Disaster Becomes Me

“We are dealing with someone with totally incoherent aspirations,” B, the prof at the helm of my nonfiction workshop summarized.

“I mean we’ve got art, and journalism, and the church, and all these resumes—it’s clearly a crisis.”

B had just finished reading aloud a disaster piece he found promising.  Unfortunately he doesn’t know the author—me—well enough yet to know that what he labeled “incoherent aspirations” was not a byproduct of disaster, but the stuff of my existence. 

Indeed, my prior nonfiction workshop prof had a similar assessment, although his words for the state of my prose were “needing focus.” Dan liked all of my pieces individually but baulked at the idea of they could become a manuscript.  He was always worried about them “holding together,” as though such a book would literally come unglued from its binding without a bigger show of stability from its author. There seemed to be an overall feel that humorous essays about the adventures of an Artistic Hypochondriac is just not cohesive enough.  Dan wanted me to present a unified identity in my work.  According to Dan, I could be an artist, a teacher, a journalist, hypochondriac, etc.—but not all those things.

The trouble is, I AM all of those things, at once, and I do aspire—to many things.  As implausible as it seems, this IS the story.  The good news is, B seems to like my persona within the context of disaster, so for now I’m just going to focus on being a disaster writer.  It sounds suspiciously like a coherent aspiration.

As a postscript (while we are on the topic of disaster, I am finally getting my car fixed!  Total price tag on scraping the side of a tiny green Spark along a concrete post? $2500--including the outright replacement of one of the doors.  But it looks like next week my car will go back to looking as good as the new car it is, courtesy of my insurance.  The downside? I've been avoiding gas stations ever since which led to my husband having to pour the contents of his can of lawn mower gas into my tank yesterday morning when I discovered that I didn't have enough to make it to work.  The last minute fill up caused me to be late for my 8 am class and teach the only 4 students left in the room.  Good times.

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Black Rice, and It's Not From Asia: News from the Science Desk

There is news on the rice front.

On Sunday, I explained that we're putting to a scientific test the power of words.  The experiment was a week old yesterday afternoon, and there are developments.

First and least importantly, Monday Me came pack from cyberspace against all odds.  It turns out that if you do accidentally delete Photo Booth videos from a mac, they WILL turn up in the trash…after a long delay, perhaps 12 hours or more.  This is a relatively unknown phenomenon.  In fact, I should probably go post it on some computer geek forum as I did NOT learn this fact from anywhere online, but from my own personal mac authority--a savvy college student who has been dabbling in macs probably since birth.  But none of this is the point.

In truth, I did not hasten to post the video, as, in the final analysis it just wasn't as important as I first thought.  I actually preferred chalking the whole thing up to New Journalism and carrying on.

However, in light of my next news tidbit, I am going to post the video at the end here as an, er, postscript due to the fact that the experiment is yielding results, and it's probably key to show my methodology.

Here is the "good"/"blessed"/"happy" rice:

And here is the "bad'/"cursed"/"sad" rice:

That black dot began forming on Saturday.  I know this is all about words, but I am nearly speechless. Nearly.  I mean, time will tell where this thing will head, but it is, literally, food for thought.

I will keep you updated on future developments.

For now, I will leave you with Monday Me.  And please--talk back.  What do you make of this? 

Living in a Snow Day Moment

Here in southeast Virginia, winter and snow aren’t words that pair automatically, like macaroni and cheese or peanut butter and jelly.  Indeed, even the rumor of flurries prompts local residents to clear store shelves of not only mac and cheese, peanut butter and jelly but milk, bread and eggs, too.

Years back, my mother was visiting from PA when she caught me glued to the local news early one morning.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“I’m watching the school closings,” I replied.

My mother glanced at the thin dusting on my lawn and gave me a puzzled look.  “Why,” she asked, “would you expect school to be closed?”

I gave her and equally puzzled look.  “Mom, I explained, the local government and the military have already buckled beneath the weight of this storm—the schools are sure to follow.”

It’s true: our courts, military bases, and school systems cannot sustain operations during even the merest amount of winter precipitation. 

Which is why a Real Snow Event such as the 8+ inch accumulation we had last week, is a really big deal in these parts.

Now, I’m a girl of sun and surf: long sun kissed days and warm, firefly-lit nights are my thing.  But I enjoy a good snowstorm as much as the your average elementary student, particularly in light of our recent live-in-the moment discussions. 

So I decided to have as much fun in the snow as seemed reasonable.  Within minutes after the first flakes began to fall, I grabbed my camera, outfitted it with the macro lens I got for Christmas and attached it to my tripod.

Even with the fun as I was having with my camera, I still wanted to do more than just let my husky run around the back yard (although that was a treat to watch).  The Baker and I got excited about attaching Audrey to some sort of sled and mushing with her.  We couldn’t really find a sled, so we did what any beach-dwelling family with a husky might do:  we hooked her up to a body board.  And that where the truly Big Fun began:

Audrey was a natural.  It was so much fun to see her dig in with her hind legs and get into a rhythm: she was doing what she was born to do.  I had such a good time, I almost wished we had snow every day.  Almost.

The snow has now melted, but not before we sucked ever big of fun from it’s cold, wet goodness.  May a snowfall never end without my yard looking like this:

Monday Me and the Not-So-New Journalism

So this week in my MFA workshop we’re reading a piece called Frank Sinatra has a Cold.  It is a celebrated piece of journalism that came about when the writer, Gay Talese had the creativity, foresight, and gumption to forge ahead with his assigned Sinatra profile despite the fact that his subject was down with a cold and wouldn’t agree to the interview.

Being, as it were, the 1960s, creativity in nonfiction wasn’t, as my students say, a thing.  At least until Talese made creative nonfiction a thing by spending a week following Sinatra from afar and talking about the icon to anyone who WAS willing to go on record.

The piece launched a whole movement called New Journalism, which is, of course, the only journalism I have ever known.  I have long held the belief that the real story is what ACTUALLY happened, not what you wanted or planned to happen.  Take, for instance, a young journalist who went out on her first Big Story to interview a radio personality who not only failed to show up for the interview, but unexpectedly quit the profession and disappeared permanently from the grid.  The plucky journalist assumed that the personality, who was celebrating her 30^th birthday at the time of the disappearance, was having a hipster, one-third-life crisis and wrote an entire book on the travails of entering the third decade.  Way to go, young journalist, way to go.

Which brings me to the original topic of this post, which was originally supposed to start with the next line.  There is a scientific experiment afoot in my house.  It began earlier in the week when bestie posted this link about the power of words.  Since, as a profession, I broker in that particular commodity, I was instantly intrigued.  I wasn’t familiar with the source (and still can’t vouch for it) so I took to google to see what I could find.

The gist of the experiment concerns two jars of rice (although there are 3-jar variations).  One jar is complimented, thanked, or otherwise praised each day.  The other jar of rice is insulted, jeered, or otherwise dissed.  (I know, it sounds ridiculous, but stay with me).  YouTube suggests that a majority of independent analysis (translation: curious people doing home experiments) supports the idea that the praised rice stays fresh, whereas the insulted rice molds.

The idea is that words have the power to literally change the structure of physical things.  Biblically, we can turn to the episode when Jesus cursed the fig tree and it died (of course, he’s Jesus, but…) and there’s also the adage about love being the “secret ingredient” in food

If true, the implications of this experiment are considerable; even frightening.   I admit to being skeptical, but if it is true, I want to know.  If my words have the power to either preserve or kill, I need to know. 

So I’m taking the question to science, and inviting you to follow along.

And here’s where the post gets tricky.  Like a good journalist, I had an interview all ready to roll here concerning the particulars of the experiment.  And, like the predicament of the above mentioned young journalist, my interview subject is permanently gone.

The subject of the interview was Monday Me.  Monday Me made you a nice video about the experiment, sitting next to the steaming pot containing the sanitized the jars I pulled out with tongs and filled with a couple scoops of Minute Rice (which Monday Me explained was not generally used in our house). Monday Me was thorough and witty—everything you’d want in an interview subject.

But, alas, she’s gone; permanently deleted in an editing mishap resulting from the interviewer’s (also me) poor decision of recording the video on my mac in Photo Booth. So, you’re just going to have to take it from Sunday Me that there are two sanitized jars of rice on my studio counter.  I have been praising the one on the left and railing the one on the right all week. Future Me will keep you posted.

On Living and Connecting

Way back in mid-summer, I posted a list of topics I felt would be covered here in future posts—a sort of preview trailer, if you will. One list item, tiny houses, hasn’t had much play here on the blog, but took a prominent role in class discussion today.

We’re reading our way through John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley and our format is that everyone is to come to class with a list of three discussion topics. Anything is fair game: questions, connections, favorite quotes—the only rule is you have to come with something (three somethings, actually) to talk about.

Often times, a student’s thoughts will be, quite literally on the same page as my own.  Today was one of those days. 

While spending time in Maine early in his journey (midway through part 2, for those reading along at home) Steinbeck marveled at the apparently new practice—in1960— of people living in mobile homes. Steinbeck made it a practice to talk to people along his travels, to pull locals into his trip experience so he could learn new perspectives. Not a bad way to go about a journey of any kind, I’d say.  So he spent time in a few of these newfangled trailer parks—supped with families, chatted with park managers, toured a few of the “wonderfully built” homes.

Of course, the immediate response here was to giggle just a bit at the concept of mobile homes being not only new, but applauded.  But then I asked the students if they could think of any modern day parallels to the mobile home.

M—always sharp, that one--noted the irony of today’s RVs being a status symbol, but trailers representing the polar opposite.  True.  But I encouraged the students to dig even deeper.  What was really going on here? Why were people attracted to this new type of living?

Steinbeck asked the same question. “Why did a family choose to live in such a home?” he asked, then answered his own question: “Well, it was comfortable, compact, easy to keep clean, and easy to heat.” Hmm.

I asked the students if they have heard of tiny houses.  One or two raised a tentative hand.  So I pulled up google images and we took a look at our modern version of sustainable, simple living.  Go--check it out--it's fascinating.

It became clear, then, that this idea to downsize—to not be tied down to endless chores and cleaning, and throwing cash at a heating bill wasn’t bound to a certain decade.  Thinking back to Whitman, we realized that the idea of unfettered living in the moment wasn’t even tied to a single century.  And so it began.

I divided the class into groups and they worked at finding other connections between Whitman and Steinbeck.  One group decided that Steinbeck and Whitman had similar views on religion—finding God in nature rather than organized religion.  Another group talked about Whitman’s comments on animals:

“I think I could turn and live with animals, they're so placid
    

and self-contain'd, 
I stand and look at them long and long.”

--Song of Myself, section 32

--and discussed Steinbeck’s choice of Charley as a traveling companion.  M and his group talked about both authors' desire to sleep under stars and live in the moment.

Connections and ideas and energy coursed through the room as it did through the veins of the writers who included us in their journeys.  I can only hope this semester will be a launching pad for many more adventurous travels.

Good stuff.

I hope someone out there may be reading along with us—and, if you are, please join in the conversation.

This is the fourth installment of our new Friday Feature exploring the literature I'm teaching my sophomores in our Great American Road Trip course.  I'm so excited to be sharing some of my favorite books--stories that have inspired me and fed my sense of adventure and belief that anything at all is possible if you just set out and explore. Glad to have you along for the ride.