It’s awful! In the past I would never associate myself with that over-exuburant, kind of cheesy form of punctuation, but now for some reason I can’t help myself! I just can’t help myself!

I mean, I did used to admire writers who used them, the same way I admire people who drink from public water fountains. 

However did that turn into this?!

I need some kind of therapy!

I need some kind of help!

Some kind of exclamation point patch!

Maybe an exorcism!!!

So first of all, last year something really cool happened. I took second place in the fiction category of the 2011 Press 53 Open Awards. What that means is that Chris Offutt chose my story as second out of ten, which is pretty awesome, but it also means that my story, “The House That Grandpa Built” was published in their annual anthology. I have a link to more info on my Publications page.

I’ve just started a new blog actually at http://absolutelyalexander.wordpress.com which will explain I think, where I’ve been, and while writing for me still has to take the backseat so often.

Well it’s the annual time of applying for things for the heck of it. I’ve got a UNCG app out, an app out to Breadloaf, and getting ready to finish the stuff for Tin House, just in case I decide to go again and really work with Dorothy Allison this time.

A few months ago, I picked up Alice LaPlante’s huge writing book “the making of a story”  and I’ve been slowly trudging through it. Trudging probably doesn’t have the right connotations. It’s not tedious and muddy; it’s dense and thourough and it is my pleasure to take my time through it. It’s a good thing to sometimes pretend you don’t know anything about writing, and to go through it, facet by facet, tool by tool, re-learning, re-sharpening. The fact of it is, the only things you know about writing are based on what you’ve written before, and every piece, every story is its own. With every blank page or blinking cursor, the rules change.

I had Alice  as a teacher for a class as an undergrad at SFSU and the cool thing about this book, is that it’s a text book. It talks about an aspect of craft and then uses excellent stories to illustrate and question the points raised in the chapter, moving the ideas away from pure theory and chit-chat, and of course the excercises are pretty cool too.

So, in my little notebook, I’ve been writing a lot of gems from that, but I’ve also been reading a lot. First was Benjamin Percy’s The Wilding. Currently I’m making my way through Pinckney Benedict’s Miracle Boy and other stories. And I’ve got a tiny library waiting in the wings: Jim Krusoe’s Toward You, Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America, Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Hummingbird’s Daughter, Ali Shaw’s The Girl with Glass Feet, Peter Rock’s My Abandonment, and today after a trip to Borders: Hannah Tinti’s The Good Theif, Charles Baxter’s The Feast of Love, and then in a whole other direction Jane Eyre, and the book I don’t know why I love, Wuthering Heights. It’s like I just stumbled upon this gigantic net and I’m snatching up books as fast as I can, and trying to pull my way through them, taking what I can out of them, writing down words, sentences, effects down in my book, and closing them in there like pressed butterflies.

It’s wonderful. I know it is. It feels great, satisfying, like stuffing out a hunger, but I know, sooner or later, I have to exhale. I have to write too. I can only hoard these words for so long before they start smelling a little funny.

Some highlights from this year:

1) The woman from Winston-Salem that I was looking around for turned out to be staying in the dorm room exactly across the hall from me.

2) The readings. Ok, so the wooden benches of the Cerf Amphitheater hurt, but it’s always worth it. I should go on about all of them. Karen Shepard’s story about a group of college girls ignoring, not acting, while their friend is being raped. Benjamin Percy’s voice. The bit he read from his novel was great, but I can’t get his voice out of my head. Dorothy Allison’s voice confined to Vollum during a night of rain. That hardly stopped her voice from swelling to a boom and then receding to a heart breaking whisper. Luis Alberto Urrea told a story about how stories were told to him when he was a child and then he threw his book to the grass and performed his reading. Amazing! Steve Almond being Steve Almond while being interrupted by some kid walking on the path behind him. It was awkward. The kid looked confused, stoned. Both. He eventually sat down and Steve got to finish. Charles D’Ambrosio reading something new. Giving us the chance to see how seamless his sentences seem to flow, piling on top of each other. Joy Williams and her wonderful and hilarious short pieces about God, or like, from his perspective. I always love listening to D.A. Powell, and his hard-working poetry. He can make just about anything dirty. Aimee Bender read from her book, and then Jim Shepard finished up the week with a funny, but terribly sad, and kind of frightening short story from his new collection.

3) The chicken pot pie. There is this guy who works in the dining hall. Last year he was at the grill. This year he was making oven entrees. I always like getting what he’s prepared because he seems to love what he’s doing so much.

4) The seminars/ panels. I don’t go to them all. I specifically do not attend the morning ones. I just need that space after breakfast. I heard that Matthew Dickman gave a good one on suicide, though. I was sad to have missed it. It was interesting, because every morning in workshop we’d talk about the talks we’d heard, and everyone took wildly different things away from them.

Richard Nash talked about “The Future of Publishing” which seems to be a little less confusing than I imagined it. He gave a brief history lesson on publishing, on how often, and how drastic the changes through the years. His publishing company, Red Lemonade seems to have a pretty sophisticated social networking element incorporated into it. He emphasized the writer’s responsibility in the health of the reading industry. It’s about being connected. Being active in the community and supporting writers and writing.

Pete Rock talked about using research for novels. His novel My Abandonment, and a new novel he’s been working on, have fictionalized pieces of real-life stories and events. Pete talked about the dangers of too much research, and getting too close to the real-life people. He talked about the dangers of wanting to show off cool stuff that you’ve found.

A lot of people I talked to complained about Charles D’Ambrosio and Joy Williams panel, “Architecture and Impulse : Building the Short Story.” Some called it too mumbly. But I think it’s probably a good thing when writers who are trying to pin down an aspect of craft fail to do so. It was great to hear Charlie talk about following the music of what he’s writing, the sound, the rhythm. It was good to hear that he doesn’t keep a book of ideas. That if an idea comes, he writes it out, even if it’s just a page or so. Joy Williams had a particularly hard time talking about stories she had written in the past. It’s as if when they were released into the world, they were truly released from her, and she had a hard time remembering things about writing them, like she had a hard time or a resistance to think or talk about them at all.

I was distracted during Luis Urrea’s talk, “The Theory and Practice of Trust: Writing as Ghost Story” but when I became undistracted it was amazing. He started off by channeling Jim Morrison’s, “Is everyone in? Is everyone in? Is everyone in? The ceremony is about to begin.” His seminar was more otherworldly than most, exploring that spiritual side of the impulse to write, the inspiration and the responsibility the writer has to tell a story that someone, a family member, or fallen soldier cannot tell for him or herself. It was sad. It was as if he was handing us some item. A wand or staff bestowing an honor and responsibility upon us. Believe in coincidence. Believe in everything.

Benjamin Percy talked about the importance of work in writing. How a character’s occupation defines them, how they see the world, and how they speak in it. He showed us a clip from “Stranger than Fiction”, he talked about his father in-law waxing his tractor, he sang us a little song. I sang along.

Aimee Bender made us listen to a six-minute Kate Bush song twice while she talked about fairy tales. Then she gave us a little excercise. I haven’t done mine yet. We were to pass around pieces of paper, one with an occupation, one with a verb, and we were to write a story in which the occupation longed for the verb. I got a dancer who wanted to bellow.

Dorothy Allison talked about dialogue. I never know what to do about dialogue. I feel like I have some grip on it, and when my dialogue is failing, it’s because I don’t know my characters as well as I should. But Dorothy of course blew my mind and opened my eyes. Of course you’re characters need to make sense, and use their own voices, of course they need to be pushing against each other all the time. Dialect isn’t just dropped letters. She used it like an accent. People from everywhere have a dialect of certain way of speaking. I learned that Dorothy is always listening and writing down what she’s heard. So watch out with those cell phone conversations!

Steve Almond gave the last seminar of the week, “Funny is the New Deep.” I am of course already very funny, but it is good to be reminded of the relationship between humor and tragedy and the things that are the funniest often arise from things that are the saddest. It’s also good to remember that you can’t just throw in a bunch of jokes to show off how funny and clever you are. You have to open yourself up to the ridiculousness of this world and use your funny right.

5) The math camp kids in their sarongs!

6) On Thursday, I totally skipped out, and I totally missed Pete’s reading so that I could go to the Eddie Vedder concert. I managed to snatch up a last-minute ticket from Ticketmaster on my phone during Luis Urrea’s seminar. It wasn’t working at first. I was cussing at my phone. I wonder if Dorothy saw. Anyway, I would say it was amazing, or that it was sublime, but I haven’t been able to tell people how it was for me. Glen Hansard opened. I thought I was dreaming. I actually pinched myself several times. Glen’s voice is great, and then Eddie who I’ve loved and been into for years and years played ukulele, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, banjo, mandolin. Glen played with him a couple of times, but mostly Eddie was solo, and I love shabbily dressed men screaming their hearts out over acoustic or stripped down music. Even if he hadn’t dug out some of my most favorite songs, I still would have felt all the stirrings, it still would have felt exactly like church should feel. All that weariness was sloughed away, leaving a gleaming, raw newness inside, something for possibility, for love, and for joy, to cling to.

7) I had to run to Powell’s the last day after the seminars. I had promised my son books and I was running out of time. The bus was no problem but it took me a lot of walking up and down the same streets in Portland before I found the bookstore. I got in and out of there so fast, like record time grabbing Bunnicula books, and old Sesame Street collections that were published during my childhood. By the time I got back to Reed though, I just missed dinner. I got a Cliff bar and an Odwalla from the bookstore, and Steve Almond gave me the chicken noodle soup he hadn’t touched for all the broccoli floating in it.

8) Dorothy Allison. One of those late mornings of the week. Was it Friday? Saturday? I zombie-walked to the dining hall, eyes half-open staring at the muffins, and someone said, “You look how I feel. Like why bother.” Dorothy Allison was speaking to me from the other side of the sneeze guard. I had grounded myself from talking to her, because I could only stammer. I stammered something, and she said, “Because you’ll feel better.” I wanted to fall into that voice of hers and be held. It was a long week. She was my strange breakfast angel.

And then…the last night, after the last readings, Pete got me a beer, we went outside and he asked me who’s class I’d be in next year. I told him I wanted to take Dorothy Allison but I was a little scared of her. Like ten minutes later, more of our class had gathered around, and Dorothy was right behind us. Pete started talking to her and soon was telling her all about how frightened I was of her, and then talking about some award I’ve won that I was being quiet about, and then about the story I turned in for the workshop. It was like an ambush. It was a good thing it was dark out there, I’m sure I was blushing up a storm. Of course, in a way, I think I might take her class in the future, however embarrassing it is to have someone embarrass you it’s less embarrassing that embarrassing yourself.

So that was my Tin House 2011 in a nutshell. Of course I’m missing a lot and I didn’t even talk about all the amazing people in my class, but that will come, for now…a nap.

It’s true. I haven’t written every day. I haven’t been keeping up with my submissions. I think I may have sent as many as ten out. I don’t keep in touch too well with the wonderful writers I know. And although I have joined Winston Salem Writers, I have not been out to any of their things, nor have I gone out to any of the Press 53 Writers Center things.

That is bad news.

It’s still just March though, and I’m choosing to believe that there is still time. That time is really all I have. That I can at least consciously try to do better.

So here goes.

A Person

Once upon a time there was a person. He slept in his bed. He woke up and walked into his living room. He drank some juice and he watched TV in his living room.

He went outside. His dog needed to go potty. He found a boy. He said, “Uh-oh.” He saw a plane and he went up on the plane with his dog. He needed to go somewhere else. The boy was still outside.

The person went up, up, up in the sky and he saw some letters. He saw A,B,C,D, and two Xs. He danced with the A,B,C,D, and two Xs and he went down to his living room with his dog and the letters and they lived happily ever after.

The End

Chocolate

Bitter river
stopped,
cooled into
dark squares,
chopped into chips,
dripped halfway over
a macaroon,
my teeth break
into
you wherever you are
my teeth break in
but my tongue is the
one that unlocks
the sacred pull and swoon
of where you were born,
cloves, currants, and wine.

1) Send out 100 submissions.
2) Write every day.
3) Keep in touch with the writers I know, and get involved with the local writing community, because there is one.

There are some specific publications and programs I plan on submitting to or applying for. I also hope to discover new oppurtunities, try for things I haven’t in the past, and to just keep my mind open and maybe go about things in a different way.

Here’s to 2011!

The Word: Wash

Lila’s hair was all spilling out of her bun. She was wearing one of those tank tops she always wore. This one was in a color somewhere between teal and turquoise, but her red bra straps were slipping all over her shoulders.

She was a beautiful mess all right, one hot catastrophe. She bent down to throw her clothes in the machine and those tight jeans of hers got all tighter and hugged the roundness of her ass. I wanted to…to smooth my hands over, grab her hips…pull her…

But some guy came out of the Laundromat, asked to bum a cigarette from me and totally blocked the entire window. Jerk. I gave him a cigarette anyway, because that’s just the kind of person I am. I wasn’t about to smoke one with him though. He tried to look down my shirt when I handed him my lighter, so I just kind of “accidently” stepped on his foot and went inside to watch Lila clean her clothes.

“Meggie!” She squealed my name when she saw me. It was like I was the new “it” girl coming down the red carpet. Like Scarlett Johansson five years ago. “You done destroying your insides babe?”

I slapped the pack down on a dryer. “Your turn?”

“Yeah, Matt doesn’t like it when I smoke.”

“He smokes reds.”

“He says it makes my breath smell bad. He won’t kiss me if I’ve been smoking.”

“Then take the whole pack. It’s on me.”

Her eyes got all shiny. “You would quit if Luke asked you to. I know you would.”

“Whatever.” Lila was always throwing Luke in my face.

“I just know you would. You would do anything.”

“I don’t care. Don’t smoke.”

She opened her mouth a little like she was going to say something, but then she didn’t. And I pretended like she wasn’t thinking something really mean and I watched her clothes spin around and around in their vicious-fast circles. Her cherry blossom pink blouse caught my eye. It was so precious in there, swirling up with the bolder colors. I was so worried it would get twisted up in there. Lila looked so good in that one, so soft, so just-woken up, so sweet.

I saw everything in the reflection of that damned machine. The guy who bummed a cigarette from me was back inside talking with his friends, so loud, pointing at us, laughing, and Matt and Luke were outside smoking, bullshitting, and we didn’t even tell them that’s where we were going to be and there were like five other Laundromats in our neighborhood, and Lila’s eyes were getting so heavy, and her hands were getting so shaky, and our guys were telling stories out there and slapping the window for emphasis and I heard some child whimper, “mommy,” and I wanted to open the machine, grab out Lila’s cherry blossom pink blouse, save it, have her put it on.

If only I could be brave enough to do that…If only I could be brave enough to grab her wrist, bend her back, and kiss her the way I really wanted to…If only I could be just that brave, maybe we could close our eyes and wash away all those men who were never really going to be good to us no matter what. Maybe we could ride on out of that place on a swell of soap bubbles.

The Word: Count

One. Two. Three. Four. Clare closed her eyes, whipped off her shirt, whisked off her pants and plunged into the November pool. Five. Six. Seven. She kicked up from the bottom, broke the surface of the water, and lost her breath to the raw chill. Eight. Nine. Ten. Her skin was all goosey. An upstairs light was on. Her mother’s silky silhouette paced the drapes. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen.

Baxter should be home any time now. Clare dog-paddled and listened out for his hand-me-down Chevy. Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen.

“Baxter?”

Seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen.

Nineteen. Nineteen. Nineteen.

“Yeah?”

“You’re a dipshit. You should go tell mom you’re ok.”

A passing wind tickled the bushes. They giggled. “What and ruin all the fun?”

“I hate to piss on your parade, but you’ve been gone for two whole days and mom thinks you drove your car off a cliff… or something.”

Twenty. Twenty-one. Twenty-two.

“Baxter?”

Twenty-three. Twenty-four. Twenty-five.

“Baxter?”

Clare jumped up as high as she could and dropped down as hard as she could. She was going to be a rock at the bottom of an ocean. Her hair haloed all around her.

Twenty-six. Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight.

Twenty-nine. Thirty. Thirty-one.

“Where are you?” Clare bubbled her words into the water.

A tiny blue fish answered. It swirled around her ankle, spiraled up her leg, braceleted her wrist and took a seat in her palm. It sucked at her skin with its thin kissy lips. Clare stroked its spine. She wanted to make it purr.

Thirty-two. Thirty-three. Thirty-four. Clare’s body was panicking for air. She closed her fingers over the fish and came up.

Her mother stood at the edge of the pool, her white robe fluttered a little at the bottom. “Clare?”

Clare felt the fish wiggle and wriggle against her hand. But when she opened it up to show her mother it was empty. “Of course.”

“Clare. Come on now. You’ll catch your….”

Thirty-five. Thirty-six. Thirty-seven.

Frozen, numb, red, and rubbery, Clare pulled and struggled her way out of the water and into the towel her mother held out for her.

Thirty-eight. Thirty-nine. Forty.

Clare shivered a convulsive series of shivers and tried to lurch her way toward the house.

Forty-one. Forty-two. Forty-three.

“I bet he just ran off with that girl,” Clare’s mother slid the glass door open. “I bet they’ll send us a postcard from Maui.”

“Maybe.”

Forty-four. Forty-five. Forty-six. Forty-seven. Clare stopped at the door.

Forty-eight. Forty-nine. Fifty.

“Clare?” Her mother looked so warm, inside the warm house, on the warm carpet, in her warm robe, waiting.

Clare didn’t want to stop counting. She wanted to sift through all the stars in the sky, until she found that one point of light Baxter was hiding behind, until she knew where to look whenever she needed to remember that he had been real and solid and huggable and punch-able once upon a time.