your life."

And I can-- I can picture myself, surrounded perhaps by those who have lasted and I hope those I've loved, still love, my youthful foolishness and desire and ambition muted but perhaps adequately realized to give me a sense of a life that has had some importance and scale, can see how I will regard all the harm I did myself in self-judgment, self-imposed isolation, uncourageous boozing, willful refusal to stand on any terms that are not my own, which will seem finally less necessity than solipsism indulged with a terrible price. What would that older man, that mellowed and wiser self say, looking back? I know already what I will regret-- the arrogance, the silent endurance of the unendurable, the children I imagined I could save and so harmed in trying, the people I couldn't tell the truth to and so hurt, the love I couldn't stand for and so may lose forever, the bleary evenings of my mid-twenties when I imagined liquored heights could lift you instead of leave you to the fall, the women I tried to save instead of love, the love I couldn't feel, the losses I couldn't face, the excuses I made-- and none of it tells me how to live now. I have been like this since I was seven years old, and used to lie in the upper bunk hearing my brother snore, safe in sleep, while the hard ticking of the clock assaulted my ears and the darkness turned and turned about me and I lay thinking about how the reason I couldn't sleep was exactly the fact of not being asleep, that I dreaded waiting, and too recognized that one day I would think back on how I couldn't sleep for fear of never falling asleep and remember that I knew it was a foolish reason for insomnia, knew that someday I’d look back on it and even recognizing the immature foolishness of those nights awake, I'd remember too how I'd already recognized then that one day I'd see it differently, and if I’d grown up to be a decent man who hadn’t forgotten what it was to be a child alone with his fears, I would wish I could go back to that boy so alone in the night and offer him solace, or at least the comfort of knowing that the duration would end, the sun would come up, and one day he would move beyond such sad and lonely thoughts.

Of course, I had it right then: I would want to go to that boy and tell him such a thing, but I would not be able to. And even now, I too often cannot sleep, and muse late, late into the night.

To AWP Go, and Pray Against Snow

2011-01-31T10:08:00.000-08:00

Those who go to DC may never catch their flight home, as winter storms mount, but hey, there's faith.

I think it will be worth it to attend AWP-- last year I went to Denver, where I was reading for Copper Nickel, and it was well-worth being there if only because I met a couple people and nearly got a job with the Richard Hugo House in Seattle. This year I'm not even reading or paneling, just going to meet a few friends, attend a few parties, talk to editors of the magazines I've been in or have work forthcoming from, and all the same, I think it will be worth it. I can't exactly put my finger on WHY I think going is helpful: there are awful things about AWP, not limited to the hunger, the legions of the aspiring and all the ways the moderately (or wildly) more successful assert their superiority. The whole thing can be icky. But there's also something about encountering the thousands and thousands of people who want to be literary artists or are: these are people who still care about literature.

And that gives me hope.

Not hope that I'm likely to rise to the top of the AWP hierarchy (what a terrible thing to aspire to anyway), or ever achieve any significant success in the scrum that is contemporary American fiction, but hope in the sense that, for all these people, writing still matters. We're in agreement, and I find a comfort in that even as I try to avoid the despair that's attendant when you realize just how many people out there are 'writers', or want to be.

2011-01-13T15:48:00.001-08:00

Lately, I feel emptied. I go to write and am desperate to grasp something, anything, and the result is addled lyric, nonsense, sentimentality, narrative concerning lack of narrative: throwaway musing, self-indulgent posing, throat-clearing, drek. All of it sad, of course, and angsty, and really, when it comes down to it, pretty fucking pathetic. I know that Twain said that you reach a point where there is nothing left, and then you wait and fill back up again; I don’t even doubt that I’ll be inspired again, that I have more work left in me. I know it’s a bleak cold winter here, and out the window the weather lacks the decency to choose rain or snow and does miserable both at once, and under such circumstances my track record is not good. I know this feeling of narrowing, of teetering on the edge of something so vast and bleak it begins to seem preferable to step than to maintain balance. I know this sounds terrible, and so dear friends, do not worry, I am not speaking of suicide or of seasonal-affective disorder or depression—I’m not unstable. I’m just talking about this sense I have that if I don’t change my here and how, if I don’t find words for something, this bereftness, this malaise, will become the better part of me. Of course, you require nadir to swing up again, and I’m smart enough to recognize that if I think my small sorrows are so great, I should look around me at what others must suffer and buck up. That’s little comfort on an afternoon like this, when so much falls from the sky and every disappointment and longing is amplified, and you sit at the keyboard mouthing words like want, need, please, begging for reprieve in single syllables that speak only of absence.

Anyuta continued-- The Cat, in full

2011-01-06T14:37:00.000-08:00

There was the matter of the cat. I do not like cats, am thoroughly a dog person, untrusting of the cat’s dainty fickleness and indifference: a cat does not need man, but only tolerates him for food, shelter and change of litter—contingent affection, smug, purring self-regard, those are the cat’s qualities. Anyuta’s cat was the worst. His name was Takahashi, after an anime reference I never understood—suffice to say that the character in question was no doubt obnoxious and quite mad, as these were the qualities most apparent in the cat. He was a thin tabby with a patch of white over his left eye that gave him a look of permanent derangement, and he was neurotic, lean and full of a mean, spoiled self-regard: he loved himself almost as much as he hated everyone but Anyuta. I was usurper in his space, and he delighted in finding ways to let me know how he felt: if I was making out with Anyuta, he would insert himself between us and find a way to present his furry little ass to me, his tail swishing in my face; he would attack my feet if I wore socks, digging his sharp little claws into the soft flesh; worst of all, he would pounce on my head in the middle of the night, his claws tearing my pillow with pent-up savagery as he choked me with his furry chest. And he even intruded on our intimate moments—no sooner would I be into it with a head of steam than I’d look up and find Takahashi watching me with disdain, that white-patched eye giving him the look of a raised eyebrow as he evaluated technique and pronounced it hopelessly inadequate. He’d been the man of the house before I came and he was confident he’d outlast me—after he made me pay for my intrusion. And so I did what any self-respecting man who was so challenged might do: I declared war.

Of course, the war was fought in secret—Anyuta adored Takahashi, loved him for all the reasons I hated him. “Kawaai!” she’d exclaim in Japanese (Cute!) when he attacked my feet, jabbing his sharp claws into the tender flesh with obvious pleasure as I withheld curses. She took his insertion of body between us at every intimate moment as Takahashi’s sanction of the relationship—she got the cat’s grinning face as I got the ass-end, and in the absence of a tail whipped across the cheek, perhaps it was possible to imagine affection in Takahashi’s devious actions. She adored the cat, would seize him by the shoulders and fly him through the room with adoring, exultant exclamations: “Such a pretty, clever fellow!” she’d cry as I watched his beady little eyes swell up with the praise and affection. When she returned him to the ground, he’d walk past me with a sort of feline swagger, a little kick to the paw, his white-patched eye almost winking. He knew we were at war. But I intended to win.

Of course, it was hard to strike a real blow when my human actions couldn’t be played off as unintentional feline behavior. Takahashi could rend my feet to ribbons and it was instinct (“Your feet in those socks do look like little rats,” Anyuta said when I complained about the attacks), but if I kicked him off, I was abusing the poor cat. If I shut him from the room so that I could have at least one unobserved moment, he would mewl piteously, so that Anyuta would be distracted and insist we let him in to continue his voyeurism. And so I had to wait for her to go before I had my chance. As soon as she was out the door, however, it was on—I would try to shut him in the bedroom so that I didn’t have to tolerate his presence. The first time I had the satisfaction of his mews of frustration and angst, but he was no simpleton. The next day, as soon as she was out the door he scampered away from me when I neared and there was no cornering him; as I finally had him he darted through my legs and I turned so fast I hit my elbow on the razor corner of the television stand and so, bleeding, I had to take a breather and wash the wound, and there, with the tap running, I struck on it: water. Cats hate water, and surely Takahashi was no different. And so I filled a butter container, removed my shoes, and sat on the couch with my socked feet extended as bait, wiggling my toes in as seductive a manner as I could manage. Takahashi had been watching the preparation from the coffee table across the room, licking his paws to ensure his razor claws were clear to slice me, but now that I was ready for him, he showed no interest at all in my feet. I turned my ankles in circles, wiggled my toes and called his name, and he regarded me with a puzzled look of disdain, as if to say, you think I’d be troubled for those feet.

“Come on, kitty, kitty,” I said, redoubling my efforts.

He closed his eyes.

“Here, cat!” I called, and he opened the white-patched eye just a smidge in acknowledgement and then closed it.

“Damnit!” I said, standing quickly with no regard for the brimming butter container, which sloshed across my lap, soaking the front of my jeans as if I’d wet my pants. Disgusted, I set the butter container down and stalked to the bedroom for a dry pair of jeans. The moment I had my jeans down about my ankles, I saw a furry blur from the corner of my eye and then felt the claws pierce my foot. “Get—off!” I kicked at him, tripped on the jeans and crashed to the floor while Takahashi retreated to the corner, nose twitching, one paw raised threateningly. Slowly, I sat and kicked free of my jeans and found a dry pair and shimmied them on as Takahashi watched smugly. When I was dressed again I stood and backed out of the bedroom, my eyes locked with his, and the moment I cleared the door I rushed to slam it but the cat was already through and past me. In the living room, he slowed and glanced back at me over his shoulder before leisurely making his way to the coatrack where I’d hung my new overcoat. Rearing up on his hind legs, he began to scratch it with his paws and purr. Slowly, as if I was ignoring him, I picked up the better container and made my way to the tap and filled it, the scratching of his claws suggesting the damage that was being done to my coat. With the brimming container raised I stepped back into the living room where he was still at it, got as close as I could, but just as I threw the water the front door opened and I looked to the door and so missed Takahashi as he dodged, doused the coat, and heard Anyuta’s cry of horror at my assault.

“What are you doing!” she cried, running to Takahashi and scooping him into her arms.

“You abusive bastard!” she said, retreating from me and stroking Takahashi’s pleased face as he sat dry and coddled, his white eye winking. I looked at my soaked pea coat, at Anyuta’s accusing eyes. “Is this what you do when I go? I just left a book I needed, and here I’m gone five minutes and already you’re torturing my baby.”
I began to speak, and went silent, trying to imagine how I could explain what had actually happened, how my feet were scratched, my elbow bloodied, jeans soaked, coat wet and dignity gone and the cat now a blameless victim, and I knew there was nothing true I could say.

“It was just a game, Annie—I would never have actually poured water on him,” I said. “That would be cruel. It was all a chase. I was trying to miss.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Are you an idiot? You were throwing water all about the house? What kind of—game—is that?”

“A harmless one,” I said. “You should see how much water I got on myself—I already soaked one pair of jeans. But Takahashi was just having so much—fun...“

She didn’t really believe me, but my soaked pants and Takahashi’s dry hide convinced her just enough; as for me, from that day on I accepted defeat and bought thick wool socks and took the tail-lashing when it came. I have abandoned only a few battles in my life, but there was no victory to be had over so nimble a foe as Takahashi. In fact, the grace with which I suffered his attentions seemed to strip them of their pleasure—now that I didn’t kick and curse, he left off my feet, and when I closed my eyes and refused to acknowledge his bedroom presence, the self-involved encouplement of humans seemed to bore him, and often enough I’d open my eyes to find he’d turned tail and walked off. I tolerated him until he had no effective weapon left—and it was at that point, finally, that he stopped his harassment, and would even come to me sometimes when Anyuta was gone and rub against my leg until I scratched the hard-to-reach spot between his nose and eyes—now he needed me. I had outcatted him.

2010-12-31T19:07:00.001-08:00

It was a night to remember. It was a night like any other. It was a night like no other. It was just the other night. It was the night I lost her. It was the night I lost everything. It was the night I had nothing to lose. It was the night my faith died. It was the night I found Jesus. It was the night I wrestled with God. It was the night I sold my soul to the Devil. It was a devil-may-care night. It was a nightmare. It was a dream of night. It was the taste of night. It was the night in me that made me do it. I remember the night it happened. That night, I could have done anything. I don’t remember that night. One night, we could hold back no longer. I only wanted one last night. I wish I could take back that night. He came to me one night. Night settled over us like a shroud. The night was flush with stars. The night was gone. Good night. Tonight will be the night. And then I went out into the night.

2010-12-24T16:23:00.000-08:00

A Christmas Prayer

For those who believe in the birth of Christ and those who do not;
For those who have and those who want;
For the hale and mighty and the meek and small;
For those left in the cold, and those who stand by warm fires;
For the beautiful and the unlovely, for the ugly and mean;
For the son and the daughter and the mother and the father;
For the fatherless, motherless, childless, bereft;
For those who fear loss they’ve not yet known, and those who have lost more than they can bear;
For those whose burden is great, and the light of heart;
For the lost and tired and the weary and hope of being found, of finding;
For those overseas and far from home, and those whose homes they pass;
For the joyless and the sad, for the bright-eyed and the happy;
For the cynic and the satirist, the bully and the bloviator, the loud, the silent;
for the scared, for the sick, for weary, the angry, the dispossessed, the suffering;
For us all, united after all in what is human: in error, in disappointment, in failure and inadequacy;
In hope, in desire, in common dream;
May we have the courage to try, even when the odds are long, the pain imminent.
May we refuse to become selfish, arrogant, myopic, self-righteous, and violent.
May we forgive. May we find solace and comfort.
May we dream. May we laugh. May we sing. May we listen.
May we pray with generous hearts, in prayer that exceeds ourselves.
May we be better than we are, each and everyone.

Oregon Arts Commission Fellowship

2010-12-15T12:43:00.000-08:00

I am honored that the Oregon Arts Commission has just selected me for a 2011 Individual Artist Fellowship:

"Oregon Arts Commission Awards 13 Artist Fellowships
Grants Recognize Excellence in Performing and Literary Arts

The Oregon Arts Commission announces 13 recipients of its 2011 Individual Fellowships, awarded to performers and writers of exceptional talent and demonstrated ability, professional achievement and continuing dedication to an artistic discipline. Peer‐review panels of artists and arts professionals from across Oregon recommended the recipients to the Arts Commission.

Fellows may use the $3,000 award to complete work in progress or embark on a new body of work, undertake research, study or experiment with new materials or media.
Over 70 artists working in the literary and performing arts submitted applications for review.

“The artists selected this year have proven themselves to be thoughtful, with outstanding talent and a commitment to the creation of new work. These artists are representative of the highest caliber that Oregon offers,” commented Arts Commissioner Henry Sayre of Bend, who chaired the review panels."

2010-12-13T12:06:00.000-08:00

"What we speak becomes the house we live in."
--Hafiz

There are many possible meanings in this quote-- the poet who was quoting it to me took the metaphor to be constructive, ie, the words that make up the structures and attendant meanings of poetry can provide us shelter and solace. In the mouth of someone not a writer, the line could be cautionary: watch your language, your judgement, the degree of harshness or rancor or anger or ugliness that you put out into the world, as you are the aggregation of those words-- they surround you. I prefer the gloss that includes both those meanings: as writers, we have only the words we use and what we say with them. We are of them; we are culpable for them; we had best make sure that we can live under their weight, that we have said something of substance that is constructed with craft, that what we speak we can bear to inhabit.

2010-12-03T13:48:00.000-08:00

"To transform the things and events around us into the metaphor of the story form and to suggest the true nature of the situation in the dynamism of that substitution: that is story’s most important function."

--Haruki Murakami in the New York Times

Pushcart Nomination

2010-11-29T10:56:00.000-08:00

I am honored that Copper Nickel is nominating my story "It," for the 2011 Pushcart Prize.

"Want"

2010-11-28T14:50:00.001-08:00

Just placed my lyric short "Want," with The Literary Review.

Now, fingers crossed for The Sun.

2010-11-17T11:24:00.000-08:00

Just placed my essay "To Cut," with Gulf Coast.

My, but it seems nothing is quite enough these days. Years ago, I'd have felt that a great victory: an outstanding magazine, prestigious, hard to get into, paying a professional rate for prose. These days, I want more all the time. That must have to do with just how long I've been trying to agent my novel-- I know the work is good and deserves to see print.

I used to believe one day something would tip. Now it seems as if I have to fill the glass until it brimmeth over.

Why I Read, What I'd Like to Read

2010-11-12T11:45:00.002-08:00

Stole this from a post at HTMLgiant. But it's really nice:

“I believe that you should only read books that bite and sting. If the book we are reading doesn’t hit us like a fist on the head, why are we reading the book? For it to make us happy, you write? My God, happy we would also be if we had no books, and such books that make us unhappy we can write ourselves if need be. We need books that affect us like a misfortune, that hurt us a great deal, like the death of someone whom we loved more than ourselves, like a suicide, a book must be an ax in a frozen sea inside us.”

– Kafka writing to Ernst Pollak

Kafka's not advocating violence for the sake of violence, gore for the brightness of the blood, as so many writers seem to misunderstand the compelling nature of the troubling and difficult. There's an indie trend today that too often mistakes writing about apocalypse and torture and suffering as being significant or compelling because it's loud, bright, awful, and thoroughly amoral. Writing of the interweb and indie book too often feels like the new age of William Burroughs as rendered by artless children-- and that is the best of it. What Kafka is getting at is making art that doesn't flinch, that is bold and significant and refuses to go down easy. That is not the same as art that does not know what art is, and instead substitutes the excesses of a Tarantino film without the craft or vision of Tarantino. Kafka is talking about writing that gets at what is irresolvable, what implicates the reader and exceeds the reader, what can strike at our still, cold heart and free it for a moment. He's talking about art that exhibits honesty and courage to face the difficult, about reach and ambition, about writing that refuses to satisfy easy expectations. The last book I read that did that was Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio." The last prose I read that did that was the FINE essay in the new issue of The Missouri Review by Michael White concerning the end of the life of alcoholic poet Tom McAfee.

Why I

2010-11-12T11:45:00.001-08:00

Fingers Crossed

2010-11-05T08:38:00.000-07:00

The Fall is Wintering up, and I am getting ready to take the next round of longshot lottery tickets out: Wisconsin, The Stegner, the new Emory Fellowship, a new round of agent queries. These bigger reaches have greater significance for me this year: I am determined to get out of Eugene at the years end, and want to find a path that will support my work, that concerns writing and is not a sub-lateral move. But these options are not likely, any of them, and so increasingly I'm a bit despairing about the next step. What I do know is that I'm not inspired here in Eugene-- not by the community, the people, even the work now, as much as I love my students.

I just received Copper Nickel 14 in the mail, which contains my dialect story "It," and my craft essay "Race, Authority, Culpability," and it's a beautifully produced issue; in a few days, I should receive Unsaid 5, which contains my dialect story "Pipe." And I have three other reasons to hope: my story "True Conditions," is out at Tin House, where they solicited a revision. My essay "To Cut," is in the final editorial meeting at Fence, which should occur in the next couple weeks. And my story "Classroom Management," is newly out in revised form at The Sun, who also solicited a revision. Any one of these fine venues would be a success; of course, I desperately want all three to pan out. Perhaps it's a mark of how long I've been trying to place each of those pieces (4 years; two years; two years) that now, rather than settle, I think each deserves prominence. Why else wait so long?

Or perhaps it's all a long impatience. I am tired of hurrying up and waiting.

2010-10-25T08:32:00.000-07:00

The snow-haired senior’s banal conversation echoed loud in the wide, high-ceilinged restaurant, talk of pensions, politics, truisms concerning a penny saved, and the echoing inanity was cover for the whispered confession between beautiful, well-dressed strangers concerning the things they’d done that they thought terrible and significant and amounted, really, to a celebration of wrong, the narcissism of guilt, or at least that was how it seemed to the sad, plump young woman in the corner who overheard them from behind the partition of booth and who had only recently lost her mother to cancer, her job to the recession, her self-respect to tattooed, pierced men at dive bars who forgot her name while fucking her. The dog was chasing the cat past the open window of sepia-toned memory, echoic bark after echoic bark as the girl focused only on the noise and left her body to become the sound, but the closed window with the blinds drawn was where the young girl stood being touched by her stepfather, and nobody ever looked in, and the girl grew up with the secret and ended up at the restaurant on a leaden gray October noon nursing a hangover, face pinched and swollen, makeup applied hastily and so unevenly with the thick shimmery eye-makeup, so that one eye blared peacock and one sunk dully by contrast, seemed fixed as if staring just beyond where the young woman was gazing. That was how it seemed to the fellow sitting at an adjacent table, anyway, who was observing the young woman with undue, almost predatory interest, intending to invent her story and so steal it, though he imagined he would return to her some dignity through compassion of representation, by letting her pain be rendered in an essential and properly cold manner that was necessary to the artifice of art, and he was only arriving at the beginning of it, the first glimmer and pang of it, when he glanced up from his keyboard and realized the young woman was gone. And then there was nothing else to say.

2010-10-23T13:38:00.000-07:00

At htmlGIANT, Roxane Gay wrote an interesting piece about how grammar is often poor in work submitted to her as an editor at PANK. She also notes that since PANK moved to an online submission manager, some writers will submit and withdraw and resubmit five times in a day. She wondered about the role of the internet and e-submission in driving these trends; commenters responded that they found it hard to keep up with the Joneses whose names were all over Google Reader, that online writing was performance and response. One commenter said, tongue-in-cheek, "Here, here, Roxane!"

My own response follows:

Yup, "here, here!"

Trying to keep up with the most-published bloviators of the interweb, to get your name out there through frequency of publication, is the wrong reason to write. Of course we all would like to immediately be acknowledged as God's gift to English prose, but fame and fortune, or even the recognition that comes with the visibility of being prolific is entirely the wrong reason to write. In fact, I would suggest such an approach does much to drive the sort of sloppiness Roxane decries. Form is necessity in a work of art; grammar is that part of form that enables meaning. It's one thing for a beginning writer who doesn't know grammar to understand that it's ok, as you learn to pay attention to grammar, for form and intended meaning to diverge a bit. It's quite another for a writer to attach their name to something which is unforgivably slipshod, unproofread, or dashed off. If as Joseph Young suggests, there is a performative aspect to writing as it occurs in the world of the internet, that may indeed be it's own thing-- shenanigans in comment strings like htmlgiant, trickster trolls having their amoral fun at the expense of the pious and serious, participatory, living communities of people interacting. But I would argue that such writing is necessarily different from the sort of work that belongs in a journal of the quality of PANK or of TNY, that actual fiction or nonfiction that aspires to say and mean something significant ought to, as made objects, be made with care. I have been guilty of the submit/withdraw before-- usually caught up in that first heady flush of creation, before you begin to understand what's not working (a year seems sound, indeed, if not longer). But none of the work I've ever withdrawn or resubmitted has been grammatically sloppy... it's more that I made significant edits after realizing something important about the story or essay in question. And I think every time I have done a withdraw/resubmit, I've regretted it... it's usually been a sign that the story or essay in question wasn't ready yet. It is a problem if online submission managers encourage such indulgence... but it's surely on writers to wait until their work is complete. Maybe that's not true of writers who aspire to the mediocrity of broad popular recognition, but for any writer whose work has significance and integrity, Flannery O'Connor's dictum ought to hold true: "Absolute accuracy of expression is the sole morality of writing."

2010-10-22T08:42:00.001-07:00

I live in a city where all anyone really cares about is that the football team is ranked first. It is a lovely, provincial little college town, a gentle, slow sanctuary still living in the simultaneous legacy of the sixties and the success of Nike, a town of lean, hungry, swoosh-adorned runners and graying hippies who have been stoned so long they no longer remember precisely what they were protesting, though they are sure, SURE, it is something important, man. It is hard to remember what is important here—this city is nothing if not uninspiring and dull, as unvibrant a place as it is comfortable. It forces accommodation to its narrow boundaries and small horizons, its pretense of relevance. The green team is good! We’re the bottom of the top tier of universities! We have bike paths and vegetarian options!

I am exhausted with it, and refuse to become it; my whole life, I have never belonged here, and that has never been more true than today. I am restless and wallow in discontent; I am bored; I am increasingly bitter, not at the cards I’ve been dealt but in the ways I can play those cards in this town. Give me the mirage of a glittering victory, the shimmer and shine of it, the Shangri-la, the hope however false. Give me skyscrapers, not retirement homes like the tallest building in this town. Let there be something bigger than the football stadium, some dream beyond the BCS and the perfection of Bud. If I don’t leave, it’s not that I will give way, accept diminishment and mediocrity. It’s that I’ll go up in flames for the sake of heat and light.

2010-10-02T15:24:00.000-07:00

Americans today need to learn to listen.

We require less of what we ask for and more of what we’d prefer not to recognize.

In the echo chambers of the internet, we have become convinced that it’s enough to hear ourselves speak. Our individual actions expand to tremendous proportions, and are accorded broad importance: we are all artists, every hack who can play a chord a rockstar, every narcissist who can type a writer, everyone who ever rented a room and added furniture a designer. We are all beautiful and all our children are outstanding and everything we do, from breakfast to bedroom and toilet inbetween is worth celebrating and sharing. We all know better than heads of state and captains of industry, and the proof is in our audacity: we said so in our blog, we twittered boldly, we declared so in caps in the comment string of a story in the New York Times and linked the article to our Facebook where our friends all agreed with our superior gloss. Or, better yet, we ignored the difficult, untidy, and complex, and our refusal to look meant we, the people, had spoken: nothing happens at all anymore unless we care to notice.

We are navel-gazing, but our midsections are not so amazing, are swollen with consumption, fat with the swill of our bloviation. We require less of what we ask for and more that looks beyond ourselves.

Try it: look up from the screen you’re staring at. Put down your e-reader or smartphone and regain the world. The problem is not the screen, or even the semblance of connection that is in fact unsubstantive; there is nothing wrong with the availability and dispersal of information. The problem is that out the window the sun is shining with a particular cant and hue that you may never see again. The problem is that a few miles away a child is watching his mother slip a needle into the tender skin of her arm while the fridge groans with emptiness, and half a world away a woman is being stoned to death because she is in love and prideful men believe words in a book mean atrocity is justified, and somewhere else a solider is firing on a child hurling a rock, and higher walls are even now being built between nations, and men’s limbs are being hacked apart, demagogues are banging fists to podiums that are pressed to the temples of the poor and disenfranchised, and the icecaps are melting, the peace is failing, the nukes are unsecured and another girl who would stand and speak has been shot through the throat, and listen, right now, in your own home, in your own hand you are loading another page, tired of being lectured to, exhausted with listening, and you’re right.

You’re not the problem.

We all are.

Reports of the Novel's Death

2010-09-30T15:10:00.000-07:00

At Luna Park, a staff writer, discussing an essay by Benjamin Kunkel in n + 1, asserts:

"It’s neither the publishing industry nor its product but rather us, the human being, that’s changing as our technologies advance. Kunkel quotes Jonathan Franzen to this effect,

"Haven’t we all secretly sort of come to an agreement, in the last year or two or three, that novels belonged to the age of newspapers and are going the way of newspapers, only faster?"

Our digitization is evidence of a change in our consciousness, so it makes sense that the novel and its role in our lives must change with us."

I am unconvinced that Mr. Franzen’s quote, in context, means anything like it’s taken to in Kunkel's essay. It’s from Franzen's lovely essay on the value of Christina Stead’s novel “The Man Who Loved Children,” that appeared in the Sunday Times Book Review, where he discusses why Ms. Stead has been excluded from the canon, and by extension, what the real value of the a novel consists of, what it does, what it is for and not for. There is an implicit criticism of a culture and world that has no place for novels… of course there is, coming from our supposed ‘new great American novelist.’

He says of TMWLC, “As the narrator remarks, matter-of-factly, “That was family life.” And telling the story of this inner life is what novels, and only novels, are for. Or used to be, at least. Because haven’t we left this stuff behind us? High-mindedly domineering males? Children as accessories to their parents’ narcissism? The nuclear family as a free-for-all of psychic abuse? We’re tired of the war between the sexes and the war between the generations, because these wars are so ugly, and who wants to look into the mirror of a novel and see such ugliness? How much better about ourselves we’ll feel when we stop speaking our embarrassing private family languages! The absence of literary swans seems like a small price to pay for a world in which ugly ducklings grow up to be big ugly ducks whom we can then agree to call beautiful.”

If you took the initial quote at face value, and didn’t consider that the words come from the man who just wrote a nuanced novel about family and culture, you could come away with the idea that Mr. Franzen thinks the novel a relic of the days of newspaper. But that would be willful distortion.

Perhaps new media indeed allows us new ways to consume print, new expectations and altered attention spans, greater connectivity, new kinds of community. Perhaps it will eventually give rise to new forms, though for me, as a novelist and short story writer and essayist, I can imagine no form I cherish more, that can accomplish more at saying something that matters. Regardless, I see little evidence of the novel’s decline– reports of its unprominence, let alone its imminent cultural irrelevance, are greatly overstated. Why, even consider the modest short story, that much-maligned form that commercial publishers have long refused to publish collections of. A great deal of attention and buzz has been paid to Electric Literature for their new delivery model and methods, their cost effectiveness. But the fiction that they publish is more than anything else classically (and finely, even brilliantly, I might add) crafted, and represents mostly the most celebrated and established fiction writers of our day. Delivery of an old form in ways you can interact with differently and consume differently is not a paradigmatic shift, let alone an evolution of mankind or of our culture. It is an affirmation of the old form’s significance, a quicker, easier, glossier access, a reassertion of form’s merit.

But I guess I am old-fashioned.

Announcing

2010-09-23T12:39:00.001-07:00

Please visit me at my primary site, www.michaelcopperman.com

New Piece at GOOD: The Book

2010-08-25T15:18:00.000-07:00

"That spring, on the two-day bus ride to D.C., through the furrowed fields and dusty flats of Tennessee, then threading the rolling green hills of Virginia, Nyson finally read his book. I watched him there, holding the book to the window as the landscape flashed past in blocks of green and brown, reading the words aloud, laughing sometimes to himself with delight, sometimes racing for me along the aisle as other chaperones called for him to finally sit down, eager to tell me everything that had just happened."

An Open Letter to Jim Beam Concerning What he Stole Last Night

2010-08-11T13:04:00.000-07:00

Dear Jim Beam,

We have long been fast friends. We have hung out nights when we just sat and enjoyed each others calm company in the cool dusk, and had wildly lucky nights when we couldn’t miss a ball on the billiards table. We have skinny-dipped at midnight, closed down Mississippi juke joints, swaggered the glittering streets of the street named after your family, Bourbon, with our necks thick with beads.

Speaking of your family, I know them well—what about that time with your strange Canadian half-breed second cousin Crown, and what of all those crisp winter nights your first cousin Jameson came out to dance away the chill? What of your stately, aged great-uncles Laguvulin, Laphroig and Macallan? What of your respectable older brothers Woodford, Jefferson, and Booker, at whose table I’ve feasted? What of your sharp, eccentric brother with the strange name, Knob, and what of your sweet, bright younger brother Mark who I have spent occasional weekends with in the mountains, and so enjoyed conversation with in the hot-tub at that party I threw on the river?

I inquire because, after our long and intimate acquaintance, last night you stole my restraint. And then I woke this morning to realize that it was worse than that—that you’d taken my dignity, too. Sir, you’d best hide from me for a while, because when I see you there will be a reckoning. I will take you to the bottom just like you’ve taken me. And then we’ll see who did what to whom, we’ll lay the blame where it rightly belongs, that I promise you.

Jim, my old best friend, you just wait.

Fighters

2010-08-02T14:28:00.000-07:00

Every time I see it, I’m mesmerized and repelled, unable to look away. Two men, in some sort of cage or walled ring, hands balled in fists, doing the stutter-step of the fighter, the dance of opening and action, strike and counter-strike, single-leg and double, front-headlock and arm drag and guard. Men with the broken faces of fighters, with eyes struck shut, with blood streaming from broken noses, with cracked skulls and shins bruised black, breath coming in gasps, adrenaline overcoming fatigue, will overcoming sense, concussions piling on concussions as knees and elbows crack skulls and the crowds clamor for the killing blow. These Fighters know only how to offer themselves on the altar of competition, the only devotion that can sustain them.

I know these men, or knew them, so many of them that I wrestled with and against—Chael Sonnen, Evan Dunham, Uriah Faber,Randy Couture. I know what they want, what they long for, just as I know they will find no adequate achievement in the octagon, only a temporary intensity that years later will still be all they know how to care about. For them it is a way of life, of persisting; how can you care about the petty disappointments and small pleasures of normal life, the unglittering spectacle of the finally daily, when there has been the glory of a hand raised in victory? The money and fame, the impassioned legions of fans have only heightened the thrill, raised the stakes. Maim or be maimed. Win or be forgotten. Go until you have nothing left to give.

Every wrestler I speak to still wants it, to return to it; it there in their eyes, the need. They watch the best of us now on television, repelled and fascinated, wanting the ring and wanting no part of what they would sacrifice. Once you leave it you cannot leave it; but neither can you return, can you persist, unless you are willing to submit to the cost, to allow yourself to become only gladiator, faceless warrior, inhuman instrument of entertainment. And so, unable to quit, these men fight, go years under the toll of blows, even as the purses dwindle and the specter of glory is gone, the crowds rise to their feet calling not for mercy or the honor these men fight for, but only for more blood, more spectacular a spectacle, these clamoring legions who cheer the gladiator of the moment, who want real violence to rise to the heights they have seen in movies and in video games, limbs broken, blows thrown so hard a face breaks, a body is hurled through the air and crumpled to the ground. They thirst for an authenticity purchased at the price of real bodies, real blood—nothing less will suffice. Americans are the new Romans, require a Collosseum where no excess is barred, no bloodlust unsatisfied. We would throw the losers to the lions if we could.

I lack the stomach for it, but I cannot avert my eyes. Someone must watch understanding that beyond the bright and dirty lights, this is an awful spectacle. This is the offering of body and will to the god of commerce, who wants only for the bones to shatter, the flesh to crack, who cares nothing for consequences. As close to fighter as observer, I am still complicit; we all are, we desire it in our heart of hearts, to know the blood is real when so much blood is spilt on deserts and mountain passes overseas, when it is all images and words and the glib voices of newscasters and politicians speaking of casualties and losses, and we change the channel to the Hollywood movie where heroes and villains bleed digitized crimson, we play soldier on a video game console, we shoot the bullets and the bodies disappear, we raze the cities to the ground, we do not want to see or know. And then these men are really there, trying to kill for all of us from what is in them only the desire to go purely, to be blessed, and it ought to break our hearts, to draw from us no bully cheer but only sadness for the lost, for we who require such a ritual and what that says about America.

The End of July

2010-07-31T14:13:00.001-07:00

Walking Pre’s trail at the end of July, and it is too early to sense summer’s end, but that is the feel of the afternoon: the sort of high bright day that cannot sustain its light and heat and cools into slow decline, the long low shadows pooling at my heels with every step. When the sun begins to orange, casting shafts of failing light through the crooked branches of oak and willow, there is a terrible melancholic pang, the moment unendurable in the imminence of its absence. There will be more summer afternoons, but none quite like this again; soon, the evenings will become briefer and cooler, the grass will brittle until it is crushed underfoot, the leaves will yellow and curl in anticipation of Fall, and this time will be gone. My whole life I’ve longed for something better than what can be, an infinity of rising summer, the days endlessly getting longer, so that in the glory of some sunblessed afternoon all my burdens would lift all at once. There is no such day coming. And if I can’t suffer the Summer, how then the long dark Winter?

It is time to leave the town where I was born. The past is close and stifling; nothing here suffices. Here I will strive and dream until I’ve been starved to nothing, until me and my shadow are indistinguishable even in as golden and lovely a sunset as this one. And then, when the sun goes down, I’ll disappear.

New GOOD Piece: A Lesson in Fortitude

2010-07-28T13:24:00.000-07:00

My newest piece for GOOD Online, "A Lesson in Fortitude," is here:

Rail-thin, he walked slowly with almost comic intentionality, as if placing his feet in invisible foot-sized squares. He wore hipster glasses that gave him an air of intellectual superiority, and he spoke with such sarcasm that no student dared to oppose anything he said.

At Eleven, I was a Better Writer

2010-07-21T20:01:00.001-07:00

It's pretty amazing, but I recently found this piece I wrote about my Grandpa Thorold when I was eleven years old-- the first assignment of sixth grade (the date is there). And I have to say-- my voice is the same, the retrospection the same (I was only about five at the time), the tendency to observe and the type of description the same, the rhythm of the prose the same. Um, why did I go to graduate school?

I mean, look at my concern, as always, with what memory can do and can't, with accuracy and how time changes things, with retold story:

2010-07-16T15:26:00.000-07:00

Leo wants to play foosball in the basement and I don’t want to go to the basement, to the dank bottom below the stairs where the foosball table sits lonely and sad, so I say, “What about the river?”

Leo likes the river. He blinks his raccoon eyes and lights a cigarette and takes up his guitar and with it slung over his shoulder like a scabbard we start along the queue of trailers, the sun beating down in hard solid hot sheets, the train beating staccato clacks as the cars pass, one after another, beneath the overpasses where cars flash by as beads of color on the black string of road.

In the hollow beneath an overpass a girl in jean cut-offs and a wifebeater slips from the shadows, plants herself in our path with her hands on her hips. She is all low, sharp angles, a hard chin and triangle of hips and elbows. Her great sad eyes take her face; tattooed on her neck is a sad-eyed girl who I realize is herself, only with a gentler look. “Mikhael,” she says, and I realize it’s Quinn, Yoni, Vladena—whichever name for my Belorussian singer-songwriter ex is possible. She is angry for the way I left her, which was unconscionable—I put her on a plane for a trip to New York, collected my things from her house and left my key, and told her I was gone for good.

“Have you met Leo? He plays good music. And he smokes,” I say.

Leo offers her a cigarette and a light and she takes it, begrudgingly, lights it herself as Leo swings his guitar about the front and says, “You like Rock and Roll?”

She glowers, and I remember the morning I knew I had to leave, as she stood there naked in the dirty light of morning, chest heaving with tears, with the footlong sushi knife pressed to the tender flesh of her throat as she said, “You don’t think I’ll do it!”

I took a step toward her, and she lifts the knife toward me again as she lifts her cigarette now and then Leo comes down into the heart of the song, how Mary’s been down in the doldrums now for a decade and thirty two days and I’ve been down so long it seems that they threw all the numbers away, and she starts nodding with it a little despite herself, takes a long hard pull on the cigarette and throws it aside as she nods to the chorus, yeah, okay, she hears it now, and when Leo comes back in she sings harmony with him, do you like rock and roll? Well she sure likes rock and roll, and they’re perfect together, those two broken, cracking voices singing softly at the gates of heaven.

When they’re finished it all ok, forgiven even, and I look at the tattoo of the kind-faced Vladena on Vladena’s neck and the expressions match now and so Leo shoulders his guitar and Vladena joins us with her fierce long strides and we walk out from the shadows of the overpass and the train is gone and so we cross the lane of tracks and here now is the path through the grass and tall, overhanging trees toward the shifting silver sheet of river.

And then from behind a tree now is my recent ex, Whitney, who I somehow knew would be here because she loves this shaded spot that is most like the Redwood forest out the back of her college, and she says “Hey there, the party!,” and there is a joke implied that I do not get, and she has bobbed her blonde hair pixie-short and her voice is strange, I don’t even recognize it in this register and pitch, and it drives home that I haven’t spoken to her in six months and I do not want to now. But Leo is being friendly, and swings his guitar around and asks her if she’d like a song, and because I want to include Vladena I say, “You both like Leonard Cohen,” because that was always Vlad’s best song, and they both seem to know it can only be Hallelujah. They begin and it’s all minor fall and major riff to the fush of river, and we’ve all been here before, and Whit is swaying and her eyes are closed and she’s singing too, it’s a cold and broken hallelujah, and every breath they drew made the music more perfect, and Whit finally looks like she’s happy there giving her voice to the song, that pinched, anxious look gone from her face now for good. She is better now-- better without me.

I stand watching them sing, and I wish I could carry a tune or hit a true note. And because I can’t, I turn and leave them there singing, and run for the river and dive in, find the water clear and breathtakingly cold, and I don’t fight the current, go with it, the strains of song still reaching me, buoying me as I stroke for the the far bank where I can make out beneath the blinding sun the vague shape of a high silver tower rising toward the sky in a flurry of parapets and balconies.

I wake. My back is stuck to the sheets, and out the windows the birds are calling the sun from the warm dark. Hallelujah, I whisper. Hallelujah. As if I could so easily forgive and be forgiven, and there was any river to ford, any fresh, distant height to seek. As if I knew how to leave the past even in a dream.

Newest GOOD Piece

2010-07-14T14:02:00.001-07:00

My essay "Thank You For Everything," just went live at GOOD.

Done Again

2010-07-10T10:46:00.001-07:00

So after being finished for eight months, I decided my novel wasn't finished, attempted to resurrect my romance, imagining that:

1. Interracial love might make my novel salable.
2. Sex might make my novel salable.
3. The flaws and haziness of what I was trying to get, how and why in the material might magically have disappeared since last time I cut this material.
4. That through sheer persistence, I might make the damn thing work.

I also did a sort of Hemingway-esque (as in, In Our Time) interpolation of italicized, lyric passages, vignettes and scenes I cut for their failure to achieve any direct purpose. In other words, in a very un-Hemingwayesque fashion, I rebirthed all my darlings.

And I did go back through a chapter where the teacher gets established in the Delta, and did a lot of work trying allow just enough entry into character. Kato is shifty, and the book is finally only about him in relation to the children (and the children themselves), but there were things that needed to be established. In that way that Nick is present and not present in Gatsby, his sustained focus on Gatsby there in part because of himself and his desire to understand, to arrive at the flat bottom of narrative, Kato needed to be allowed to present just enough to be-- well, there. Because so much was now up in the air, I felt the freedom to seriously alter the second chapter, to move and cut and refigure.

Now, of course, I've seen that there can be no Reverend's daughter and no interracial love affair-tragedy-digression. My friend J.T. pointed out that I had, in the sex scene I really wrote the hell out of, engaged in perhaps the most egregious instance of pathetic fallacy known to man. "I don't know why on this night they suddenly decide to have sex," he said. "The only answer I can see is the rain. The rain makes them do it. The rain becomes them doing it. There's a lot of energy here in the rain."

When someone is that right, it hurts. His similar point about how show-offish and unnecessary the italicized vignettes also, sadly, was also correct. Goodbye again, my babies. Who could have known that the line "a virgin, unsullied country, the magnificient dream of God before the nightmare of man," was a tad overwrought?

Yet these two weeks of abandoned writing wasn't for nothing. Because at the point where I was able to imagine the novel as being unfinished, in process again, I did make my second chapter work in a way that well may stick. What I had was clean, but not lapidary in the way that the rest is. Now, though it may take more weeks to really know, I think it's right. Which means, finished yet again, I still have no agent, no contacts. But I have a fantastic sex scene based in and on the intrinsic attractiveness of rain. Talk about signs you've been in Eugene, Oregon too long.

As to Devotion

2010-07-06T15:19:00.000-07:00

Outside, a loud windswept afternoon, the leaves of the overhanging oaks swaying in too much light, too hard and steady a brightness. I have spent all year longing for sun, and now can’t bear its arrival, huddle here in the shadowed café listening to accordion jazz sung in another language—French?—German?—coat buttoned against the chill blast of air-conditioning, and I don’t know what I’m doing at all, here, here. In this café at the glory of day, in this town where I was born and have lived now for six years, six long years, from all the innocence and hope of my early twenties all the way now to thirty, allegedly writing a novel, supporting myself teaching, making supposedly something substantial of words and air and ambition.

I am not so sure of this enterprise, am beginning to doubt it’s solvency, it’s saliency: life or art or either, I have in these last years gained the right to call myself a 'writer'. By that I mean less the pretentious WRITER writ large, and more that I have, through sustained pursuit, gone down that rabbit hole and run all my promise and effort into making something of words, to crafting narrative that is meant to mean something substantial, something significant. And yes, I can point to two dozen, perhaps three dozen published pieces, in commercial and literary magazines, newspapers, e-zines, anthologies, all the minor successes that offer support, encouragement, the satisfaction of payment and visibility. I am not unaccomplished as a writer. But I am far from where I want to be.

No, what I mean by solvency and saliency is: so what? In these years of work, the finally daily of work and teaching has left me with words, most of which I have discarded, and some of which have been looked at by others, examined for entertainment or temporary uplift or occasionally, intemperate anger, a sense of betrayal or in a few cases, a judgment that I had said nothing at all. I made a white supremacist angry enough to call me up and threaten me. I made a lawyer in educational policy angry enough to write and insist I had erred on the side of evil. I have an ex-girlfriend who will no longer speak to me for what she felt was a simultaneous misportrayal and overexposure. And of course, I have on occasion delighted or moved a person or twenty. But it was never meant to be for them, or about them—my friends, family, audience. It was about the need to say something important.

And it’s here that I find my life lacking. I write because I must; I need to speak from here, like this, because it is all I’ve ever known how to do. If I could quit, I would—I’d make some money, be able to afford a less threadbare jacket and pair of jeans, a second pair of boots, an apartment with an unstained couch and a bathroom bigger than a closet and a dvd player that works and an actual stereo and ipod and perhaps even a car that I can trust to take me beyond the city limits. I have unsurprisingly conflated art and life, lived so austerely in pursuit of pure and absolute expression that devotion has undone me. Last week, sitting with a beautiful woman at a bar who hardly knows me, I made some comment about wasting my life.

“You make your choices,” she said.

“How so?” I was curious about what she thought. I’d met her playing pool, and we’d found ourselves connected by the neat bind of narrative, our recent exes a former, messy affair, though we’d never before spoken. She interested me, had a way about her of seeming to intuit essence from the inscrutable clamor of what was before her—she’d surprised me in the accuracy of what she’d had to say about my ex, her observations little like the easy contempt I’d expected from a woman who’d been wronged.

She put her hand to my arm, the one holding the bourbon. “You spend your money on booze—you drink more than you should.”

This was in itself surprising—not the idea that I was at the bar frequent late evenings, which everyone knew, but the idea of that being vice or excess. Most people were convinced I drank water out, that there was no indulgence at all in it: I always keep it together. And it is true too that I long ago gave up trying to reach some gorgeous, liquored height, a flight that always ends at the bottom. I don’t drink like that, but I know what it is to want to. I'd stay out of the bars entirely, but sitting in my tight, dim apartment watching reality television past dark, the city spread beneath me in a circuit of lights, I often want more from the beckoning night. And so, the real question. “Why do I drink too much?”

She leaned in, whispered in my ear, “Because you’re lonely.”

It wasn’t meant as a come on, and I didn’t take it like that. But as an observation, it is both obvious and profound. It is a cliché, the lonely writer who drinks too much to drown his sorrows, who spins out his evenings shooting billiards and keeping his cards so close to his chest that even he doesn’t know what he’s holding or what the cards portend—cards that can only be played for augury and transcendence in some still unwritten scene, some book that one day will arrive in a box at a publisher’s door and open the way to some other passing glory and recognition that too will be insufficient. I am not a cliché, but I run the risk of becoming one living this way, writing this book and living so hungry and isolated.

I would like to say that I will close my computer and venture into the day outside, beyond the foyer windows where the sun is striking diamonds off the hoods of passing cars, and the light through the leaves in overlap and gap is a great green pane of stained glass. I would like to be bound somewhere with purposeful strides, to walk through so much light and heat to a clear destination, a meaningful end, to have a richer, easier life. But like the lady said, I make my choices according to what I can and know how to do. And so I’ll have another cup of coffee, roll back the sleeves of jacket, and try to write something less self-indulgent, something necessary and important. After all, the sun will go down, and the stars will come out, and by then the glittering lights of the city will beckon again. And I’d like to be able to say that I already answered.

Summertime

2010-07-03T12:15:00.000-07:00

And a long time coming.

And after so long, it's better, still, if a bit melancholy and slow, a lull into heat: sunlight kissing a shoulder, a bright sweetness to the air, a finally just yes god please.

Hello, July.

Authenticity, Again

2010-06-22T23:04:00.000-07:00

The newly redesigned Luna Park did a beautiful redesign of my essay on Race and Authenticity:

http://lunaparkreview.com/questions-of-authenticity/

David Backer also referenced my comments to the Luna Park Editor, Travis Kurowski, concerning Amy Hempel from last month. I wasn't trying to give Mr. Backer a hard time-- it's just "Reasons to Live," is one of my very favorite collections of stories, and "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried," is a famous, and wonderful story that I felt deserved due respect.

2010-06-16T21:33:00.000-07:00

My new piece on the suprising fate of Jacqueline:

I came upon the blackened shell of her house, nothing left but rubble and burnt scraps of tin and the open sky beyond.

Listening to Leo London at The Rumpus

2010-06-01T10:49:00.000-07:00

My piece on Eugene songwriter Leo London is live at The Rumpus!

"If you took the love child of Dylan and Patti Smith, conceived under a full moon with Waits howling somewhere out of sight, and raised him to twenty-four in a dark cathedral with only a guitar and drum set and organ at the altar and the pews were a bar where the drinks were plentiful and cheap and beautiful, sad, hard-drinking women congregated to worship songs sure to break anew every broken heart you might have a songwriter like Leo..."

Race in 2010

2010-05-27T11:14:00.000-07:00

My essay "Race and Response," appears today at the Eugene Weekly.

Goodwill

2010-05-25T14:37:00.000-07:00

Yesterday a student from four years ago brought me a box of chocolate covered Macadamia nuts and thanked me for being the only teacher at the UO who'd ever inspired him. As I passed the chocolates about my three pm class, I was struck with a sudden conviction that something good was going to happen.

Ten minutes later, I opened my email inbox. The Irene Goodman Agency was writing ME to solicit my novel-- they'd read about me winning an Oregon Literary Fellowship and heard I had a finished book I was looking to agent.

As I pressed send with my work, another email appeared in my inbox: The Rumpus will be publishing my-- review? essay? creative nonfiction piece?-- concerning the songwriter Leo London. I have mentioned Leo here before, but to blurb the forthcoming piece yet again:

"Leo London loves the Beats and the Beatles. Leo London loves booze and cigarettes and guitars of many makes. Leo is baby-faced, flop-haired, perpetually unshaven, all intense raccoon eyes and shuffling steps, all stumbling grace and celebration of being laid low. If you took the love child of Dylan and Patti Smith, conceived under a full moon with Waits howling somewhere out of sight, and raised him to twenty-four in a dark cathedral with only a guitar and drumset and organ at the altar and the pews were a bar where the drinks were plentiful and cheap and beautiful, sad, hard-drinking women congregated to worship songs sure to break anew every broken heart you might have a songwriter like Leo. Leo London, son of drug addicts, today hungover and full of new sorrow and excuses, tomorrow hungover and full of bright hope and the possibility of something sung in a cracking, human voice that could encompass all that and then some. Leo, barely twenty-four-years old, sleeping each night in a garage with the guts of the Wurlitzers he spends his time restoring, pieces of instruments made to pieces of music marching rumba staccatto decolletage, brass band two-step jukebox tilt-a-whirl, the music of his dreams as terrible and glorious as the music of his days."

I am excited to be in The Rumpus-- they're fantastic, and I've long admired what they do. Good news indeed.

I'm not particularly woo-woo, but it has often been my experience that some months everything in the cosmos is, if not against you, at least indifferent. And then one day there is some shift, if not in the stars, then in the feeling created by a student's thanks and a shared gift of something sweet, and everything appears altered. Of course, it is not. But for today, I'm going to pretend.

Signals

2010-05-20T14:47:00.000-07:00

Today's ashen sky makes me long for Oahu: my aunty’s orchid farm up Waianae Valley where the road ends, the corner where the coastal range meets the Koa mountains. Haleahi Ranch-- literally 'House of Fire,' for the way the morning sun crests the ragged peaks in a blinding flare. I wish for the beach at Pokai Bay and out Makaha, where I spent the best months of childhood, ghetto paradise where at fifteen, I'd wake and run in the still cool dawn, along the water out Farrington highway, the cliffs tipping over the churning reef as the rising sun made everything too bright and beautiful, even to the great piles of trash from the squatter's camps pastiche on the the too-golden sand beside the road, mountain of strange, beautiful broken things: slick black bags full to the bursting, the tire and handlebars of a child's bicycle, a fan torn from its casing, a television with a shattered screen, antaennae on top raised as if to catch a phantom signal from God.

I need a warmer, brighter place, require the grammar of ocean, the idiom of sunshine, the words that are grains of sand that become beach. I have moved too far from a language beautiful enough to sustain me.

As far as Gatsby Goes

2010-05-18T09:47:00.001-07:00

There is no honor in diminished hopes, no comfort in the dull compromise of reason. Integrity is failing to sin enough to sully the purity of longing.

Here

2010-05-18T09:15:00.001-07:00

I am restless and so I spend my days examining my ills, wanting there to be something I can do, something I ought to do better. This week I worked, and I persevered, and I bitched about working and went for long runs imagining I could reach a finish line that would mean an end, and there was none: my legs only gave out. I was standing miles from home and the sun was hot on my shoulders and when my breath slowed to silence there was a dog barking out of sight, a squirrel’s feet tapping an oak tree, the crooned fush of river.

Sometimes, diagnosis of the problem is the problem. We search for what’s wrong until we find trouble.

I’m learning to trust what I can feel: Spring thick in the hot liquored air of midnight on a Saturday when the reckoning is still distant, and there is only the here and now of a dance floor in a city where what everyone requires is a dance: bodies pressed to bodies, a hundred hands finding spaces that can be opened, tracing the hems of jeans and the plunge of an open-backed blouse and the strobes shadow-stroke of shoulder-blade and spine. Bass hums hairs on the back of the neck, loosens hip-joints and elbow-sockets, as the pursuit of happiness sounds need through the bones of the inner ear and out the lips whispering, yes, right here now, yes.

As far as Prayer Goes

2010-05-13T12:22:00.000-07:00

Prayer
by Jorie Graham

Over a dock railing, I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl
themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the
way to create current, making of their unison (turning, re-
infolding,
entering and exiting their own unison in unison) making of themselves a
visual current, one that cannot freight or sway by
minutest fractions the water's downdrafts and upswirls, the
dockside cycles of finally-arriving boat-wakes, there where
they hit deeper resistance, water that seems to burst into
itself (it has those layers) a real current though mostly
invisible sending into the visible (minnows) arrowing
motion that forces change--
this is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more by
each glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself,
also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something
at sea. Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through
in the wind, I look in and say take this, this is
what I have saved, take this, hurry. And if I listen
now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only
something I did. I could not choose words. I am free to go.
I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never.
It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.

I came to this poem via Cheryl Strayed, a wonderful writer. She keyed into the same lines I do:

"motion that forces change--
this is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed."

I mean, that is perfect, the essence of prayer, what it means to be alive and want. The longing is indeed to be pure, and you instead are changed, and not necessarily for the better.

Friday in Spring

2010-05-07T18:51:00.000-07:00

The Spring stumbles in, stutters out two sad clouds and five sunny hours and staggers off shamefaced into sunset with promises of returning in finer form. No judgment from me: it is Friday, thank fucking god, and another week is gone, the stacks of essays thinned to none, the open pit of evening beckoning with distant, flickering lights and music and glorious hopes. I like anticipation of the night best, when there is only the unrevealed imminence, no hint yet of the liquored end, the tawdry descent of closing time, when the music is revealed as a man with a pinched mouth playing a harmonica and swaying, and it is all dirty and inglorious and small: two too-made up girls swaying in a corner and frantically running their hungry fingers through their coarse hair, child-men in baseball caps pouring shots of well-whiskey over their faces, and me, standing in a corner watching it all, wondering still what happened.

2010-05-06T11:50:00.000-07:00

One hears, it seems to me, in the work of all American novelists, even including the mighty Henry James, songs of of the plains, the memory of a virgin continent, mysteriously despoiled, though all dreams were to have become possible here. This did not happen. And the panic, then … comes out of the fact that we are now confronting the awful question of whether or not all our dreams have failed. How have we managed to become what we have, in fact, become? And if we are, as indeed we seem to be, so empty and desperate, what are we to do about it? How shall we put ourselves in touch with reality?

—James Baldwin, 1962

(My thanks to Mark Athitakis of American Fiction for bringing the quote to my attention)

A part of me wants to say, yes! And yet I'd never thought of it quite that way, not about the novel necessarily. It seems to me more that there must be an awful recognition in all of us, and certainly in our best art, of the beautiful possibility of the mysterious continent, inhabited already by native people (and oh, all that could have been learned), so much unnamed possibility... instead it has been our American story to sully that promise, crush that dream by clutching it tight, to tread instead on the backs of those who want only to dream.

Yes, I am talking about Arizona at this moment, and some novel some child born now in a barrio will write about the year of his birth and the poisoned years after. But the same has been the American story in place after place, year after year, for natives and immigrants and the children of immigrants who themselves become narrow, provincial, and greedy-- too American.

We take and take, seize land for ourselves and tear it open and poison the sea and land with black blood.

We rarely become our dreams, or realize them; instead, we become a parody of what we wanted with so pure and great a longing, degrade our alleged ideals with ugly appetite: steal, swill, rut and feast while others die of famine.

We want too much.

If the American novel is to say anything, it cannot ignore what is American, what we are all responsible for and culpable of. What we have done even as we dream, as we imagine we follow a dream, when we are following only the memory of our dreams still echoing on earth, a remnant, a ghost of what could have been.

Some days, I feel we might still find our way. But that will require a sober reckoning of the sort Baldwin speaks of. I'm not sure we have the stomach or the will. I'm not even sure it would be best that we see ourselves as we are and have been. It might be too much to bear.

Oregon Literary Arts

2010-04-28T17:04:00.000-07:00

Thanks, Literary Arts, for the support!

It's been a trying week in terms of writing-- pleased to place my essay "What You Would Give," with New Madrid, it was nonetheless hard to have to turn down River Teeth on Monday, when I was informed they too wanted to publish the piece if it was still available. Many have pointed out to me that I ought to be pleased it was taken after three years, and that I should see the River Teeth offer as vindication of the piece's merit. It is that-- RT is among the finest venues for literary nonfiction in the United States. That's why, as much as I respect New Madrid, I was crying into my coffee yesterday... what are the chances, I whined, of two places wanting the piece in two weeks, after three years of rejections?

Evidently, the answer is, pretty damn good. To add insult, an agent I was hopeful about wrote me (another) kind rejection of "Gone." Like almost all the other agents who have looked at the full manuscript, she complimented my 'immense talent' and the 'beautiful writing' before concluding that the book is insufficiently commercial for her to take a chance on. I'm beginning to wish an agent would come and tell me I'm a second-rate hack who's written an ugly, awful book, but luckily it has great commercial appeal and so they're fully on board. In fact, I think I'll write that book next. It will be called 'Twi-twilight,' and will basically recycle the plot, characters, and pre-teen vampirical romance of the Twilight series in prose that imitates the appalling unartfulness of the original. As promotion, I will twitter Twi-Twilight's first chapter at a rate of a sentence a day for a week (ok, it might take a bit longer-- but seven sentences would be enough space to cover the actual substance of those books). Agents take note!

Now, with a few days to mull it all over, I'm at peace with the whole thing. Tomorrow, Junot Diaz comes to the University to speak to faculty and read, and since his wonderful book of stories, "Drown," has been a powerful influence on me, I'm awfully excited.

Disappointment will end. The sun will come back out. And all the racists will move to Arizona*.

*For more on racists, see my essay in tomorrow's Eugene Weekly.

Afternoon

2010-04-17T13:08:00.000-07:00

Murmur of café, clatter and hiss of espresso being pressed, children calling from adjacent hallways, a man laughing from the belly. Sun pushes through the front windows, tiles the floor with rims of shadow, squares of light. Outside the air is wet and warm with Spring; the leaves that will fall are budding from the oaks, and it is all burgeoning, return, the kinder swing of seasons when what is to come is surely better than what has been. Maybe it is easier now to persist, even if it is all ribbon curving back on its end, all pendulum with equal and opposite energy. I know too little these days to choose a single metaphor. I have been emptied, and all I want is to be full—if not with a high, sweet afternoon like this, then with the heat of touch, the beginning of love when its price or end is unclear and it is possible to imagine for a second that this is a good and gentle world, that I have come all this way for the moment which is whole and itself enough.

And perhaps it is sufficient, this fine, bright afternoon: a fragrance of flowers and coffee grinds, smiling, well-scrubbed young baristas passing steaming cups over counters, these words released, things I have said before and will say again. I will want more; I will always want. But today, laughter, warmth, only the promise of promise. Yes-- enough to be here. Yes.

Acceptance

2010-04-15T17:09:00.000-07:00

"What You Would Give," was just accepted by New Madrid, and will appear in their Summer 2010 issue. Three years out, and rejection by more than forty journals, and finally, my favorite essay has a home.

To AWP-Denver and back again...

2010-04-14T14:21:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, over 7,000 poets and fiction writers descended on the Denver Convention Center, and I was among them. I hadn't attended AWP in four years, since I was a graduate student swollen with the sort of arrogance possible only when you don't know enough to know how little you know. Now, older, moderately wiser, and perhaps more than a little worse for wear, AWP was nonetheless a lovely experience. I attended a panel moderated by Luna Park editor Travis Kurowski that convinced me that the future of the literary magazine is still bright; I walked tables at the bookfair, and chatted up the editors of literary magazines (and in the case of Post Road, the literary journal out of Boston College, saw my work in print for the first time and gently chastised them-- they'd forgotten to send me a contributor's copy!); I attended the Canarium/Octopus/Ugly Duckling reading, where I was impressed with the work of Heather Christie, John Beer and Paul Killebrew; I attended a lovely reading given by an old friend, BOA poet and current Stegner Fellow Keetje Kuipers; I saw fiction writer Caroline Morris and poet Elyse Fenton (who just released her first book, a real knockout); I drank immoderate amounts of Jim Beam at the Hyatt bar, where I met a bright, fun bookseller named Stacie through fiction writer Mark Sleiter, and also made the acquaintance of writer Margot Kahn Case, who does wonderful work in Seattle with the Hugo House. And on Saturday night I read fiction for "Copper Nickel: An Audible Edition," at the Denver Press Club, an intimate and intense little reading that was recorded, and will be available soon online (I'll post a link when CN releases the recording).

The whole time, the sun shone, the sky was a depthless blue, and the downtown bustled with life. I returned to low-pressing clouds and showers, to the finally usual of my daily life, and it was a bit of a bitter pill. Of course, every weekend cannot be AWP-Denver-- but surely I could live in a place where there are writers and readers (an actual literary community!), people to meet. It may be time to seek a change.

Creative Nonfiction in Eclectica

2010-04-12T13:33:00.000-07:00

Today, my essay "The Files of the Living," was published in Eclectica.

Finding the Story published in GOOD

2010-04-07T13:19:00.000-07:00

My third essay for GOOD, "Finding the Story," was published today.

AWP!

2010-04-07T08:27:00.000-07:00

So, shortly, I am off to AWP, the annual conference of the Associated Writers and Writers Programs Organization. AWP is the premiere literary writers conference, though it should be noted that it represents the MFA-literary journal-small press triumvirate that has come to dominate the American literary landscape. In the past, I have referred to the MFA as a pyramid-scheme, which it surely is: established, literary writers who have demonstrated some success make their living off the millions who aspire to be 'writers', finding some stability in the income and support of academia. The MFA is a genuine pyramid, too-- that is to say, those who pay pave the way for a few who demonstrate enough merit, luck, or savvy (likely a combination of all three) to be offered a fellowship and so paid to go to graduate school. The organization and the yearly conference are in some sense primarily social: writers glad-handing other writers, boozing at the bars and snickering at the readings of other writers, the famous attending private parties and searching for the beautiful young admirer who won't mind becoming belt-notch. But the conference is also an opportunity to confirm contacts in this tiny literary world-- to speak to editors who've encouraged and published you, to meet contemporaries whose work you've encountered and admired, to seek advice and support. Such direct contact is especially important in a landscape where most everything now takes place online: submission, acceptance, publication, response and review-- everything is e-. I would like to see faces and shake hands and hear actual voices.

I intend to make sure I attend to the liquor, of course, and I'm excited to read for Copper Nickel (one of AWP's primary sponsors this year, as they are out of Denver) on Saturday night at the Denver Press Club, but more than anything, I'm excited to be excited-- I seek the energy of the conference, the force of gathering. Perhaps that's naive, but I often feel marooned here in Eugene, too old and too published to have much to say to current MFAs, and without peers or colleagues. For years, I conceived of networking as a tawdry schmoozing practiced by people I didn't like. In the last nine months, as I've sought representation for my novel "Gone," I've had to recognize the importance of collegiality, generosity, and outreach. The serious consideration my work has received has generally come through contacts, and not necessarily by people who have any reason to help me at all: Susan Straight read my work six years ago at a Master Workshop, but was kind enough to forward my manuscript to her agent, Richard Parks, though all she recalled of my story was a girl diving from a bridge. The photographer Brian Lanker, a friend of a friend, read my work and liked it and put my manuscript in Maya Angelou's hands. My cousin, an intern at ZSH, put the manuscript in the hands of an agent. An old buddy from the Stanford Wrestling team read a piece of mine in Stanford Magazine about our old assistant coach, contacted me, and was kind enough to forward my novel to a friend who was an agent. A girl I taught with in the Mississippi Delta whose father is a well known journalist sent my novel to her friend at an agency. Another TFA alum, the education editor at GOOD magazine, contracted me to write a series of pieces about the Delta and teaching at-risk students of color today. And on Sunday, the writer Steve Yarbrough, who was born and raised in Indianola, Mississippi, and is faculty at Emerson, took the time to speak to me about the Delta and my work, told me how his first novel was rejected 43 times by publishers before it found a home, and connected with a rising young agent who now has my manuscript in hand. There is nothing tawdry about having an open orientation toward the world.

That is the outlook I intend to take as I, an introvert after all, wander about AWP. Who knows who you might meet, where you might go; who knows if I can help you, too, or if you can help me? If you're going to be there, come speak to me. I'm the guy with the smile on his face, standing with open arms but looking maybe a bit lost, maybe a bit confused-- there in the middle of the crowd, waiting for you to come tell me what you will.

In Defense of Teach For America

2010-04-01T18:02:00.001-07:00

It doesn’t happen often, white as the people of Oregon are, except when I drive to see my buddy in North Portland, out MLK boulevard. He’s in Alberta, a neighborhood the yuppies are moving into, but he’s beyond the upscale edge, and by the time you get to his place it’s one-story brick houses with sagging stoops, liquor stores and pawn shops, hoodied homeboys on corners pounding fists and leaning to telephone poles. That’s when I’ll see them, in a crowd waiting at a crosswalk, or in a group outside an arcade or convenience store: a black girl’s head held high and proud, a boy clowning with wind-milling arms, the shadow of a child’s corn-rowed head and mischief in a flash of eyes. I’ll pump the brake, stare over my shoulder trying to be sure. Thinking maybe it’s my kids, and I can still turn the car around. Go back to them.

Ω

Recently, Teach For America has come under fire for its supposed failure to create good citizens. A study done at Stanford, a long-time bastion of resistance to TFA, with much publicized results, found that charitable donation by TFA alumni lagged in comparison to those who applied and were rejected, or who were accepted and declined. The implication, according to the researchers, is that Teach For America doesn’t make good citizens, that it burns individuals out, leaving them jaded and ungenerous. The study failed to take into account the question of population, of course: if you take the body of students willing to offer two years of service in America’s most troubled schools, you have selected the idealistic. Those who didn’t get in presumably went directly to work or to graduate school, while Teach For America alums spent two years making the salary of a first year teacher—barely enough to live. After that late start, a majority stayed on in a field, education, that is unlucrative, and they almost certainly did so out of the conviction that they wanted to make a greater difference—education is not a field you choose from a desire to make money, and there is little money there. To put it bluntly, a TFA alum who stays in education, which is a majority, is unlikely to have a great deal of money to give away, and perhaps their continued service (as well as the two years they gave) should be considered when judging good citizenship.

Still, continued service, or persistent ‘good citizenship’, does not obviate the question of Teach For America’s influence on its corps members. I cannot deny that the two years I spent teaching in the rural black public schools of the Mississippi Delta changed me, and it was not simply for the better. People speak of how idealism ought to be tempered by reality, and think it a benign process: growing older, becoming wiser. They are wrong: there is a price for lost naivete. Some days, I would give anything to be twenty-two again, to have more heart than sense and still believe that good easily overcomes all else. I wouldn’t be teaching low-income, at-risk students of color at the University of Oregon if it weren’t for those two years in Teach For America, would long ago have traded in my degree for a job with status and decent pay. All the same, I am a sell-out. In Indianola, the children I taught walk the dusty streets headed nowhere, and I’m not there helping them.

Some nights I lie awake bargaining, trying to get back to the man I was, and imagine choices: if I could trade my comfortable life for theirs, if I could take their lot and free them from poverty, would I? So simple to say, of course, when there are guarantees.

I dream of carrying children to safety from fires, of bearing them across ravines in a storm, of leading the way through a dark wood and a line of children behind following blindly, grudgingly, until we emerge in a city with clean, bright streets, the very air shimmering with possibility, and they are with me despite all our doubts. We have arrived.

When I wake, the relief is bitterly lost: I am alone in my highrise apartment with all the comforts of a middle-class life, and those children are a world away in shacks on the wrong side of the tracks, hearing the bark of a stray dog, the far-off whistle of the train bound elsewhere, always elsewhere. I left them behind, and so cannot let go.

Ω

Whatever Stanford researchers conclude, I do not accept the idea that my work today amounts to nothing. Each quarter I face room full of black, yellow, white and brown faces, kids who have kept their heads down and made it to the University against all odds. Many of them come from little, and have had little offered to them, but they have made no excuses. Many of them have a deficient skillset, do not know how to spell or punctuate or make an argument. They still have a long way to go to realize the American dream. I stand before them, and think of the children I taught in Mississippi, a responsibility I cannot return to. Then I consider these young men and women who have come so far, and accept what can be done here and now:

“This class is rigorous and challenging, and my expectations are high: I will accept nothing less than absolute excellence. Most of you lack the skills you require to make it at the University. But if you put in your best effort, you will improve. If you work hard, you will succeed in this class. That is my promise to each of you.”

And in a greater sense, I keep the faith: all children deserve the opportunity offered by education. Perhaps there is a price in committing to so ambitious a conviction, but it is has not made me a bad citizen. It has taught me to fight for what matters.

so many wings of birds

2010-03-12T14:46:00.000-08:00

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.

More Cesar Vallejo

2010-03-07T20:58:00.001-08:00

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.

The Chances

2010-03-07T13:22:00.000-08:00

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.

GOOD PIECE PUBLISHED

2010-03-03T07:06:00.000-08:00

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.

Trusting Yourself, or at Least Trusting Twain

2010-03-02T18:55:00.000-08:00

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.

Away from Here, in a Year

2010-03-02T14:00:00.000-08:00

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.

What Dreams

2010-02-26T17:48:00.000-08:00

I survived to Friday, a long week of conferences and teaching, a long wet winter week, turgid hours, no hope of Spring, no uplifting signs of anything at all. Finally, the late afternoon class was over, and I closed the office door and laid on my couch and let the tapping of the rain at the window lull me to sleep.

The dream came quickly, impossibly vivid: I was on a landing in an ill-lit place full of shadowy figures and loud voices, a bar perhaps, or a performance in an old hall. An old woman with a kind, well-scrubbed face and curled hair came on me, knew me. “Michael!” she said, taking me by the arm, leaning hard—she was unsteady on her feet with age, with the place she found herself. “It has been so long. I have searched all about this place for you. I want to tell you, congratulations, I am so proud of you.”

I didn’t know her or what she was congratulating me for, but in the dream this somehow didn’t matter to me. It was as if her words themselves had the force to make all inconsistencies irrelevant; she knew me, that I was sure of, and she knew of what she spoke. In the dream, all I was worried about was her—it was late in this place, and she was frail and tired. And so I offered my arm, and slowly, slowly, I escorted her down the stairs to safety.

When I woke, I had been asleep only a few minutes, but I felt completely renewed, light, as if everything I carried had been released. I am no believer in ghosts, spirits, devils or deities, have no faith in the supernatural. But unlike most dreams, where the elements and impetus can be identified—this situation, this place, this person—this afternoon’s experience was unique, and profound in effect. I feel—good. And whether touched by an angel, or forgiven by my own conscience (I have been trying too hard for too long—what more can I do—and why can’t I be kinder to myself about it?), I believe it will be a very good weekend.

Shout-out

2010-02-22T18:53:00.000-08:00

Curious-- I just found myself a part of the mission statement of a site called Fiction Daily, run by Millions editor David Backer. He quotes me as saying:

Commenting on a Mother Jones article called “The Death of Fiction,” Michael Copperman writes:

“The question is not whether print literary journals that are affiliated with universities are threatened today, their audiences dwindling and their funding threatened. That’s the situation that exists. The question is how literary journals can respond, who can innovate and demonstrate relevance…who can help us sift through so much content to find the best content. That will take new ways of thinking–”

Consider Fiction Daily an attempt to do this, following the enormously helpful model of Arts and Letters Daily (aldaily.com). Here, we select and aggregate content from the “independent” publishing world– the magazines, the websites, the small houses, the self-publishers–and put it into one place. Use this site to find stories to read, and to explore the myriad places that publish them (see our growing Literature list). Use it as a gateway to the vast sea of literature that’s being produced now in ways that the old industry can’t keep up with.

Mr. Backer's project, Fiction Daily, is interesting and innovative. You can find Fiction Daily here:

http://fictiondaily.org/

The Story

2010-02-21T21:40:00.000-08:00

In everything, I make narrative, see narrative, find the story. That is how my mind works: I only understand things in causal relation to other things, in order, arranged unconsciously, unwinding in words. In fiction and poetry, much gets made today of the need to acknowledge the artifice, be true to sources, indicate what is reality and its reference points and its constructed nature, to find a way to indicate fracture, instability, ambiguity, the fundamental pastiche of it all. I am not that sort of writer mostly because that is not who I am or how I experience the world.

But I might be wrong. Certainly, I’ve come to recognize the way much of our lives are spent looking backward and forward from the current moment, and finding a narrative that is tenable. Ten years of suffering becomes the hard work necessary to moving beyond; a traumatic accident is made a turning point that suggested the fragility of life and the importance of living each day to the fullest, and so on and so on. The breakup becomes less of a blow that knocked you to your knees and more of a necessary release that told you what you do not ever want again. Narrative is a revision and a meaning making, perhaps a necessary forming. But what do we do with the irresolvable? Poet Cesar Vallejo phrases it this way:

“There are some blows so violent—I can’t answer!”

I am interested in such moments as a writer-- the violence that lays bare something profound and true and too often, terrible. But I also have to wonder about the process of narrative in general, about how I perpetually form everything happening to a form I can control and understand. Look at post-9/11 America, at all we did to make sense of the Twin Towers—we needed heroes and we needed enemies, we needed action, we needed…something. It sounds trivial, but look at all the CSI-style forensic shows that rose to popularity after 9/11. We imagined that there was some science that could tell us what happened, how, and to whom, that we could determine cause and guilt and assign final responsibility and punishment. We are still trying to, as even now Marines die in the Afghan offensive. We want the story to end well, so we can justify the muddled middle, the incomprehensible opening. The blow came first, and there may never be an adequate accounting, a resolution that comforts or explains. And if that’s the case, what if it’s almost always the case?

I’m not kowtowing to the post-modernists or the pompous idiots of literature departments who think what they and their theories say about art matters more than the art itself. I’m not really talking about art at all, in fact, but about how we live and go on, how we find a story we can live with. I often fear I have spent these years writing this book for nothing—that it will find no home or readership, that I will have come all this way for nothing. I also recognize that even if that is the case, I will reckon with that blow, make peace with it and keep writing, perhaps even write something more commercial that does go somewhere, and I will think of the disappointment and lost labor as a necessary rejection, a time when I was developing and only beginning to write.

But I am not so sure that will be true—I have put everything I have into this book, and though it may not be an easy or pretty book, it has merit. And what it will do to me will not be so easily resolved either. What if the narrative we want to tell can’t be made, before or after; what if these stories, these tenuous ribbons spun out and out, fray to nothing, contain nothing but the threads themselves?
These thoughts are diffuse. But then, that is the point.

New Projects

2010-02-16T14:32:00.000-08:00

Out the window of my 11th floor apartment the valley spreads in blocks of forest bounded by road. On the horizon, the Coburg hills, and in the sky beyond crook the three fingers of the Three Sisters. Rain renders it Gaussian blur, and what is nearer is equally indistinct: television muted on something trashy and dramatic, couch covered in books, sink full of unwashed dishes. The white walls about me, and on all sides the sleeping geriatrics (my building is full of the old) dreaming of youth. And me, wasting my youth—whatever I do next year, I will have spent my twenties in this apartment in Eugene, Oregon.

So much for the best years of my life.

This won’t be another blog lamenting the weather or the austerity of my bachelorhood. The first paragraph contained enough imagery of things contained to suffice—as I’ve said before, I tire of whining about my situation, of writing solipsistic foolishness to gentle the duration of this endurance. It is all a long persistence, that is my revelation of the week. Keep on keeping on. Do. Or, don’t.

This rewrite of Hamlet won’t be winning any prizes, regardless.

Instead, an update on a new project. You’ll see more here as it emerges, but my newest pursuit, in addition to the ongoing series of pieces for GOOD, has to do with the musician Leo London. My friend Justin King introduced me to Leo; he’s produced Leo’s album, which will be released sometime in Spring when Justin returns from South Africa. I have been hanging out with Leo and his girlfriend Laurie in occasional dive bars and coffee shops and even my apartment, where we attempted to drink enough Jameson to summon the volume to wake the neighbors (we failed—they sleep hard, or rather, are hard of hearing). He is a friend, which requires no justification at all, but he interests me for the originality of his music, the way his aesthetic somehow IS Leo London, son of heroin addicts, round-faced, flop-haired, perpetually unshaven, a twenty-four-year old man who sleeps on the floors of friends and in the basement of his grandparent’s house, where all about him are the guts of the Wurlitzers he spends his days restoring. Leo who loves the Beats, who listens to Dylan and Waits and the Kinks and sounds like all of them and none of them. Leo who confessed to me last week on his birthday, struggling from beneath a dozen drinks, that he never expected to make twenty-four, that it was, how do you say, perhaps an awful mistake and not a blessing at all, not really, not this life lived this way. Leo who wrote these last lines to the song about liking it at the bottom, cigarettes and rock and roll and little hope of heaven:

We’ve both seen some terrible things my love
And we both served our time the in the dark
But the things that hold our hearts in place
Are the things that have to tear us apart

Well do you think I could let it go
No, I know I know I’ll never let it let go
It’s hard to tell the difference between what’s real
And what’s real only under affliction
But something lately tells me it’s all the same
As your love comes in the form of a question

Is there some other place where we could speak like this
Is there someone out there who would listen
Who still likes rock and roll
Like I like rock and roll
Singing softly at the gates of Heaven.

There may be no other place he can speak like that, but right now I’m trying to find what it is that Leo has to say that I need to hear. I'm-- listening.

Luna Park

2010-02-02T10:28:00.000-08:00

Today my essay, "Questions of Authenticity," went up at Luna Park. It lays out a position I've worked out after years of struggle concerning the ethics of writing. I discuss the resistance of editors to my dialect work and the work in my own voice that simultaneously 'failed to' and 'went too far in' dealing with representations of race.

That essay, and my GOOD piece, were also reviewed here on Fictionaut by Travis Kurowski, who said the following:

"This week on Luna Park, Michael Copperman writes what seems to me an original and thoughtful essay considering some aesthetic and political assumptions made about race in contemporary publishing. Possibly one of the most inspiring pieces we have published on LP, Copperman’s essay moves quickly from describing publishing obstacles onto the important reasons we read and write stories: “recognizing human suffering and responsibility, and so examining what is true in us and about us.” Here’s from the beginning of the piece:

The email from the editor of the literary journal started out promisingly enough, noting that they liked my story very much. I knew that couldn’t be all, for the story I’d submitted was a dialect piece, and I knew from long experience that no editor would accept a story deploying a form of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) without some confirmation of authenticity: they would try to verify my racial background and personal history, especially in the absence of publications I didn’t possess because no editor would accept a story written in AAVE without…guarantees. And there it was:

Our editors have concerns about how you colonize this young girl’s voice.

I took a deep breath, wishing polemic came easier to me, and started to type…

"In non lit mag news: Copperman also has a similarly-themed brief essay in the latest GOOD magazine on education against the odds in an area of rural Mississippi just half-a-day’s drive from where Luna Park was once based. The sensitivity with which Copperman describes the schoolchildren will no doubt speak to the heart of any teacher or parent."

Luna Park

2010-02-01T19:28:00.001-08:00

My essay on Race in Publishing (specifically, the issue of 'authenticity') is up today at Luna Park.

GOOD

2010-02-01T12:50:00.000-08:00

The first of my three linked pieces on teaching low-income, at-risk students of color in the Delta and at the University of Oregon appears today in GOOD.

Can Ghetto Children Rise on Homeric Lines?

2010-01-29T08:22:00.000-08:00

Only with time.

I've been thinking of this line, a paraphrase of educator Mike Rose's quote from his book "Lives on the Boundary," in which he advocates for a pedagogy not tied up in a debate about curriculum (conservatives tend to hold that the Great Books are the answer to educational inequality, as if handing poor minority students Shakespeare or Plato somehow is an answer to the deficiencies in opportunity they face), but focused on HOW we bring student's own experience into the classroom:

"Although a Ghetto child can rise on the lilt of an Homeric line-- books can spark dreams-- appeals to elevated texts can also divert attention from the conditions that keep a population from realizing its dreams."

Rose's contention is that while eventually a minority child should approach the Western Canon, their education begins in the medium of their own lives, their obsessions and interests and experiences. How can students be given a stake in their education, a place to start speaking from? How can the reading they do help allow that stake-- in subject, and in the invitation given by good teachers who can encourage those connections?

My experience in over thirty composition classes with low-income, first-generation college students and at-risk students of color, as well as my experience teaching fourth grade in the Delta, convinces me Mr. Rose is absolutely right. Some kids can find a way to rise on Shakespeare-- certainly they have the capacity. But they can be held out by texts foreign to their own experience, books that even 'majority' students struggle to orient themselves in. Ghetto children deserve to rise, period-- and those first lines are more likely to be the rhyme of a Jay-Z or Lil' Wayne song, on a styling of Common or Nas that speaks to rhythms and spaces more accessible to them. They're more likely to find a place in "Precious" than in Harry Potter. And if allowed to rise, perhaps one day the lilt of the homeric line, the foreign understood in terms of the present, but not as a place to start.

So the answer is, against all odds, in due time, and only if they're offered the opportunity.

Risk

2010-01-24T14:05:00.000-08:00

Taking chances has never come naturally to me. I am not cautious by nature either, just thoroughly an observer, someone more likely to be found on the margins noting details and looking for reasons why than someone who's out...doing. Back when I was a wrestler, the refusal to make a mistake took me exactly as far as it could: I failed finally to succeed at the highest levels of sport because I was unwilling to risk anything. The cliches abound: no risk, no reward, don't try and you can't succeed, and so on and so on. Samuel Beckett says the same thing more poetically:

Ever tried.
Ever failed.
No matter.
Try again.
Fail again.
Fail better.

Only with writing have I been able to follow this advice (luckily that was what Mr. Beckett was discussing). That is no small thing-- I threw a thousand pages of prose at the Delta to come away with 170 pages, and every time I let a hundred pages I'd labored over go, it hurt. But I learned, and while I'm not half the prose writer I aspire to be, I will stay true to that process.

What I am less good at doing is taking chances in the rest of my life. I may write about the world, but living in it can be a bit of a struggle. I am good at persisting. I am good at trying to do right in the situations immediately in front of me. But going when the outcome is uncertain-- that I rarely do. And so I find myself now surprisingly successful with writing (if still in limbo with representation for my novel), but caught in an austere life I suppose I have chosen, yet don't entirely want.

By austere I mean that there is my work teaching low-income, at-risk students of color, which is meaningful, but after four years, also awfully familiar. There is my family in this town, who I love dearly. But as to my friends, well, this provincial little city is the sort of place one leaves, and all my friends have gone to bigger ponds or fallen into different crowds. I have too little here. Which returns me to the question of risk: how do you pick up and go without something to go to? At what point do you take a chance?

Even in this awful economy, I am considering it-- picking up and moving to Portland or San Francisco or New York or D.C. without work lined up at all. The prospect terrifies me; such a move would be completely unlike me. Yet I'm beginning to wonder if that's not a good thing after all, if perhaps staying stunted here is far worse than venturing, broke, to some other place where at least I can fail, and try again.

Reading Cesar Vallejo

2010-01-11T15:49:00.000-08:00

Was reading James Wright's translations of Cesar Vallejo, and came across this poem, which is, I cannot really say what it is-- something beautiful, vast, and sad.

I am free from the burdens of the sea
when the waters come toward me.

Let us always sail out. Let us taste
the marvelous song, the song spoken
by the lower lips of desire.
Oh beautiful virginity.
The saltless breeze passes.

From the distance, I breathe marrows,
hearing the profound score, as the surf
hunts for its keys.

And if we banged
into the absurd,
we shall cover ourselves with the gold of owning nothing,
and hatch the still unborn wing
of the night, sister
of the orphaned wing of the day,
that is not really a wing since it is only one.

After a Decade, Tod Surmon Still

2010-01-09T09:35:00.000-08:00

My essay in memory of Tod Surmon was published by Stanford Magazine today.

Winner, 2009 Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship

2010-01-06T09:31:00.000-08:00

Yesterday morning at eight am my phone rang. I'd intended to sleep in, but was worried-- nobody calls me in general, and certainly anyone who knows me well understands that the days I don't have to make campus by seven-thirty in the morning, I prefer to doze and laze.

So, I was anxious, got up, bleary and confused, and looked at the phone and saw I didn't recognize the number. Surely somebody wanting money. Then I listened the message.

I'd won an Oregon Literary Fellowship, had a hefty check coming in the mail with no strings attached, more money than I've earned in my entire literary career, the reward based entirely on the merit of my work.

Yesterday afternoon, I drove to Portland to attend the announcement of the winners at the Christopher Hitchins reading that Literary Arts was sponsoring in the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. I had a complimentary ticket on will-call, picked it up and found my seat near the front. The lecture was sold out, the high-ceilinged hall airy and grand, evoking cathedral (Hitchens noted there was some cosmic irony there, that he always gave talks on why God is not great in places where the architecture was religiously inspired). The head of the Oregon Literary Arts Council went to the podium and spoke of the 322 applications they'd received this year, how they'd only awarded eight Fellowships to writers who worked in obscurity to little notice or acclaim. Then he made us stand, those of us who were able to be there. I turned back as the applause rose, the momentary recognition of thousands and thousands there for another purpose entirely, to hear America's most prominent Atheist, a pro-war, pro-life intellectual conservative who I mostly disagree with, and still-- I don't know.

The long rows, the full mezzanine, all those people clapping at a small achievement they knew nothing of-- none of the qualifications mattered. I have published in several magazines and newspapers with distributions in six and even seven digits, but there is no moment of applause, no recognition that your great hopes and long labor have amounted to anything. For a moment as that applause swelled, it felt like everything was worth it after all.
.

And that's priceless.

There and Back Again

2009-12-28T18:58:00.001-08:00

A quick jaunt to the islands, and it was beautiful and quiet, restorative, perfect. I saw my aunties at their orchid farm up Waianae Valley where the road ends, at the place the coastal mountains meet the Koa range. Haleahi Ranch-- literally, House of Fire, for the way the rising sun flares across the ragged peaks, edging everything with a hot red light. The beach at Pokai Bay and out Makaha, where I spent much of the best times of my childhood, is much as I remembered it. Ghetto paradise. I ran every morning, starting in darkness and hitting the cliffs over the churning reef as the sun came up, everything too bright and beautiful, even the great piles of trash from the squatter's camps extraordinary on the the yellow sand beside the road, such strange beautiful broken things discarded-- the tire and handlebars of a child's bicycle, a fan torn from its casing, a television with a shattered screen, an antaennae set on top and still raised as if to catch some phantom signal. On the last day, I made mochi with the family there from scratch, pressed and formed the searing rice in flour, turning the inside out until it had the right shape.

It was a very good trip.

The strange part has been returning to my life. I would like to claim that I have new perspective and high hopes, that everything looks better after stepping away. That has not been true at all. Instead, everything that I have feels tight and small, the escapes available to me in this cold wet town tawdry at best and sometimes even unendurable. I plan on getting out of here soon. I just need to find an opening, an opportunity, and I'm gone.

If you can't beat it, leave it

2009-12-12T19:33:00.000-08:00

In these last three weeks, I have discovered a number of things. One of them is that it makes very little difference if you stand and face what afflicts you or avert your eyes and pretend there’s nothing there. I have discovered that you can wipe a slate clean and still remember so vividly what was there that you might as well have let it be. I have found it makes only the difference of a hangover if you abstain from alcohol or drink as if to empty every whiskey bottle in Eugene—the action or inaction, the diversion or sober endurance still points at the same unhappiness. In short, I have coped as well as I know how, and have found nothing to mitigate loss. And I’m tired of trying, exhausted with the sound of my own voice, tired of being tired of being sad.

And so I’m going to Hawaii, where I haven't been since my grandfather died five years ago, to visit my aunties and family there for a week. I'll be where nobody can find me, out the leeward side of Oahu where the tourists don’t go given the likelihood of turning up facedown in the surf, going to the beautiful white-sand beaches and red cliffs. I’m getting away from my life.

I leave Monday. And that really does make me happy.

Some City, Somewhere

2009-12-09T07:59:00.000-08:00

Recently, my friend Rica wrote to ask me when I was moving to the Bay Area. She was tongue-in-cheek about it, but was awfully confident in the superiority of San Fran and environs, the one urban area I know well, as my father’s whole family grew up there and mostly stayed near, a familiarity I expanded in four years of undergrad in Palo Alto. Is San Francisco, that North-Coast Cali lefty techie thing where I save the environment by googling ‘efficiency’ on my iphone and then purchase a Prius for the prestige (yes, a Malibu would have been most ‘efficient’…) and offset my carbon and be sure I’ve pinned my lapels and stickered my bumper full of my politics writ in pithy phrases really the…best? Is it?

Don’t get me wrong: I love San Francisco, and as I said, I know full well there’s the grittiness of Oakland, the suburban Silicon bubble, the pricey ocean digs of Santa Cruz, the hemp-international cosmopolitan hippieness of Berkeley, the choices are endless. But this America is myriad, too. Is San Francisco the best there is?

Or is it Seattle, serious and dark, but dapper too, never a shortage of coffee or hipsters or alterna-anything, northern outpost and port city and place of markets, Mariners, warehouses made studios with walls of concrete and metal and velvet drapes?

Nearer to here, there’s Portland, that uber-clean, uber-progressive mecca of everything done right: the outdoors, the organic everything, the counter-culture and counter-counter-culture and all of it embraced by everyone simultaneously in a place like a series of Eugenes interconnected and fed steroids? Is Portland the perfect million-five, the place of all places like Portlanders claim?

I have no great affection for Los Angeles or San Diego, as long as we’re talking about the West Coast; I love me some sun, but have found too that the further South I get in California, the less comfortable I feel, as if every white person were going to mistake me for Mexican and at the same time I’d drown in standardized suburban sameness. Perhaps not, but too I do like the natural world. And I have the sense that the closest one gets to natural in L.A. is when in a four-mile long traffic jam, one breathes through a cloth for filtration, and the scent of exhaust is temporarily undetectable.

But I offer California too much. What of New York, the place my father was born, a place I’ve visited a couple times, in each instance concluding that the noise and clamor and press of so much was too much? Does that recede with neighborhood and familiarity, with time? Or will I discover after all these years of complaining about the provincial that I actually am a small-time, small-city, rural West type who whined of the place I was born until I was forced to leave it and found myself marooned in an alien urban nightmare of subways and skyscrapers and teeming throngs of strangers?

Cold as it is right now, with the recognition is this cold all winter long, I have to dismiss Chicago out of hand, the myriad wonders of Midwestern cities aside (yes, that goes for Minneapolis too).

And what of Boston, or more specifically Cambridge, that self-declared center of all intellectual activity, where black-clad graduate students sip wine and compose algorithms and feel confident in a place that promises that America is a meritocracy, and you’ve arrived through force of merit in a place where everyone is commendably meritorious and bound for imminent fortune?

And what astounding locales have I missed?

Statement of Intent, and Disclaimer

2009-12-08T18:12:00.000-08:00

It’s colder still today, and will be colder tomorrow, and then on Thursday the paper prediction said COLD in capital letters, just like that across the box usually devoted to pictorial depictions indicating weather: emoticons, snowflakes, the beaming (mouth of the) sun. There is a draft under the door here, so I can attest; at my office in the Prince Lucien Campbell prison block (no, really, the building seems to have been built with our ugliest prisons firmly in mind), it’s more like testify, as in, yes, your honor, I nearly lost a finger that Tuesday that the heat stopped working, so I can understand how the Professor Emeritus came to be frozen solid—although it’s true he wasn’t the warmest fellow when he was alive.

But I— I don’t think digress is the right word. I hyperbolize, prevaricate, indulge in foolishness and generalized fuckery, I speak nonsense, am filled with it, and feel the need to be filled with something. Aren’t there worse vices?

Perhaps not those that afflict you, dear reader. But then, if you’re still with me, you probably know me or are yourself disinclined to judge.

If you set yourself to a feed of this blog at some regrettable point in the past, I cannot help you now—surely you ought to have noticed the long hiatus, and if you liked the tone of that earlier blog and are still reading, well, I cannot help your bad taste. Here’s what my current project is: to be at the keyboard, to use these words to say something. As you’ve gathered if you looked at these last couple posts, I’m feeling particularly frustrated and stuck, in limbo professionally and in transition personally, and currently consigned to this cold gray lameness that is Eugene, a place so agreeable and comfortable I could pour lamb’s blood on a vegan just to hear the scream. I quit writing here because most of my serious work goes serious places now, and I cannot really get away with posting it online, and so this blog has become little more than a link and report for my minor writing success. That was nice enough for a while, but as I’m waiting on representation, and have no immediate projects on the queue, and as that word, serious, has a tendency to define me overmuch, I’m going to let it go a little. Forget the necessary lapidary quality of the well-made object. Forget aesthetic, form, the need to get at something significant or leave everybody weeping.

There may be some of that, of course—but I wouldn’t count on it. What I’m saying is this: there will regular posts here, of what I have no damn idea, except to say that I’m feeling edgy and polemic and uncompromising, and at turns of course am equal parts sorrowful atonement for every angry thing I’ve ever said, and the only thing I can imagine doing is speaking until enough of those words are gone that I can go on.

So, that’s what to expect. If the prospect excites you, I promise to disappoint. If you’re already disappointed, chin-up and buck up and go find something more exciting. This won’t be, I promise that. But it may be a bit confessional, a bit silly, a bit angry, a bit—grand, in an overblown, overwrought sort of way. It’s time to live up to titles.

There it is

2009-12-07T09:43:00.000-08:00

This morning my windshield was petaled with frost, and the cold was acute, seeping inside layers and pressing everything in. I went to bed early but woke bleary and exhausted, feeling as if I’d spent the night warding off bad spirits, the demons that often accompany a deep freeze: loneliness, doubt, loss.

It has been a difficult month.

For six years now I’ve lived in Eugene, the last four as a glorified adjunct teaching at-risk students of color, atonement for the Delta and purpose in the present: I can offer these kids something. The intermittent schedule of such work has allowed space to write, enough so that, after perhaps a thousand pages thrown at the Delta and what I need to say about it, I have finished my novel, even written a book I am proud of. My work goes everywhere (well, nearly everywhere—any time the New Yorker wants to come calling, I will acquiesce), and the unplaced pieces on the queue are better than what’s been placed, and sometimes now I receive checks in return for the work I would do for free because it’s the only thing I really am any good at.

But let’s be honest: given the choice between counting my blessings and decrying my failures, it’s always the latter—I’d call it an aesthetic, even, which is less exculpatory than descriptive of my particular sensibility. And so there’s the part where commercial publishing is in crisis, making agenting and sale of this book increasingly unlikely. There’s the part where I’d planned my life around a girl who’s gone, planned to leave with her so that now I face the prospect of another year here, the deadlines for the fellowships I would have applied for already past. There’s my apartment, recently stripped and scrubbed clean of every memory of the last year, and as you might expect, rather than feeling I’ve started anew, all I see are the things that used to be hers: the pictures and books and rows of beauty products, the collages of Raptor Jesus, the missing rows of shoes, all these things more vivid in absence.

Today I’ll finish the grading that remains, and be done with this quarter. I am already done with this year, 2009, which I dedicated to a relationship that was bright and ephemeral, a flare and the attendant dark after, deeper for having been temporarily dispelled.

I know: time and all wounds, we heal, we move on, we find possibility, let all those old, brittle hurts fall away. I would mix metaphors further, but I’m ill with it, light and dark and cold and deepening and lightening and falling and rising and for god’s fucking sakes, abstracting abstraction, overburdening language, sitting at a café staring at a screen whining about what was, is, will be, with the simpering solipsism of every weeping nancy.

I am tired of it. But then, that’s where I started, that’s what I already said. So there it is.

"Harm" published in Southword

2009-12-02T17:23:00.000-08:00

My story "Harm," which was shortlisted for the Sean O'Faolain Prize in Fiction from the Munster Literature Centre, is published here in the journal Southword.

And I think they've done a nice treatment of it.

Night, Cafe, Tea

2009-11-30T22:25:00.000-08:00

Tonight, I linger at the cafe. People form long, snaking lines, drum fingers to glass desperate for a hot cup of something to fight the chill. I need heat as bad the next fellow, but wait for the line to clear. Sometimes you can pretend you don’t need anything until the pretense becomes solid. This is most true when it comes to tea; perhaps it is also true that it pays to whistle a happy tune.

And today, I manage it, that much. Part of that I owe to a fine conversation with a wise woman last night, who pointed out that I might have a tendency to find the downside of things and then wallow in shadow moaning about the lack of light.

The sky out the steamed windows is a bruised blue-black; rain seems imminent and never arrives. Intermittent, auguring nothing clear. But I’m willing to consider the possibility that it's winter, December weather, and not the cold gray evening of the soul. In considering this last week I wince a bit—at what point does recognition of grief become indulgence, loss just a sad-sack celebration of self-inflicted misery?

Today I finished a short-story I’ve been working on for four years, and I believe it good. (My favorite line: “And in a moment I understood how you could sacrifice until commitment made you better than you were.” My second favorite, from tonight: “And then Laura gives a laugh that’s like a cry, everything becomes the commotion of relief, and I look down at this infant innocent of all the grief ahead of him, and know how to love this child like my own”). My novel is free of the stacks and under consideration by four different agents, all established and reputable. The end of the quarter is near. My tea is still hot, as a result of not having moaned too much here.

And so I think I’ll stop, and figure out where to go from here.

The Day after Thanksgiving

2009-11-27T13:34:00.000-08:00

Today the sky is yellow and distant. The sun clears the clouds now and again, throws sharp, short shadows that cling to the bottom of things as if hiding, and people walk briskly in heatless light, hands in pockets. It’s rare to see clearly in late Fall—a gauze of rain blurs and softens everything, and the blinders of coat-hoods tight about the ears keep one focused only on what is ahead. Now everything can be examined, and the exposure is terrible, a world of judging eyes. I do not look directly at anything, squint into the bright afternoon hoping for blindness.

I like metaphors like this, but if I am being solipsistic, it does not mean anything good. And I know it doesn’t. I do not want to consider. I do not want to see myself.

I am on the edge of thirty, and live still in the comfortable, provincial little town I was born in. I’ve lived in the same cramped highrise apartment now for the last six years, an oriental rug laid over the veneer-wood floors, the dirty windows offering an eleventh floor view of the campus of the tidy, adequate little state university where I teach. For the last year, I’ve been in a relationship I thought might be the one, with a girl who I cannot manage to hate though she’s taken from me until she wanted nothing more I could give. It is not that I’m too forgiving, or too self-flagellating, just that what happened was nobody’s fault.

But my god, I am sick of this town, of the confines of my life. My family is here, my decent, kind folks who are so very concerned for me in light of this breakup, and so like my ex that they actually suggested I go back to her and tell her we were making a mistake. My brother and his wife and kids are near, and I love them and appreciate being a part of their lives. Yesterday we ate a moist turkey and decadent sausage and fennel stuffing they’d made, and everyone but me collapsed on the couch, cuddled with children and dogs, satiated, satisfied— content. I sat across in chair, back straight, holding myself apart. I am complicit in limiting myself, I don’t deny it. But I can’t fake it: try as I might, I am not thankful for much at all. What I have discovered this year is that it is possible to travel a great way on a long and difficult path and arrive at exactly the same place.

I want more; perhaps I want too much. Or perhaps this restlessness is more than loss or grief. Perhaps it is a kind of beginning, the first flutter of resolve that insists on change, that finally takes wing after so long.

Kenny Cox scene

2009-11-24T18:15:00.000-08:00

This little piece of prose was originally in the essay I published about Kenny's death in the Eugene Weekly. It is simple, adolescent, clunky, and sentimental. But I still like it.

As usual, it comes down to the three of us, Kenny, Gabe and I, two in and one out, takedowns or until you’ve waited too long for your turn. Practice is over, the windows steamed and everywhere the contained scent of bodies and sweat boxed by the cold dark beyond. Some of the kids watch at the edge of the mat, sprawled about their gearbags, waterbottles in hand. They’re fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years old, and I would say guys, but we have a girl out for the team this year, Penny, a real brawler who doesn’t take shit from any of these little shits. She’s watching them go, Gabe and Kenny, Gabe with his great swollen biceps and chest and all those tattoos he came back with from Iraq—that, and the scar that runs red and blue from his knee to his hip. Strong fucker, benches 450 and weighs an all muscle 170 to Kenny’s 155. State champion that Gabe was in high school, strong as he is now as a competitive lifter, he has no chance.

He’s wrestling Kenny Cox. The Kenny Cox. Not that you’d know him, with that shoulder-length hair and full golden beard, those tattered sweatpants cut to shorts and a tucked in shirt, those wrestling shoes with only the memory of rubber soles, the leather cracked, colorless. Or maybe you would, if you ever saw Kenny Cox compete. There’s still the barrel chest, stubby little piston legs, the same forward-driving fury, flurry after flurry of levels, hands on an elbow, head, tapping the knee to see if Gabe lifts it, the forward-back side stutter-step, fake for a low single, and Gabe sprawls back and Kenny tries a quick snap and shuck, fails to get around him, and waits in a perfect stance for Gabe to recover and push forward just a bit, and that’s it: Kenny clears the left elbow, steps into an easy single, yanks the leg straight onto the top of his shoulder, Gabe hopping comically on one leg, once, twice, and Kenny sweeps the last foot and Gabe is on the mat and Kenny on him and that’s the takedown. Two points.

Kenny stands, offers Gabe a hand up. Then he turns to me, and we square off and shake hands.

That’s the last memory I have of Kenny in the wrestling room. I can’t remember our go, though I’m sure he took me down—he almost always took me down—for it blends with hundred other times we went at it in that wrestling room, grown men pushing thirty, bad backs and joints, artificial tendons and chronic sprains, slower than we’d been, less hungry to win than to be on the mat. In that room, I spent four years of high school pushing myself beyond breaking, wanting so many things I didn’t yet understand and funneling all of it into each effort on that mat. And so it is somehow fitting that’s the last place I’ve wrestled, the last place I wrestled Kenny, a moment that’s past, a place that is gone for me now just as Kenny is gone, those losses inseparable.

Kenny died on Kauai four months ago seeking Eden, searching for an ineffable something that he couldn’t stop wanting. He went a very long way. I too have looked in strange places for something pure and true to heal me or release me, to finally suffice, and so I can’t say I don’t understand. I understand too well. And that makes me mourn him not because I was so close to him these last years, but from kinship, as if my grief were also for a lost part of myself. Perhaps it is.

The last time I saw Kenny was a year ago in the heat of August. I didn’t get to talk to him; I was in an air-conditioned café working, saw a flash outside and then a short, tan, shirtless man run past in only jeans, his feet bare. Kenny. I pressed my face to the glass and watched his halo of hair recede down the street. I could have called to him, stopped him, but he seemed so purposeful and sure in his stride, and so I watched him run into the blinding afternoon, farther and farther away, until I lost him.