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.