78 Pages and a Sprinkle

“Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.” Ann Lamott

The challenge is complete. Last night, at midnight, the NaNoWriMo challenge officially ended, and not a moment too soon. Though I can honestly say I’ve enjoyed the act of sitting down daily to write, pushing myself to think of memories that don’t always come readily, like the time I broke my arm sliding down the slide wearing sweater tights, or how my brother kept saying “my feet are nice and moist,” when he got a concussion mopping the floors with his sock clad feet while I was his high-school babysitter. I have no idea the quality of the writing, or the quality of the memories, but somehow, bit by bit I wrote, daily, to complete a whopping 78 pages plus a few little sprinkles. I used three wheels of ink for the typewriter, and a partial ream of paper that I might have ‘borrowed’ from the office copier. Living dangerously on borrowed paper.

Today I borrowed a few more pages, and made myself a photocopy of the original. Because someday I’m going to want to revisit this ‘masterpiece,’ and do some edits. Or maybe that’s overly ambitious the day after the challenge is over. Maybe I’m always looking forward to new projects. A year barefoot. A year without shopping, or buying books. Three years without shaving any body hair. 30 days of yoga in a summertime. A month of daily writing, 78 pages later. A few tiny accomplishments, which leads me to my new favorite podcast, A Tiny Sense of Accomplishment, by Sherman Alexie and Jess Walter, two Spokane poets. Sherman’s on my mind a lot since I’m teaching one of his novels next quarter.

Maybe I’ll look over these stories in the springtime. Read them. Edit them. See where they can be tweaked and shaped into something new. For now they’ll go in my folder of completed words that live a life unseen by the public, unlike this blog.

Take the Edge Off

In class I have my students learn about their procrastination styles, and one of them, The Dreamer, appeals to me, especially as far as writing goes. The Dreamer is a type of procrastinator that spends most of their time dreaming about a project, and rarely even starting (let alone finishing) the project. I ask the question to my students, “anyone here want to write a book?” Hands sometimes raise and then I say, “but do you actually want to sit down and WRITE that book? Or do you just want it to appear.”

That’s when the class laughs, because typically my merry bunch of high school dropouts are filled with The Dreamer affliction. They’ve wanted things to happen, but haven’t quite gotten around to doing those things. Because other, cooler, things have gotten in the way. The moment takes precedent over the future self, which wants to have written a book.

While the class is comprised of all the other types of procrastination styles (taken from It’s About Time: The Six Styles of Procrastination and How to Overcome Them), I find that The Dreamer category is usually the largest. And it’s something I’ve been thinking about for quite awhile, even talking with bestie Ruth about it. Because on good days I think about the things that I want to write, the stories I want to tell, and while I’m not sure fiction lives in me, I’m certain that I have enough material for a book. Now whether I have an audience or not remains to be seen, but can’t be seen if I never even write. And I wonder about how living in 2014 affects our ability to get things done. Because blogging, a form of writing, is an instant form of gratification. I can write, not edit if I like, and send this out to at least 345 people who are currently subscribed (though based on readership numbers, only 10 or so ever actually read this. So there’s that).

Blogging takes the edge off. It’s like posting a picture to facebook for some likes but not taking the time to go out to coffee and get ‘likes’ in person. It’s like eating a power bar instead of a meal. Am I a writer who takes the edge off of that desire to have written a book. I’m a writer who thinks about writing, but rarely ever sits down to write, especially not intentionally write something with a direction of book attached to it. A blogger I can safely say I am, but a writer? And I wonder, if the pressure built up enough, and I didn’t take the edge off through blogging, would I sit down and actually WRITE?

Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: A Book Review

If you’re a fan of pee-your-pants-funny writing, lots of parentheses, post scripts crazy stories from childhood, AND snark, then you really need to buy this book. Like, now. I mean it. Hilarious. Also, if you’re not a big fan of those those things, well, I don’t really know what to tell you…except you might want to skip the rest of this review.

I mostly love this book because she’s nutty and her writing reminds me of the rambling in my head. And while I didn’t have nearly as exciting of a childhood, I can definitely think of a few random stories that might compare.

A taste of one of her stories, is about the raccoons her dad helped rescue:

His name was Rambo, and he’d learned how to turno nt he bathroom sink and would wash random things in it all the time, like it was his own private river. If I’d have beent hinking, I would have left some Woolaite and my delicates by the sink for him to rinse out, but you never think to turn your pet raccon into a tiny butler until it’s too late.

Hilarious, right? RIGHT?

She then regales us with the tale of her father’s jumbo quail (read turkeys) and how annoying they were, chasing her and her sister. Her sister “had heard that turkeys were so stupid that if it rained, theyw ould look up to see what was falling on them and drown from rain falling into their noses, so we began to pray for rain, which was promptly answered by a full-on drought.” But she goes on to say, “we often talked about spraying the hose on them in order to weed out the stupider ones, but we could never bring ourselves to do it (both because it seemed too cruel, even in self-defense) and also because our father would probably find it suspicious if all his turkeys died in a freak rainstorm that had apparently broken out only next to the garden hose.”

But in between the hilarity, there are these gems of wisdom, such as the question:

Have you ever been homesick for someplace that doesn’t actually exist anymore? Someplace that exists only in your mind?

But, if you’re maybe just a littel bit curious, and don’t want to BUY the book, then head on over to her blog The Blogess

Still: A Disappointed Review

Lauren Winner is one of my dashboard saints. She is in the list of writers and spiritual seekers who influence my own journey. When I was in college I voraciously read her two books “Girl Meets God,” and “Mudhouse Sabbath.” I loved them. Simply loved them. I tried out her “Real Sex” book, and found it less-than-applicable, so I put it down halfway. It’s been years since I’ve thought of her, but finding myself in this confusing spiritual place I decided to pull out a few of my saints and see what they were up to. Anne Lamott’s book isn’t out until November, and I’ve been making do with simply her facebook updates, so seeing that Lauren had published a new book, entitled “Still: Notes on a Mid Faith Crisis,” I knew that I HAD to read it.

I so identified with Lauren’s “character” in her first memoir, as I, too, was wrestling with my own shocking conversion story and jump into a spiritual practice and life that had energy and passion and wasn’t quite as conservative as the faith I grew up with (though there were PLENTY of fundamentalist tendencies I would later see). A mid Faith Crisis? Perhaps a good description of where I am, as it relates to my actions and feelings about church/God/religion/Christianity, etc.

Sadly, with a bursts of shiny quotes I can hang on to, my love of this book stopped at the preface. And in that, the most powerful part of the preface is a quote she uses by some other author:

When the Lord came into me,”  Buddy tells her, “it was such a good feeling. I thought, well I can do anything because of this feeling, but then there was all this stuff to do and to think about, and I don’t remember the feeling all that well.”

Yeah, that sums me up pretty well.

The rest of the book read like random thoughts, mixed with metaphor and some prose/poetry combination. While I resonated with the overall feeling of questions and stuckness of “staring against a blank wall.”

But the magic I felt during her first memoir was gone. The breathless reading and relating was gone. Perhaps its more of a testament to where we both feel we are, but I did leave, feeling rather disappointed.

Wild: A Review

My hips and thighs and ankles hurt. Not from hiking 1,100 miles, like Cheryl Strayed does in her memoir, Wild, but from lying still, in bed, for hours on one side, cuddled up to a smallish human being who aches for my nipple to soothe him into slumber. I often feel alone, and resonated deeply with Cheryl’s descriptions of the necessity to do her trip alone, while appreciating and loving the people she meets along the way. Very much an example of the hero’s journey, and while I’ve heard reviews that state it’s over the top, I felt she lived up to her “Queen of the PCT” title given her by her fellow travelers.

I was introduced to the author by women in the processing group I lead. One suggested we check out the advice column “Dear Sugar,” and that she had also written these things that were worth mentioning. My co-leader said she had Wild on her nightstand and was making her way through it. Fascinated with a story about the PCT, a trail that I once fantasized about hiking solo, too, I knew that I had to read her adventure, if for nothing else than to see, perhaps, a glimmer into what my life could have been like, if I had done a different solo trip than the one I actually did.

I think my three day solo adventure to Ohanapecosh, my childhood campground in the Mt. Rainier National Forest, actually prepared me for those 6 months in India. I wonder if the 6 months in India prepared me for the solo adventure of motherhood. And when I say solo, I don’t meant that I’m not mostly-happily partnered up, or that I don’t have a great network of supportive people around me to watch Potamus or go to coffee with, but because the journey to becoming and embodying motherhood is inside me, a trek I’ve only been on for a short-though-feels-like-fucking-ever time. I am on a trail, and I pass beautiful things, and hard things, and I feel like stopping and resting my feet and sleeping for 1,000 hours, but the drive to keep moving forward, the nudge from the foot in my side saying “feed me mama,” is still there. Like Cheryl, I have my own Monster…her pack, my baby. Love sometimes. Loathe others. Feels heavy and full and bears down on my hips making them ache from swaying to relieve the pressure, if only for a moment.

I am tired after reading this book. I feel like I have so many more miles to walk, through snow and rain and sunshine, and while it gives me hope, it shows me just how hard it actually is. She doesn’t sugar-coat the difficulty, from losing toes, and gaining callouses, to the intangible diffulties of overcoming fear and the cocky unprepared pride she had starting out her journey.

I would recommend it to so many of you. She will go on my shelf of spiritual and literary dashboard saints. Maybe I’ll wedge her between Donald Miller and Anne Lamott, or closer to Elizabeth Gilbert and Sherman Alexie. I feel inspired. I feel like I can hobble to bed and not feel guilty for memory foam or a down comforter, but know that my journey is hard and that is okay, because my journey is different, but that maybe I’m doing it for the same reasons or entirely different ones, and that is okay, too. Maybe, when I reach my destination, my own Bridge of the Gods, I will be healed, just like Cheryl.

Book Review: Poser My life in 23 yoga poses

If you would have told me a week ago that I would have found time to read a 350 page memoir, I would have laughed at you. While I used to pound the books harder than a sorority girl does jello shots, I haven’t been very book minded since Potamus has been born. Unless of course you count the many readings of “That’s not My Lion,” or “Quack Quack Springtime Animals.” But I’ve been thinking a lot about yoga lately, having this bodily desire to get back on the mat, but this mind desire to never get back on the mat because of how it changes me by making me focus and be present and realize and ease into my limitations.

Yoga seemed like just exactly what I wanted: something to calm me down. It also seemed like just exactly what I didn’t want: a place where everyone could see what a mess I was, could see my tremor and my anxiety and my worry. There was something about holding still, about inhabiting a pose, that was scary. What was under all that anxious chatter?

But there I was, at the local splish splash park outside our library, and to kill some time I was browsing the “must read” section and there it was…a book I needed to read. Poser: my life in 23 yoga poses, by Claire Dederer. I am a sucker for memoirs to begin with and to have one focused on yoga poses (dang her for cornering the market on that type of memoir!). It seemed appropriate…would get me reading about yoga (and not having to actually DO it).

I wasn’t expecting it to hit me in the gut like it did. Not only was it a story of her experience and relationship to yoga, but it was mainly about her life as a mom, a new mom, and growing up and raising a family in Seattle, and the anxiety and fears of trying to re-create the childhood she didn’t have, and do everything right according to the latest mommying trend. It’s probably narcissistic on some level, but I love books that are set in Seattle, or the Pacific Northwest, where I feel like I can just settle into the main character’s shoes and walk around. Funny little things like, “In Phinney Ridge, people didn’t have BEWARE OF DOG signs. They had PLEASE BE MINDFUL OF DOG signs,” that make me go “yes, that’s it, exactly.” People who have only visited once or twice wouldn’t quite get the nitty gritty of the city, the nooks and crannies, the differences between Queen Anne or Fremont or Phinney Ridge and the islands.

And she gets it bodily, as shown in this little exchange in her mind about her own hunching and her teacher’s response:

I’m a huncher. I hunch when I stand and I hunch when I write. Sometimes I suspect years of breastfeeding left me curled forward like a fist or a flower…

Seidal said, “I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of a huncy person. I don’t mean I have great hunches about things. I mean, I hunch a lot. When I’m at yoga, I do the opposite of hunching. I open. I draw my shoulders back. I used to thik that if I did enough yoga I would learn to stop hunching in regular life. I would teach myself at yoga to become a non-huncy person, and I would go around all the time with wide, open shoulders.”

Who can relate to that truth? On an anxious, body level, I relate to the hunching forward, fear, hiding my heart chakra from the world, and it reminded me of my favorite Ann Lamott’s quote about her shoulders being raised up to her ears all the time, like Richard Nixon. I also relate to the hunching from breastfeeding. And I too have though if I could just master this whole yoga thing that I would become the perfect picture of posture and openness, thus perfecting my appearance and getting rid of my anxiety for good. If only I could work hard enough at it, that would solve everything.

I feel accomplished, like I’ve scaled all 14, 411 (used to be 410 when I first memorized that stat in 4th grade) of Mt. Rainier. I read a book. A 350 page book, while working full-time and nursing my child on-demand.  It was real, and inspirational, and definitely belonged on that local library’s “Must Read” list. Check it out.