La Literati

La Literati MOVES

2011-11-23T12:45:00.004-05:00

Hi friends, La Literati has moved/metamorphosed over to SPEAKING at: www.christeenealcosiba.blogspot.com

All of this blog's previous material has been shifted over as well. Hope to see you over at the new site!

Cheers, and thanks for reading--
Christeene

La Literati Reviews: Six Months, by Josh Olsen

2011-09-23T09:45:00.016-04:00

SIX MONTHS, BY JOSH OLSEN
Tainted Coffee Press, 2011, $10.00
http://zygoteinmycoffee.com/taintedcoffeepress/josholsensixmonths.html

FULL DISCLOSURE: I don’t know how to classify Josh Olsen’s work. Partially that’s because—

1) I am a librarian by trade, and

2) I am not an academic

3) I do not possess a MFA or an Arts & Culture column in the Huffington Post and therefore I do not I feel that I have the subject expertise or authority to wax eloquent on literary genres and the criterion for placing creative works into neatly (or mostly) defined categories.

What I am, however, is a voracious reader and fellow writer. So my stab at articulating what Olsen’s work is comes directly from nuanced—albeit impressionistic—observations of his work against the smorgasbord of things I’ve read and written personally.

Some back story: I first discovered Olsen’s work in New York Quarterly, where his poem “KT and I,” was first featured before finding a home in his debut book, Six Months. As such, I’ve been operating under the assumption that what I’d been reading for the last month was, in fact, poetry. Poetry in the rhythm-and-meter-and-not-prose sense of the word.

FLASH FORWARD TO SEPT. 17, 2011

Imagine my surprise when I hear from the author’s mouth via a BlogTalkRadio podcast that he categorizes the contents of his first book as flash fiction, not poetry. Grrrreat, I thought, I’ve got to rethink my entire book review!

But I’m not going to rewrite the review. I’ve decided, at least for the purposes of this post that Six Months is a collection of prose poems—author distinction be-damned. I suspect, somehow, that the flash fiction label was chosen out of convenience, and not necessarily derived from the firm conviction that what Olsen is consciously creating is fiction, not poetry. Else why submit “KT and I” as a poem to New York Quarterly in the first place?

On my first read, questions surrounding this book persisted beyond superficial ponderings on genre and carried into the collection itself. This pervasive sense of whaddayamakeofthis plagued me. There’s a kind of tension where the reader (at least, this reader) is unsure of how s/he should feel or think about the tone and execution of the material.

Is Olsen being serious? Are these poems about chronic masturbation and diarrhea mere sophomoric shock-jockery, or is there something more going on here?

But before you think I’m throwing this poor man (or his editor) under the bus, you should up know up front that I admire him and what he’s done with Six Months. Because my suspicion is, that beneath the obvious campiness of the book—whose back cover bears the tag line ‘I returned to the womb every six months’—is a poet who is using humor quite slyly, quite heartbreakingly, to wrestle with somber themes of domestic abuse, sexuality, the woes of working-class parenthood, and childhood trauma.

A graduate from the Sharon Olds School of the Earthy-and-Unapologetically-Autobiographical-Body-Celebrators, Olsen comes off as the keeper of dirty little masculine secrets. And I suspect that many readers (particularly young male readers of a certain counter-cultural stripe) will enjoy Olsen for this very reason—for the pure joy of nodding their heads in affirmation of the oft-comical, at times humiliating male libidinal impulse.

Take a cue from a line in the opening poem, “On a Train Back to Michigan” (I’m ignoring line breaks):

“Doubting her consciousness, I took my time eyeing the soft skin of her inner thighs”

AND this line from “Apple Pie”—

“[I] quietly masturbated through a grainy VHS copy of Class of Nuke ‘Em High.”

OR this line from “Last Night’s Ice Storm, (Pt. 1)”—

“I just shaved my pubic hair. Toilet paper clung to the razor nicks on my scrotum.”

I imagine that some people might dismiss this book or find it distasteful because of the incessant genital schtick Olsen keeps returning to. But the appeal, for me anyway, is Olsen’s plainspoken, working-class hero persona and his reckless, at times ridiculous, joie de corps—it’s what makes Six Months a pleasurable, quick read. Some writers are so abstract/academic/avant garde/high-falutin’ that reading their work feels very much like trying to make sense of the ingredients listed on the back of a bag of Doritos; a mostly useless exercise that leaves 97% of the population frustrated and scraping to remember the prefixes they’d forgotten long ago in high school Chemistry.

Josh Olsen is not one of those writers. He lets you have it without affectation.

Further, to counterbalance all the boxing-the-clown shmuh, there are these redeeming lines that belie deeper, more poignant artistic reaching toward the themes I mentioned earlier. Some gems:

*My sexual revolution peaked in the first grade

*Sometimes he confronts me. Asks where I’ve been all this time. Why I’ve been running away.

*Sometimes I wake up feeling guilty. That I should make amends. Should write him a letter and let him meet his grandkids.

*I had not punched a hole in the wall, I pounded

*I waited for the day when Jack would write his poem

*[I] wondered whose god he prayed to

*My daughter’s condition made me feel dirty

*She used to smell cold, like snow or cucumbers

*I forgotabout the condom, stairwell, miscarriage, and Rodney

*He thought I was there to throw my son in the water

AND my personal favorite—taken from the piece “My Fear, My Guilt,” where Olsen pits his own uneasy desires against the biology of his daughter’s young slumber party guests:

“I feared them and their bodies, humming with potential, moments
From bursting, seconds away from something I would desire.”

That’s the zinger for me in this book—when Olsen actually gets down to the marrow of what it is he seemingly wants to talk about as a writer, but never quite indulges fully (presumably because it is either too painful or too personal or against his creative principles to do so).

What I’d like to see in Olsen’s next book is a total shirking of the locker room antics for a more raw examination of the family and parenting dynamics hinted at in this collection.

There’s an exchange from the poem “Carpet” between the poet and his girlfriend KT that I think is particularly to the point (bold added):

““You should write more about your family,” KT suggested.
“But that’s all I ever write about!” I replied, and KT told me that
I had been too gentle.”

KT—I couldn’t agree more. So, what say you Olsen? Let’s dig in.

In short, spend some time with Olsen’s first book. And when you do, what you’ll find is the promising beginnings of a richly human conversation on fatherhood, relationships, the body, and sexual impulse related with a hefty dose of winsome self-deprecation and nervous humor.

WRITERS: Interested in having your book or chapbook reviewed for this website? Email Christeene at laliterati83@gmail.com

Graduation Isn't Enough: Maintaining the Post MLIS Momentum

2011-08-25T10:16:00.015-04:00

For the last three or four months I've done very little but labor over the work for my last semester of library school.

Over the summer I spent many, many caffeine-fueled nights fantasizing about what it would mean to have the leisure to be a total non-thinking slob if I wanted to. Minor jealousy filled my heart as my friends cracked jokes and drank beer at Braves games or lounged in the grass and watched 80's classics at "Screen on the Green" while I sat at home and pondered copyright law. Everything other than school looked sooo good. A veritable buffet of pleasure. So bleak was my work-life balance that I was beginning to drool over the prospect of watching "Keeping Up with the Kardashians" while pile-driving through a bucket of extra crispy.

Then seemingly, out of nowhere, I was marching to "Pomp and Circumstance"/being hooded/ushered down a platform/posing with my degree in front of a camera/and receiving palpitation-inducing exit counseling emails from the Graduate DIRECTPlus Loans office.

My first order of business after graduating was to get out of dodge; so I took a trip Chicago. I stayed up late, got up early. I watched an entire season of "Sex and the City" in one shot in my hotel room while laying in bed in a bathrobe. I met up with some fabulous writer people I know who toured me around their fair city. I read poetry magazines while soaking in a ginormous whirlpool tub and listening to Dvorak and sipping on cheap Shiraz I bought from the 7-Eleven on the corner. Oh the lack of research papers! The joy! The decadence! Yes, that's decadence for a young mother: bath tubs and cheap vino and alone time (shut your face).

But now that that's done, I've been scouring the LIS job boards, and realizing a few things: 1) my Master's degree doesn't make me a desirable candidate, it only makes me minimally qualified, and 2) there are understandable gaps in my education or experience that I need to address (and fast) if I'm going to secure a job in my field.

Instead of poo-pooing the fact that my Master's degree isn't the end-all-be-all of my education as a professional, I'm excited about the challenge of figuring out what I can do to make myself a more nuanced librarian and enticing job applicant.

In this difficult economy, entry-level positions are few and far between and the competition for these coveted spots is marked by more tears and self-loathing than an episode of America's Next Top Model. In fact, a recent article from the San Jose State University LIS program confirms that 26% of all current LIS job listings are at the management level (although as a job-seeker it feels more like 80%). With all of this in mind, I propose 10 ways that others like myself can keep the post-graduation momentum going while applying for that first professional position:

1) Edit, edit, and RE-EDIT your resume or CV. Seriously, dude. Nothing makes you look more not-with-it if you're still rocking the objective statement under your contact information. Or heaven forbid--you misspell something.

2) Labor, labor, labor over your cover letters. Make them personal. Make sure that you address as many of the job responsibilities listed in the job announcements as you are convincingly able. Don't lie or overstate your qualifications. But neither should you assume that because you have a MLS that a potential employer will know you are the goddess of MARC or ILS or children's programming. Customization is also incredibly important because many HR departments now sift through hundreds of applicants by using software that automatically weeds out unqualified candidates based on the number of specified keywords used in cover letters or resumes.

3) Use your nifty new research skills to locate a few research articles written by or about the institutions you'd most like to work for. This info you'll gain by understanding your most choice employer will not only be edifying to you, it will go a long way in creating a dialogue and setting you apart in interviews.

4) Develop your technical acumen by taking a continuing-education IT course or the like. Luddites in the library profession should truly take a reassessment of themselves--or take a Xanax. The future of librarianship is steeped in technology. As for myself, in the coming months I'm dedicated to mastering Drupal (a free website content & development program).

5) Unlock the power of your professional organization. I've joined ALA (American Library Association) and SAA (Society of American Archivists) in the last year, and have only really just started to discover what membership actually means in terms of services and networking opportunities. To the unschooled person, I'd advise: take advantage of any local or regional professional development classes offered by your chosen professional organization. Get on the job listservs. Go to the events and actually get your face in front of your colleagues. Attend conferences where possible. At the very most, this could mean that your name may stand out in a sea of applicants for a future position. At the very least, it could mean that you grow and develop as you exchange ideas and share anecdotes with more established professionals.

6) Position yourself as the chief-muckety-muck of something or other, and develop a website that displays your know-how. Love special collections and archives? Create a blog that discusses the recent acquisition of collections at various institutions, or the need for improved training for new archivists. Love children and teen programming? Think about a starting a website that reviews the best books for those age groups. Get it out there. Think of your internet footprint as a supplement to your resume. Which leads to #7...

7) Safeguard your internet identity. Things happen, as we can all attest--and we are not always able to prevent having the one idiot friend who tags you in a picture wearing a less-than-professional costume while chugging a Hurricane on Bourbon St. in 2001 or whatever. But with that being said, control your Facebook/Myspace (who still uses Myspace?)/Twitter rants/Flickr uploads. Nothing says don't hire me like a person who doesn't understand (or care) about the ramifications of social networking in 2011.

8) Give in to the inner 12 year old that still likes to: write/draw/skateboard/knit scarves in funky colors/collect comics/bake cookies. Developing your hobbies and having fun in a way that is completely unrelated to the field is, I think, a HUGE deal. So many people are so laser-beam focused on being the best worker-bee possible that they forget to be a human-being also. Who wants to hire a bland robot? I don't.

9) Get thee a Mr. Miyagi. You know that cult-classic-amazing-piece-of-cinematic-genius called "The Karate Kid?" If your 80's nostalgia serves you well, you'll remember that Daniel-san couldn't get to that final championship kick without the help of his coach, and a lot of wax-on-wax-off action. What does this mean for professional development? It means you should find your equivalent, a mentor of sorts, to help you along your way. Of course nothing would suit my vanity more than the idea that I didn't need someone older to help me along, but I'd be stupid to think that. We all need a Mr. Miyagi. Immerse yourself into the wide world of librarianship and see who the cool kids are that you can admire; you'd be amazed how many of them will be willing to offer advice when prompted by a (sincere and heartfelt) email.

10) Get some library experience by hook or by crook. If you are already employed in a library somewhere, then thank your lucky stars and go hug a patron. If not: volunteer, get an post-grad internship, a part-time position, something. All experience is valuable, and EXPECTED of you when you apply for that first gig.

The uncanny thing about this is: this plan of action works for nearly any major professional attempting to transition from graduate school to the work force. Substitute a few words and sprinkle in some optimism. Think of anything I've left out? Email me or comment below. Let's start a dialogue and get hired!

Why I Became a Librarian: Notes from the Rose Main Reading Room

2011-07-11T00:48:00.011-04:00

During a recent presentation given by one of my library school colleagues, I was shocked to learned that something like 0.5% of the population determine that they want to enter the library profession before or during college. Most graduate students entering library school do so after having explored or worked in another industry or profession. I mean, I was one of those people. And while I knew that the numbers would be scarce (after all how many kids say 'I wanna be a librarian when I grow up?'), I never imagined they would be *that* scarce.

When I tell people that I'm getting my Master's degree to be a librarian, two questions generally arise: 1) why, and 2) you need a Master's degree to do that? This used to make me wince because I knew that behind those responses was a perplexed person who assumed I was somehow wasting my talent in becoming an information professional because they had absolutely no clue what a librarian actually does. It was like they were basically saying to me: "You want to get a Master's degree so you can check out books for people?!"

Yes, checking out books is sometimes a part of librarianship (and there's nothing wrong with that, you snobs), but that's not the whole story. The childhood stereotype of some four-eyed curmudgeon with an aversion to noise is not the face of modern librarianship. I think part of the problem stems from poor national campaigning and image-shaping by professional organizations within the LIS community. Let me clarify a point: I think organizations such as the ALA have done a fabulous job in national campaigns to discuss the societal impact and value of libraries as institutions. But by comparison they've done a lackluster job of illustrating what information professionals do within that context, especially when compared with the national image-shaping & recruitment campaigns for other professional organizations such as a the American Nursing Association.

My colleague's presentation made me think about why I'd entered this profession, particularly as a minority. Why did I choose to become a librarian in the wide world of options before me? To answer this question, I'd like to share a portion of a reflective essay I completed for my capstone course which discusses what initially drew me to the profession:

"In the fall of 2002 I was a freshman college student renting a room in a squalid apartment in the Southside Bronx while attending SUNY Purchase. I’d left my native Georgia and sojourned to New York carrying dreams of big city life and a career in medicine. And in the spirit of nearly every New York City story, I learned quickly that my fantasies of that great and terrible place were merely preconceived notions derived from the movies, pop culture, and impressionistic observations from previous trips. What I encountered was far beyond my means and capabilities as an inexperienced eighteen year old girl, and by the end of my freshman year of college—I was on the Dean’s list, and essentially homeless. It was during this time of personal and financial turmoil that I took comfort in the New York Public Library, one of the few places in the city that was free and open to the public; and under the frescoed ceiling of the Rose Main Reading room, the seeds of my future profession were planted deep inside of my subconscious.

The New York Public Library represented a kind of refuge for me. When I wasn’t in class, I spent whole days studying or writing poems at one of the long tables in the main reading room, fingering the spines of gilded books in the stacks, or examining the portraits of long-dead aristocrats from New England in the adjoining gallery. On one of these extended visits to the NYPL, I wandered down a hallway of glass-walled rooms where the special collections were housed. From the corridor I watched as white-gloved researchers handled delicate pieces of paper with the same attention and tender care of a mother bathing her infant. At the time I had no concept at all of special collections, the research role of primary records, or the qualifications needed to access such things. But that day made a lasting impression on my young mind: I wanted to be one of those people on the other side of the glass. I didn’t know immediately that I wanted to be a librarian necessarily, but I did know that I wanted to work somewhere like the NYPL—a place where beauty, history, and knowledge was accessible to anyone irrespective of education or socioeconomic status. A place that took seriously its explicit role in the creation and continuum of knowledge and service to a greater societal good."

I share that excerpt only to demonstrate a point. I don't think that one testimony is enough to shift the perception of librarianship, but perhaps several thousand testimonies could? Perhaps if library professionals--and their subsequent organizations--made a concerted effort to share their stories, and spur a national dialogue on how they are touching the lives of individuals in ways that are comparably value-added and intimate as other professions, we will see greater library school enrollment, a better societal understanding of the profession, and political shifts in the understanding of libraries and librarianship as fundamental to the cultural and intellectual growth and sustainability of our nation.

What Color Parachute Would You Like?

2011-06-08T10:30:00.016-04:00

I feel like 27 is some sort of critical age. Which is a stupid 27-yr-old thing to say, I know, but it *feels* true nonetheless. The truth is EVERY age is a critical age, but it is only now that I'm starting to feel like possibility and limitation are scaled in equal measure before me. And that is an entirely new prospect for many people in their late twenties.

What I mean is this: you never tell a 5 year old that they're being unrealistic when they say they want to be an astronaut/President of the United States/ballerina/doctor/pirate/NBA star/firefighter. Our own cynicism might quietly *think it*, but, for all you know that freakin' kid MIGHT ACTUALLY DO IT. Who knows? Life is before them. Possibility outweighs limitation. But at 27, the field narrows. What was once an open meadow is now this scraggly little path winding up Work Mountain.

But the funny thing is, I'm finding this narrowing to be a sort of blessing.

I have a dear friend who is pulling his hair out trying to decide what to do with the rest of his life. Ah, that question: what to do, what to DO with our remaining youth, our remaining work years? He's prayed. He's discussed. He's researched. He's sought counsel. What he hasn't done, in my humble opinion, is be quiet. Quiet enough to have an objective discussion with himself. All of his understandable fretting has made me think about my own career trajectory, and in retrospect I find it ironic that my true passions were illuminated only after I recognized and accepted the limitations I have. I had to have the cajones to be painfully honest with myself and my desires before I could start reaping any joy from the work that was, in fact, sucking up my youth.

For me, teaching was a disaster. Not because I wasn't good at it, or because I didn't like the kids, or because the pay was bad (and it was). I LOVED my students, and by all accounts I was a stellar teacher. But, and here's the thing, I felt like I was extinguishing some essential part of me in order to do it. If it had been my "calling" all of that work would have been nutritious for my soul instead of draining, taxing, toxic. This is not to say that our passions should come easily, but rather, the work that comes as a result should grow us, feed us.

The narrowing of the field has helped me to zero in on what I want my life to look like, really. Not what I think my life should look like. And for the first time, I'm starting to see glimpses of the dreams I began as a girl. At fifteen I read and fell in love with The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. At 22 I taught this book to my 9th grade students. And now, at 27, I've received a note from Sandra Cisneros herself saying she loves my poems, lauds my future in writing. How else could that have happened, ever, if I hadn't been honest with myself about my desire to become a poet no matter how daft it made me look to other people?

I may never achieve any measure of *success* where writing is concerned. And I am, in fact, a no-name in the publishing world. But I'm totally okay with that because I am living a life that looks and feels exciting to me. Thank God the field is narrow for me now. Thank God I've had the good fortune of falling on my face hard enough to know now what I want. Bring on my thirties and beyond: I'm ready to run through them, torch in hand.

Pity Party for One, Anyone?

2011-04-21T09:23:00.022-04:00

I've kept a journal since I was probably...10? For the last 17 years, I've chronicled every awkward phase (or, I should say, every phase of a perpetually awkward life), every heartbreak and new love, nearly every vacation, most of my harebrained book ideas/poem drafts/sketches of random strangers on NYC subways. My diary has been with me on the bank of the Seine, the beaches of Hawaii, and in the hospital room where my daughter was born. My diary contains the eulogy I wrote and read at my father's funeral.

I think it's a peculiar thing that people should even have the impulse to journal. Some might think it is an inherently narcissistic motivation--this desire to archive the minutiae of one's existence. Who, after all, stands to benefit from your illegible musings besides you? But narcissism or not, I was incredibly grateful for my journals the other night when I was in the midst of a pity party for one.

I've been in a weird place professionally and creatively. An odd purgatory where I've had enough success or achievement to lodge a foot in the door, but not enough to actually be invited in. Last week I was battling a hefty double punch of self-pity: I'd received two rejection emails from literary magazines I was hoping to publish in, and I was dealing with an unmitigated sense of loser-ness in the prospect of my future career as an academic librarian.

And as I retreated to my journal to commemorate it, I noticed that I only had one page left to write. Not only that, I was finishing my journal EXACTLY a year to the date that I'd started it. I figured it was a sign. Divine intervention. So I gave the first entry a reread.

What I wrote about myself was this, "For what purpose am I here? Failed poet and sappy diarist. Overblown ego and burning heart."

That one line in particular, "failed poet," prompted me to read my diary from start to finish. I wanted to know if that statement still felt true a year later.

What I realized after reading my diary was this: I had grown tremendously as a woman, as a writer in the past year. When I wrote those things I was coming from a place of brokenness having made the difficult decision to leave my teaching career behind, and feeling insecure in my capabilities as a writer. But in the year since I penned those statements I wrote two manuscripts worth of poems, won a poetry prize, secured publications in three fantastic literary journals, nearly completed a Master's degree, and conquered some personal issues that had been previously crippling.

That's when it hit me--this understanding of the transformative power of journaling--the unique treasure of being able to rediscover yourself and grow from the retrospective examination of who you were, are, or wanted to be at any given point in your own personal history. As my pastor likes to say, "That's good stuff." Good stuff indeed.

I felt reborn after rereading the ups and downs of the previous year. I was ready to become my own cheerleader. I was ready to steam forward into my next journal, and whatever next phase lay ahead of me with some genuine joy in my heart. For my last entry, instead of lamenting my rejection slips and lack of professional security--I wrote a list of specific ways I had grown over the last year, and another list of traits I'd like to develop in myself going forward.

Page one might read "failed poet," but the final page has yet to be written.

What the National Archives is Teaching Me About the Disaster in Japan

2011-03-18T10:00:00.041-04:00

Given the recent tragedy in Japan, and the impending nuclear crisis that resulted--I find a sense of amorphous History haunting me as I process the records from the Manhattan Project as a volunteer for the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

Something that's always fascinated me as a writer, student, and just as a human being in general, is the notion of History being omnipresent, or not even really History at all.

What I mean is, when I touched the cold limestone of the Notre Dame in Paris, I thought of plague victims from the 14th century leaning their feverish bodies against the same cool exterior. I thought of Napoleon Bonaparte walking down the center aisle in an ermine robe, snatching the crown from Pope Pius VII and placing it on his own head. When I interlace my stubby brown fingers with my husband's long pale white fingers and walk down the streets of Atlanta, I know that perhaps some of the eyes that see this small act of public intimacy also witnessed the protests and death it took to allow it. None of those things that we call 'History' seems very far away from me, from my life as a woman living in 2011.

In my hot little hand yesterday, I held a blue print that showed the nuclear reactor used in Oak Ridge, Tennessee to process the Uranium needed to power the first atomic bomb, dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. Later that same day, I went home and scrolled through images, and read in-depth commentary on the Fukushima nuclear reactors threatening to wreak havoc unseen since Chernobyl.

The images of Japanese men and women crying over leveled homes gave me chills. It was like time woke up from a feverish nightmare repeated again with slightly different details:

Hiroshima, 1945
Courtesy of Million Face

Miyagi Prefecture, 2011
Courtesy of Business Insider

Since I began processing this collection, I've gone through hundreds of pieces of paper that might seem mundane to the average person--shipment records, correspondences, charts and tables, blue prints. But the reality of it is this, History (if we can call it that) is made through a conglomeration of individual acts. It so rarely occurs as a result of an unprecedented earthquake, but when it does, we are still tested by the weight of our smallest decisions.

I feel very differently today about nuclear technology and the ramifications of our work as Americans in the Manhattan Project. Not just because of the problems Japan faces now, but certainly in light of them. A sense of remorse. A sense of unease. A sense of we-can-do-better-than-this. There are 50 or so Japanese workers risking life and limb right now to try to exterminate the nuclear reactors that threaten their nation. They, and their countrymen are being tested by their daily acts of service, community, and sacrifice. I am inspired by that, truly, and I feel like we could learn something from that here in America.

If it is in your power, or realm of concern, considering donating to a fund that you trust that is working to provide aid to disaster victims in Japan such as MercyCorp or Unicef.

Let us not be the generation that idly grieves when we might act. Passive sympathy is as inexcusable as active cruelty. At the very least, let us be the generation that respects History as a living thing that we participate in and can change.

Oh Writer's Block, Thou Art a Black Dog from Hell

2011-02-16T09:03:00.025-05:00

What are you supposed to do when the inspiration just sort of...stops?

From March to December 2010, I wrote about 250 poems. That's an average of 27.77777778 poems per month--just shy of a poem a day. We had a good run, me and poetry. This creative burst came after years of neglecting poetry in the wake of endless academic papers, lesson plans, reports, and email. I never made that choice consciously, to stop writing poetry--but being a good little student and careerist, poetry seemed like a selfish indulgence.

But then I attended a writers conference, my first, and I arrived ready to go to battle: with two fully-groomed non-fiction book proposals, business cards, a binder of writing samples, and my best I'm-a-serious-but-hip-writer-glasses a la Jonathan Franzen. I had a couple of promising bites for my book proposals, but it was the poetry that stood out the most for the editors I met, particularly one who was kind enough to actually sit and talk shop for an entire hour. My poetry? But those were the writing samples I had shoved in the binder at the last minute to show "range." I was nominated for the conference poetry award, and while I didn't win, it was an awakening of sorts. It reminded me of who my first love was, and had always been. That was the beginning of our love affair.

Luckily poetry had not divorced me in favor of someone who took her more seriously over the years.

And now, nearly a year after that fateful conference, I find myself writing blog entries during my hallowed poetry time. Every time I've tried to put any poems down the last 7 weeks or so, I've hated them. Hated them. They've felt forced/trite/too-overworked/too aware of themselves/too you're a sad woman with an English degree stop kidding yourself.

So I'm left with the question, what do you do when you hit this wall? Some thoughts:

1) Talk to other writers--I've met some A-mazing writers in the last year. Both in the academic circuit and online. People that I feel privileged to have met, and I know to a great extent that this will benefit me in the long run. Not so much because of the obvious networking piece, but more because I believe when great minds interact a piece of them is taken away in the other. It's a kind of magic osmosis, a blending and rejecting of ideas, aesthetics, and principles that might have never occurred to you, sitting alone in front of your laptop.

2) Go do something other than writing for a bit: This is not to say that you shouldn't continue to labor on your writing in some way daily, but I think it's good to add something new to the mix. Any good trainer will tell you that you will hit a weight-loss plateau after awhile. Usually this is cured by adding new elements to the workout regiment. What will this look like for me? Well, let's just say I have my first session with Sheneka Rosser trainer extraordinaire this coming Saturday. Have you ever seen a morbidly obese half-Asian female poet? Well have you?! No. Not gonna happen here. Facebook/Google images has officially killed the whole illusion that you can be a writer who cares nothing for your appearance. You don't have to be a sex symbol, but you can't look like the uni-bomber either. I know how shallow that sounds, but it seems naive or deceptive to tell a writer otherwise.

3) Get cozy with the business end of writing: Writing is like a mullet, dude. You can't have the party in the back without the business in the front. It isn't a mullet if you take one or the other away. When the muse departs, it's a perfect time to get to business--start studying literary mags you admire, reading articles by their editors, following AND commenting on industry blogs, becoming a part of the dialog in some way.

4) Stay positive: This is SO easy to tell someone else. I've told my writerly friends, "Hey, you're in a gathering season right now, that's all." Now it's time to put my money where my new-age mouth is. And I will remind myself that you can't write like you're on fire all the time or we'd all be dead by 25. And I will remind myself that I should like to sustain the fire over a lifetime. And I will I espouse the model of Sharon Olds over Sylvia Plath where life-writing-sanity-balance is concerned.

And that is precisely what I will do until inspiration rockets down into my brain like brimstone. In the interim, pass the 10lb weights--I'm busy getting ready for my new purple tankini.

*What do you do when you hit writer's block--I mean, your "gathering season"?

La Literati Interviews: Anthony Madrid

2011-02-01T09:33:00.022-05:00

I first noticed Chicago-based poet Anthony Madrid in AGNI online. His poem "If I Am a Total Washout as a Lover (and I Am)" lured me in with its playfulness and tongue-and-cheek wit; but it was his latest manuscript, The 580 Strophes that set the hook deep in my throat.

Can I get an amen for trite-but-otherwise-apt fishing metaphors? Amen. Forget it. You'll amen me after you spend some time with his poetry. Read on, take notes:

Q: One of the things that initially struck me about your poems was this sense of highbrow finesse that was accessible to the "common" reader—a reader perhaps not initially aware of some of the allusions you incorporate. It seems to me that many poets pander to either academia or the plainspoken, whereas your poems have the potential to please both, aesthetically. Is this a conscience effort? Do you consider who will receive your poems when you write them?

You're talking about all those literary allusions. I'll tell you what that is. That's my having been fucked up for life by reading T.S. Eliot when I was a junior in high school. All those footnotes, back of The Wasteland—? That stuff looked to me like this great big heap of unbetterable awesomeness. And still pretty much does. I—don't really expect to recover.

So, no, I'm not conscious of any balancing act. I just write what I like. Like every other good little twit out there.

Q: You've got an impressive list of publication credits—snagging coveted spots in AGNI, Boston Review, Iowa Review, Poetry, and Copper Nickel among others. Do you have any wisdom to impart for poets attempting to break into the world of these competitive journals?

Ha. Copper Nickel looks funny in that list.

Do I have any wisdom to impart. I don't. Every one of those acceptances was a Slush Pile Special. Nobody had heard of me. I was nothing. Which I still pretty much am.

I can tell you what I did, though. It's stupid. I wrote the whole book first, and then sent all those poems out at once. Theory was that I would suddenly be everywhere. "Who is this guy?" and so on. Classic naive shit. That was 2008.

But then good things started happening. I got picked up at Web Conjunctions early. That's good visibility. It's how Robert and Mary found me. And then there was AGNI Online. I think Chris saw me there. Poetry was maybe a year later.

All this is irrelevant. There are gazillions of people who have been in all those places and it doesn't mean jack.

Q: Why poetry? Why you? And why do you refer to yourself in the 3rd person so frequently?

Ay ay ay.

Why poetry/why me. The real reason I got into poetry is 'cuz I was very, very vain about the expressiveness of my talk, all through my childhood. I liked that, and I liked my handwriting—but that's it. I had no other sources of satisfaction. I looked like shit; I didn't have an idea in my skull; I was perpetually excusing myself so I could go into the bathroom and cry with rage. Need I say more? Anyone answering this description would become a poet.

Now, why third person. Oh, that's just this good thing I got from the Urdu poetry I worship. All those guys with their ghazals, they end their poems with these sudden shifts into third person. Berryman of course does this too, and everybody goes into total bliss. I don't know why it's so good, but it is. And so I do it.

Q: You've said previously that poets should consider, if not rely on, being read and experienced aloud. Some people might disagree with this, as the majority of poetry's consumption happens between a solitary reader and the printed word. Why do you think it's important to construct a poem with oration in mind?

Oh, I don't want to insist on this point. There's all kinds of perfectly good stuff that would never in a million years work at a reading, and that's fine. All I'm saying is I know ALL THESE PEOPLE who are so fun and exciting in real life, and will write you emails crackling w/wit and drama and opinion and all the rest of it, and then you turn to their poetry and it's like this soup of evenly-distributed hydrogen atoms. No fun, no drama, no opinion, no one's talking, and nothing is being said. But I think if these poets would just take the presentation-before-a-live-audience thing seriously, and write as if the idea was that you have to get out there and kick the ball down the field and then fffooompf put it in the net, maybe this whole poetry operation wouldn't look like such a drag half the time.

Q: Your latest work is called The 580 Strophes. For the non-English majors, explain what a strophe is, and why you want to change modern poetic form with it?

Part 1. What is a strophe. Strophes are when the poem is made out of a buncha same-sized scoops of talk, all in a row. Think verses in a song. Verse, verse, chorus, verse—this kind of thing. The verses are strophes.

A strophe is not the same thing as a stanza, though. 'Cuz you can have a poem where the stanzas are all totally irregular in length. The point of "strophic structure" is you get a rhythm going:

blah blah blah blah blah blah BLAH?
blah blah blah blah blah blah BLAH!

blah blah blah blah blah blah BLAH?
blah blah blah blah blah blah BLAH!

and so on. The whole point is the rhythm. Once you get it going, it actually seems annoying to break with it. This is somehow the nature of rhythm.

Part 2. Why do I think strophic structure is going to save the world. Basically? because people secretly want poetry to be rhythmic. That is my sincere belief. I'm not saying metrical; I'm saying rhythmic. They want the poet to jump in the hole and start shoveling out same-sized scoops of neat talk. It's just good to do that. But people are ashamed of it. They think, Oh well that's boring, that's monotonous. Yeah, well, if it is, how come songs are all like that, and it's not a problem there?

Rhyme too! People love that shit; they just don't know it. And since they're all terrified that they might be doing something their MFA guru would sneer at, they write these poems that look like blackboards at MIT. Oh boy, aren't we all having fun being "interesting"—! Except it sucks.

(I hate every last one of the "New Formalists," by the way, so don't start getting ideas. My la-la here has nothing to do with "participating in a tradition" or "proving you're a disciplined craftsman" or any of that. It's all about rhythm and rhyme as drugs. That's their justification; that's their glory. Anything beyond that issues directly from the Devil's anus.)

Q: You get to take credit for having written one poem in history. What is it, and tell us why.

That's easy. I'd like to have written Ecclesiastes. King James Version, babe. There's stuff in there that causes me to squirt tears, virtually every time I look at it. And I look at it all the time. That and Revelation are like favorite CDs I take down and play whenever I need a lift.

(Better mention: I have no religion.)

Q: What should Madrid fans keep their eyes on, going forward? What's your next move/project/piece?

"Madrid fans." That's rich. (Hi, Mom! How did you find this blog?)

Actually, I'll tell ya, my "next project" is → I want that book out. The 580 Strophes. I need that thing published, and I need to get the hell out of grad school. If I could have those two wishes, I don't need a third.

Madrid, as I have come to call him, is quite modest considering what he is doing with his poetry. In a poetic climate where writers tend to either rebel from the perceived pompousness of the high-brow, or run to impress/outdo other career writers without pausing to welcome the unwashed masses, Madrid's poetry offers something savory to both the ultra-violet academic and the unschooled lover of words. Something that is exciting, fresh, and within the confines of a consistent poetic form. Something that is, at times, simultaneously campy and high art. My advice? Keep your eye on Madrid. You won't be disappointed.

Finding Stories in Unexpected Places

2010-12-23T15:28:00.060-05:00

You know those random papers you have laying around your house? Tax forms, loan records, letters, paycheck stubs? That stuff is History. No, really. The everyday paper stash of our lives tells the story of our time, although it may not be all that apparent at first glance.

Recently I've begun volunteering for the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) as an archival assistant. I've just finished my first project--creating a database of WWI Navy enlistee records from Port Royal, South Carolina. This is the first time I've had the opportunity to process records like these, and I came away with so much.

Some things I've learned from the WWI enlistee records:

1) Everything you own can be listed on one page: When an enlistee deserted or died, a full inventory of his possessions was made. Items generally included military-issue clothing, toiletries, and a few letters. What stayed with me is this realization that what we leave behind physically is incredibly transitory and insignificant compared to the life we've lived.

2) Military tedium can teach us a little about how to run our business: Part of the records included a weekly and monthly report of strengths and weaknesses, and a detailed account of how many soldiers were present, sick, needed, and the general quality of operations at Port Royal. There was a system of perpetual self-assessment that nearly any individual or business would do well to mimic. There is this quote by Robert Brault that sort of summarizes this, "Know thyself, or at least keep renewing the acquaintance." Any institution or individual that ever made any real progress was willing to do the difficult work of looking in the mirror. A lot.

3) Self-descriptions are telling: Technically this is not a part of the records I processed, but it's worth mentioning. NARA is the official repository for the national collection of WWI draft registration cards. The cool thing is that they have the registration cards of some very famous (and infamous) people--Al Capone, T.S. Eliot, Rudolph Valentino, and Robert Frost among others. The way registrants describe themselves is interesting. Harry Houdini, godfather of magicians, listed himself as an "actor" under occupation. That's a revealing statement isn't it? Actor? Self-descriptions can be incredibly poignant, even if they are somewhat inaccurate; particularly in retrospect. How might Hitler have described himself? A painter and idealist?

4) After everything else is gone, stories remain: I've gone through approximately 200+ enlistee cards and files, but what stays with me are the stories. The deserters. The soldiers casted-off into government hospitals for the insane. The suicide cases. The nineteen-year-old enlistee who died in a bar fight. The immigrant enlistees who came to America and earned medals for outstanding service to the U.S. Navy. Through these seemingly banal records, letters, and reports--our collective American history unfolds like a beautiful hidden flower. Lives come off the paper for me when I find someone with my birthday, hailing from my hometown, or bearing a 'Death Before Dishonor' tattoo. The time between generations seems so much smaller, and I am inspired, having found so many stories in unexpected places. I think this is the reason why genealogy becomes so encompassing for many people, because of this sense of connection despite the continuum of time.

The WWI enlistee records I mentioned will be available to researchers and genealogists soon. If you're a History enthusiast or just a curious onlooker like myself, come on down to NARA and take a look. You may find much, much more than you anticipated.

The Face of Homelessness

2010-12-17T11:37:00.034-05:00

"We must live together as brothers, or perish together as fools."

-Martin Luther King Jr.

This week the temperature in Atlanta dropped to an unprecedented low for this time of the year, clocking in at 15 degrees Fahrenheit this past Tuesday morning. Walking to work from my car, completely unprepared for the sudden shock of winter weather, I could only think: how do the homeless do it?

The truth is I already knew the answer to this question, in part, because I've been homeless. Twice in fact. I am the face of homelessness.

When I was a young child, about 2 or 3, my mother and I were homeless for awhile. I don't really remember it, but my mother has told me stories of us sleeping in her car. The lights and rattling of the city bus would frighten me, so she'd place a blanket over my head at night to help me sleep. In the morning we'd wake, and wash ourselves in a Taco Bell bathroom.

As an undergraduate student, after a series of unfortunate financial and personal circumstances, I found myself homeless again. I was an Honors student sleeping on the subway. Every penny I had, I scraped together to afford the 2.5 hour bus ride to and from college, and the occasional item from the dollar menu to feed myself. During the day I walked around New York City visiting free places like St. John's cathedral or the NYPL to stay warm. Luckily I still managed to look presentable, or even these luxuries would have been denied to me by well-meaning security guards protecting patrons or customers from the uncomfortable reminder of poverty in their midst. Now I work at one of the finest research institutions in the world. I go home everyday to a comfortable and modest house. I am well-fed and have insurance and the luxury of time to be able to write. I'm nearly finished with my Master's degree.

I say this not to brag about some arduous journey that I've come through victoriously, but rather, to say I could very well be homeless again. And so could you.

Lately I've learned that Atlanta, my own city, has the highest rate of homeless children in America. I've also recently read about the alarming increase of tent cities across America. In Florida alone there are a projected 8,000 people living in the woods near Disney World. While tourists spend nearly $100 in admission for the privilege of playing in a fantasy world, 8,000 people live in the shadows of Cinderella's castle in pop-up tents, cooking their food in coffee cans. Please understand, I am not condemning people for wanting a good time. But I do feel that there must be some sort of coming together as a society, or we will perish.

I don't know where I am going with this post emphatically, other than to say that something's got to change in this country. We need to wake up. Stop bum-rushing stores and trampling each other for gizmos from China, and start looking at each other, talking to each other again. Start helping one another with the same voracity we use to please ourselves. Not just because it's cold outside. Not just because it's nearly Christmas. But because our collective fate is determinant upon it. Because it's time to be human again. Because the true success of our lives is measured by what we do to help one another chip away at the overwhelming struggle that life guarantees.

One small step we can take is to understand the face of homelessness. It is not always the crazed beggar on the train, or the limbless veteran downtown that you give change to on occasion. It is families. Children. Someone's impoverished grandma. It could be the Honors student you sit next to in class. It could very well be you.

Check out this article by The Huffington Post about tent cities in America.

Get the latest facts about poverty in America.

Connect with a local charity you care about.

Say 'No' to the extravagant and indulgent lifestyle we've come to accept as the American Dream, and live within your means.

Dear Self: How About for Christmas You Stop Being an Egotistical Schmuck? Okay? Ok.

2010-12-07T16:06:00.018-05:00

I think I've been going about this the wrong way. And by "this," I mean of course, writing, and life in general.

I just turned 27 a few days ago, and it's admittedly freaked me out (just a little). Naturally, the addition of each year forces us in some way to do a retrospective, a self-survey of our lives to some degree. Am I where I want to be? Am I WHO I want to be? The answer to that is 'yes' and 'no.' It's both.

I don't know that I can agree that 'art for art's sake' is enough, is a sufficient raison d'etre for writing any more. There is absolutely no lack of egotists stroking their neuroses with a pen. For the sake of hearing themselves talk out loud. For the sake of someone else's praise. For the sake of deluding themselves into believing they are enlightening the reader with something original or revolutionary or avant garde when there is nothing new under the sun. Their writing, their accomplishments serve absolutely no greater purpose than to congratulate (or exonerate) the person behind the pen.

I have been one of those people I condemn.

I don't think writers start out this way. I think true writers write because they must. Why else would you force yourself upon something that seems so unnecessary and generally snickered at in this world of quantitative urgency? Somewhere along the way, certainly as a writer's profile increases, we forget that our words have actual power to help people, to transform culture. Our skills can be used for more than self-glory, as more than a blanket to warm our past hurts and wrongs.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I want to do something more than glorify myself with that I do.

There is a quote by Swami Vivekananda that I admire:

"Do not stand on a high pedestal and take 5 cents in your hand and say, 'here, my poor man,' but be grateful that the poor man is there, so by making a gift to him you are able to help yourself.It is not the receiver that is blessed, but it is the giver."

I've spent too much time trying to bless myself through accomplishment and recognition, and felt altogether emptier as a result. I don't have a ton of money. I have enough, and for that I'm grateful. But what I do have are a few chapbooks and a certain skill set. So what I propose is this:

1) From now until the end of January, 100% of all sales from my chapbook, Desir, will benefit "Celebrating Angels, One Cupcake at a Time." Celebrating Angels is a not-for-profit organization that hosts cupcake parties for children in Atlanta-area homeless shelters. In addition to cupcakes, Celebrating Angels also donates much-needed seasonal items such as school supplies and winter coats. For every book purchased at $5.00, I will match by $2.00. Whatever I collect by February 1st will be donated, in full, to the organization. See below for purchasing info.

2) I will offer my skills as a former English teacher for FREE tutorial services. I am willing to assist 2-3 middle or high school students on Saturday mornings for help in English, History, and test-prep/study skills. Email me for details: laliterati83@gmail.com

3) I will also extend an offer to help with reviewing or editing resumes or CV's. Please email me with the document attached to the address above. I am happy to do basic copy-editing and/or give suggestions for revision, GRATIS.

This is by no means a permanent solution to the dilemma of ego and art, but it is at least, a small light. A small move to remember that any talent I have, however large or small, is undeserved. It does not originate in me, or for me.

To purchase a copy of Desir, send $5.00 cash or money order to:
Christeene Fraser
Emory University
Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library
540 Asbury Circle
Atlanta, GA 30322

You're So Vain, I Bet You Think This Status Update is About You

2010-11-23T11:17:00.057-05:00

Hello. My name is Christeene, and I'm a Facebook junkie.

After an entire work day of staring at a computer, I came home the other night and fired up my laptop for an extended YouTube/Facebook/piddly waste of time extravaganza. I wanted to unwind from my long day of exhaustive computer usage with...more computer usage.

[Enter toddler, stage left]

My daughter ran in the living room, circling the coffee table in her brand new plastic play heels and hot pink tutu. "Mama, can I sit with you?" she asked. Before I could respond she plunked down next to me on the couch, sucking her middle fingers while I looked at a friend's family vacation photos. She asked, "Who's that, Mama?" when it hit me: I was looking at pictures of other people's children while my own sat next to me, ignored.

I snapped the laptop shut, and proceeded to make a jerk of myself for her entertainment for the next two hours. But I have to admit, and here is the ugly truth: some small part of me hesitated momentarily, as though this were an actual choice that required thought or sacrifice.

Recently my brother told me he was writing a research paper about social networking for his Communications class. "What about it?" I asked, to which he summarized, "Basically about how social networking sites gimp us as humans." Well said, Plato, well said. Gimps, indeed. I couldn't agree more.

But what is it about social networking sites that "gimps" us as flesh and blood people, communicators?

Some people argue that social networking sites are the penultimate tools of the narcissist. Where else can you update your friends on the completely useless minutiae of your day? Where else can you carelessly broadcast every idiotic or base thought that crosses your mind? I am not exempt from this. It's just an observation. You know the old adage, "God gave us two ears and one mouth so we could listen twice as much as we speak?" Well, He also gave us ten fingers to type, and those bad boys can construct atom bombs in 140 characters or less. Just ask chief-foot-in-mouth tweeters John Mayer and Kanye.

Now we can snipe and ponder and proselytize via status update, the Reader's Digest version of conversation. Thank God there was no Facebook when I was in high school lest every embarassing moment, ill-conceived blurb, or compromising picture haunt me ad infinitum.

So why even bother with these things?

I think there's something fundamentally human about the need for connection. Even the biggest misanthrope wants connection, or at the very least a sense of being "understood" by someone outside of him/herself. Social networking sites give people just that, or, at least they give us a possibility of connection. In many cases, Facebook has allowed me to reunite with family members and old school friends I might have never have spoken to again after life took us on our separate paths. Indeed, I even know two couples (former sweethearts) who reunited over Facebook and were consequently married. But for every reunion and joyous reconnection, there are countless stories of Facebook or Myspace as the impetus for many empty and false relationships, bullying, strained friendships, and in some cases, divorce.

It's not just social networking sites, it's the whole way we communicate as a generation. Text messaging has made me all ancy about phone calls, even with people I know well. Admittedly, I will silence a call and reply with a sufficiently witty text message later if at all possible. Despite the false appearance of the instant update, we've in essence taken the spontaneity out of communication and relationships in an effort to put our best faces forward; and in many instances end up looking and behaving even more foolishly, and feeling more empty, I think, in the long run.

The problem lies when this virtual life replaces or supercedes the actual one; when writers/teenagers/businesses begin to believe the things that are said to or about them online; when our time and energy is directed toward posting family pictures depicting a happy life instead of living one out. Of course I don't think social networking is 'The Devil,' or the next great social ill. It is what you make of it. Most of us, unfortunately, make too much of it.

I propose a detox.

I think over the Thanksgiving holiday, I will NOT allow myself to access Facebook, MySpace (yes, I still have one), or Twitter. I want to take this opportunity to be totally present for my family, whatever that entails, as we sit at my mom's house and salivate over the turkey. If I want to communicate with someone else not physically present, I'll call them (holy panic attack, Batman).

Now if you'll excuse me, before I detox, I need to make sure this blog post is linked to all three of my social networking sites...

Stop Waiting, Start Living

2010-11-16T02:32:00.014-05:00

"My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends. It gives a lovely light."

--Edna St. Vincent Millay

I don't think I've ever simultaneously neglected and nurtured myself to this extent. Let me explain. For the first time in my life, I feel like something is actually on the horizon because I'm consciously putting it there. And that requires a lot, metabolically speaking.

The future is not this amorphous thing, even though I have no idea what will happen to me in the next hour. Of course if I don't unexpectedly keel over from an aneurysm, there will be work, and the commute home, dinner made for my family, and bed time stories for Ava. But I guess what I mean is, I am conscious of the future I am creating for myself: repercussions, pains, pleasures, and all. I'm writing this after having stayed up until 3 am to finish homework, so maybe the overdose of caffeine and the lovely crisp weather is making me grandiose, but I don't think so.

I'm tired of waiting for my Hollywood ending, for life to come banging on my door as if it is obligated to me alone.

In August of 2009, I looked at my father in a casket.I held the weight of his body in a box, poured his ashes into the ocean. He was 45. And as trite and common as this may sound to many, something inside of me snapped. My father told me once that he wanted to be an architect. He wanted to build things, be both an artist and a mathematician. In no way do I believe that his life was wasted or cheapened because he did not do those things. It's just that, I know how bitter that was for him at times, knowing that he could have had something else, something more.

The last year, I have nearly broken myself apart living my life. I rarely sleep. I've gotten down to about 1 or 2 meals a day, max, because I'm writing every chance I get. There are days and even whole weeks where I feel so burdened by school obligations and life and my own self that I cannot talk to people. BUT. And here it is:

I am alive.

I will not waste my time chasing down retirement. If this means living a life that is odd or inconvenient to some, so be it. What extraordinary person ever lived a life that looked like a carbon copy of someone elses'? Some people may call me crazy for it, but I'm telling you what's crazy is living like you have time. For me it is writing, but for someone else it could be starting a family or a business. Maybe it's a mission trip you keep sweeping under the rug, or a move to another state. Or a job that you hate but are too fearful to leave. What really is our excuse when the smallest, most insignificant thing could end our lives this very hour? Perhaps the best thing we can do to combat the grave--even over and above diet and exercise--is pursuing a life worth living now. Mistakes. Scars. Memories. Relationships. Art. Even if it means making ourselves look ridiculous from time to time.

We are candles, light. Impractical and beautiful things. Candles are useless if they sit in the cupboard waiting for a power outage. Candles were meant to burn. And burn I will.

A Girl's Girl

2010-11-07T12:19:00.012-05:00

Surely you've heard of the expression, "He's a man's man." This implies that a man has certain qualities that makes him lovable by other men.

Usually this involves some sort of hard cowboy stoicism, a certain sense of humor, a notable knowledge of "man things" like sports statistics or vintage cars. He holds his liquor well, is good with the ladies, he's respected by other men, has a sense of fashionable edginess without looking like an overly-coifed metrosexual. You know, he's a dude the other dude's want to be, or at least be friends with.

So what's the woman's equivalent? What qualifies someone as a 'girl's girl' or a 'woman's woman?'

From my experience, a girl's girl is someone who:

1) Is attractive without being threatening or overly sexy. In other words, she escapes the skank factor. This is a big one. Because most women want to better themselves with friends who will propel them into the next category, without constantly worrying if their spouses secretly lust over their gal pals.

2) Her house is just so. Do I even need to explain this one? No.

3) She wants babies, lots of babies. Or at least, she publicly pines over all things motherhood in a way that rivals only her husband's rabid love of SEC football. Because this, apparently, is the fruition of womanhood. And of course one child is never enough. One child forces her to ask the question, "So when are you going to have another one?"

4) She is smiley. In fact, the probability of being a girl's-girl increases with the size of and the frequency by which you flash your pearly whites. Think Julia Roberts toothiness. She played a prostitute in "Pretty Woman" and still audiences perceived her as wholesome as granny's apple pie every time she bared those mega-watt chompers.

5) She does not have a past. Or if she has an unsavory history, it is one that makes her look enduring in a June Carter, Lifetime movie sort of way.

6) She is good with correspondences: think thank you cards, holiday cards, birthday cards, scrapbook pages, etc...

7) She has a well-stocked purse. Need a tissue/nail file/safety pin/tampon/ironing board/tire iron/vintage off-white cameo pin? This girl has it all in her Kate Spade. Eat your heart out Mary Poppins.

8) She is better than all of your friends in at least one hobby. Bonus points if she is a) a militant jogger or triathlete, b) insane coupon-clipper, c) yoga instructor, d) culinary queen, or e) a combination of two of the above.

9) She looks effortless in ridiculous trends. Somehow she manages to be the one person on earth who doesn't look like bloated roadkill while wearing jeggings and faux-fur wrap.

10) Other girls like her, and she likes other girls. The majority of her friends are other women (mostly) like her. Because girl's-girls tend to attract one another.

I've brought a good deal of suffering down on myself wanting to be a girl's-girl. I've always known that I wasn't one. My throw pillows are not perfectly fluffed, or even necessarily matching. My nail polish chips almost instantly. Sometimes I go a little overboard on cleavage or eyeliner or high heels, or all of the above at once. I loathe baby showers. I am terribly uncomfortable in groups of women. I've got a past that may land me a movie deal with HBO, not Lifetime. I'd rather fish than go on a girl's getaway. But that's okay. The strange thing is, I've recently made a few girlfriends because of church, and they are ALL girl's-girls, and they're...wonderful. I've learned at least that there is room for us all. The girl's-girls and the...well, others, like me.

NOTE Celebrity girl's-girls include: Reese Witherspoon, Gwenyth Paltrow, Julie Roberts, Kristin Chenoweth, Meg Ryan (before the Russell Crow affair), Natalie Portman, and anyone who is stylish, but not classically beautiful i.e. Sarah Jessica Parker.

To MFA or not to MFA? That is the question...

2010-10-21T12:36:00.016-04:00

You know, there is something to be said for people who get out there and make it without the vestige of the almighty M.F.A, aka the 'I'm a mother-f*#&in-artist-so-recognize' degree, or Master of Fine Arts.

I think there is some sort of pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps romanticism about it that appeals to us. A sense that this person was either so wildly talented and/or ambitious that they cheated the system and went blazing into anthologies everywhere without paying tuition to learn the craft. Who am I talking about? William Faulkner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ernest Hemingway to name a few. But it's the same with any profession--we love a good underdog story. How many times must we read about Michael Jordan getting cut from his high school basketball team? Or Einstein failing Math?

Why? Because these stories give hope to the average person that they too, could be a genius, a basketball prodigy, or a literary great who just hasn't been discovered yet. But some part of me thinks this kind of legend-leeching gives people false dreams. There will never be another Einstein, after all.

I love this picture that I've coupled with this blog post because in some ways I feel like this explains the curse of a writer, or at least, a creative person: "Just because you are unique doesn't mean you are useful." Ouch. Some part of me recognizes that this must be true. I am not performing life-saving surgery, or even helping someone save 10% or more on their car insurance--I'm writing. Writing about things that, in many cases, never happened.

I think getting a MFA is part of this fear, and maybe that is why I'm seriously considering it.

Don't get me wrong, MFAs open doors and create a certain caveat when you are publishing and speaking and doing all the peripheral puffery that comes with writing--particularly poetry. BUT. Why else get it if you weren't afraid of being useless? Jobless? Without insurance? Without prestige? Some people, granted, do it to become professors; but I think if they were honest, they'd tell you they'd rather be holed up in a cave (or bar) writing their magnum opus without having to grade scores of terrible student first drafts.

So maybe I'll MFA and maybe I won't. I'm leaning toward won't. But who's to say? I want to be useful and talented. I need health insurance too. Just remind me to delete this blog post before I apply to the Iowa Writer's Workshop or Vanderbilt...I can't have an Admissions staff Googler reading this and ruining my statement of purpose.

Though I did fail English one semester in high school. And wouldn't that make a lovely addition to Michael Jordan, and Einstein, and Hemingway? Har. Har. Har.

Sometimes Reading Isn't Power

2010-10-02T09:14:00.009-04:00

I never thought I'd say this, but...I think I need to stop reading. Well, at least for awhile.

Let me preface by saying that I have great reverence for reading. Nothing makes me happier than the smell of a new book, except maybe an acceptance letter from an editor. I take pride in the fact that I have more books than I can handle; I could probably make furniture pieces out of the more substantial volumes.

The problem is this: as a writer (or still a wannabe at this point), I find that the things I'm reading are starting to choke me out. I've been reading so much that I feel quietly paranoid about what I'm doing. Sure, the right piece of literature can awaken and inspire other literature, but lately, I feel like all the things I'm reading are trying to puke up on my page.

I've read so many great poets online recently (time for unsolicited plugs): Mathias Nelson, Justin Hyde, and Amanda Aucter among others. I've also gone the traditional route and raided the library for inspiration. Recently I devoured Sandra Cisneros' Loose Woman, and Natasha Tretheway's Bellocq's Ophelia is sitting on my nightstand in the cue just behind Bukowski's What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire.

I think it's a fundamental thing to educate yourself by reading as promiscuously as possible...until it's time for you to speak. I've been a reader my entire life and now? Now I need some quiet. I need to blood-let all these other voices and talents that want to smother mine. They are screaming at me when I'm writing, especially the male poets. And they say: who wants to read about that? You are too sentimental, too clean, too Tampax to have any bite. Be a misanthrope. The academic poets tell me that I'm not pedigreed enough. The influential poets tell me to copy them. It's vicious I tell you.

So I think, just for awhile, I will be alone in my own room and see what sort of sounds I can make. I think the cruelest thing you can tell a writer is that they are a stillborn version of someone else. I don't want to be anyone else, and I think the most successful people are those who are willing to be a total failure for the sake of being themselves. And maybe I'm not a special snowflake, maybe my writing voice isn't avant-garde or powerful, but I'll never know if I can't tell the other writers to shut up and go away while I work.

The Wisdom of Others

2010-09-30T21:47:00.008-04:00

I've always been a quote junkie.

As a teenager my diary was filled with them. As an English teacher, I'd put a new quote on the board every week that correlated with my lessons. As a dork, I list a quote of the week on my outgoing voicemail. As a poet so many of the things I write begin as a response to a quote I read, or a singular line that comes to me somewhere from the ether.

Here are a few favorites that I've gathered over the years:

"The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which makes you lonely."
--Lorraine Hansberry

"The meeting of two personalities is like the meeting of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed."
--Carl Jung

"You do not have a soul. You ARE a soul. You have a body."
--C.S. Lewis

"There are years that question, and there are years that answer."
--Zora Neale Hurston

"The true genius shutters at incompleteness, and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be."
--Edgar Allen Poe

"The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death."
--Oscar Wilde

"Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
-Leo Tolstoy

What are your favorites?

One Shot Wednesday Poetry

2010-09-29T10:15:00.009-04:00

House Ghost

by Christeene Fraser

“He’s right there Mommy,” she says, “Behind you!”
I turn and see framed crayon pictures of yellow flowers,
stuffed rabbits nibbling carrots sewn to their paws.
“The man is sick,” she tells me, “He’s mean!”

My daughter, the clairvoyant—should have named
her Cassandra. I tell her it’s not nice to fib to her mama,
recalling the light left on in the basement, skin pimpling
from the rush of cold pulling the cord.

Maybe this house ghost of ours rocks in the
corner chair, remembering the heat of July when
he strangled his Dolores in the sewing room, before
he swallowed a barrel, whole, like a ripe banana.

Maybe in the dark he whispers his secret in
my daughter’s ear so that she cannot sleep,
or dreams of death. Perhaps he is angry that
we have painted his walls a shocking cobalt.

Or maybe this house ghost of ours, ‘the Man’ (we’ve named him),
is truly harmless and only watches in the shower while
I lather my hair, and maybe he slides the conditioner closer
to me when I’m blinded by soap and cannot see.

I tell her not to be afraid. I tell her to sleep,
that she is safe in my care; like all parents.
Like all lies.

For One Shot Wednesday

La Literati Travels: Ocean Isle Beach, NC

2010-09-19T14:43:00.030-04:00

I'm an expert in beach-bummery. If they conferred degrees in sun worship and wave riding, I'd have a PhD as distinguishable as my tan lines.

I've been to beaches all over the world. I've been to iconic Waikiki; sat against leaning palms pushing up from black sand on the Big Island. I've lounged on sugar white sand stretches in Jamaica and Mexico's Mayan Riviera. I've exhausted the spring break options on the Florida Panhandle (aka the Redneck Riviera). I've been to your standard skeezy beach complete with boardwalk and burnouts; I've watched the Pacific smash up on the cold and rocky coast off of California's Hwy 1.

And yet, of all the places I've kicked my flip flops, this little eight mile stretch called Ocean Isle, one hour north of tourist strangled Myrtle Beach, is my absolute favorite.

Top Reasons why OIB is OMG, y'all:

1) It's truly a family beach: If you're looking for coeds with poor judgment and the combination of white t-shirts + water + tequila, you WON'T find it here. You are more likely to find an arcade or ice cream parlor than a bar (there is a strange abundance of homemade ice cream parlors here; think of a ratio of 1 creamery to every 50 people). However, there is a large and well-stocked ABC Store immediately on the left after crossing the bridge to the island--so don't despair if, like me, you still like to toss back a frosty beverage after the kiddies are on the snooze.

2) It's relatively unknown: Let me preface by saying, that in the high season of travel (late May through August) the island is swarming with teenagers on rented bikes and families trolling around on golf carts. But because of it's relatively difficult-to-reach-quality, it still remains a largely underexposed jewel in the Grand Strand area of tourist destinations (ASIDE: our GPS was on the verge of a nervous break down trying to negotiate the backwoods of South Carolina before we finally reached OIB, just beyond the border). If you want to experience the best of OIB travel, go during the off-peak season in September when the weather in North Carolina is gorgeous and the beaches empty.

3) It manages to remain tourist-friendly without being tourist-tacky: Sure there are the obligatory beach souvenir, putt-putt, and pizza joints, but they manage to blend into the scenery, not overwhelm it with a cartoon grotesqueness or suburban banality. They've managed to balance tourist ADHD without the strip-mall experience. There are no major national chain restaurants or stores on the actual island; the closest fast food joint is one Subway over the bridge, and a few selections in the next town 8 miles over, Shallotte. Some people may take that as a negative, but my personal philosophy is: why vacation if all you do is carry the same generic experiences into a new backdrop? Spice it up. Go local.

4) It captures the memory with its distinct look: Have you ever watched the movie The Truman Show? Something about the island's aesthetic reminds me a lot of that movie set: it feels and looks intentional, together, charming without being contrived or bland. The West and East sides of the island have distinctly different looks and feels (the West being more populated by locals and thus more "cottagey" and relaxed, and the East dominated by large multi-family beach house rentals, a resort, and upscale oceanfront stunners. Incidentally, my family and I are "East-eggers." OIB manages to marry the beauty of its dunes and Atlantic views with equally pleasing and unobtrusive edifices.

5) OIB maintains a genuine spirit of relaxation: Even though this place is so stunning, and clearly the inhabitants have SERIOUS cash, it does not have the sort of high-life pretentiousness that comes with a Palm Beach or Martha's Vineyard crowd. The standard uniform here is whatever you choose to wear, no Polo ponies or Coach bags, or Chanel sunglasses required. Take it from a Hawaiian, this place is refreshingly laid-back for the East coast, which tends to take itself WAY too seriously.

My family has vacationed here every year for the last 3, and it's a tradition that we plan on continuing. If you're looking for an alternative to exhausted beach destinations on the East coast, give OIB a try. You'll find Spanish moss, swaying sea oats, translucent crabs, pink sunsets, obliging locals--and me, sketching in the sand, digging up mussels, or diving into 5-8 foot swells like a teenager (but only in the off-season, I don't do crowds).

Impressions from a Book Fest

2010-09-06T12:04:00.017-04:00

Recently I was asked by Emory University to be one of their featured authors signing/selling books for their "Authors Spotlight" at the Decatur Book Festival. I'm not really sure why. When I saw the caliber of writers also appearing on that featured author's list (Pulitzer Prize winning author Natasha Tretheway, National Book Award finalist Kevin Young, Emory University Vice President Gary Hauk) I felt sort of like the scraggly chicken patay passed around before the main entree.

These people are accomplished, well-known, hold copious degrees and important university titles, and I'm...well, I'm just Christeene. Christeene of 'Hey, go file this for me' notoriety.

The night before the festival, my husband and I stayed up until nearly 4am stapling and folding these beautiful little chapbooks stuffed with 32 pages of poems that I've lovingly tended to over the last month. As the books grew in number on our dining room table, and we laughed over the intimidating length of our Freudian inspired booklet stapler, I felt proud. I felt like a Writer (capital 'W').

The next day, alone, with my homemade volumes packed neatly in my book-bag I felt something very akin to the sinking dread I had on the first day of middle school. The prom scene from the cult movie Carrie replayed in my head ('They're all gonna laugh at you!') until I imagined that my hair was clumped in thick pig blood.

Luckily it turned out to be far less traumatic than all that.

Some Impressions:

1. When selling a chapbook, be sure that your 'FOR SALE' sign is large enough for little old ladies to see from at least 100 feet away. This will save you both from the ensuing embarrassment when a little old lady assumes that you're handing out pamphlets and takes one while you wave your hands and screech sheepishly, "Ma'am, those cost five dollars!"

2. Have no shame whatsoever when two friends show up unexpectedly and start snapping photos like you're Billy Collins or Stephen King descending from The New York Times bestseller's list to greet the plebeians. Embrace the free PR. Just pretend like you don't know who they are, and ask for their names as you sign their books with panache.

3. Don't be insulted when someone comes up to you and assumes you're the information person even though you are clearly sitting under a HUGE sign that says 'Author Spotlight.' Just smile and say, "Yes sir, Joseph Skibbell IS scheduled to sign at this booth later this afternoon!"

4. Have some enthusiasm when you're pimping your own wares. Apart from a tap-dance, people need to be convinced to pay ANY thing for poetry these days unless you've been thoroughly swabbed and vetted by The New Yorker or The Atlantic Monthly.

5. Never underestimate the little details. One woman bought my chapbook because she liked the Anais Nin quote on the back of my business cards; it spurred a whole conversation about writing, which ended in her perusing my first chapter and parting with two copies at $5 a piece (Hey, ten bucks is a big deal when a gallon of gas is nearly $3).

6. That lurky couple that talks to you for fifteen minutes and then stands awkwardly in the distance whispering and staring at you for another 20 mins after the husband has already asked 'So, what are you doing after this is over?' may be A) swingers looking for a friend, or B) just weird. Either way, exit from the back of the tent unseen.

7. Remember that every step, no matter how small or awkward, is still a step forward in your writing career. No one that ever wrote anything worth reading did so for money or recognition (even if they fantasized about both); it may be to your advantage as a living writer if you have neither. To be a real Writer, you need only a great big soul made of "empathy and intuition" (to quote a friend of mine).

I sold more books than I anticipated during my hour-that-felt-like-two-days. Surprisingly more books. I remembered that I was invited to sit at the same table as lauded authors even though no one knows my name. No one knows my name...yet.

La Literati Interviews: Mathias Nelson

2010-09-03T16:28:00.006-04:00

Somehow interviewing Wisconsin-based poet Mathias Nelson seemed to be the most appropriate next step after I reviewed his most recent chapbook, They May Try to Kill Me for This (see post below). Despite his humility, I'm still putting my money on a bright, blazing literary future somewhere in his horizon--if not presently, then posthumously. Read on, take notes:

Q: You make no effort to conceal your literary influences in this chapbook. From the metaphorical cannibalism of Bukowski, to the iconic Sylvia Plath rescuing you, literally, from a grave in "Digging Up Sexton," it almost seems in some ways that this collection is as memorable for its imaginings of the literary elite as it is for the chronicling of your own personal experiences. Where do you see yourself within that continuum? Do you hope be aligned with these poets (or others) in some way?

A: I just hope, with a distinct tone, to cut my own place on bookshelves, and the more I write the more I see the possibility of it happening. The nice thing is that it's happening all on its own. I hear of other writers struggling to find their voice, but that doesn't sound right to me. Why would you struggle? Let yourself come out. That's your voice. If you're struggling because you haven't found out who you are as a person, then go find that out before you write. As for me, I know too much about myself. And I'm terrified.

Q: There is a strong undercurrent of, and sometimes a collision between, the tender observer and the brutal participant; this dichotomy of tone elicits incredibly strong emotional responses in your readers and provides much of the joie de vivre behind your confessional poems. Can you relate any personal instances when these two distinct urges melded together?

A: Well, I often desire to be tender. I think I'm most tender with nature, to the point that it plagues me. I avoid stepping on ants. I feel bad when trees are cut down. Nothing is misplaced to me; it's just there. But with humans I can be rather harsh, and since you asked, I'll tell you I shoved a man through a window once for smacking the ass of my brother's wife. The man broke through the glass, could have fallen and died, and for what? A little ass smack! I don't even believe in marriage. I guess I was thinking about my brother. So in that sense I was harsh throwing that man, but also tender with my brother in mind because he gets very upset and hurt about people messing with his wife. And that man was embarrassed. It was even his window, right in the middle of a party. That makes me feel bad. See how tender I can be? His face looked like a squeezed scrotum, really red and in need of a shave.

Q: In a previous interview you discussed your view that empathy and intuition are the two most critical elements for successful writers. Explain that to me more fully:

Empathy is the most important thing in life, and of course if you want to write it's important there too. Feeling your character, and why they do what they do. Without empathy, what do you have? A jackass. Is that all you 're going to write about?

Intuition: you gotta know when to stop and go. It's like sex, you use empathy to feel your mate (reader) out, then you use intuition to know when to penetrate and finish and get the hell out of there. Unfortunately I haven't had sex for quite some time. Misplaced empathy.

Q: This is like asking a parent which child is their favorite, but, for the sake of being honest: what poem(s) in particular from this chapbook are the most significant to you?

A: I like the first poem, "A Bumble Bee Sting...", because it confronts religion with a little humor, and I was lying in bed when I heard the words come out of my fan.

Q: Are there any guiding principles for you when you write (stylistically, morally, etc)? If so, what are they, or how do you know when a poem is finished, optimal, "Mathias-approved," etc...?

A: I don't like to complicate things. I don't sit down and think about rules when writing. When I was younger I wasted a whole lot of time contemplating that bullshit. There aren't any rules, just make it clear, though sometimes it's okay if different readers derive different meanings from it, I just try to use a language that they'll understand.

I'm finished with a poem when it makes me want to puke. Not that I'm constantly picking it apart and changing it (though sometimes that is the case), but that I'm rereading it to the point of sickness because I simply like what I write.

La Literati Reviews: They May Try to Kill Me for This, by Mathias Nelson

2010-08-20T19:37:00.034-04:00

I first discovered Wisconsin poet Mathias Nelson through the 2010 July/August issue of RATTLE. Before I could finish the last stanza of his poem "Dip My Pacifier in Whiskey," I was already flipping to the back of the magazine in search of his author profile. It should have come with a PSA.

Be warned kids. His poems are like crack.

Nelson's debut chapbook combines the effulgence of raging youth with the steadied craft of a mature, contemplative writer. His sense of voice, of self, is as constant as his subjects are variable. At once tender and terrifying, beautiful and brutal, nothing is spared from his acerbic observations. Consider these lines from his poem "Fish Food":

"I was pompous. Saw myself as special--
a suicide over an ice-fisherman's hole,
a stiff body floating beneath that ice
and clawing at it while growling bubbles
as the soles of big clown shoes
glided above
to where children made snowangels."

OR this passage describing the slow deterioration of a nursing home patient, in "Enamel Eyes":

"The faces of her family
don't know. Maybe she
doesn't completely know.
Maybe her mind is
like the photographs, gray
taken fifty years ago
blowing kisses.

The dentures won't go in
today. I begin to sweat,
to shake.

'Ah,' I say, 'Ah'
and begin to weep.

My tears fall
into her mouth."

In my opinion, it is in instances like these where Nelson shows his potential to be more than just a post-Bukowskian shock jock or mere peddler of images, but rather, a great observer of the human condition.

Certainly, many readers will find amusement, laughter, bewilderment, anger--lots of anger--in several of his poems and be satisfied traversing everything from the cannibalism and near-necrophilia of literary icons to fishing with his nephews. But it is his ability to weave past and present, American history and personal history, and transfigure them into something larger that haunts the psyche, leaving you hungry for much, much more.

Synopsis: this book makes me excited about contemporary poetry. Get your money together and head to the post office, now. Consider it an investment. I have no doubt whatsoever that somewhere in the future we will include Nelson in the lineage of great counter-culture poets before him.

Author Information:
They May Try to Kill Me For This, by Mathias Nelson. Self-published. 36 pages. $5.00. Contact and ordering information at:
http://www.nyqpoets.net/poet/mathiasnelson

In Memorium

2010-08-18T11:05:00.012-04:00

For my father, Lance Bradley Alcosiba. December 25, 1963-August 20, 2009.
Together always, at Bay Farm Island Bridge

“Tracks”

It’s been a year since you left, and I heard
the earth crack open, swallowing you whole;
and though I knew, though I’d been given a schedule

of your departure, an express at noon—
I never knew how hard it would be to witness
the cars pull away, and me behind the caboose
running
running
running
run
to catch it, jump onboard before it was gone.
The steam beneath the wheels left me breathless, unable,
collapsing on the tracks.

But sometimes I lean my ears to the rails,
and I can feel the hum of an engine
chugging far away, speeding along the coast:
the dining car warm with brewing coffee and
shuffling newspapers or steadied crosswords
on the laps of bi-focaled women, and children stare
from windows, coloring vermillion
sunsets over smashing waves—
and I am happy.

for One Shot Wednesday

Rejections of Famous Authors

2010-08-16T10:02:00.009-04:00

The other day I received an envelope in the mail with my own handwriting on the front.

I don't know why that fact didn't register, but I somehow glazed over this glitch in my thinking and went on to open the letter furiously, delighted that I should receive something in the mail other than a bill, and there it was: "We thank you for your interest in publishing with Autumn House Press, but..."

BUT. But. But. That evil little conjunction gets ya every time.

This is the third consecutive rejection slip I've gotten since I started to earnestly send my poetry out for publication. My favorite rejection slip came from The Paris Review a few years ago. I was so stoked to have anything mailed to me on PR stationary that I kept it. I wasn't mad at all that they'd rejected my meager little poems.

Admittedly, I had a minor pity party for myself after that last one though, because I'd gotten so idiotically excited hoping it was a letter, some good news, a how'ya'doin, and instead it was a 'thanks-but-no-thanks-loser.' The familiar cloud of self-doubt began to form over me until I was convinced that I was just some horrible little egotist who would die obscure, unknown, my writing the jumbled mess that I'd always feared it was. But then I remembered William Faulker, Nobel Laureate, who received a horrible rejection of his book Sanctuary: "Good God, I can't publish this!"

It made me wonder, who else got rejected? A short list of manuscripts/writers who were rejected SEVERAL times:

1) Animal Farm, George Orwell
2) On the Road, Jack Kerouac
3) Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling
4) Twilight, Stephenie Meyer
5) Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
6) Lord of the Flies, William Golding
7) Dr. Seuss
8) Emily Dickinson, who was told "[your poems] are quite as remarkable for defects as for beauties and are quite defect of poetical qualities."
9) Torrents of Spring, Ernest Hemingway
10) The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells
11) Catch 22, Joseph Heller

Publishing, may be a good-ol-boys club, but it is also a numbers game. I intend to keep playing, go for broke, because I don't have time for anything else.

I still believe in this glorious dream that is writing. Even if the rejections pile in, and they will. Even if my friends and coworkers and lookers-on think I am a nut-job without the luxury of a new car or a disciplined retirement savings.

Hell is a Cave. Hope is a Cave: Finding Inspiration in Unexpected Places

2010-08-08T22:12:00.015-04:00

I'd never been in a cave before Sunday.

At the urging of a dear friend anxious to show us where he grew up, a group of six of us sojourned to Cave Spring and Rome, GA for a day of caving, lake swimming, and cemetery touring. I anticipated anecdotes about Joey's childhood while reapplying sunscreen, laughter over diarrhea-inducing Southern cooking, and daydreaming as our van lurched over stretches of bucolic hillside that made me want to leave Atlanta for some place simpler.

I got so much more than a sunburn, crappy lunch, and a Walden-pond moment. I was inspired by this little town in the middle of nowhere with it's little piece of Jurassic charm and Rome's historic hillside cemetery. They followed me home.

I didn't like the cave at first: it's incredibly cool and dank, the stalactites kept dripping on my bare shoulders and back (making me squeak in surprise), and I half-expected a Velociraptor to jump out of the darkness and snatch me by the throat it was so primordial looking because of the red light bulbs they had chosen to light certain angles. My friends decided to go down and explore a hole off of the path, and I stayed back deciding it was better left to those who had not been stupid enough to cave in a strapless sundress and flip flops.

Then I was left completely alone, in this ancient and smothering space--exhaling its cold minerally breath, curling into hellish plumes illuminated by the red bulbs, and the dark corners that stalked me, and the wet rock underfoot, and I started to feel a little woosey and freaked out and thought to myself hell is a big cave flooded with lava where all of us will go to burn and smack our bodies against stalagmites pushing up from the ground while bats nest in our hair, and then I saw carved into rock: Erin loves Michael.

Graffiti snapped me back into reality: someone's act of vandalism, an expression of love captured at one moment, hope ground into rock for posterity.

And I thought about people who lived in caves a million years ago and how fearful and urgent living was for them, and how a cave represented shelter and safety from the outside world. I thought about how even they made time to draw pictures of animals or daily life with blood or charcoal because there was this need for expression and beauty that was somehow essential and totally unnecessary, and therefore ultimately human.

I realized I was not alone any longer when I heard the peals of children echoing deep inside the cavern. And then my friends re-emerged from the ominous hole covered in mud and laughing about someone's butt being too close to their face in the dark, and I was happy. I sketched Cave Spring on the way home, and drafted poems about our graveyard walk in Rome.

And as we explored the rocks and took photos of molded tombstones, the time between generations and people seemed to meld together. Hope is a cave, too.

When Does the Final Draft Actually Appear?

2010-08-05T12:16:00.011-04:00

"True genius shudders at incompleteness"--Edgar Allan Poe

Writers: ever written something that you thought was absolutely GENIUS until you saw it again the next day and then hated yourself and were subsequently humiliated by your poor lapse of judgment?

I call that having a one-night-stand with your first draft. It's just ugly.

But what if it's not your first draft, but more like, an entire book? I had a mini-meltdown the other day before emailing my first book, Little Earthquakes, off to a friend to read. I reread almost 70 pages and nearly decided to torch it, blot it out of my memory like a victim of incest. There were only a few redeeming lines in what seemed like endless pages of amateur, uneducated, undisciplined, prose-posing-as-poetry pieces of narcissistic garbage. I emailed them to her but went home that day feeling sad and depleted like a middle-aged actress who has realized that she will not be getting calls to play the ingenue any longer.

I shared this feeling with my spouse and he just shook his head: "But, you won a prize for that book. A PUH-RIZE!" He articulated loud and slow, as though I didn't understand what the word 'prize' meant.

Writers are notorious for this, or really, creative people are notorious for this. The work is never done. The finished product is always as scary as first draft.

I remember reading an article once where Nicole Kidman said it was painful for her to watch herself acting: she was constantly critiquing herself, judging her every move. I thought to myself, this dumb broad, I'd LOVE to be sitting in a theater somewhere in a couture gown watching myself act in some movie where I was paid millions of dollars to play pretend and kiss some hot actor, give-me-a-break! Now I have a lot more sympathy for the botoxed Aussie.I understand her pain completely.

Being creative publicly means willingly placing some part of your body on the chopping block for others to decide whether or not that appendage is worth saving. It's pulling up your sweater for others to see the breast cancer scars and mawed tissue and deciding if it is profound statement of truth or just grotesque. But its a beautiful thing, this truth, this grotesqueness. Writing and creation and carnage and love and first-draft or Pulitzer Prize book, it's all the same. It all has its place and function. So what if people can my writing?

It helps me to remember that I am learning, that I am still new to it all.

I would never judge my daughter for not running after barely learning to walk. I'd tell her to take it slow: steady her gait, plant her heels, try the stairs, master the stroll, running's bad for the joints.

Why We Love What We Love

2010-07-30T14:14:00.012-04:00

Writing love poems is harder than you'd think.

Let me clarify that: writing honest love poems that do NOT make me gag is harder than you'd think. I abhor sap. I dislike love poems that don't sting just a little. Anyone who writes those kind of love poems has failed to capture the astounding range of love. Their 'violets are blue' sentimentality does the reader a disservice.

I'm in the process of writing my second book of poetry, Desir, a volume of love poems based on the four loves as understood by the ancient Greeks, and later redefined for modernity by C.S. Lewis: storge (affection), philia (friendship), eros (erotic love), and agape (unconditional, God-like love).

I find that writing about love is some of the most challenging writing I've done because of the amorphous nature of that emotion--the erotic melding into the platonic, or the platonic yielding to the erotic. Soaring, iridescent love as impressionism of the senses, fruition of memory, desire, and psychosis.

Why do we love the things and people that we love?

In writing about love, this question is almost more important, or certainly more interesting, than the expression of love itself. The apertures of erotic love, for instance--the yearning, the kiss, the embrace, the explosive desire--are universal. But why him or her? There is nothing more individual or singular than the trajectory to the beloved. How is it that two people with so much in common could find absolutely nothing to love in the other? How is it that two people with nothing in common can bind their lives together without much consideration?

I don't care about expressing how love makes an individual act, per se; I'm interested in reading and writing about how love melds the mind. I'm interested in exploring why we love the things and people we love in the first place. Is our choice of partner merely an expression of out "desire-mapping" through past experiences, media images, familial models, or is it more?

I don't know if I can believe in something as delicious as fate. I don't know that I can get behind something as idealistic as soul mates; and that really says something about me, doesn't it?

What I can believe in is this, at least: when we say 'I love you' or 'I love ___,' it says more about the person saying it than the object(s) of affection themselves. We are what we love. This can be both a wondrous and terrible revelation.

Read Me Or Die: Book Titles That Smack Your Mama

2010-07-23T15:47:00.009-04:00

There's something to be said for finding a good book simply by walking around a bookstore.

In the library world we call it "serendipitous browsing."

Finding a good book in a sea of books is a lot like dating. This fretful process can be recreated using new technologies (Kindle is not too unlike match.com in my mind), but there is something magical when it happens in person. Needless to say, I spend hours in bookstores. I met my husband in a bookstore. But as much as I fetishize books, even I admit that after a while the shelves just blur into one mass of gaudy volumes squeezed together like crayons in a box.

It takes something truly special to stand out in the crowd. Here are some books I wanted to purchase based on the titles alone:

1) The History of White People, by Nell Irvin Painter

This title immediately jumps down the throat. Either you think 'this is going to be the most infuriating anti-caucasian book in the world,' or you snicker and say, 'well I can tell you how that goes in ten words or less.' Either way, the book gets picked up.

2) I am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced, by Nujood Ali with Delphine Minoui

Do I even need to say anything about this book? The title says it all. No semi-colon explanation needed.

3) Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Tips to Creativity, by Hugh Macleod

Plays on the neuroses of the creative person by reaffirming we are all God's special snowflakes (and we are). The huge endorsement by viral blogger Seth Godin doesn't hurt either.

4) The Ninja Handbook: This Book Looks Forward to Killing You Soon, by Douglas Sarine

Humor is always welcome. I wouldn't go near a book about ninjas if the title didn't make me laugh (just a little). I most likely won't buy it, but I WILL pass it along to at least 4 other dork ninja-enthusiasts who might.

5) Choke, by Chuck Palahniuk

Sometimes simple is best. Sometimes one word says more than an entire sentence.

6) My Name is Memory, by Ann Brashares

This just sounds pretty. It appeals to my sense of aesthetics and sounds almost poetic. Imagine my shock when I discover that it was written by the same author who penned The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Oh well.

7) Mr. Darcy, Vampyre, by Amanda Grange

It's Jane Austen revisited with blood-sucking vamps. Who doesn't think that's cool? At least for the first 50 pages. This sounds like literary Splenda--appealing to my dignified sense of English major nerdiness AND my adolescent desire for carnage. WIN!

8) A Field Guide for Burying Your Parents, by Liza Palmer

I know nothing about this book, other than I buried my father last August, and that alone prompted me to at least consider it. Pulling something terrible and universal into the title is a guaranteed way to make people stop and look at the very least.

9) The Wild Things, by Dave Eggers

Again, like the Mr. Darcy book listed above, it appeals to the consumers pre-packaged experience with some other well-known and beloved work/author. In this case it is the children's book Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. And bonus points for this book because the volume was covered in mock animal hair (no joke).

10) A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers

Good 'ol Dave, he is absolutely brilliant. Bringing back the art of the cover design, kitschy titles, and sharp sardonic writing to boot. The crazy thing is, the title is as hysterically arrogant as it is true. I want to take a seminar by this man. I want to send him fan letters and unfinished manuscripts and make him my mentor. But I'll settle for pre-ordering his next work on Amazon.

But cover design may even be more important than title, particularly for new and unestablished writers.

I cannot tell you how many of my former students (first-wave Twilight lovers) told me that they had picked up the Stephenie Meyer books simply because the covers were so gorgeous, and looked different than everything else in that section. If you venture into the teen/YA section now, there has been an explosion of books adopting the black/red graphics that the Meyer books made en vogue.

Of course publishers and booksellers know this; but how much more then must new authors fight for books that both look AND read like New York Times bestsellers? It's nothing new. Dating is full of pigeons and peacocks, and the bookstore is no different.

Perfectionism Is Nuts, or, Brachioplasty Anyone?!

2010-07-22T11:14:00.007-04:00

I realized last night that I may, in fact, be a crazy woman.

Why? Because last night I was trying to rationalize to my girlfriends that I had a "low self-esteem moment" because I made two B's last semester, and because I have this troublesome pocket of fat under my armpit that I've nicknamed "the Bat-wing."

There I was in my bathing suit with three of my best girls slack-jawed as they watched me jiggle my arms and rant about marathon sessions of research-paper-writing at four a.m. while questioning the spiritual implications of plastic surgery.

More evidence of craziness: I've already read half of my required reading for the upcoming semester which hasn't started, AND I just got the book in the mail yesterday. Oh yeah, it's already been highlighted, and my notes TYPED (mind you) and bulleted in a Microsoft Word document.

Don't mistake me, this is NOT bragging.

I know sooo many women like this, like me. Maybe it's grades, or staying thin, or being the expert at work, or having the most accomplished child, or dressing like a celebrity, or having a house with floors so clean you could do stem-cell research on them. Women in particular have this crippling bent toward perfectionism. I've always thought that this kind of Rainman-like preoccupation was admirable, until lately.

I'm not sure when it dawned on me. Maybe it was after I felt the all-too-familiar-encompassing-diarrhea-nervousness that comes before I start a new semester, or maybe it was when I realized that my lovely friends WERE not commiserating with my Kanye West wailing over TWO unholy B's.

Perfectionism is not only unhealthy for your colon, it is also really ungodly.

As a Christian woman, pushing myself to these ridiculous extremes shows that I don't trust the Creator with my fate; I don't trust God with the creation he's made. It shows that I am incredibly shallow in chasing after GPA's that don't account for much when I've barely seen my toddler or my spouse. It shows that I expend way too much energy on the temporal and not the eternal. Never, to my recollection, have I ever burned my candle at both ends for another person like I have for myself.

When Jesus said "love thy neighbor as thyself," it was not only a command, but in some ways, an indictment. He knew how self-centered we are, and stuffed it in our faces: "Hey go-getter who's up at four a.m. writing about collection development for your pompous degree, remember to funnel some of that energy into the homeless guy you try to ignore on the entrance ramp to I-75."

All my admirable go-getter-ness is simply self-serving.

Perfectionism is another way of saying self-centered. I am more than my GPA. I am more than my title at work (or lack thereof). I am more than a weight. A credit score. A bank statement. I am more than what my child does or does not do in life. I am more than this bizarre outcropping of fat that hangs from my right armpit and bobbles over my bra when I run.

[Insert Oprah audience claps and cue "I am Woman"]

Sin and Honesty in the Christian Church

2010-07-16T10:11:00.010-04:00

Confession: I am a big, fat, dirty sinner. No, really. NO. Seriously.

I get that I wear cardigans and am going to school to be a Librarian. You're probably thinking: anyone who wears khaki and ballet flats and plans a career pushing books can't be that wild, right? Wrong.

The truth is that I sin on the daily. On the hourly. Moreover, I have one or two choice sins that perpetually get in my face. They're more annoying than SEC fans in September. Though you'd never know because they aren't visible like drug abuse or alcoholism.

Confession no. 2: I love God, and I don't want to be this way.

I know that this conversation about sin seems really stupid, antiquated, and/or probably just "too precious" for my friends/relatives/associates who are not Christians.

They are rolling their eyes right now, saying, "For the love of, here she goes again throwing herself under the bus because she said the 'F' word once or something equally as innocuous." But it's not just about having a filthy mouth. It's about having your eyes opened to something true, and not being able to go back. It's passing through the wardrobe and into Narnia. It's Neo after the blue pill. It's Columbus catching his first glance of Hispanola.

Sin is death. I've heard this my entire life, and it meant nothing. We hear about gravity as children, and scoff when our parents talk about jumping from bridges to follow others, but when a plane begins to nose-dive and shake uncontrollably mid-flight we finally understand that our bodies and collective wisdom have no bearing on the force hurling us to the ground.

It was only after I understood that sin is not only real, but here for a very real purpose that I was even able to care about my actions. This thing called conscience, was the Holy Spirit pulling at my heart quietly. Those who are not Christians feel it intuitively, but call it moral order.

Confession no. 3: I believe the Christian church (at least in America) is failing miserably to discuss this issue of sin.

It seems like our goal is to get people cleaned up, dunked in the baptism tank, and send them along their merry way. We talk about sin as an abstract concept, a cancer that affects us all. We get them to accept that they have the cancer, and that Jesus is the cure for it. But we never talk about what type of cancer it is; how it moves, grows, how it changes, how we can prevent it. Not really. That conversation is too graphic, not family-friendly, too raw, glorifying of secular behaviors. I think this is a cop-out.

If we as Christians want to change the world, we can't be afraid to talk about it. Honestly. Brutally. We can't be afraid to cut into the cadaver and look at the tumor, spreading. We can't be afraid to put it under a microscope and share our findings with others. We can't be ashamed to show the ugly surgical scars on our own bodies.

Confession no. 4: I'm really tired of oatmeal evangelism. Give me truth.

Wanderlust List: Or, Christeene's "Anywhere but Here" Top 5

2010-07-01T13:51:00.010-04:00

Confession: I've got wanderlust. Bad.

My mother's ex-husband worked for Delta back when I was in high school/college, and that meant lots of free (or nearly-free) travel to exotic locales like Dayton, OH and Fort Walton Beach, FL. But there were more exciting travels too--like a business class seat to Paris (where they stuff you silly with food to pass the time), a first class ticket (with champagne, yeah mon!) to Jamaica, pan-Pacific flights to Hawaii in the large air-misted bowels of a 777, and copious quick-turn-arounds to NYC for shopping and various museum sprints.

Oh, the good ole days.

These days a weekend in Macon sounds like an enticing prospect given my (now) lack of airline connections and a checking account so thin it's giving Calista Flockhart a run for her rib bones as of late.

These days I'm content to watch the Travel Channel, and search "Last Minute Vacation Packages" on Travelocity--my own version of porn on these Georgia afternoons where there is nothing to do but dream of escaping the hot-wet-fart-trapped-in-a-bag-heat/humidity combo that makes me wish I was anywhere but here.

Which leads me to share my Top 5 "Anywhere but Here" list of places that I'd love to travel to right now:

5) Chesapeake, VA: I think "classic American" when I think of Chesapeake. I think of summer and really good seafood and yacht clubs and Fourth of July fireworks over the bay and douchey blond dudes who wear loafers and coral golfing shorts with little polo ponies on them. I think of its closeness to Virginia Beach and historic Williamsburg only an hour north. Sign me up for everything BUT the douchey blonds, please!

4) Seattle, WA: Nothin' says lovin' ala Christeene quite like coffee, grunge, fish markets, and a close proximity to the woodsy town of Forks where the Twilight saga is based (geeky fan girls, UNITE!). Ahem... Oh yeah, there is also the infamously brooding weather, which frankly sounds appealing to me after being sun-bleached for 9 months out of the year.

3) Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada: Expansive mountain vistas. Prehistoric cedars. Cerulean waters full of biting fish and whale watching. Luxury lodges accessible only by water airplane. Fresh salmon avec chanterelles for le dinner. Sounds like the furthest thing from this Georgia red clay and "moonlight through the pines" business. Sounds like heaven.

2) San Miguel de Allende, Mexico: Most people think of coeds slamming tequila on the beach when they think of Mexico. But San Miguel de Allende has so much more to offer than white sand and cheap Senor Frog's t-shirts. Think cobbled streets, Colonial architecture, Mexican artisans selling one-of-a-kind wares, and year-round temperate weather. I want to stay here, in the "La Biblioteca" (the library) suite: http://www.casaschuck.com/newSite/mainEng.html

1) Santorini, Greece: Blame it on my love for Grecian epic poetry, or the fact that my favorite color is cobalt blue (which is the modus vivendi for all rooftops on this little island). Blame it on the fact that my half-brother's Greek grandma gave me an addiction to Spanakopita and Baklava and all things sprinkled in goat cheese. Santorini not only makes takes the #1 spot for my "Anywhere but Here" list, it's hovering somewhere near the top of my "Must See Before I Die" list as well.

What's on your "Anywhere but Here" list?

Doppelganger, Or, Can You Ever Go to the Same Place Twice?

2010-06-16T16:05:00.024-04:00

Recently on my trip to New York City, I found myself visiting the same places I'd loved while I lived there. Without any conscious thought at all, my feet took me where I spent countless hours as a penniless undergrad: Bryant Park, the Rose Reading Room at the New York Public Library, the Central Park great lawn, St.Patrick's on 5th, Barnes and Noble on 66th, the same, the same...

And yet. Not the same.

Same:

-Bryant Park loveliness.
-Magically delicious street gyros.
-7 train that shakes you like a deranged nanny caught on tape.
-Eau de subway (it has its own unique funk, like home).
-Crazies yelling obscenities below my window at 2am.

Different:

-Neighborhoods: Columbus Circle now = mini-mall.
-Stores: Bronx Target(I-wudda-given-a-leg-for-one-back-in-tha-day).
-Laws: Honking illegal in Manhattan? It's the city symphony.
-Inhabitants: 125th Street is so...white? Not bad, just different.
-Weather: It was hot, balmy even. It always seemed freezing to me in New York before. Maybe I'm just fatter. Yeah, most definitely fatter.

I tripped around the city looking for something familiar or beloved in the changing landscape; and I was a little overwhelmed by it, the passage of time. The apartment where Edgar Allen Poe lived is now a NYU dorm room. The bookstore where William Faulkner made his fateful meeting with Elizabeth Anderson is now a department store. A bariatrics clinic looms awkwardly in proximity to Edith Wharton's house in leafy Gramercy Park.

Everything is a version of something else.

Why do we return to places, sometimes even people, expecting the same thing twice? We want things, loves, experiences to be held in suspension, bottled at their peak. I suppose this is what getting older means. It means that neighborhoods will look different, even only a few years later. It means that people and love, not only can, but WILL change.

It means that you can never really go back to the same place twice.

But if you are very lucky, this new thing--this hybrid child of past and present--will be more than just a doppelganger following you in the dark recesses of memory. This new thing will be even more lovely than the park bench you remembered, speckled in light.

I won? Wait, I won! On the 2010 New York Book Festival

2010-06-06T23:06:00.009-04:00

Last Wednesday was no ordinary day for me. I woke up and packed my trunk to the brim with popcorn and pottery and rubber ducks (a one-woman flea market), and made my way to work where I was on a committee planning a "county fair" honoring the good folks of the Emory University library.

If the rubber ducks and riku glazed coffee cups weren't bizarre enough, the news I received that afternoon certainly was:

I won the poetry prize for the 2010 New York Book Festival for my first chapbook, Little Earthquakes.

Maybe 'bizarre' is the wrong word, it was more like complete-and-utter-shock-my-throat-is-doing-the-lumpy-cry-of-a-beauty-queen-getting-her-tiara-after-6-months-of-nacho-deprivation. I had to read my name on the website two or three times to be sure that I wasn't hallucinating or developing cataracts from the inevitable diabetic coma washing over me from the cotton candy I'd downed earlier.

A note on the chapbook: it was completed in 2.5 months of solitary confinement with caffeine pressure-wash at my favorite table in the Pitts Theology library. It was completed with tears and prayer and irreverence and gratitude. It was completed with a I've-got-nothing-to-lose kind of laissez-faire. It was completed without expectation.

Life is like that, isn't it? When we truly drop all expectation, the most exciting things happen. I've prayed for months (years really) for God to open a door or slam it in my face when it comes to writing. I am not delusional. I know this prize is not a guarantee of anything; I am still unknown and unpublished and unrefined. I am still a nobody. But that's okay with me. Even more important to me than winning, is this: God's undeserved love, a prayer unambiguously answered, holding true gratitude in my hands. I don't care how cheeseball or backward that makes me sound. I don't care how my career flies or flops if I can carry that gratitude, this moment in my heart forever.

Precision of Language, Please

2010-05-31T12:57:00.003-04:00

In the book, The Giver, a utopian society is architectured around community, efficiency, and politeness. Children are chastised for saying "I'm starving!" when what they meant to say is, "I'm hungry." Because of this push for precision, absolutes and extremes of feeling have fallen away from their vernacular almost entirely; so much so that the main character, Jonas, is admonished by his parents for asking "Do you love me?" They look at him, shocked by his foolishness, and bark, "Precision of language, please!" In their world, love is a word without meaning; they are as incapable of feeling love as they are in using the word itself. It is outdated, foreign in their mouths and in their hearts.

Is fiction so different than reality?

The word love has lost its meaning. Not from limitation or underusage--quite the opposite. 'Love' is in our mouths so much that it might as well be the same word for 'dinner' or 'sleep' or 'sock.' We use the same word to describe our feelings for pizza as we do our spouse. I love you. What does that phrase even mean anymore? It means I have an above average response to you. It means I enjoy the way you make me feel. It means I adore the way they have seasoned the crust on this Sicilian style pie.

I say we place a moratorium on the word 'love' for awhile.

The ancient Greeks had a complex, more comprehensive way of expressing love in their language. They understood 4 types of love: storge (affection), eros (erotic; being 'in love'), philia (friendship), and agape (unconditional, God-like love). Certainly these words lack the fluid quality of our English counterpart; 'storge' doesn't roll off the tongue like 'love' does. But if we adopted them into our vernacular, they could possibly enable us to evaluate our feelings with a little more consideration rather than sweeping them under that giant and complicated welcome mat we call love.

The Power of Unexpected Praise, or, Memoirs of a Nobody

2010-05-11T11:53:00.008-04:00

Last Friday sucked. I was pretty sure that my coworkers hated me, or at least, pretty sure that they only tolerated me after two unremarkable comments sent my self-esteem into a tailspin. I was pretty sure that I had only just realized after 26 years that I was both red-headed and a step-child; that I was, perhaps, the stupidest ex-English-teacher-turned-assistant on the planet.

I have a hard time making new friends, but it's not out of my lack of desire for them. I desperately want to connect with people, but often feel deflated because my lack of comfort in social situations makes me look like I'm on the receiving end of an enema. I got in my car feeling like a rejected middle-schooler ready for a mini pity party when my friend Emily called me. Or, at least, I thought it was Emily.

My caller ID lied to me, it was actually Emily's mother--a charming lady that I'd never met. But I knew her well because of Emily, and the upturned corner of her smiling mouth whenever she uttered the phrase "my mother." I knew what kind of woman she was by the respect and the stunning more-strawberry-than-blond hair mirrored by my dear friend.

Earlier that day I emailed Emily a copy of my poems for her to share with her mother, as she requested. I did not expect that twelve hours later, I would be sitting in a Target parking lot weeping as a women I'd never met told me how wonderful my writing was for her. I was overwhelmed with gratitude for her, for Emily's mother (who I still haven't met in person).

I often feel helmed in by series of losing titles, losing statistics: I am a credit score, a weight, a bank statement, one unknown writer in a sea of drowning writers. Emily's mother asked me if I'd ever considered writing "my story" and I almost laughed, "I'm a nobody, no one wants to read about that." "We're all nobodys," she said.

Her unexpected praise and her wisdom have stayed with me all week. We're all nobodys. Somehow it's a comforting thought to me. It makes the pen and the workplace seem less intimidating. I will begin to pen the memoir of a nobody, and perhaps nobody will read it; and that's okay with me.

What "Pretty in Pink" Taught Me About Love

2010-05-04T15:12:00.010-04:00

While waiting for my rotini to boil, I plopped down on the couch and began to channel surf: Rachel Ray (maybe), Nascar (NO), "For the Love of Ray Jay" (definitely NOT), and then "Pretty in Pink (girly squeal, YES!).

I'd turned on the movie precisely during the iconic scene where Ducky glides into the record store and starts crooning "Try a Little Tenderness," by Otis Redding. John Cryor slides around the stacks of vinyl, his New-Wave-come-50's greaser-revisited hairdo bobbing in time with his pelvic-thrusting, lip-synching genius; he finishes his triumphant moment only to be crushed by the realization that his paramour is waiting for a date with someone else--a bland, uptight prepster named Blaine. It's cinema magic.

But for me, its more than just an iconic scene. For me it reveals a deep romantic flaw in myself, and in friends I've counseled disapprovingly saying "I told you so!"

By the end of the movie the ginger protagonist Andy chooses the granola Blaine over her eccentric friend Ducky. This never bothered me as a girl; but as an adult it made me scream at the television set, causing my toddler to drop her tea set and look at her mama, alarmed. She chooses Blaine?! Seriously? Seriously. ::sigh::

Andy doesn't even look amused when Ducky waltzes into the store; she being all too accustomed to his shenanigans. She doesn't crack a smile or even roll her eyes as he parambulates around the store singing a Motown golden-oldy that would be lost on most teenage boys. Instead she pines and waits for Blaine, who is late for their date, and shows up wearing Dockers and Ray-Bans like some bored, W.A.S.P.y demigod.

We are led to believe that Andy will live happily ever after her fateful prom date with Blaine. But we know the truth. We know that they will fade as quickly as the flowers of her hideously homemade corsage. She should've picked Ducky. Too often we cry and wait and pine for the ultimate dreamboat to come when we've got the DREAM singing in our faces. We've become too engulfed with pursuing the 'new' at the expense of really evaluating the 'now.' Or in some tragic cases, we live out the cliched "you don't know what you got til its gone" syndrome pursuing other pastures, other grasses that are never really greener.

The Blaines of the world have their place, but it is my hope for my daughter, and for my single friends, that they will not neglect to appreciate their very own Duckys waiting in the wings. It is my hope for my marriage that I will never forget to look at my husband like he is too familiar. I never want to take him for granted again because I let his personality become too common, forgetting why he is the ONLY person on the planet that I want to be married to.

So, ladies and gents, this is what "Pretty in Pink" has taught me about love: 1) when you find yourself waiting for a love to rescue you, look around you instead, and 2) when all else fails, try a little tenderness.

Crisis Mode, or, Who's On Your Team?

2010-04-30T09:50:00.010-04:00

"People often meet their destiny on the road they take to avoid it"--French Proverb

I came home Wednesday night completely spent. The end of the semester is wrapping up, and I've been pulling late hours or waking up at 3-4am to get my assignments done before work because it's the only quiet time I can manage to get with a toddler in the house.

Bleary-eyed and hunched over from the weight of my laptop bag I came in the door to be greeted by my best friend sitting on the couch. He took one look at me and said, "You look like a zombie." My thoughts exactly.

(AN ASIDE: I love friendships that are honest. I love friends that will tell you: "Yeah, you look like crap in those shorts, go change." It's real love, truly, to be honest with people).

After throwing my bag down, I made my way to the basement (where it sounded like a small war was happening because my husband was playing Halo with the surround sound on). He was just about to start a game when I sat down in front of him and began to bellow like my two year did last week after I told her she could not wear her playtime princess heels to bed.

Wretched and exhausted, I told him about the relentless conversation I'd been having in my head all week:

Bad Christeene: "Drop out. Drop out and write."
Good Christeene: "Who says you're even any good at it?"
Bad Christeene: "Who says you'll be a good librarian?"
Good Christeene: "You're 30k in debt. You've invested an entire year."
Bad Christeene: "She doesn't want to invest another minute."

Jason looked at me with those tender eyes that I love, his arms curled around my legs, and said "Forget the money. I will support you no matter what you choose." Right there. That moment. The two of us in the basement with the Halo intro blaring, was the moment I remembered why I married him, and not someone else.

I am fighting a war against myself. The good girl that everyone praises (including myself), wants a stable career. She wants multiple degrees so she can reassure herself and others that she is good enough, smart enough despite where she came from. She wants stainless steel appliances, an annual vacation to the beach, and a retirement fund. She wants respect and validation.

I have not registered for fall semester, and I am praying on whether or not I will. It's not that I don't love the library/librarians (libraries are my favorite places!), or that I think it's impossible to have a day job and be a writer (most do). But it's good to know, that no matter what I choose, I have amazing people on my team. And that makes all the difference.

Ways to Deal with Grief

2010-04-14T11:44:00.003-04:00

It's been almost eight months since my father died. There are lengths of time where I'll wake up and be content to go about the minutiae of my day without blinking, without pausing to remember his booming laugh. But the other morning I found myself putting my makeup on in the car mirror (which is my haphazard commuting ritual), and I stopped in the midst of painting black liquid liner over my eyelid. His face. I'd seen a flash of it when I lowered my eyebrows in concentration: Lance's face in my face. And I began to sob in Atlanta traffic. It is these moments--small and unanticipated--that I have to learn to navigate, more so than missed holidays or birthdays. I've managed almost a year without him. So I offer a few suggestions for the left-behind:

1. Write really bad poetry: Write a letter you'll never send. Write anything, really. Grab a pen and rage and don't think while doing it. Don't worry about spelling, or phrasing, or logic, just metaphorically puke it up on the page.

2. Celebrate new life: Plant a garden, watch the sunrise, hold an infant, do something that literally or symbolically celebrates rebirth and regeneration.

3. Sun-worship: There is something restorative about sitting in the light. Go to the beach. Sit in a favorite window. Or grab a blanket, kick off your shoes, and revel in the grass like a bearded, Jerry Garcia-lovin hippie in Bolinas circa 1968 (without the psychotropic drugs, of course).

4. Pray: This sounds obvious, but it's grossly overlooked. Sometimes I howl "Save me, Save me, Save me God," and other times I just talk to God like he is my celestial guidance counselor. The point is to talk to God, honestly.

5. Have a (small) pity party for one: I think it's cathartic to feel sorry for yourself once in awhile. No, the world isn't fair. Yes, you were robbed. No, you can't change what happened. Yes, it's okay to be irritated that people expect you to be over grieving already, especially since your relationship wasn't great with your dad in the first place. Got it all out? Good. Pity party done.

6. Embrace Sleep: True grief looks a lot like narcolepsy. Grieving requires a lot metabolically, so it's perfectly acceptable to fall asleep in the middle of a crying fit. Take it as an opportunity to catch up on needed rest; somehow sleep is healing.

How do you navigate loss?

Summer Reading List

2010-04-13T10:15:00.007-04:00

Summer is fast approaching. I can tell by the pool of saliva that forms in the corner of my mouth whenever I try to do something productive, and the yellow plague of pollen that coats my car and snaps at the back of my throat like a venus flytrap. Almost immediately after deciding NOT to take any classes this summer, my synapses fired up with images of insatiable nerd lust: fantasies of tearing through books, drunkenly, promiscuously. I cannot wait to get my little grubby hands on something of my choosing, something not required of me. Some books I'm considering for my upcoming fete de libre:

1. This Book is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All, Marilyn Johnson: The hippest shout-out to tattooed, politically/socially active, people-loving librarians everywhere. I can't wait to read something that makes me feel warm and fuzzy about the profession I've chosen despite a slouching economy and uncertain future.

2. Dear Darkness, Kevin Young: A book of poetry by a gifted and lauded poet, that I have the pleasure to work with at Emory. I have only recently discovered Kevin's poetry, and I'm eager to devour it. As a poet (self-proclaimed and revered only by my husband and gracious friends) I want to dissect Kevin's work with careful observation and childish awe. You know a writer is good when you want to take a scalpel to their work, peeling back the skin and slicing into the sinew.

3. 10 Most Common Objections to Christianity, Lee Strobel: I'm beginning to write a book very similar to this, but centered on 20-somethings raised in Evangelical homes who are now unpracticing or non-Christian. Strobel's book, while more theological/apologetically-based than mine intends to be, will still prove a valuable read.

4. Jane Austen Ruined My Life, Beth Patillo: I met the editor for this book while at the Mount Hermon Writer's Conference, and her enthusiasm for this novel had me sold immediately. Even if I hadn't met her, the English teacher in me is drawn to the title; the twelve year old in me is drawn to the book cover. Aint it so pretty, y'all?

5. The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie: I'm embarassed to admit that I have not read this novel. It is arguably Rushdie's most famous (or infamous) book to date, and I feel not only compelled but obligated to read it.

Do you have any suggestions for my summer reading list?

I'm Ready to be a Mary

2010-04-12T09:22:00.004-04:00

I'm tired of being a Martha. Being a Martha has gotten me nowhere. I have made Dean's lists and graduated with Honors only to be reminded that I am not the smartest fish in the pond, and sometimes not even in the pond at all. Sometimes I am beached and flailing wildly, eyes bulging, and full of panic. All of my egotistical little achievements really mean nothing.

I'm tired of being a Martha. Being a Martha has made me "spoiled and exhausted" to borrow a phrase from my dear friend and fellow writer Emily Osburne. I am tired of running after perfection: perfect grades, perfect career, perfect marriage, perfect body, perfect soul. I am incapable of all of the above.

What I want, more than anything, is a life of adventure and purpose. I want to throw away this notion of coordinating throw pillows and performance, always this exhaustive performance to prove that I am worthy of being loved by someone, anyone. This dance leaves me lonelier and lonelier.

I'm ready to be a Mary. I'm ready to sit and listen and leave myself open to criticism. I'm ready to trade what is good for what is best. I'm ready to depart from the tribe of normal and form my own partnership of extraordinary--Just me and Jesus. I'm ready to not only be saved, but also sanctified.

Who Are You?

2010-04-02T16:09:00.010-04:00

At the writer's conference I recently attended, I sat down to pitch my book idea to an editor, and before I could lace up my tap-dancing shoes she asked me, "who are you?"

Now let me explain that she was not being cheeky, or rude in the least. It was a perfectly legitimate question. In fact, I've been trying to answer that very question for the last 26 years.

Successful writers generally have a tag of some sort. Stephen King is synonomous with Horror, and Danielle Steele with the trashy beach novel (my profound apologies to Steele readers clucking in disapproval, but let's face it--it's not exactly Jane Austen).

So who, then, is this Christeene person? I can't really place her in a neatly packaged, PR-ready, glossy-photo'ed, cataloged section of the bookstore just yet. But what I can say is this: I am a girl who dreams with a book in her hand, and a poem on her lips. I disdain sappiness, but crave romance. I take copious pictures of trees because I can find no other thing in creation (beyond human life itself) that amazes me more, except maybe the ocean. I am someone who loves God, and fails time and again, only to rediscover His unfailing grace.

I am a mother who packs extra socks but forgets the juice. I am someone who cares deeply about young people, especially the "scary ones," with tats and wild hair and adult mistakes; I want to mother them all, I want to shake my tiny little sausage fist in the faces of those who won't. I am someone who loves rainy days, and sad songs in French that I can't really decipher. I am full of dark desires and sanctified by Jesus. I am Christeene Renee Fraser (nee Alcosiba), half Hawaiian and half redneck--a girl who learned to gut fish, drink black coffee, and quote T.S. Eliot.

What I Learned at My First Writer's Conference

2010-03-28T22:36:00.021-04:00

The Mount Hermon coffee shop is brimming with very important looking people, click-clacking away on the keyboards of very important looking laptops. In addition to looking important, those with Macs get bonus points for coolness, and double bonus points if they have BOTH a Mac AND horn-rimmed glasses.

I am in a room composed almost entirely of writers, or rather, people making a living (some monetarily and others only metaphorically) off of the written word--poets, novelists, editors, agents, publishers. I am surrounded by my fellow near-sighted, English class-loving, Espresso-worshipping, Walt Whitman-quoting soul mates. We have all come to this place, lovely and perfumed by earthy Redwoods, hoping to catch some part of eternity through the written word.

In 48 hours I will return to my little sullen (but beloved) corner of Georgia. When I return, I most likely won't have a book deal, but what I will have is some valuable information as I embark on my journey to the New York Times Bestseller's List (hey, you should always aim high people):

1) Industry words/phrases are important: As pompous and foreign as they may feel in the mouth of a new-comer, you must learn to embrace the jargon that gets you noticed by editors. Phrases on my industry vocabulary list this week include: "dramatic narrative non-fiction" and "felt needs."

2) Being a writer is SO much more than writing: Being a writer in the 21st century means embracing the new ways people consume media, which increasingly blurs the lines between the personal and the professional. Books will always have a place, of course, but no longer can a writer assume that he/she can get away with being a surly, unshaven recluse without people skills. Blogs, speaking engagements, and at least moderate attractiveness are required in addition to your ability to craft a mean sentence.

3) In the presence of power, just be yourself: In the course of pitching my own ideas, and overhearing others do the same, I've learned that the best way to sell your idea is by NOT sounding like an overly-rehearsed, contrived, infomercial salesperson. People want something real. Apparently animals, children, and editors can smell a fake. So breathe deep and drop the three-point sermon already.

4)Research, research, research: Since we're on the topic of pitching, it should be noted that it is appreciated if you know WHO you're pitching to. If a publisher specializes in Christian devotionals, don't come with your YA romance novel about a teen who falls in love with (fill in the supernatural being), and expect anything more than crickets chirping. It's not just about wasting their time, its also about sparing your own(as well as your ego).

5)Writer's conferences are conducive to crying: Apparently it's perfectly normal to have a complete and total breakdown during the course of a conference; we're talking full-fledged, toddler sob, snotty-faced breakdown, with a dash of 'Oh God, why do I suck so badly?' thrown in. But I wouldn't know personally of course, I'm too mentally strong for that (she says as she throws away the soggy ultra-soft Kleenex crumpled in her pockets).

6) It's perfectly okay to change your project on the fly: After one VERY unsuccessful pitch (the impetus for a truly pitiful breakdown. See #5), I was left baffled about how I could have done better. At the next pitch, still shaking and unsure, I let the conversation begin to seep into my own understanding of the project rather than approaching the conversation with an immutable and fixed product. This was a turning point for me. Editors stopped being gracious, and started being interested. Four requests for proposals later, I am thinking that this whole "listening" thing may actually work. Who'da thunk?

No Other Gods Before Me

2010-03-21T21:04:00.016-04:00

"We are left alone with our imagination and our arithmetic"

--Salman Rushdie,
"Wonderlands" lecture at Emory University

A few days ago I watched Salman Rushdie lecture before an enthralled group at Glenn Memorial Hall at Emory University. He is in the process of writing a Children's book, and spoke about the power of narratives, the necessity that we as a species have for stories. It is as fundamental as the need for food, shelter, love. Stories are those things by which we understand the world, understand ourselves, and transmit culture across the ages.

After an hour of basking in his presence, I rushed to my car, my heart on fire to go home and create, to write, to form a story by which someone else could understand the world, understand themselves, and trasmit culture across the ages. My facebook status proclaimed to my friends and family that Salman Rushdie was timeless, brilliant--that he was in fact, and or rather colloquially, "the bomb-dizzle." I could not contain my enthusiasm, and shared this thought with every victim I encountered, like a deranged PR rep or starry-eyed fan-club president.

But then I talked to Grant.

Grant, an intelligent friend and adept conversationist, shared with me an article that Rushdie had written called "Letter to the Six-Billionth Person." I had never read this before, so naturally I was eager to gobble it up, particularly after the night of inspiration I'd had. Approximately 1,500 words later I felt deflated, disparaged, and off. I felt irritated in the same way that someone feels when they discover a stain on their favorite blouse when I read:

"To choose disbelief [in God or religion] is to choose mind over dogma, to trust in our humanity instead of all these dangerous divinities."

I choose belief. To choose belief means holding love and selflessness over the lies and self-aggrandizement of the world, to trust in the righteousness of a holy God instead of the faulty knowledge and fickle adoration of academia. It is not infantilism or suspension of disbelief. It is real. It is power. Oh Salman, I still love you. Your writing, your quotes, and your lectures still thrill me. But I love God more.

Music that Amps Me Up

2010-03-17T11:06:00.010-04:00

Sidonie Gabrielle said "Music is love in search of a word," and I could not agree more. Often times when I write, I have various different playlists that I use to inspire me. For me, the music is drawing the words out, pulling my mind into the realm of emotion and experience and expression. Music opens the third eye. It is the muse for an otherwise quiet brain--lyrical lube if you will. Here are some songs I return to perennially:

1. "Saeglopur," Sigur Ros
2. "Moonlight Sonata," Beethoven
3. "Bachelorette," Bjork
4. "La Valse d'Amelie," Yann Tiersen
5. "The Killing Moon," Echo and the Bunnymen
6. "Strange Fruit," Billie Holiday
7. "Death is the Road to Awe," Clint Mansell
8. "Gnossienne no. 1," Erik Satie
9. "How Soon is Now," The Smiths
10. "Yes," Coldplay

What's on your creativity "hit list?" Scroll down to the very bottom if you'd like to sample mine.

5 Books I Wish I Wrote

2010-03-12T11:16:00.011-05:00

As we speak I am sitting in Barnes and Noble typing my blog, drinking my dark cherry mocha, and dreaming. Somehow I'm hoping all the collective inspiration and talent lining the shelves around me will seep into my brain and onto my laptop via osmosis. But if I could steal just a little genius, I'd take it from these authors whose books I keep coming back to for various reasons:

1. Seven Types of Ambiguity, by Elliot Perlman: Prose so painful and romantic and haunting that it physically hurts to read and/or makes you want to marry the author. His characterization is also phenomenal; his characters are so real for me that I fear I may run into one of them at the grocery store. If I didn't absolutely adore my spouse, I might've flown to Australia and stalked this writer.

2. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov: Let me preface by saying, that I am so torn about this book. As a Christian who genuinely wants to hate what God hates, and love what God loves, this book shakes me because of its almost blatant glorification of pedophilia and sexual abuse. Or does it? That's the genius of Nabokov's writing, the sheer power of his use of the first person; it is so convincing that it almost makes you sympathize with a rapist, a predator. As a writer, I want to peer into Nabokov's brain, figure out how in the world he does it. Brilliant and awful. I don't know whether to kiss this book or burn it. I think the latter.

3. The Giver, Lois Lowry: It's a small children's book that packs epic punch. I think about this book a lot, it surfaces in my mind not for its "literary" value (whatever that means), but rather for its originality, its brutal revelation about the world. It makes me ponder the value of human emotion and imperfection, and our futile efforts to perfect life at the risk of cleansing it of all that makes it exciting, messy, vital. This "children's" book achieves what so many "adult" books do not: it makes you think, makes you question, makes you feel.

4. Crazy Love, by Francis Chan: Get on your boots, Christian soldiers. I had to take a day or two after I read this book, and just examine my life for a bit. This book is an indictment of the beige, safe, and passionless life that so many Christians (including myself) succumb to in pursuit of a life that doesn't offend God, rather than chasing a life that pleases Him. I want to thank Francis Chan for writing a Christian book that tells me the truth, without the sugar coating. It is his conviction, strong sense of voice, and brutal honesty that I am inspired by and hope to emulate in my own writing.

5. Philippians, Saint Paul: Ok, so technically, this is a letter and not a book. But what is so remarkable about it is Paul's life, his peace, his urgency. This epistle is riddled with highlighting in my Bible because almost every line says something that makes me want to sell everything I have and open a school in Honduras. Writing like this has REAL power in the lives of people, it breathes hope into the believer, and at the very least shows the non-believer what a Christian life should look like; it is an earthly benchmark. Paul, in prison for his faith writes: "I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation...I can do everything through Him who gives me strength" (Phil 4:12-13). Above all, if I can learn anything about writing from Paul, it is that powerful writing, writing that carries through the ages, comes from a life that is full of passion and devotion to something larger than onesself.

Phrases That Make Me Cringe

2010-02-28T21:16:00.009-05:00

At the risk of sounding like a total elitist language-Nazi wench, my face erupts in a series of ticks when people use certain phrases. It's not that I'm judging them (well, maybe a little). It's more like my actual nerve endings reject a certain brand of ignoramus. I'd love to say that I had a neatly compacted 'Top Ten' list, but for now I submit the 'Top Seven' that are nagging me this week.

1. "We're pregnant"--No, actually, SHE's pregnant. Is HE also downing prenatal vitamins like candy, hovering over a toilet every thirty minutes, and experiencing a strange darkening of the areolas? No? Then "WE" are not pregnant. I can accept "We're expecting" on a technicality, but even that makes me wince just a little.

2. "Going green"--Let me clarify by saying that this phrase only makes me cringe in advertising. Just because you are a store that is now offering to sell me a crappy reusable bag that I will inevitably forget to bring during my next shopping experience does NOT make you an environmentally friendly company. I am not fooled; but thanks for the new lunch bag anyway.

3. "You people"--It's the favorite phrase of bigots everywhere for a reason. Fury-inducing cringe-worthiness.

4. "I hate to bother you, but..."--Remember that song from School House Rock, "Conjunction, junction, what's your function?" Well in this case, the conjunction 'but' is meant to describe its speaker. As in, you ARE one by using this disingenuous phrase to feel less guilty about bothering me.

5. "Can I ask you a question?"--This is the epitome of backward-logic-falsely-polite-I'm-too-insecure-to-just-spit-it-out-waste-of-a-phrase. You need to ask me permission to ask me a question? Oh, the irony. That level of self-doubt could cause a head injury.

6. "Parking in rear"--Do I even need to say anything about this one? Your inner middle-schooler should take care of this nicely.

7. "She/he's my boo!"--Excuse me, what? She's your boo? Are you scared of her or something?

What's on your cringe list?

Christeene's Bucket List

2010-02-16T10:25:00.008-05:00

Have you seen the movie with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman in it, "The Bucket List?" Neither have I. But I hear it's fantastic. The basic premise, I gather from those who've watched it and reported back, is that two old guys are dying and they decide to make the most of their time on earth by doing things on their bucket lists; as in, 'kick the bucket' list. I asked myself, what are the top 20 things I want to do before I die, without concern for money, talent, or practicality? Here's what comes to mind immediately, in no particular order:

1. Participate in the annual "Running of the Bulls" in Spain: One pair of, Nikes $100. Plane ticket to Spain, $800. Being able to say you barely dodged the horns of a raging bull by mere inches? Priceless.

2. Meet and talk with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, my favorite (living) author of all time.

3. Direct a movie version of "The Giver."

4. Jam session with Coldplay.

5. Create a collection of couture wedding gowns and premiere them on a runway in New York City.

6. White water rafting in the Colorado River.

7. Spend a day in the Vatican archives.

8. Have coffee with the president.

9. Get published in The Paris Review.

10. Backpack through Spain, southern France,and Italy.

11. Learn to play the violin or guitar.

12. Earn a black belt in a martial art of some sort.

13. Go on an extended missionary trip in South America: Jesu Cristo se ama.

14. Star in a Broadway musical: jazz hands people, jazz hands!

15. Deep sea fishing for Marlin ala Ernest Hemingway.

16. Tour the top ten greatest libraries in the world.

17. Open an amazing bookstore/coffee shop in the McDonough Square.

18. Spend a season on a commercial crab fishing boat in Alaska.

19. Go to the "Body Farm" in Tennessee. Yes, it's as weird as it sounds:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_farm

20. See my name on the spine of book on a Barnes and Noble bookshelf (even if it's the bargain section).

What's on your 'bucket list?'

10 Things I Heard at Work This Week

2009-08-09T19:45:00.007-04:00

10. At 4:55pm: "I'm leaving for a 6 month trip to Tanzania tomorrow, and I expect you to fill my (anti-anxiety/high cholesterol/high blood pressure/anti-diarrheal) medications before 5pm! Oh, and do I need a malaria shot?"

9. "What do you MEAN Medicare doesn't pay for that?!"

8. "It burns when I pee....a lot."

7. "I was eating Mexican today, and when I ate my burrito I suddenly remembered that I need a gastroenterology referral."

6. From a 93 yr. old caller: "I need to make an appointment for my 57 yr. old son for chronic hemmorroids."

5. "I think I've got the herpes."

4. "If it's a fasting appointment, can I still have a doughnut in the morning?"

3. "Pretty soon we'll be signing these insurance checks to Dr. Obama."

2. "Can I get a prescription for anti-gas medication? I have a funeral to go to tomorrow, and I don't want to embarass myself."

1. Handing a stool sample over the counter: "I have a present for you!"

Girlfriends

2009-06-13T06:54:00.007-04:00

Backstabbing. Fake. Judgmental. Uptight. Two-faced. These are some of the words I have used to describe the majority of my relationships with women in the past. Or at least, they are the words I associated with being intimately connected to a woman outside of my family. I have always held other women at a distance, prided myself on being someone who "tends to have only male friends," as though this were a rare and special trait. The fact is, I think there are more women than not who go out of their way to avoid other women. There is some sort of residual middle-school angst that keeps us from extending our true selves to other women.

I am currently reading Captivating by Stasi Eldridge, and while I don't agree with everything in the book, I do believe it has some vital things to learn about the attack placed on femininity. History relates centuries of repression and cruelty, and modern man continues the trend of the assault on Eve. Stasi Eldridge makes the point that Satan attacks Eve, not Adam, in the garden not because she is the weaker sex, but because she is the pinnacle of creation. There is something threatening about her beauty, her goodness, her reflection of God in the feminine that is too much for Satan to bear. He makes it his personal mission to disarm God's most beautiful work of art. It is easy to see how this has come to pass in the form of sexual slavery, clitoradectomy, foot-binding, burkas, and $0.70 to the man's $1.00.

But a more subtle and innocuous tool of evil is the assault on female friendship. If one woman was too much and too powerful, how much more then is a group of women together in friendship and love? Women are the bearers of peace, a reflection of God's beauty, the creators of life. Imagine the potential we have to radicalize the world if we could learn to stop being sexist against ourselves, and embrace one another en masse. What could we achieve if we stopped giving the world permission to cut women down by NOT participating in gossip, criticism, and exclusivity ourselves?

God has sent me some amazing women. He has given me an opportunity to lift them up, and thereby myself, by loving on them as He intended: as my friends, my sisters. There are some things that can only be gained in a friendship with another woman, and I can't wait to see where it takes me. Even if it means making myself vulnerable. Even if it means they won't like the fart jokes I reserved for my male friends. Even if they don't like my throw pillows or approve of my parenting. Love is vulnerability, and you cannot get anything worth getting in this life without a heavy dose of it.

Poker Face

2009-06-08T20:39:00.005-04:00

Poker Face--it's not just a song by Lady Gaga. It's a something we put on everyday. It was just a casual remark from a coworker, said in response to an observation that I had about the office. I ended my remark with, "Well, I won't complain," to which she answered, "Oh Christeene, it's okay, you never complain." I thought to myself, really? I never complain? Me? Could she please repeat that to my husband? (Literary term moment: this was actually ironic, because I actually was complaining in a back-handed sort of way)

I realize that in my office, I have a reputation for being a compliant hard-worker. A smiling, optimistic, "non-complainer" (apparently), who rolls with the punches, and keeps moving no matter what happens. It is a reputation that I am proud of, a reputation that I strive to maintain everyday, swallowing many a sarcastic remark, pointless whine, and caustic critique for the sake of maintaining office harmony.

I realized today, hovering over the copier, that my husband and family may not recognize that same Christeene that my coworker so earnestly praised today. Who is this "non-complainer?" they may ask. Because she surely doesn't live in our house. Why do I not bring the same gusto to my home life as I do to my job, for strangers? I have prided myself on my poker face, the veneer that I plaster on for the world ad nauseum, and saved the real ugliness beneath for the people I love the most.

Why is it so hard to bring our best home? Is it because there is no promotion, no raise, or no recommendation waiting for us at home that we allow ourselves, our tongues, our demeanor to be as primordial and ugly as possible? But when I die, I will not yearn for the faces of my coworkers. I will not remember the titles that were used to describe me when I am in need of a hand to hold from the hospital bed. Tonight I will ask my family for forgiveness for my acid tongue. Tonight I will vow to pour as much (if not more) into my family as I do into perfect strangers. Tonight I will no longer take pride that the world has not yet called my bluff and seen past this poker face.

Great Expectations

2009-05-30T08:22:00.005-04:00

A view from the Marta train this morning:

Every morning on the way to work, I take the Marta train (cause Marta is "Smarta," and greener, people! But I digress...), and I couldn't help but be disenheartened by what I saw when I looked out onto the neighborhood that the train was passing through. I've been through that part of Atlanta dozens of times, but today it really struck me just HOW desolate it really is. Homes boarded up. Stores closed. Graffiti proliferates on every surface. There is the possibility of something menacing at every turn, and an overall sense of melancholia in the deadness of the place. This is not a new scene for me; I've lived and traveled to several places like Southwest Atlanta, some far worse. But what frustrated me so much were the billboards that popped up like gaudy weeds all over this little concrete plain: "Seeking Abortion alternatives?" and "Pledge to Have No Unwanted Pregnancies!"

Make no mistake: I am NOT pro-choice. I do NOT support abortion. But what troubles me, is the lack of sensitivity and love that these "practical" ads suggest to the people who have to look at them everyday. I am somewhat offended by them all. They seem less about love and more about patronizing; why afterall do we only see these ads in the "ghetto?" As if to say, we expect you to make this mistake?

I wonder if some real positive self-image would do MORE to uplift than some impersonal attempt to teach about alternatives? Rather than assuming that the poor girl from the ghetto will automatically get knocked up, can we deter her from that outcome by showing her how to love herself by being proactive, not reactive? Certainly the pragmatist will disagree, crying afoul saying, "surely unplanned pregnancies will happen, and we are doing them a disservice by NOT educating them!" and "statistically it happens the most in neighborhoods just like this one!" Perhaps they are right. But I can't help but wonder how much more effective those same organizations would be if they redirected their money, advertising, effort, and exhortations on building centers, encouraging businesses, and reaching out in person rather than through removed didacticism that does more to demoralize the impoverished rather than to liberate them.

We internalize, and ultimately become, what we see and are told about ourselves over and over again. My mother told me I was a smart girl virtually everyday of my life, and I have always had confidence in my intellect (warranted or not). If you tell girls that we expect you to get pregnant, many of them will. That problem is compounded when you place that message somewhere like Southwest Atlanta; it takes on elements of class and race, and does more to keep people down rather than lift them up. Last time I checked, there were no billboards like that in Buckhead, or in the McDonough Square? And certainly there are teens there who will make the same error. I'm asking people to stop preaching, and start offering hope. Stop talking about change, and start expecting it.

Catch for Us the Little Foxes

2009-05-04T21:53:00.008-04:00

"Catch for us the foxes, the little foxes that ruin our vineyards.

Our vineyards that are in bloom."

Song of Songs 2:15

I was rereading Song of Songs (also known as Song of Solomon) a few days ago when I came across this passage. It struck me over the head, haunted me all day as I repeated it in my mind: "the little foxes that ruin our vineyards, our vineyards that are in bloom..."

Amidst a beautifully sappy depiction of Godly love and sex in marriage, we get this thinly veiled admonition. Be warned. Be cautious. Be watchful. Love is a delicate thing that is destroyed by the small things that eat away at us: money, children, work, stress, boredom, sin. These little foxes creep in and devour the delicious fruit of love one vine at a time. My marriage has not been immune from the little foxes, our vineyards not without the devastation of neglect or willful sabotage.

Our marriage class at church is currently completing a small group study of "Fireproof," and I am hopeful that this will help us to identify and strangle those "little foxes." It is time to reclaim the passion and fulfillment that God intended for us within the great mystery of marriage. It is time to stop hoping the vineyards will flourish, and start doing the work of tilling the soil, watering the vines, mending the holes in the fences. How would the world change if marriage was reclaimed for the sake of Christ? How many families saved from the fire if we would take the time to trap the foxes in our midst? What are your "foxes" today?

Tabula Raza

2009-04-26T07:17:00.000-04:00

For me, the quiet of the morning reveals God's perfect creation. The freshness of the air, crisp and cool. The saturated colors of the flowers, the trees, the sky--all brilliantly speaking of the supernatural artist who spoke them into existence. There is a certain hope in the morning, a rebirth. Everyday is a chance for a new life in God.

I find that walking with God is a series of battles set within 24 hour increments. Each day is consecrated or lost, but with the gift of Christ's blood, we are given the incredible grace that allows us to awaken everyday without blemish. No sin accrues under this gift. Whatever we were yesterday--a liar, a thief, a drug addict, an adulterer, a murderer--all vanishes before Him, and is cast as far as the East is from the West. He will remember our sins no more. I am astounded by this fact, because it is as contrary to the human condition as you can get.

We have the capacity to remember the tiniest, most insignificant grievance done against us from decades past, still fresh--we rip open our own scars remembering them. And yet, God, the keeper of all knowledge, wisdom, and human history will remember them no more. There IS no greater love. I've been told this my entire life, and it is only now truly resounding within me. I want to shout it from every fiber of my being. I want to wear His truth like my favorite dress.

Lessons from Genesis

2009-04-26T07:06:00.000-04:00

When God banished Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, he condemned Eve to painful labor and wanting a husband who would "rule over her." For Adam, he would only survive by the sweat of his brow. The animals, once their helpful companions, would now bite and snap at their feet. Disgraced and cursed, they left the Garden to a life of pain and bitter, neverending toil.

Everyday I watch my husband wake and get ready for work--as the hours grow closer to his departure, his kind eyes glass over, his already small mouth pursed into an even tighter oval on his face. His movements become quicker, and his words more sparse. I struggle to change and feed and clothe and strap the baby in for the ride; I am my husband's warden, escorting him to the prison yard where he negotiates amongst the other inmates, all desperate and scheming. As for me, my days are filled with cable television--sure--and creature comforts like windows and couches. I am not confined to a cell, I am able to walk outside at my leisure. But nonetheless, something eats away at me. I am dying even as my husband, the inmate, dies in the prison yard. It is a gradual death, quieter, as the world outside my home keeps moving on without me. I am not a prisoner, no, but nonetheless, I am still here in the jail as the warden. I am here because I choose to be, which is sometimes worse than the inmate, coerced. I am alone. I yearn for my husband, who is always gone. I am still suffering from a painful labor. I lick my wounds, feeling powerless because I am not the money-maker now, and he pushes down whatever bitterness he feels as our daughter grows out of his presence. We are eachothers' wardens, in the end.

So what are the lessons learned from Genesis? I find that my suffering is ancient and universal. Somehow this comforts me. I find that there is no one gender more afflicted than the other, though the punishment is so different. Somehow this also gives me comfort. I learn that eventhough God cast Adam and Eve from the Garden, he provided them clothing--protection, provision--before sending them to their deserved destiny. This gives me hope. It reminds me that this bitter toil is necessary, but that God will take care of us, however undeserving.