cornmeal-crusted oysters

     A mostly sleepless night. Turned the TV toward my bed and watched too much news about the women kidnapped and tortured for ten years in Cleveland. Drifted off in a deep panic about people who are trapped against their will.
     Woke to dark early morning light, pouring rain and violent thunder, the wind smacking the rain against the loose windows. Unpacked waiting for the rain to subside. Read the New Yorker review of Gatsby ... underwhelmed. Decided before 7 to go out in the rain.  Didn't want to miss Saturday morning in the French Quarter before anything was cleaned up from the night before.
     Turning onto St. Ann I notice ferns growing out of a brick wall. Life will out in the Quarter, a fecund, disgusting, affirming place.
     The garbage trucks are out rolling slowly along Burgundy Street (pronounced BurGUNdy). A stink comes from the full garbage cans that smell like old cardboard and rotting fruit soaked in beer and vomit. I remind myself to buy a rain poncho, which I later forget to buy anyway.
     Looking for a new place for breakfast I stumble onto Stanley's on Jackson Square. Tiny breakfast selection:

• EGGS STANLEY - cornmeal crusted oysters, poached eggs, canadian bacon, creole hollandaise
• PANCAKES - with vanilla icecream and louisiana cane syrup
• EGGS STELLA - Cornmeal crusted soft-shell crab, poached eggs, canadian bacon, creole hollandaise
• BREAUX BRIDE BENEDICT - House-made boudin sausage, smoked ham, american cheese, poached eggs, creole hollandaise, on french bread

   The sky is so dark at 7am that it still looks like nighttime.  There's one other table of people and they have money, the mean kind of money. Their clothes look like Brooks Brothers, and they act like they'd crush butterflies or put a cigarette out in someone's carpet - that kind of money. Careless. Not-give-a-shit wealthy.
   The coffee here is so strong that I put all three 1/2 and 1/2 packets in and it's still saddle-leather brown.
     "Our House" by CSNY is playing.  The girl at the other table is talking loudly to the two men with her about her "rug rash" and she contorts to show them the bumps on her elbow, and they lean in to her, actually interested.  One man, her husband maybe, since he's wearing a large, highly-polished gold band on his ring finger, is competing with her rug rash by describing his wart, and I can't look away, and I wonder if thinking that the world revolves around you is enough to make it so.
     She's wearing a dumb hat with a crease in the middle and it's placed on her head in a careless way that she knows looks cool.
     CSNY reminds me of Craig and how I feel I am my best writer here in New Orleans and does that come from the security of my marriage? Does it come from knowing that my mom and sister are coming to join me soon? Does it come from having enough money in my bank account to afford this trip?
     The girl in the dumb hat is saying to another girl who just showed up, "No no." She laughs too loudly.  "No, I'm just up very late.  I never get up in the morning before 10.  We've been up all night."  She elbows the guy with the wedding ring and laughs, like a dog barking. Ha ha ha.
    On the way back to the B & B the rain has stopped.  I walk down a quiet cross street, Dumaine maybe, and I see what looks like a pile of vomit in the street.  When I walk up to it, though, I realize it's actually a thousand white flowers from an overgrown oleander plant that sits in a pot on the balcony.  The rain has pummled its flowers to the ground.
     I think that if I had had a daughter, I would have named her May.

Day 1 in New Orleans (May 2013)

            School ended yesterday and this morning, I went to the airport and got on an 8am plane bound for New Orleans.  It’s raining now, has been raining all day on and off.  I splashed out of the airport shuttle and into the courtyard of this old, familiar bed and breakfast.  My box of books had already arrived and I was met by some characters.

            The woman who owns the place … I remembered her from years ago, remembered that she spoke a lot, but this time, she started talking and didn’t stop.  She so quietly went on and on, and I noticed the thick white beard, almost invisible, that she’s grown since I saw her last, as she talked about leprosy, flitting from one subject to the next, as though I wasn’t there.

            She had hired a part-time maid, she told me, and in the maid came, bounding up the stairs, reeking of old, strong liquor.  She looked like my friend JK who was using crystal meth …  skinny with jumpy eyes, large red welts on her cheeks and her shoulders.  She couldn’t make eye contact and kept running up and down the stairs.  She said to me, “So did X talk your ear off?  She has dementia now.” And I felt angry, protective of X, for no reason, and worried that this meth addict had a key to my room.  But then I remembered that I brought nothing of value here with me, and that I am in New Orleans where women grow beards and ramble, where crystal meth addicts want so badly to help you carry your suitcase up the rainy steps in the courtyard.

            I put on my baseball cap and walked in the rain to Jackson Square and found a little table covered in confectioner’s sugar at Café du Monde.  A couple came by and I invited them to share my table. She was one of those women who is I-don’t-know-how-old, and who just puts me to shame.  Perfect.  Lovely.  They give me the address of the Ursuline Convent as I’ve asked them (and everyone I come in contact with) if they know of anyone who can help me with the history of the Daughters of Charity. I want to know if they wore those enormous woolen wimples during the summertime yellow fever epidemics. I want to know what they wore underneath. I want to know the details of their days.

            I carry my café au lait with me to the visitor center where a woman named Bea gets books down to help me find a plantation that is open to that public dating to 1878. I want to know about the plumbing then. I want to know what the windows were made with.  Were they open to the elements with shutters?  Were they closed in with blown glass? Where were the cisterns?  When the toilets flushed, did they empty into a septic system?  She keeps me there for an hour and I fill up my pad with notes, and my purse with brochures for tours she thinks I should take.

            I walk along Chartres ducking under awnings as the drizzle strengthens to fat, gray rainsdrops.  My shoulders get wet now and I walk along Bourbon Street to a hotel bar called Desire. There is one seat at the bar and I take it.  A man to my right strikes up a conversations.  He is drinking Sazerac and I order a martini and a shrimp cocktail, which comes out with shrimp but also with a bowl of spicy cocktail sauce filled with pickled okra, string beans and cocktail onions.  The bartender leaves a tub of horseradish for me too, and the Sazerac guy tells me about the bachelor party he’s going to tomorrow. He asks about my research.  
         The man and woman to my left are giggling and I have a sudden worry that I’ve done something stupid, but they lean over and start chatting with me. They are British and wish they had ordered my shrimp cocktail. They are book lovers and I add the names of three novels they recommend to my notebook.  She gives me her business card and tells me to please email her when my novel comes out.  She is a voracious reader and her husband, who is in New Orleans to celebrate his 60^th birthday agrees.  “She’s married to me,” he says, “just so that I can help her remember the names of the authors she loves.”

Story Ideas

I have a list of stories that are finished enough to send out.  There's one about Dad in a nursing home.  There's one about a doorman who eat mangoes in Bryant Park, and another that's an essay about miscarriages, and another about a kid I knew who was really pretty in 2nd grade, but things didn't go well with her later in life.  There's a story about a cat in a restaurant basement in TriBeca and another about a med student in Louisiana getting her first "bone box" for gross anatomy lab.

Those are all "finished" stories, meaning finished enough to send out, but I know that if a year goes by and they aren't published, I'll read them again and make changes, take out words, or more than that.

On my computer I also have a folder full of unfinished stories, meaning they're fleshed out but need time to be digested. Stories need time, it turns out, or for me they do.  They kick around in my head for a while, just below consciousness for a year or more before I am able to sculpt them properly, or that's how it's been since I've been in grad school.

Next to my desk at home, I have a file called "story ideas."  It's a real file in a blue folder.  Hand-written notes go in there, slips of paper.  Some of them are just a sentence long, like this one, "Mary Cheever feeding the deer," or "Jason and Crystal Meth."  They're images from my life that I haven't made sense of yet, that rattle around and stay with me, until I feel like I've figured out what I'm supposed to have learned from them.

There are a few story ideas that are a full page or two long.  Every once in a while, between semesters, I like to go to this crappy Italian restaurant, sit at the bar, order a glass of their house chianti, and write.   A story called "Black Ice" came out of that one day, and I have a page right now in my folder called "Blake" and another called "Echoes" that came from there too.  I wrote "Penny Lane" on a piece of paper once because I was listening to the song by the Beatles and thought how great it would be write the story of a town the way they did in their song, like a poem.

There's a bulleted list of stories from my year in St. Croix 30 years ago now.  The bullets read:

• Getting and returning 2 puppies
• The guy peeing in the shoes at the foot of the bed
• Buying earrings on layaway
• Kissing a sailor

I find it relaxing. stablizing even, to have a place to put my ideas that is outside of my head.  Today, for instance, when I went to the movies, I realized that everything reminds me of something else. I was eating popcorn and it reminded me of how, when I was 13 and visiting my brother in Hawaii for the summer, I hung out with this crazy friend of his named Venus. She had an eating disorder and she whispered to me in the movie theater, "Can you hear the sound they're all making chewing on their popcorn like a bunch of caterpillars?"  She was right. I stopped and listened, and now whenever I'm at the movies, I think of that, and of her, of how she hit on me one night when I was sleeping over at her apartment. She said, "You don't have to sleep in your nightgown if you don't want to."  Well, I knew what was what, so I had a very sleepless night, way on my side of the mattress. The next morning when I met up with my brother for breakfast I said, "I'm not sleeping over there anymore."  And he said "Fine with me."

That seems like a story to me, how every time we sit in a movie theater, we relive our entire lives. When I got home I wrote "popcorn and Venus"on a slip of paper and added it to the Story Ideas file.

Good Editors are DREAMY

I was excited and trepidatious when I got an email from an editor at The Westchester Review saying that she wanted to give me notes on a story they had accepted for publication called "Beautiful Mom."

I began my MFA a few years ago because I felt I'd reached the edge of my writing abilities. I wanted to become better.  I sat in my first class reading other people's work, sharing mine, bewildered, intimidated, excited.  I began  to understand the technical under-pinnings of my craft - how to layer in subtext, build arcs, surprise my readers, make them care or flinch or think. I looked forward to workshopping my writing because I wanted to know how other people felt about my characters.  Until then, no one had met them but me.

Over the last two years, though, as my confidence grew, workshops became decidedly less compelling.  They still provided me with what I needed most - a deadline - but the feedback I received became less and less useful.  I knew what was, and wasn't, working and I didn't need my classmates to tell me. As my friend (and brilliant writer) Martha said, "By the end of your degree, you become less porous, and that's a sign that you're ready to move on."

When the editor of The Westchester Review called me at home, we had a great, 1/2 hour phone call.  She asked me questions about my story, which she had clearly read with care and intelligence.  She came at the work with a humble attitude that said, "Let me help you get this story where you want it to be." I revised with gusto. Her questions made me realize the small spots where I had failed to convey what I had intended to convey. I was excited about the piece again. I felt it getting better. When I sent it off to her, she wrote back with two more questions, and the caveat that I should feel free to ignore her comments, if they were less than helpful.  I loved her notes, even the one I didn't end up using, because it helped me clarify my own position on the story.

She made me love my story again. She helped me make it even better than it already was, and she reminded me of what I hope will be the next stage of my writing life, now that my MFA is almost complete.  I want to spend time talking about writing with dedicated, smart readers and writers for the rest of my life.  What could be more fun?

It also reminded me of what it means to be a good teacher.  The editing of my students' work is not about "fixing" their writing, but about helping them find the tiny heartbeat inside their own paper, what makes it live.

I turned in the final final draft tonight, along with my 50-word bio. I'm feeling sort of dreamy, like the world is a magical place. I've always loved good editors, and I just had the luck to work with one of that rare breed.

You Can't Always Get What You Want

It has been a week full of chores. I wrote three letters to my father. I went to the dentist to get a filling replaced. I've been to the farmers market and got apples. I made my lunch, I did my laundry, I cleaned the toilets. It is a struggle to find time for what matters.

I have over 100 students this semester, and all the classes that I teach are writing classes.  Even if nothing else were on my plate, my plate would be full.  Teaching is deeply rewarding to me.  Last week we discussed Poe's "The Black Cat" and I reveled in the arguments students had with one another about why it should, or shouldn't be considered 'literature.' What fun.  Tomorrow we begin discussing Chekov's The Cherry Orchard.  This is the perfect job for me, but still, they are turning in final drafts of essay tomorrow, 100+ of them, and I can feel the light going out of my eyes.  How will I ever manage? When will I write?

My own writing life seems to come last these days.  My novel is begun, and I've given the first pages to my thesis advisor and the next set to my thesis group.  My advisor emailed to me today with good notes.  "Your first chapter is well-written," he wrote, "but I think you're throwing too much at the reader too fast. Take things in order of importance. So the first chapter should deal with her pregnancy ... Save the petty thievery for later on, well after we've become involved with her. let us care about her before you get into that."

I trust him and he's right about this, but I long for the summer weeks when I had the gift of two residencies, and nothing to do there but write.  Having to pay the bills is ruinous for art, but it's a challenge we all face.  We have busy days, and sometimes the things that matter most to us get shoved to the side so that we can get fillings replaced.  Is anything more important than getting a filling replaced?  But this week in particular, I wish that I could sink into my writing without having to come up for air.  I'd like to ride my bicycle out to my studio somewhere in the middle of nowhere, make a pot of tea like I did every morning at MacDowell, shut all of the blinds and just obsess for hours and hours - no phones, no cats, no fillings, no friends or husbands or students or fathers, just thinking deeply about this book and inching forward as I feel compelled to do.

It's not reality, though, and as Mick Jagger said, "You can't always get what you want."  I have a great thesis advisor, and I should be grateful (I am, I swear).  I've got applications into VCCA for the summer, and I'm working on the one for Edward Albee, and those two will give me hope that perhaps, when the warm weather returns and school lets out, I can go back to finish my project there in time for it to be due at the end of August. I have a story being published and an essay a total stranger likes.  This is all good.

And so, like the rest of life, I reconfigure my expectations. One thing at a time, I tell myself. Tonight I re-read The Cherry Orchard.  I will get up early and work for a half hour on my book, and then I will teach four classes, and I will revel in my students' originality and fears and ideas about this play that I suspect none of them has ever read before.  And tomorrow night, my thesis class meets, and so my writing life will roll on apace.

Finding Nemo

I am about 4 weeks into my thesis, which is the work on this very novel.  I had a false start, which is to say, in writing terms, I began.  I wrote about 20 pages and realized I had to start over. I was writing from the point of view of a little girl, but it wasn't working. I couldn't express what I wanted to express through the voice of a little kid.  So I went back to the drawing board.

It's at times like this that it is very good to know other writers well, well enough that you can say "Help" and "what should I do?" and "I'm not up to this."  My friend Martha came to the rescue this time, with an exercise based on building several alternate outlines, which I did.  It helped me discover that my protagonist as to be a grown woman of at least 30, and so those first pages went into the pile of what I refer to now as "background."  The book begins with Constance at 30.  I've begun to write again and it's flowing.  Yay for Martha.

This has been a good few weeks for my writing. After almost a year of sending out stories, "Beautiful Mom" is being published in The Westchester Review.  It changes everything, getting published, even though it shouldn't. I slept well that night, and began sending out other pieces.


The next day I heard from another magazine about an essay that I wrote called "The Lifted Corner."  They wrote that they liked the piece's "sincerity and poignancy."  They went on to say, however, that they want me to revise it to include a research component.  While I want to publish the piece, I see it as an emotional essay rather than one that will benefit from research. I thanked them and said I'd send them something else another time.

So we dig out here from the 20 or so inches that fell overnight.  I have more writing to do this morning before my work is complete for today.  Persistence seems to be the key.

Books for my Thesis

I placed an enormous book order last week, of all of the books I will need to complete my thesis.  I plan on spending most of Christmas break reading and planning to work on my thesis, which will take up all of next semester and the summer.  Then my MFA will be complete!

I reached a milestone last week by turning in the proposal for my thesis. It's just the proposal, the outline of the project that I plan to do, and all of you who read this blog already know the project at hand. I am finally getting ready for the final, 6-month sprint of this novel.  How exciting (and daunting) it is to be here.  I have so many doubts, but the momentum of the project carries me onward.

The family tomb in New Orleans

The proposal itself is twenty pages long. It includes a bibliography of the books I will use in my research, as well as a detailed outline of the project and writing samples. Writing the proposal was a big project, requiring thought, planning and reflection - such a good process to go through.  

I like lists, and so I thought I'd share with you the "Proposed Bibliography for MFA in Creative & Professional" for my thesis.

Non-Fiction

1. On Writing by Eudora Welty
2. The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans by Lawrence N. Powell. This book is of interest because it outlines the establishment of the city of New Orleans, from Bayou and boy to thriving port city.
3. The American Plague: Yellow Fever, A Crippled City and Medical Heroes by Molly Caldwell Crosby.
4. Plague Among the Magnolias: The 1879 Yellow fever Epidemic in Mississippi by Deanne Stephens Nuwer.
5. Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them by Francine Prose.
6. How Fiction Works by James Wood.
7. The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice for Writers by Betsy Lerner
8. The writing of Mary Bella Brice under the pseudonym of Soeur Marie during the Civil War in The New Orleans Times.  Mary Bella Brice was my great great grandmother and the protagonist of my book is inspired by what I know of her.  The original copies of her articles were donated to The Historic New Orleans Collection research facility. I plan to use her papers to help develop the character of Constance Branch, particularly for Part 3 of the novel.
   

Fiction

1. The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
2. A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
3. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
4. Wolf Hall by Hillary Mantel. My interest in Mantel is that she is a current writer of historical fiction.  My work will place less emphasis on history than Mantel’s, and will, I hope, be considered more literary. Still, she is considered a master, and I hope to learn from her.
5. New Orleans Stories: Great Writers on the City edited by John Miller
6. A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert.  This is a novel about the relationships between women of different generations.  My novel deals, in large part, with the relationship between grandmothers and granddaughters, and I am anxious to hear a contemporary take on this theme.
7. The Best American Short Stories of 2012 edited by Tom Perrotta and Heidi Pitlor. I want to stay in touch with the finest current literary fiction.
8. Evangeline by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
9. The Awakening by Kate Chopin.
10. “The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allen Poe. This story was first published in 1842, right in the heart of when my novel takes place.  Since so much of the action of the story is set into motion by yellow fever, I wanted to look at how terrifying diseases like yellow fever were perceived during their time, and not just in retrospect.
11. The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty