the curve

I'm going to try and think of this picture when I imagine the learning curve. Dirty, slapped-together. All kinds of tidbits to play with.

Yes.

photo by Cat Palmer

I've also got saying yes on my mind. Over the last year I've noticed that the artists who say yes a lot move with exciting velocity.

My friend Cat Palmer is like that. She says yes to shows and opportunities left and right. She is always crazy busy, and her work has fabulous vitality. She is constantly in action, and I wonder if she is plagued by the stupid time-suck of overthinking. I think probably not.

Let go let go

Last night I ripped my fortune cookie fortune in half, which, I'm pretty sure, is like drawing a rune upside-down, or a pseudo-Confucian not-joke: "It is a good time to start new projects and hobbies." Not. 

I've got finishing on my mind. Finishing, stopping, and even quitting. I'm not sure why calling something done gives me anxiety; I just want to work it and work it forever. I think I need rituals (like seeing my articles in print is a great completion ritual) to let myself know a project's done. Although I heard that as Z.Z. Packer was reading from her story "Brownies" a couple years ago at Litquake, she pulled out a pencil and made an edit in her (acclaimed, published) book. 

Unfinished projects are the baby birds of the psyche. They gape and gulp with their naked blue-tinged heads and demand you fly back and back to their nests. 

And quitting: I think it's an art. It's not something to do when you're facing a new challenge and are challenged, or are mid-commitment, but more like when the horse is dead. Or the goldfish. I once was about to put fish medicine into my tank when I decided to poke the sick fish and discovered that its whole belly was cavernous and gone. Which is why it was looking lethargic and milky-colored. Not long after that, I quit trying to keep fish. I dumped them into a pond where they soon bred themselves into a giant school of goldfish and lived much more happily without me. 

I wish I could talk to my would-have-been neighbors and ask them about their decision to quit this project:

The Amazing Jellyfish from the Year 12,000

Jellyfishmobile Before Dark from Jared Gallardo on Vimeo.


I think the thing about creative projects is that once something is created, it's hard to imagine that it ever didn't exist. In a couple of weeks Discovery Canada is coming to shoot footage of the Jellyfish, and then they'll shoot follow-up footage in August at Burning Man. A year and a half ago Jared didn't really even identify as an artist.

My role in the project was to say yes. I was kind of like the old Inuit man in Never Cry Wolf who says "good idea;" when Jared would wake up and say, "I just had an idea!" I would look at his sketch and say, "good idea." Or, I would get excited with him and say, "or what about like this!?" and draw another picture. That was my job: keeper of enthusiasm, late night brainstormer, sayer of yes.

no one knows about it

Jared and I went back to the desert last weekend, together this time. And with our fuzzy beasts. The amazing thing about Utah is that it has five national parks, myriad state parks, and then places like this, that are what I imagine the Grand Canyon looks like, that are just BLM land, and you can crawl all over it with your dogs, and camp right on the edge of the canyon and no one is there, because no one knows about it.


There was something Mary said in an email yesterday, “We took the trolley tour in Savannah, we went to the beach with the dog, we went bowling. It was a trip we couldn't afford, but aren't those always the best ones?” that made me think about something.

I’ve been on a creative binge lately. I wake up and start writing. I write in my journal, then I work on a story, or this video I’m working on that I’m creating a kind of prose sestina for, then I think of a story that would be good to look at, so I read for an hour, and by two I’m still in my pajamas. And then I turn on the phone and listen to my messages and make vows to myself to call people back later, and then answer a couple emails, and vow to answer the others later, and then take a shower, and then get to work, late. And it’s the slow season at work, so I’m not making enough money to cover my expenses this month, so there’s this financial urgency hanging over my head. But I think, maybe, I’m turning the financial urgency into creative urgency. It feels hard to admit it, because if I say it out loud, or write it, I feel like I’ll have to stop. But it feels like grace. Like I’m sneaking grace.

the end of the earth

On Island in the Sky in Canyonlands, you just keep following the road until you get to the end of the earth. It's marked by a cairn, and then there's a cliff that drops a thousand feet or so, and below you are the canyons and rivers that are part of some other place, the place below earth, and it spreads out before you forever.


It's what I'd always expected, from the time I was little, and we'd be driving down the 99 and I'd ask my mom where the road ended. Somehow, I always knew this was where.


This is a path that runs along the edge of the earth.


I think sleeping in my car satisfies some deep desire in me to be a turtle, or a snail. The back of my car is really not long enough for me to sleep in, so I was diagonal and curled all night, but I was so happy. I camped in my car, by myself. The first night I read a book of creation myths by candlelight, and when I finally blew out the candle and looked out the window, there seemed to be as much starmatter in the sky as there was dark space between stars. Each thing in the desert feels distinct, the plants, the jackrabbit I met while picking sage, the stars, but especially the sounds. It's quiet. A crow flew overhead while I was sitting in my camp and it's wings made a sound that was somewhere in-between newspaper and heartbeat. A swallow swooped past me while I was overlooking a canyon, and it made a sound like wind ripping along a high-tension cable. When I woke up the first morning there I wrote in my journal: "I am delighted with the red dirt here, and the trees-- the piñons and junipers feel like friends, like species that I have relationships with, I know them like I know oaks and dogs. Even though I admire the trees in the mountains, I don't feel that instant friendliness, or maybe the feeling of family, almost, that this desert has for me."

It was beautiful down there, sunny and warm, but cool enough to hike all day on Monday.


Here is another spot I hiked to. You approach this lovely little arch, and then the ground falls away on the other side.


I'm home now and it is snowstorming again today. I feel like I've used all my credits for incredulousness well over a month ago. I'm going to go to the desert as much as possible this spring.

pink parachute

Sitting in my living room and I've been just a little low-- with the snow, and the dusk, and then night comes and I've neglected the iTunes, and the library is playing some weird Moog stuff that only a producer could love. I apologize to the dogs for letting it go on so long. They wag their tails as I get off the couch to change the music.

But then I make some tea and put on some Madeline Peyroux, and it's perfect, just enough somberness to sweep me somewhere else-- and it's not just the Madeline Peyroux, but the parachutes that we hung all over the living room for Jared's birthday that are still up-- and something about the layers of fabric and light are fabulously exciting.


I start daydreaming about building a treehouse, and a garden with banana trees, pink climbing roses, water lilies, and Polish Frizzles roosting on stone Buddha heads. I must build a chicken pagoda. And then I start daydreaming about quilts with raspberry bandannas and fringe, big pillows and lemon yellow chaise lounges, lemon trees and thistles; thinking about road trips to the desert and drinking pine needle tea, buying cowboy boots, and renting an apartment in Paris. The parachutes seem to represent possibility, and I feel surprised that anyone could sit under them feeling dreary. This is a middle of the night Chico kind of night (not the weather, but the feeling of infinite possibility.)


It's an unscheduled night tonight, I was cut early from work and am home by myself now with my journal and books. These moments... I think they only happen when you completely let go of the to-do list: riding your beach cruiser home in the dark in a t-shirt at 2 am and it's warm and moony out, walking with a new friend to find the flowers that bloom at night, starting out on a road trip at dawn with a mug of coffee and then the sunrise and the empty streets, writing at 4 am with the breeze coming in through the screens, just a little too brisk. This is why a person becomes nocturnal. I think this is one of my best selves: it's like the inner four-year-old comes waltzing out with her crayons and blanket forts and starts saying, "and then we could do this, and then this, and then this...!" And the world gets bigger. It's a different place of creation than the kind of creation where you're two hours into the story, and the pattern is rolling out in front of you and all you have to do is follow... there is structure in that kind of creativity. This creative place is totally unstructured and jumps around all over the place. Story ideas live here, quilts live here, gardens live here and shoes and trips.



I've been so good lately, so disciplined, and structuring my days so tightly. But it's not really all that good, actually. I think I've been spoiled forever by the night walks and maybe now the parachutes, too. Why is it better or more moral to spend my days sending timely email responses than dreaming up my next story or throw-pillow? I wonder what the ideal amount of time is for a person to hang out in this creative generation place is-- the only downside I see is that there are so many ideas and creative dreams floating around in this place that it requires more culling. But maybe that is just inspiration natural selection. The dreams you actually commit to will rise to the top. Looking back through my journals--where I tend to draw pictures of the creative daydreams--some have happened already, some I don't want anymore, and some are still creative dreams. Some are recurring creative dreams, which makes me think they are integrated into who I am-- like, for ten years I've been wanting cowboy boots. In the Second Life of my late night imagination, I take road trips all the time and sleep in my cowboy boots in the back of my pickup truck. Other things: paintings, quilts, recipes, stories, living in Los Angeles, living in San Francisco, going to CCA, camping in Moab by myself, having shows and classes at the Women's Art Center-- these are dreams that started as dreams but have happened already. Some dreams started out feeling outrageous or impossible-- going to Greece by myself when I was 23, losing 80 pounds and having clothes I love-- and now they are just part of who I am.

It is a kind of subtle self-violence, I'm thinking now, on those days while you're in email-checking mode, to look back at all the ideas that haven't happened and feel ashamed because you never make anything happen, you tell yourself, and suddenly the fact that you haven't published a novel yet or been to Bali yet seems like proof that you never will, and you'll probably never do anything, so get used to spending your days checking your email, sister, this is real life.

But really it's all a matter of choice. A healthy creative dream to creative reality differential is always going to have way more dreams than realities. And I don't think the dreams are wasted-- they help define and hone real life. The dreams that slide by are like the boulders under the water that give the river its shape. The dreams to give a hard look to are the ones you pine for but that feel too outrageous, impossible, or the ones that linger for years unexpressed. Like cowboy boots.

sandboats

I was dreaming about sailboats that skim along the beach—the beach was windy and desolate feeling, almost like another planet, like the sky was a different color, orange with dark purple-grey storm clouds, and maybe there were creatures that could have lived on that planet that don’t live on this one— there were sails like boats in Thailand or Egypt that you raised with a rope, and as soon as I raised my sail, the wind snapped it out and I was zipping just over the sand, right along the waves. There were other people with me, a sandboat in front of me, and one behind me, we were yelling instructions to each other, it was important, not fun because of this feeling of gravity and desolation, but it was exhilarating.

Van Gogh's Work Ethic

Some of my journal shots from March 2002:



There were a few years of my life, when I first moved to San Francisco when I was 24, and continuing until I started grad school, where I took my journal with me everywhere. I took it to work, I took it on the bus, I took it to bars and parties. I remember sunny spring weekend days in the outer Richmond when suddenly the world would burst into color after weeks of foggy monochrome when I would sit out on the sidewalk in front of the cafe down the street from my apartment drinking chai and sharing a burrito and carrot cake with Jared, writing in my journal with blissed gusto. The point was usually to open the world up just a bit more, and the best days had writing that surprised me and gave me new insights, like the best days of fiction writing do. Sometimes the writing was just about putting myself back together, a kind of psychic cataloging, more reorganizing myself than opening the world. Drawing was important, too, all play, but I thought of it as my work. I thought of it all as my work, filling journals with thoughts and drawings. There wasn't effort in it, I wanted it like I wanted dinner parties with my roommates and walks on the beach.

For the most part I stopped writing in my journal when I was at CCA, and I think that's a good thing. Writing fiction used a new kind of discipline, and didn't have the effortlessness or craving for me that journal writing did. The satisfaction that I got from writing fiction was more intense than journal writing, though, and it was a new challenge. Drawing changed, too. It was different sitting down with an objective for a drawing and a bunch of new skills and media to incorporate, rather than just the quick intuitive pen and ink sketches I usually did in my journals. Most days my drawing classes would feel like a struggle, and each new drawing would have a fresh new pain and resistance when I would sit down with my giant white sheet of paper. But then some days, something would click into place, everything would start working, and time would stop while I drew. It had the same feeling of effortless creation as the great journal writing days.

This was one of the first drawings I did in grad school that had a clicking-in feeling for me (after about a month of struggle):


I think that feeling of effortlessness is the result of having integrated skills that you can then draw upon without thinking about them, they're just right there. I get the strongest sense of that effortlessness when I look at the drawings of Richard Diebenkorn. They are not at all precious, and in fact feel kind of dashed off, but with a deep well of technique and experience that he's mastered and incorporated.

Richard Diebenkorn
Untitled, RD 170
not dated

I'm so uncomfortable with times of new learning; before the skills are in place, the times of practicing when everything comes out slowly and painfully (and bad, ugly, and wrong.) Writing this, though, I'm remembering that slow, painful time is totally necessary, and that the times of getting to new levels of mastery where everything comes out effortless and it's working, those times are times of grace, but if you're growing as an artist are times that will pass, and you'll head back into the painful discovery period again. Maybe the key is not to think of the discovery period as painful, but instead learn to enjoy them as exciting periods of inquisition. It's kind of embarrassing to write that, actually, because: practice, duh. But I think it's something that I need to remind myself over and over.

I started this in response to a passage I read in Rilke's Letters on Cezanne, which I'll put down here. (So funny that Rilke thought he was writing this letter to his wife, but actually he was writing it to me):

...one is still so far away from being able to work at all times. Van Gogh could perhaps lose his composure, but behind it was always his work, he could no longer lose that. And Rodin, when he's not feeling well, is very close to his work, writes beautiful things on countless pieces of paper, reads Plato and follows him in his thought. But I have a feeling that this is not the result of discipline or compulsion (otherwise it would be tiring, the way I've been tired from working in recent weeks); it is all joy; it is natural well-being in the one thing that surpasses everything else. Perhaps one has to have a clearer insight into the nature of one's "task," get a more tangible hold on it, recognize it in a hundred details. I believe I do feel what van Gogh must have felt at a certain juncture, and it is a strong and great feeling: that everything is yet to be done: everything. But this devotion to what is nearest, this is something I can't do as yet, or only in my best moments, while it is at one's worst moments that one really needs it. Van Gogh could paint an Interieur d'hopital, and in his most anxious days he painted the most disquieting objects. How else could he have survived. This is what needs to be attained, and I have a feeling it can't be forced. It must come out of insight, from pleasure, from no longer being able to postpone the work in view of all the many things that have to be done. Ah, if only one did not have the comforting memories of times spent without working.

Letters On Cezanne
October 4, 1907 (Friday)

The image in my journal next to the map of Amsterdam, with the vermilion border and the made-up kanji, is a postcard of one of van Gogh's paintings that he did based after Japanese woodcuts: Flowering plum tree (after Hiroshige) summer 1887. I like it because it is not like anything of his I've seen, because it's cool to see some of his roots, and because it's kind of awkward-- he was trying something but he hadn't nailed it quite yet. We associate him with the periods of genius grace, but then there's this, too:

Vincent van Gogh
Flowering plum tree (after Hiroshige)
summer 1887

then, something clicks, and this:

Vincent van Gogh
Almond Blossom
1890

Waiting

Last month I was mooning over spring, thinking about Chico and the birds and the flowers and pining for it like it was a crush I had. It was a sweet little hopeful crush that I had on spring.

The past two weeks have been like January all over again. Cold and blizzardy. And I have this kind of stunned feeling about it, like spring laughed at the notes I passed it. Now I am turning into this bitter woman who hangs out in the bar with the seasons, but sits by herself and stares at her beer. “Eight new inches of snow on April 7? Figures.” “Snowing again this morning? It would.” It is a physical kind of bitterness, like my body is bitter about it. I keep getting this bizarre disoriented feeling, like I have no idea what time of year it is.

This is my dryspell-breaking post.

dead elk

1. Driving up the mountains on the way home one night on the 80, there was a great bloody smear of elk. It was gorey and horrid looking, with the murdered animal in the median, and it's blood and dark meat chunks spread across the fast lane. I was driving in the middle lane, chatting with Jared, we both saw the elk, he looked at the elk, my head whipped up to see, certain I would see, another animal in the lane in front of me. No. It was not foreshadowing. I was certain that the scene called for a second elk, one that I hit, or a live one in the lane in front of me. It wasn't foreshadowing yet, anyway. For the next week, every time I drove past that spot, I braced myself and waited. It wasn't intellectual-- it was some kind of visceral sense of story. What is the timeframe for the second elk? My writer self knows all too well: my whole life. I have been opened up to the possibility that there could always be the elk to echo that first one.

2. I was wearing my white doublebreasted Italian wool coat and eating tomato basil soup at Carlucci's. I ordered half a goat cheese sandwich with tomato soup and I was checking email and eating red soup in my white coat. I had just finally gotten it back from the dry cleaners. "This is really good tension," I thought. "Why won't the character take off her coat? It's all too obvious." I didn't drip soup on the coat.

3. We were walking down near Moab on a camping trip with Steve. He told us about a video he'd seen of bugs that divebomb your eyeball and in the last dying moment lay their eggs. You think nothing of it until you have a big lump under your eyelid, and when you go to the eyedoctor, he uncovers the teeming eyeball bug larvae. (Fortunately they're not common.) Just after he saw that video, one of his co-workers had an eyeball lump and Steve said, "you'd better go get that checked because it might be bugs," and it freaking was eyeball bugs! "Watch out," I told him, "there will be one more eyeball bug incident in your life." Am I cursing him to a literary life? As if he's in a movie and I'm sitting in the audience all self-satisfied because I know where this is headed?

Wine Glass

This is just goofing off. Practicing video editing.

Cy + Ann

This blog is about what inspires me, and about the questions I'm rubbing up against, so in the spirit of that, here is an email exchanged with Jacob, and then with Laureen:

Jacob, regarding Ann William's "Cold Fire":

Just finished reading it. Absolutely beautiful. Now I just need to figure out what the hell I'm going to teach from it :)

Me, regarding "Cold Fire":

Do you know the work of Cy Twombly? I was just thinking about form, and what Ann was doing in that story, and I thought of little circles, and then I thought of Cy Twombly. I kind of wonder if the story might have started out as a series of straightforward paragraphs, which originally proceeded in a linear way, but then maybe the paragraphs were disassembled, and then reassembled to proceed in a kind of loopy way.

I doubt, though, that Twombly's painting, here, was ever straightforward.




Jacob's response (still regarding "Cold Fire"):

Dude, Twombly totally stole my ideas!

I think the fragments are about reflection from multiple viewpoints to create a series of destabilized subjects - uncertainties if you will - which are then set up in a metonymic relationship with the dead child, which, because it is only presented once, is presented as stable - just as the finality of Gordon's not-return is. But I think that's the trick: a bunch of images that gain narrative momentum/tension because of the dissonance in their multiple revisitings and that gain interest in their metonymic relationship to the dead boy.

This is all me, now, writing just to you:

Recently Jared and I were over at Jacob's house for dinner, and he argued that the emotional effectiveness in art is 90% craft. When I hear that, at first I think he's' wrong, and then I think it's quite possible I still don't know how to write a story.

Here is my question: do you think that we can ruin ourselves as artists if we have too much information? Is there some kind of innocence we've retained in our craft-based education that might be somehow harmed by a rigorous academic training, or do you think that all information goes into a creative toolbox, and the more we have, the better. I think I'm leaning toward the latter, that more knowledge is better... nevertheless, I'm pretty sure you don't have to know what a metonym is to write a good story.

Laureen's response:

"...do you think that we can ruin ourselves as artists if we have too much information?"

Yes, yes, and yes. But every artist is different. Some thrive in academia (think Nabokov, John L'Heureux, Tobias Wolff...), others thrive without (Hemingway, Hawthorne, many many modern fiction writers). I think that I agree with your friend's statement about the emotional effectiveness of art, with a bit of a caveat. To me, it seems that craft (HOW the art is executed) is absolutely responsible for a work's effectiveness, but the point of any work is also its lasting meaning (not just the instinctual, emotional response), and if meaning is tied up with inspiration (big, general word for a big, general concept), then the real question is where does craft draw its ingredients from? I think this is different for everyone, but that staying true to where your own craft comes from means staying true to your writing. Not sure if that makes absolute sense, but I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's like one of those logic questions on standardized tests (ie if all boozles are bazzles, and all bazzles are beezles, is every beezle a boozle? kind of a thing): a virtuoso craft-person does not necessarily make a good artist. Does anyone remember Junse Kim? (Katie? Mary?) To me, he is the epitome of an excellent craftsman but a terrible writer. Anyway, craft and "the how" seem to lie on the academic side of things, whereas "inspiration" is obviously organic, ever-changing, often-elusive. Good stories come from a combination of the two.

I think I'll leave it at this: we should all strive to not overthink the process while we're executing it; we should follow our instincts and, dammit all, have fun doing it!

Best,
Laureen

big shapes and little details, cont.

I love this discussion. Katie's ideas on writing from deep intuitive places resonates deeply, and I'm definitely going to read Ron Carlson's book on writing. I have two new stories that I've started and have been neglecting because I have no idea where they are going, and I think I'm letting that be an excuse. I remember Julie Orringer once saying that the most important thing to do is get through the first draft-- I've got three drafts now moldering while I wait to become a person who can impose structure on her work. That's a big bunch of bullshit.

I wrote to Katie earlier that I'm thinking maybe while structure in drawing is something that you need to have down first, in writing it is not. And maybe is detrimental. Maybe. Some writers... like, when David Mitchel wrote Cloud Atlas, he must have worked out the big trajectory of the novel first-- in fact I think perhaps that's the nature of most science fiction... probably. I would like to think about this more, though: is this one of the divides in literary vs. genre fiction? Plot?

But maybe David Mitchel started with the characters, found out about them, and then let them go. I'm starting to think that maybe structure is a second draft kind of affair. Or maybe structure is something that I might have a loose idea of for my first draft, and it is refined in the subsequent drafts.

There is something that has been bugging me, though: Larry McClary. My first and second semester of drawing, both of my teachers sent me to the library with suggestions to look at specific artists who did composition well. I'd bring a drawing to workshop and they'd say, "you need to work on the composition." And when they couldn't articulate why my composition wasn't working, they'd say, "you need to take a class with Larry McClary." Which I did, my third semester, and Larry broke it down for me. Since taking his class, I know what needs to happen to make a drawing: compose it, lay down a value pattern, choose your media, choose the elements of the craft you're focusing on: gesture, line, perspective, etc. But what was scary is that I don't have that kind of ground-up knowledge of how to write a story. And even though the earlier drawing teachers were amazing, they couldn't articulate composition like Larry could. I want to study plot like I studied composition.

My friend Rolf said that he read this study once about the age of different artists hitting their peak. He told me writers hit their stride much later in life than other artists. Maybe that is because it's really not an art you can break down easily. So again, I love this discussion.

This is what I'm working on in my writing right now:

1. Getting through my first drafts.
2. Being a student of structure
3. Letting my intuition and subconscious rule the first draft
4. Learning my craft

structure

I am doing the Field Workshop on Monday nights. It's a group of artists, seven of us, sculptors, dancers, graphic artists, visual artists and writers, who bring work every week, read, show, or perform it, and then sit there silently and get workshopped by the group. We've had two sessions now, and it's so great to be reading my work to other artists, and hearing their responses. The first night after I read, people talked a lot about my language (although they are not writers so used the words "descriptions," and "words.") To describe my language they used words like : "mesmerizing," "beautiful," and the barfy, "romantic," but they meant it in a nice way. The second night I read a different story, and again I got the feedback that my language was beautiful-- and then Amy Caron, an awesome performance artist, said, "you're such an artist. You know, artists don't want to have to deal with the bills, or keep the electricity going. It's almost as if the plot is secondary, you're so caught up in the rich romantic language, like you really just want to describe the world." Busted.

It reminds me of something Zach said after a class where we'd workshopped one of my essays (the same essay, in fact, that I read last week at the Field.) We were riding the shuttle back to Oakland and he said, "you know, it's like you've got everyone fooled. You hypnotize them with all of these beautiful words and ideas, but you really have no idea what you're doing." I kind of like the way Amy Caron put it better, but in both cases it's great criticism.

Language, I think, is like line quality. Line quality, my first drawing teacher at CCA, Judith Foosaner, said is like DNA. Every mark you make, she said, is written in your genes. I'm not sure, though, if you can pick up a pen and just automatically get to that kind of genetic mark or sentence. At least with writing, I think that to get to the kind of writing that unfurls out of your cells you have to kind of soften your focus and tumble into it. Like one day, that first semester of grad school, I sat on my roof deck in San Francisco and spilled ink onto paper. My goal was to make marks that had no effort in them, no sign of anyone trying to manipulate the mark. George Saunders, in an interview on Bookworm, compares his language with interior decorating. If you took objects out of a house, and put objects into a house that all represent the taste of the owner, that taste repeated becomes style.

But about paying the bills. Larry McClary, the drawing teacher I took for my last two semesters at CCA, was all about structure. One of the first things I learned from him was how to compose a drawing. You divide your page into a big simple shape, and then divide that shape into another simple shape. You then have a primary and secondary composition on top of which you build everything else in the drawing. He said that you can tell a beginning artist because they go to the corner of the page and start putting a lot of detail into one little spot on the page, and then work out from there. Composition in writing, I think, is plot: the big basic arc of what happens in the story. I'm pretty sure this is what Zach was telling me I have not mastered. It seems like it should be so basic but I totally struggle with it! All that talk in grad school about figuring out where the story is taking you-- I don't know.

In high school, once I turned sixteen, my favorite thing to do was get in my car and head for the backroads. I'd get to a T in the road and look left, look right, and pick one. I'd see an interesting little dirt road and take it. I think I've used that model for a lot of my writing, too.

Big basic shapes. Big basic shapes. I'm going to come up with something that is so simple it embarasses me. Structure: this is what I'm about in my writing right now.

Check out that George Saunders interview (and in fact, the whole treasure chest of author interviews on Bookworm. It's a fabulous program out of Santa Monica, on KCRW, and you can find interviews with just about everyone there. This morning, in a half sleep state, I had the idea: download them to your iPod, dummy, and listen to them in your car.)

sundance '08

Sundance turned out to be a bit like Los Angeles itself for me. When I moved there when I was 24, I decided that I would go and find the beauty, and the tender heart of L.A. This was an antidote to my impression that the people there were superficial, catty, and impatient, and the city itself was smoggy and ugly. This approach ended up being key to my living there. I found amazing museums there, the Norton Simon was my favorite, there is a movie house where they show only silent movies, there is a man who walks around Silverlake reading, the downtown library is magical, there is also a building downtown that was originally built in the 1920s to be a communist artist studio space/apartment building with a grand deco gallery space downstairs. I explored it one day while I was on lunchbreak from my temp job. There is bizarre and daring architecture in L.A, there are gardens tucked into odd places-- there are such incredible tamales. And at the end of my year of living there, I found myself saying, "I love L.A! L.A is a place of infinite possibility."

So this was my approach to Sundance: find the beauty. Because after my last two years of working during Sundance, I was pretty sick of it. Just the word made me cringe a little. As Ang puts it, it's like everyone's auditioning. And they are so often superficial, catty, and impatient. On about the third day of Sundance, I overheard this guy say, "Dude, Paris Hilton was up on stage at Harry-o's last night and people were throwing meat at her. It was awesome." The town kind of turns into a big party with strata of VIP's--with waitress to the stars not being at the top. I didn't have much fun the first few days of it; I mostly hid from it as much as I could.

I started having fun as soon as I went to a film. It's a whole different world at the films. The atmosphere is serious and professional, the audiences are made up mostly of people who make films or are connoisseurs of film. It's more like being at a gallery or a play than going to the movies-- there's much more of a dialog between the audience and the film than you usually see. People in the audience respond to the nuances, they laugh at little gestures by the actors, they even sometimes applaud mid-movie.

I went to a series of short films first. Shorts! Like short stories, you get a concentrated punch of concept or emotion, really fast. I think Francis Ford Coppola said in one of the mission statements I read of his for Zoetrope that he started the magazine to explore the relationship between short stories and films-- which makes sense. To me a short story and a feature-length film correlate-- they are both a single-sitting event. To adapt a novel for the screen, so much is going to be lost, but you can really get in there with a fifteen to twenty page story. Film is much more efficient, though, emotionally. For example, writing about setting takes time-- in film setting happens in quick flashes. You lose exposition almost entirely, actually-- which I guess becomes its own challenge. But the medium, I think, is faster than literature. Some of the shorts felt more like short-shorts, almost, though some felt very similar to short stories, including the amazing short "Dugong" by Erin White, which felt incredibly literary. Also check out "Pariah" by Dee Rees, which was a 27-minute short, kind of the Alice Munroe version of a short film. The directors promise their films will be available on iTunes soon.

Once I went to the shorts, I couldn't get enough. I went back for the Grand Jury selection for drama, Frozen River, and then the Grand Jury selection for documentary, Trouble the Water. Both excellent.

Once I started having discussions about story and craft, it was like all the stuff happening to Paris up on Main Street, and who was where and who partied with whom and all that stuff that had been bugging me in the beginning of the week, all that faded. I felt like an animal, a giant dumb animal grabbing films with its fat paws and stuffing them into its mouth while its eyes search for the next one to get in there.

sharp snow

I am still kind of shocked by winter here. I've never lived in the snow before, and it's strange to me. The last few days the temperature hovers around two degrees in the mornings, and the snow is tiny and sharp.

Summer feels so far away. I was looking through my photos and saw this picture of my first road trip to Moab from three and a half years ago.

Here's a journal entry from May 24, 2004:

"Tonight I built my first all-by-myself campfire just for my own self to sit by. I took a 7 mile hike today in Devil's Garden and I'm feeling tired and I'm feeling a deep deep contentment and satisfaction. I'm so proud of my little fire I can hardly stand it. The family camping across from me stare at me every time they walk past on their way to the pit toilet. I wave and say, "evening!" (The little girl is thinking, "someday, I'm going to have a pickup truck and go camping alone and build a fire just for myself.") My fire smells lovely and it makes little tinkling sounds and tiny mouse sighs. The sky is very dark now and the moon has nearly set over the cliffs. Just set."

Right now summer and flowers seem like some kind of rediculous miracle. Movie stars, on the other hand, are coming out in abundance. The Sundance Film Festival is in town. There are so many people here in Park City, looking like glamorous yetis.

rub up against it til i break the skin

Last night I was imagining what my life would feel like if I was doing exactly what I wanted to be doing. If the majority of my days were spent writing, if I was reading out, if I was going on book tours, what would that feel like? At first I thought it would feel like a kind of peace, and happiness-- I think that's why I chose this career, because I thought it would make me happy. But I don't think so. I think if I were doing exactly what I want to be doing all the time, I would feel vulnerable and raw. Probably scared.

But I also think I would-- will-- feel wildly alive. Raw and wildly alive: this is what I am shooting for.

I'm listening to Ani DiFranco, because her song "Shameless" is in my head, now. And I am thinking of Rainer Maria Rilke, because I am re-reading Letters on Cezanne. Rilke wrote his letters about Cezanne to his wife, Clara, who seems to have understood him so deeply that he was able to express all of the singular weird minutia of his extraordinary mind. I was thinking how incredible to have that kind of muse relationship, where you are drawn out perfectly because someone else listens so correctly. Maybe this is why grad school gets better and better. Maybe it's not so much that our writing skills got so much better, but that we increasingly trusted the ability of our muses to grasp us. I am a terrible muse to myself. My mind is actually made of rows of tiny sharp teeth. I am a hypocrite about creative risks; I celebrate them in other people, but nibble myself to death. I am like that with fat, too. I adore plumpness in other women, and I actually get pissed off when Charity starts getting too skinny, I think she looks like a sleek muscular seal when she's got a little meat on her bones, and she's so powerful. I have trouble loving my own plumpness, though. I don't know if that's because I'm a chicken, and both plumpness and creativity require risk... or perhaps that's just being called up into museness. And maybe when you're a good muse, you love the other more than yourself, at least for a moment.

"One lives so badly," Rilke tells me, "because one always comes into the present unfinished, unable, distracted. I cannot think back on any time in my life without such reproaches and worse." Apparently he was a perfectionist, too. (Rilke said that!) Thank god for Clara-- he didn't publish the letters on Cezanne, he just wrote them to her. The world maybe, for sensitive people, is made up of rows of sharp teeth. It is hard to feed tender ideas into its maw, easier just to hand them to someone who will cradle them and smile at you.

Ok. I am a chicken. My two public attempts at taking my writing into the world since grad school have scared me pretty badly. But I am also willing to be scared. So this is something kind of in-between. I'm really writing to you, muses, but I'm also tossing my thoughts to the teeth of the world.