Sharpened

We've all been sleeping in the same bed. Shea is afraid of slippery monsters. He has nightmares and wakes up terrified, screaming, "Bye!" Justin holds him. "You're safe, buddy, you're safe. You're right here with us."

My neighbors gather for a bonfire a few days after the election. There are children everywhere, chasing each other in the dark, pretending to be monsters. There is beer and a plate of rice and quinoa and a commotion inside the house. A group of children come tumbling out of the light into the darkness, "They're locked in! They can't get out!" Justin goes to investigate, somehow the doorknob came off and my 4-year-old and their 6-year-old are locked in together. I hear murmuring and it seems like they are sharpening pencils on the other side of the door. Justin gets out his pocket knife to see if he can use it as a screwdriver with a crowd of children watching, offering suggestions. One little girl pokes a stick through the lock. My son says, "Thank you," and takes the stick through to the other side. The little girl starts crying. She wants her stick back.

A screwdriver is found, success! The door is opened. The little girl rushes in to retrieve her stick. But it's sticking out of the pencil sharpener. There is real despair. She holds up her sharpened stick, half of it is missing, the end makes a deadly point. My son takes this in, then pushes past me, runs out and away from the scene, back into the night. "Look, Mommy," he says, hanging from the ropeswing in the dark. "I'm putting myself in danger to make you proud!" The little girl collapses into her mother's arms.

Later Justin will step in dog poop climbing over our fence to get back home, and Shea will cry for an hour when we don't let him watch TV before bed. For now though, there is the cold tips of our noses, the gathering supermoon, the grass, the smell of smoke, and a tumble of beautiful children.

Parenting on Wednesday, November 9

That first twinge of arthritis in your knee is a thing I imagine with all the tenderness I felt when you showed me your loose tooth. I wish I could help you carry the weight of many years. --Marilynne Robinson

On Wednesday, my son has a field trip at Three Lakes Park. Beautiful fall morning, the playground, his friends, the picnic lunch. He throws up everywhere. My husband asks, “Is it nerves? Or is he sick?” He's only four. And what to tell him? Did the mean man win? Why did I dramatize this election for him at all? Why did I use the language of his superhero books to explain it to him? I wouldn’t have, except I didn’t think it would matter. On Tuesday, it seemed like a good idea to introduce him to democracy. On Wednesday, I wasn’t so sure.

I leave a message on the school's voicemail. "We kept him out of school yesterday because, well, the election. We were excited. He's throwing up now. So we're keeping him out now too."

On Monday, there was the feeling of winter in my hair. Yet the breeze carried summer. The night was growing around us. There was a half moon, an atmospheric haze. Shea was afraid of monsters in the woods. We had lanterns and glow sticks and we walked deeper and deeper down the fire road. Two-year-old Nat ahead of us, wearing blue, disappearing into the twilight as we tried to keep up. He stumbled on the gravel, sprawling, and stayed sprawled until his daddy righted him and brushed him off. He asked, "This way?" as he ran ahead. Shea wanted up, he bobbed on my shoulders, holding the phone as a flashlight.

 Later, we found out there was a bear on the Boulevard Bridge. It was hit by a car, its leg broken in two places. A young bear, less than a year old. "They follow the waterways into the city. That's how they get in undetected." I think of the woods full of bears, but the wildlife population has decreased by 60% in the last forty years, a new report says. 60% of all mammals, reptiles, amphibians are gone. Dead. Why are we not shouting this from the rooftops? Why are we so scared of one juvenile bear? "Undetected." The word feels powerful.

We've left a shattered world. Will my sons fear for their own children? I think of my grandchildren, or my great grandchildren subsisting on the land. Maybe that won't be so bad. Hunter gatherers had moments of joy. But first there will be the catastrophe. The apocalypse runs through my mind regularly. I think about moving to a place that will be safer from climate change, to the mountains, away from the sea.

Our parents had the privilege of worrying about a leg up in college admissions. I want my sons to have a leg up in survival. Will the interior of the country be safer than the edges? I'm acting from fear, not from love. And from fear, we head down the rabbit hole.

The bear, confused, walking along the riverbank, climbing the hill up to the bridge. Alone, a juvenile. A car hurtling down on him at 50 miles an hour across the beautiful bridge we cross to get to preschool. We walk beneath the bridge in the gathering twilight, the night before the election, innocent to the small drama playing out above. I think about the end of the world, the heavy warm weight of my son on my shoulders. "Mommy, it's getting darker. I think I hear a monster. I want pizza. Can we go home?"

I am posting in here so that it doesn't get deleted! I like this blog.

Motivation

Well, I started this blog with the idea that it would help me to get a job in a community college and that I should consolidate the google search results for my writing. I was kind of bummed that I had started a blog, just because I try to avoid all of that online stuff. So I just let it lay dormant, and hoped it would just be an online resume.
Now I'm working in a high school full time, and this blog doesn't really serve a purpose anymore. The 6am grind has really gotten to me. We seem to be teaching to the test. Skills, skills, skills. The kids say two pages is long. We don't teach writing; it's not tested on the 11th grade SOL. I feel so far away from MFA land now. I think of it as a kind of idyllic place, where I used to read and write with people who cared about reading and writing. I feel sad and wonder if I can be a high school teacher forever.
Then yesterday, I found out Shipyard Incidents was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. I wrote that story almost two years ago now, and revised it last year. It felt like the ghost of my former self, reaching out to my present self, saying, well, you used to be a writer, wanna be one still? I felt so motivated last night. I showed it to my friend Rachel who teaches here too, and she said she'd read anything I wrote.
This morning in 1st period, I had a really bad class. They told me, I'm not reading. You can't make me. They called me Ms. Casey continually, even after I told them my name was Ms. Sears, because she's "the other white lady" and they claim they can't keep us straight. One lied about needing to pick up his binder from his mom and when he came back, he had potato chips from sneaking into the teacher's lounge. They wouldn't put their cell phones away. But I just kept reminding myself, there's something bigger than this! It doesn't matter if they hate reading and writing. Not everyone does.

The Power and the Glory

I just finished The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene. It felt ominous and dark, with this dreadful sense of foreboding the whole time. I was so fascinated by it. Here are some quotes from it that I really liked.

"It was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or a civilization--it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt" (97).

"Behind the wire-netted windows of the private houses grandmothers swung back and forth in rocking-chairs, among the family photographs--nothing to do, nothing to say, with too many clothes on, sweating a little. This was the capital city of a state" (103).

"This place was very like the world: overcrowded with lust and crime and unhappy love, it stank to heaven; but he realized that after all it was possible to find peace there, when you knew for certain that the time was short" (125).

"When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity...when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination" (131).

"Time depends on clocks and the passage of light" (133).

I loved the feeling that we aren't worthy of being saved, that the priest was a bad priest and yet people were dying to protect him. I loved the idea that we all have an indelible spot inside of us, which is the knowledge of the world; we are all irredeemable. It made me want to read more books about Mexico and about the anti-clerical purges, from a Mexican point of view this time, rather than an English one. I stumble a lot into books about other countries from an English or American perspective. I need to seek out books about those countries from the perspective of people who live there. Greene spent less than a year in Mexico, in 1938.

I felt like we read way too much American contemporary fiction in the MFA program. Occasionally, a Canadian would sneak in and that Canadian was almost always Alice Munro. I understand that you need to know the field that you're trying to publish in. But I got so tired of contemporary American fiction; we read almost nothing in translation. I wasn’t sure if that was because of a mistrust of translation or if it was just an American-centric narrow-mindedness. Anyway, maybe I’ll spend some time reading only books not originally written in English.

awp 2011

i felt like i was floating above myself, disembodied. i went to way too many panels and did not spend enough time in the bookfair or at readings. i was hiding out in the panels. i didn’t want to see anyone from emerson at first; weirdly, i avoided the redivider table. when i finally did go into the bookfair and did go to the redivider table, i realized that i didn’t have enough time for all the things i wanted to see and i realized how much i had missed emerson friends since moving away from boston.

i felt small and sort of lost. my nametag still said “emerson” on it, but i don’t even live in boston anymore. the panels seemed more focused on craft this year, and not so much about jobs and teaching. there were some surprise readings at panels that were supposed to be discussions and a lot of surprise discussions of new media. i loved the panel on linked stories and the panel on rejection.

the panel on tenure track jobs made me want to get a high school teaching certificate.

on the bus on the way back to richmond, i read our island of epidemics by matt salesses, (published by pank) which reminded me of italo calvino’s cosmicomics. it gave me the light, flying feeling that i get when i read playful fiction. i loved it. i also read if you’re not yet like me by edan lepucki (flatmancrooked). i loved the story, “i am the lion now.” it made me think about justin and me, and being happily married. there was so much humor in such small things in that piece--it reminded me to not take myself too seriously. i also read a lot of the new issue of redivider.

when i got back to richmond, i made a big list of journals to submit to. if i wasn’t broke, i would submit to contests.

awp inspired me to keep on writing, reading and submitting, despite not being in an mfa program anymore. looking at all of the small presses at the bookfair reminded me, there is life after the mfa.