I Am Not Your Touch Tank Sea Star

So, for whatever reason, I've been feeling like putting some of my writing up, so here is a poem I wrote that I really love.


I Am Not Your Touch Tank Sea Star

When I’m a sea star
I hold the sea’s mystery in my purple
Yet I live at the tips of my spines
Erected like walls to protect
My soft center from being hurt or feeling
The hurt I’ve already been.
As I scavenge along the bottom
For bull kelp and sea lettuce
I cling to any steady surface
With tube feel like a miser who knows
I don’t deserve the water
And I don’t let anyone touch me

Sometimes I’m a sea cucumber
Spikes only ward my demons off for show
I let them go tender
And as I lay exposed
My past creeps up behind me
Slithering inside my open sores
Carrying their torches of truth
I feel them settle in my gut
So I twist it around them, bunch it up
With a hurl I eviscerate my organs
And scramble to grow new insides

Once I was an octopus
Used eight arms to lift the top of the holding tank
Squeezed out, dropped to the floor and crawled
Through the crack under the door
Famished on the sand, inching forward
Telling myself I will not let them
Make me let myself die
If I can give me a little slack and a lot of love
I might make it
Back to the deeper seas I knew before captivity
Where they can’t coax me back
To put me in the big tank, captive
For their audience
I am free

On a blue moon I’m a blue dolphin
On waves with deeper frequency
Intelligence unfocused on rational thought
Feel no shame for stranding myself
To help a member of my pod in need
Sensed out with echolocation
Weathered harsh, howling storms
By surrendering to their windblown frenzy
I know the patterns of Earth’s turning
I have been to blue depths

Today I just want to be
Myself
Deep down
I am
The sea.


I wrote this in the summer of 2003 so it's several years old now. That spring I worked OEE (Outdoor Environmental Education) on Orcas Island. During that season, I had to teach challenge and science classes to groups of kids, mostly in fifth or sixth grade (but there were a few groups younger and older). Some of the science classes included pond ecology, forest ecology, the water cycle, microforest, "Super Salmon" and most notably related to this post, marine invertebrates and marine mammals.

I had a rough time for a lot of reasons, one being that I was not so familiar with this material before I worked there. I had taken some basic environmental science class but nothing in depth on marine life. And a lot of these creatures we were looking at and studying were soooo small I could barely see them, much less make distinctions and identifications. So I was learning as I was teaching, and learning by teaching. At the same time I was going through some intense personal stuff, and felt stressed out always having to be so "on" for the kids. There were a lot of fourteen-hour days and I remember walking around, going from class to class at different locations around camp with this poem in my head, the words coming together around my own personal struggle and what I was learning about marine life.

And just FYI the octopus part is based on a real story that happened that spring. An octopus really did escape a holding tank by somehow lifting the lid and slithering out. I can't remember all the details, I want to say it died trying to get back to the water, but am just not sure if I'm recalling that accurately. I remember feeling so inspired by that octopus' instinct for freedom.

All in all, I am not absolutely satisfied with the poem - to me it feels too prose-y. And that is always my issue. I don't think poetry comes naturally to me. I don't read a lot of it, and blasphemous as this may sound, I don't like much of it. When I find a poem or a poet I like, it is a big deal. In fact, I honestly prefer some of the poetry written by friends and people I know (in a blows everything else out of the water sort of way) to most of what I'd find in anthologies, literary journals or acclaimed chapbooks. A huge percent of it just doesn't speak to me. I like the idea of poets and poetry, and even the word poetry, more than I actually like it. All this to say, I am well aware that poetry is not my forte.

I want to say this too, for anyone who isn't familiar, the title and the last line are a play on a song by Audioslave called "I Am the Highway." It's on their first, self-titled album and though I was not a huge fan of that album, there were a handful of songs I really loved, and this one was particularly fitting for my life at the time, especially the winter immediately before that spring working OEE on Orcas Island. I had moved out of my parents' house, which felt more like an escape than a moving out, and was struggling through life in Seattle, and this song just embodied a lot of my sentiments at the time. No wonder some of the rhythm and the music seeped into my own attempt at poetry.


Currently Listening:
"I Am the Highway" - Audioslave - well, duh. It relates to the post so I put it on (and actually realized I had never transferred this album to my computer, though I did have a few songs). Crazy how you can go so many years without hearing a song and how seamlessly the words come back to mind.

Pearls and swine, bereft of me
Long and weary, my road has been
I was lost in the cities
Alone in the hills
No sorrow or pity
For leaving, I feel

I am not your rolling wheels
I am the highway
I am not your carpet ride
I am the sky

Friends and liars don't wait for me
Cuz I'll get on all by myself
I put millions of miles
Under my heels
And still too close
To you, I feel

I am not your rolling wheels
I am the highway
I am not your carpet ride
I am the sky
I am not your blowing wind
I am the lightning
I am not your autumn moon
I am the night

I am not your rolling wheels
I am the highway
I am not your carpet ride
I am the sky
I am not your blowing wind
I am the lightning
I am not your autumn moon
I am the night

"All in the Cold Midwinter and at the Midnight Hour"

Or, what I did over my winter vacation.

I've actually been dying to blog about this but wanted to get some other things out of the way first. Like revamping it and updating it, for instance.

A few years ago, I wrote this post about my favorite winter memory, the second winter I spent living in the dispensary, a perfect cabin at Camp Orkila and how blissful that winter was, revelling in my connectedness to the natural world. I sometimes feel there aren't words for how satisfying in a soul way living there was to me. And it wasn't just the proximity to the ocean, the way I heard the owls and the creaking of cedar trees at night, or the thick woods I could walk through or even the months I lived there while having very little work, or all the great books I read, or the great company I had in my friend Tracy, or the walks by the coast.

Some of it was the house itself. I have lived a lot of places. I could romanticize a lot of them in memory. I'm a nostalgic kind of girl. But the dispensary was different. To me, it was perfect. It's really a cabin, all wood walls, and I just love the coloring and the light, it just really strikes something deep inside me and when I'm there, I feel like I'm sort of spiritually home. And it is not something that is only in retrospective nostalgia. I felt it the moment I first walked in, in late 2003. I remember it so clearly. The regular season at camp was over, there were only a few of us left and this girl who I didn't know too well was living there and she invited me to come over and so I went. When I got there she was on the phone and kept telling me she would be off soon and kept talking and I was just soaking up the surroundings, instantly struck with an affinity for the house, the adorable way the curtains hung on the windows, reminding me of some old camping trip or something. While I waited for her to get off the phone, I had a little notebook w/me and I took it out and wrote a poem about the house. If there is love at first sight, well maybe it felt a little like that. I am a place-lover anyway.

So all that to say, it's been years since I spent any extended time there, until a few weeks ago. I still don't know quite how it happened. I was planning on going to Orcas for the holidays, but was having some struggles arranging it, knowing where to stay, how to get there, and somehow it all fell into place. I took the train to Seattle, met with my buddy and writer friend/mentor Janet who drove to the islands, and some friends who are at camp this winter suggested staying in the dispensary. So I did.

It was blissful. In my heart of hearts it was exactly, EXACTLY what I wanted out of my winter vacation. It was like my own private writing retreat, and I desperately needed something to get me started. Something felt so comfortable there. I sat on the couch where I once read Mists of Avalon for a month, and wrote for three days. I slept in my old room, in my old bed and just tried to soak up every moment of being there. It looks a lot different, with different people's stuff there. In the summer, the house is the "health hut" so there were all these doctorly things in there, which just rocked my world of course, lol. In my bathroom there were all these anatomy charts on the walls. It was perfect.

My first night there, I got in late at night, dropped my stuff off and immediately walked by the ocean. I have missed the ocean. I have missed that stretch of ocean, even during all the years living on Orcas but off of camp, I have missed it. I have missed walking it alone. It had been probably close to five years since the last time I did that. It was weird. I used to do it all the time. I used to know all the trees and major logs and rocks. I used to walk there all the time. That got me through the early winter of 2004, which was my first winter on Orcas, and really hard, and really, really rewarding. I had so many insights and realizations and aha moments walking that shore. I walked in when I was sad, when I was working things out in my own mind, when I was caught up in grief, when I was inspired, when I was happy, and mostly when I was most deeply, really me. That shore, with its cold, softer Puget Sound waves, its inky dark water, its curved shoreline shape, its distant, unreal horizon, its other islands, its sky, became like a real, good, true friend to me and I loved it unequivocally. And knew it. There are so many experiences I could recount that took place there, like the time I went skinny-dipping in the middle of February and how gorgeously cold the water was, but most of the experiences were more internal, personally meaningful, subtle and intangible but palpable.

So it was weird to be back. Really weird. Disconcertingly weird at first. It made me think of that phrase, "you can't step in the same river twice." It was beautiful and somber as always. It was the same. I wasn't. I felt so viscerally the difference between me visiting and walking this ocean now from me who had walked and loved that ocean years ago. I don't know if this makes any sense, or even what it means, but the main feeling I got (aside from being a visitor now, rather than a regular part of that landscape as I felt before), was that I felt taller.

What? I don't know what that means. My actual height hasn't changed. If I felt heavier or bigger it would make at least some sense, but I just kept getting this unshakable feeling that I was taller than the last time I'd been there, alone, at night. It was such a strong, distinct and precise feeling, so unmistakable, but also so not actually true in reality. So I thought it might be symbolic, but of what? I don't know. I do think it meant something though.

I also felt like I couldn't re-enter that old self that used to walk that sea. Sometimes, I sort of do this thing, if I'm really hit w/nostalgia, where I can almost re-enter an older time. The almost part is painful, like it's just within my grasp, so almost there, but always not quite, just almost. In this state I can conjure up the old feelings like body memories and capture a sense or a "feeling" about the older time, something I never would have quite felt when I was in it because it's a sense or feeling colored in by memory. It's hard to explain. But I couldn't do it. I was so not the same person as I once was.

The distance felt so undeniable, an inarguable fact. I felt the distance and I felt like I was somehow more detached, more cynical maybe, though that doesn't quite describe it. Distant is really the word. The tide was out and I climbed up a huge rock that I always used to sit on. I sat there for awhile, thinking about what happened between back then and then. It made me feel sad, and I felt like I should have felt more profoundly sad, and on some level I did, but it felt like things were only getting to that level, and not to anything deeper.

It just got me contemplating, and thinking about how I haven't been writing much, for years. Not really. Not the way I used to. Not anything other than blogs or journal entries. No poetry. No stories. No memoir. When I start, I write for a few days and then I turn away and just don't want to go back to it. Something I've been sort of circling around for months now suddenly became crystallized.

I write because I don't want to feel.

And if I write, I will feel. And if I write, I will write about a particular situation and I don't want to feel one sliver of it. I don't. It was awful. I was in a horrible relationship - that is not to say the guy was horrible, I want to make that clear, and I was no saint either, not by far - but somehow the mixture of the two of us was destructive, to me anyway, in ways I couldn't see until after he left. What kills me, the part I have the hardest time with, is my part in it all, the fact that I betrayed myself. I betrayed myself every day, day in and day out, every day we lived together. I did it so much it became invisible and I stopped even seeing it. For whatever reason, of all the things that happened, THAT is the part I have trouble accepting and facing, that betrayal of self. I shut my mouth about what I thought. I didn't say anything when he would make these outrageously sexist comments that seriously offended me. I didn't say anything when he ridiculed things I believed in politically, I just stopped saying them, or pretended to agree, to keep the peace. And then there were the things that were actually directed at me, that I still would never want to say b/c I feel so awful that I didn't say anything. And those are just the surface-y things. It went so much deeper. I wasn't myself. I wasn't free to be myself. I've gone through a lot in my life, a lot of horrible shit in one way or another, and always I felt like there was some intrinsic, spiritual core inside me that survived, that sometimes was even enriched and deepened by loss in the right context, an inner guide of sort of led me through, and when things got really awful I would often have calming or sacred or healing experiences around nature. It always felt like that part of me didn't survive that relationship. Maybe because I suppressed it and abandoned it at every turn. I've felt really lost. Really afraid to feel. Ever since. It's been awhile now. I don't want to keep feeling that way.

And, sitting on that rock, I realized that continuing to not write is, in a way, just a continued betrayal. There are a million reasons not to write, but that, and the fact that it could be hard doesn't mean I shouldn't do it. All I know is, I feel like that story is inside me, screaming, clamoring louder and louder every day to be let out, to be put on paper so it can be real, so I can look at it and maybe see things I never saw, so I can write into truth that goes beyond what I consciously know, because that's what happens when I write, other ways of knowing surface, some sort of healing alchemy stirs into motion. And I always feel better after. Not always during writing difficult things, but I always feel better after. And a lot of times it's funny. I mean what can you do sometimes when things are really, really dark, how can you face that darkness without a way to laugh? So a lot of times it ends up funny in ways that surprise me, dark ways, ironic ways, funny ways that aren't really funny, not really because they're heartbreaking, but they're also funny. And laughter, like crying, is release. But most of all, when I'm writing, I am really, distinctly myself with all my complexities and not the face I put on for anyone else, or the self I put on in this shitty situation, but wholly myself. And it is terrifying! But also rewarding. So I decided for 2010 I am going to write. I am carving out the time. I don't know where it will take me, and I am really just writing for myself, longhand, but the point is, I am writing. At the moment I'm writing about writing, but still.

As I got off that rock and walked the sea back to the dock, I started thinking about an experience I had when I was living in the dispensary. One morning I woke up really early, just around dawn, and it was one of the most glorious mornings ever. I was in the middle of Mists of Avalon (which I will tell anyone, is a great book to read in winter, it just is). I was at this part where Morgaine, the main character who was trained as a priestess in goddess worship, who has sort of left behind her training to live in the world. Then, much later, at the point where I was reading that morning, she was reconnecting with her roots, rediscovering ley lines and the old ways. Something about the feeling and that morning was so infectious and filled me with this magical feeling like I too was waking up to something. It was winter, right before solstice, but there were some brilliant sunrise colors. I went on a walk through the woods to a place called Chapel Rock in the early light and just felt so inspired and connected to the natural world and like I was coming undone and blossoming inside myself.

Awhile later, when I left camp the first time and stopped living there, I was pretty heartbroken to leave. I feel like people never fully understand this because people are so used to loving people (which of course I do too) but I loved that land. Leaving felt like tearing a part of my heart out. I had never had a relationship with land quite like that and it really, really broke my heart to leave. I had my reasons, and I think they were good and wise, but really, really difficult. I was in mourning in the days leading up to my departure. And I remember my last day of work that time around, being there in the morning, and being really caught up in the mourning, thinking of all the things I was leaving, remembering fall mornings washing the lodge windows and seeing the brilliant colors of the trees, revisiting a tree I had once leaned on in a time of great sorrow, knowing my life wouldn't be quite the same after I left. And it wasn't. I always missed living there in fall and winter with a yearning that could cut through me, and years later, I still sometimes do. I was afraid I wouldn't be my true, in touch, soul-satisfied and whole self that I was while living there.

And I remember thinking that morning, as the hours slipped away, time feeling so unreal, that maybe it would be okay. Maybe we have to lose ourselves or just lose sometimes, so that we can have a morning of awakening like the one I'd had that winter morning, reading about Morgaine's. I even wrote something about it, because years ago, I wrote about that day. Let me go find it.


I’m a little worried still that I might just be numb, but then I think again, so what? Maybe it’s not so bad that we lose ourselves now and again, just so we can experience awakening. Maybe I will indeed have another day like that one in winter when I woke up so early with Mists of Avalon and couldn’t even contain my yearning for life in the wild early hours, when I felt acute and alive like the most divine lust. It’s never a straight path, there are so many spirals and levels that i’m sure there will be more euphoria mornings.

Okay, I must say, reading this years later, I am embarrassed by that last line, b/c it's a reference to Chris Cornell and it's kind of corny, and he sucks so bad now, but the words are perfect for the feeling.


So anyway, a few weeks ago, on the solstice and at night, walking back along the ocean, I was thinking kind of similar thoughts. Maybe it's okay if parts of us go underground for awhile. Maybe we need that for survival, even if it's surviving something that shouldn't be the way it is, something that needs to be changed. Survival always comes first. Sometimes those parts go underground because we need to live in the world, like Morgaine, and maybe that's okay because there is eventually if we allow it, the joy of rediscovery, awakening, coming home to ourselves. And it's somehow richer because there's some mettle behind it, if that makes sense. There's wisdom. There's life lived. Morgaine would have been pretty boring to read about if she had just stayed on Avalon, never joining the struggles of the world and living a human life.

It felt like that is what my journey to Orcas for the holidays was about. It was an inkling. It wasn't as vibrant or as innocent as the morning years ago, but it was a glimpse of how to dig up the buried parts, and for me, it's always primarily through writing and nature. So I'm writing.

I spent the next few days walking around, writing, soaking up the feeling of the dispensary, trying not to forget that thawing out and coming home may not be easy, but they are worth it. And now I'm back home in my new home, and I'm still writing. So, that's something. I guess I got what I wanted for the holidays, and I think I'd take this more difficult gift which might require some wrestling with over anything I could find in a store, any day, and especially in winter.

Speaking of, the lyric I used to title this blog is from a song that Tori does on "Midwinter Graces." And what shocked me is when I came home and had my own little holiday thing in my apartment, drinking hot chocolate and watching (yes, here we go again) the Christmas episode of Grey's (and I love, love, love, love it, one of my all-time favorite episodes, it's sooooo good) and another version of this same song was on there! Love it.



Currently Listening:
"Abnormally Attracted to Sin" - Tori Amos

mpeccable peccadillo
You are off your guard
Pussy will calls there by the church
"don't go in if you are
abnormally attracted to sin"
Abnormally attracted to sin

She may be dead to you
But her hips sway a natural kind of faith
That could give your lost heart
A warm chapel
You'll sleep in her bell tower
And you will simply wake
Abnormally attracted to sin
Abnormally attracted to sin

Impeccable peccadillo
I know who you are
Tales of longing sway
Lost without a verse
Hymns of swing lay low
there by the church
"don't go in if you are
abnormally attracted to sin"
Abnormally attracted to sin

She may be dead to you
Kind of faith that could give
Attracted to sin
To sin
To sin

I Am Going a Little Crazy

Slowly, but surely.

So, it's Christmas Eve and I'm awake and wired and have absolutely nothing to do.

It's been snowing like crazy for the last week and a half. When it started I was in Seattle at a Christmas party with friends, and the next morning we couldn't get through the road. The next day I came back to Orcas and had a semi (but not terribly exciting)-adventure returning. And then it snowed and snowed and snowed some more. It's the most snow I've seen in the northwest, and it's my sixth winter here. It's wild, and awesome.

I'm loving it. It makes me want to go make snow angels and snowmen and build forts and have wild snowball fights. The roads are a mess, I mean solid ice covered in inches of snow. Walking anywhere that's not a trodden path or shoveled walkway is deliriously fun, I sink in halfway up to my knees. I saw a drift the other day that's practically as tall as me. On a street corner, a bunch of kids made this snowman that is taller than me, with an orange traffic cone for a hat (though the snowman itself was taller than me, even w/o the hat). I wish I had a camera because I'd take zillions of pictures to immortalize this winter weather. Last year we got almost none and I was let down by that fact. So yeah, I'm loving it. It's been massively windy too, so sometimes I just stare out the sliding glass door to my little back porch and watched the snow blow around in these huge gusts. The shocking thing is that unlike other years, I haven't lost power, though I know those that have. I wouldn't mind it, briefly. I love storms, love them.

The only downside is, I have cabin fever like you wouldn't believe. Town seems pretty shut down, and the winter weather keeps on coming, which again, I'm all for, but I'm also a little bored. More than a little. I think I now know how my dog felt. The last few months I had her, the weather was awful and I was working a lot so I wasn't taking her out as much, and I could sense this feeling of frustration from her, like she wanted to go run eighteen thousand miles and instead she was cooped up in my apartment while I worked. Now I sort of feel the same way, a little shut in with all this delirious winter happy energy and nothing to do with it. Town seems totally dead. A lot of my friends have left the island over the last few months, and my friend Becky, who was the one person I was hanging out with during all these snowstorms, just left yesterday morning to visit family for the holidays. And my friend Elynn who I spent a lot of last winter hanging out with is living on the other side of the island now, and like I said, the roads are total shit. I won't be able to get to the Christmas concert that is a tradition on Orcas, given by Susan Osborn, who is such an amazing singer. It was a magical experience last year, but it is on the other side of the island as well. My phone keeps dying because I'm spending so much time talking, to connect, to kill time. I hope my ears don't fall off, lol. Even the mail is getting fucked up and delayed. I'm going a little crazy. I check my mail (which is by PO box, so I actually have to walk to the PO) twice a day, just for something to do, and an excuse to get budndled up and tromp through the drifts.

I finished watching Grey's and I'm resisting starting to watch it again from the beginning, because I ordered the DVDs and I don't want any chance of being sick of it by the time they arrive. Although there are some scenes I must've replayed a million times. Which is odd for me, I never even did that with House, not even the House/Cuddy makeout scene. I found a Grey's board game online, and I'm such a dork that I actually really want it, even though I don't know who I'd play it with, oh and I'm leaving for a third world country in less than two months, but still.

And I'm too hyper and stir crazy to read or write, I just can't sit still like that. It's been a difficult holiday season for reasons I will not go into in a public blog, but shit, it's been a tough one. Which surprised me, because last year was such a great holiday season for me, I was so into it, baking cookies, even listening to Xmas music and all that crap. I'm pretty sure I posted about that. It rocked. This year, I might as well be a female scrooge. It's not really that bad, but it is bad. At least I do have somewhere to go tomorrow, so the loneliness won't eat me alive or I won't kill myself out of boredom. But yeah, I can't seem to sit still. I haven't even sat still while writing this blog.

And the worst part is, now it's raining. It was snowing earlier, and I say, bring it on, but now it's raining, and I'm going to have to have a word with mother nature if all the snow melts so soon. Because that's at least giving me something to smile about. It complicates things, as bitched about above, but it also so rare here, and I don't want it to fade too quickly, even if it's making me stir crazy. I am a complicated woman.

Unfortunately I don't have a camera, but my computer does, so here is the view out my door:



Well, I think I'll go kill time by cleaning my kitchen, which is exactly every single girl in their late twenties dreams of spending Christmas Eve, lol.


Currently Listening:
"Criminal" - Fiona Apple - I've been on yet another Fiona Apple kick lately. In fact I just recently found these two songs that are "supposedly" by her, "Ugly Girl" and "If We Kissed." The lyric sites I've looked do attribute both to Miss Apple, but they just don't sound like her, especially "Ugly Girl" which I must say, I don't really like at all. Still trying to find out for sure if they are her. Anyway, Criminal, great song, I always sing this at Karaoke when I get the balls to sing, which hasn't happened in quite some time. I would love to sing Never Is a Promise instead, which they have at the local karaoke deal, but I don't think I could pull it off, so Criminal it is. It's deliciously fun to get up there and sing that first line, "I've been a bad, bad girl," LOL. And I totally relate to, "I know tomorrow brings the consequence at hand, but I keep living this day like the next will never come." And I love, "What would an angel say, the devil wants to know..." I will leave you all with that thought.

Orcas Island Writers Festival

The first annual Orcas Island Writers Festival ended a few days ago. It was awesome. I'm already looking forward to the next one.

I'm so glad I went, too. I almost didn't. I haven't really written much in awhile, and have felt like work takes over my life. But I had put in for the time off back in April or something, so I said what the hell and signed up. I thought if nothing else, at least I'd have a few days away. The festival was held at Moran State Park which is a good drive from my place, so I stayed overnight in one of the cabins during the festival.

The festival blew my expectations out of the water! The instructors were EXCELLENT! A lot of them teach at Vermont College of Fine Arts which has a low-residency MFA writing program. In the mornings, we had small workshop groups. I chose the non-fiction track, and so each morning, our small group gathered to very thoroughly discuss our work. Each of us had to submit a ten-page sample of our writing before the festival, so we spent considerable time each morning, working with a few people's work each day. It was great. I forgot how great it is, not only to get feedback on your own work, but to work as a group on others' stories. You learn so much. I felt so engaged, like my inner artist was engaged in a way it hasn't been in so long. I was exercising my writing muscles. It was great even to go over some of the basics of story arc and point of view. I didn't realize I was so hungry for this sort of thing. But oh was I ever! It fed my soul, and my soul has been a bit starving as of late.

So our group looked at my piece on the last workshop day. I submitted the first chapter of my book, which I've worked on extensively. I have to say (and I think I've said before), that for the last, well, year or so, I've felt kinda flat, numb, disinterested feelings about my manuscript. It doesn't really excite me anymore. So I thought, what the hell? I also picked the non-fiction track (as opposed to another workshop which was for memoir/fiction), partly because the instructor and some of the people in the group were male (in the mem/fiction group, it was all females). It may seem silly or even arbitrary, but almost all of the places where I've shared my work - other writing circles, friends, classes I've been in - have been all women. I feel like I have a pretty diverse sampling of female responses to this particular piece of work, and I wanted to see a more mixed-gender reaction. I'm glad I did. I left feeling more confident that my story could have a more universal appeal, which was good. I also got great feedback on what worked in my piece, what was effective.

And I got some great ideas for how to change it. I've actually been thinking recently of reshaping and re-visioning the whole project in a major, major way, and this workshop pretty much confirmed that for me. I felt like I got a real sense of where the real juice of the story is, what needs to come in and be included and what I can draw out and yeah, I would just sit there at different points during the weekend with all these thoughts, ideas and inspirations coursing through me.

I also got to rethink another book idea I had in mind. I realized the starting point was a totally different place, and really saw how perfectly that would work. It was like reframing the whole thing. And because of that, I had passages just swirling in me throughout the whole time.

I thought a lot about story structure. In our workshop group we talked about the typical pyramid of a story - the introduction, rising action, climax, denouement, ending. I kept thinking of The Kite Runner, because it's such a perfect book in that way, it has all those elements so clearly. And because I just love thinking about that book anyway. With my other favorite, The God of Small Things, it's so much more murky (and that story weaves in out of time, so if I think about, in chronological order the events of the book probably do follow that arc, but the telling doesn't, not really).

Then in one of the afternoon sessions (these were lectures and mini-classes), Karen Fisher, author of A Sudden Country, said she thinks of story structure in another way. She thinks of it as the story starting out in stability, you enter the world of the story, then there's a destabilizing event, either by ambition, wanting something, or by some sort of loss. Then follows a period of resistance - either a character is resisting something, or the world is resisting them. Then they face the inevitable, or the bottom, etc (analogous to the climax in the other structure system), and then a period of acceptance. Well this description of story structure also perfectly fit The Kite Runner. I just got such a clear picture of it, using that book as a tangible example. And from there could clearly extrapolate to a book I want to write. It just makes a lot of sense.

Another thing we talked about a lot in workshops and afternoon sessions was about reading like a writer, which is something I think I sort of do, but have never been taught to do, looking at good writing and really looking at it, getting into what makes it so good, what the author did to make it so effective. I think I do some of that just by nature of being a writer and reading a lot. I mean, my LENGTHY post on here about The Kite Runner isn't really a review, not really, it's more a writer's appreciation and noticings. I want to go back to the passages from that book that I quoted in my post (there were several), or to the passages I've makred in White Oleander. I want to re-read The God of Small Things again, even though I just reread it a few months ago when I was in Hawaii, because it's just so good. The writing is so fucking good it's unbelievable. And there are so many just mindblowing things about the story structure. Oh God, I'm getting all jazzed up just thinking about it I'm getting up, walking around, thinking about it. That book is SO FREAKIN' GOOD I can hardly stand it. Some of the most gorgeous prose ever. All these great little things that Arundhati Roy does with the writing. And the end, oh the end. Yes, I want to reread it, specifically to read it like a writer, really dig into it and analyze what makes it so good, learn from it.

I'm still DYING to post about that book. I especially want to discuss the end, the choices she made in writing it that way, in the name of the last chapter (which still, years after my first reading of the book, gives me full body shivers), and on what note she chooses to end it and all the implications. I lent it to a friend actually, who was leaving to work on a six month cruise and needed some reading material. I wish I hadn't. I love my friend Holly, and I'm glad someone else will read the book, but I realize I wish I hadn't parted with it. And it hasn't even been two months yet! So, someday, I will post about it. I just feel I couldn't really do it justice without the book here. Anyway I am anxious to dig into that book again and read it in a slightly different way.

I've gotten a bit off-track, as usual. I'm taking a screenwriting class starting in a week or two. I'm going to base it on a short story I wrote a bit ago, which was based on a dream I had about writing this story (now that I think about it, the dream might have also involved it being for a screenwriting class, I just put that together, weird). I'm a little nervous about the fact that my two main characters are on acid during part of the story, since I don't know how that'll fly in some of the writing circles of the island, but after one of the readings at the festival (each night a handful of authors/instructors read their work), I'm inspired to NEVER hold back. So that should be an interesting class. On an un-writing note, I'm also taking an anthropology class this fall, on comparative Islamic cultures. I'm really looking forward to that too. My mind is just craving something like that.

Currently Reading:
Dave Eggers' What is the What? - I'm only a few chapters in. It's very good, harrowing in many places, immediately draws me in.

Currently Listening:
"Fast Car" - Tracy Chapman - this is not a random iTunes pick like usual in this section. I am sort of obsessed with this song. In some other post, I totally want to write about this song the way I want to write about books. There are so many great lyrical things she does in this song. It's also heartbreaking.