A New Month / A New Novel: NaNoWriMo

Two years ago, in November,  just after I started my blog, I wrote 50,000 words that almost came together as a novel. That was my first NaNoWriMo experience. It was good to find out that I was capable of putting that many words together around a mostly coherent, semi-cohesive story. I still work on making this blob of words into a form that works as a novel, and it is still in the cat herding, jello nailing stages. Most of the pieces are there and moving toward a conclusion that has yet to materialize in a workable form.  I struggle cheerfully with it now and then like a 50,000 piece jigsaw puzzle sitting on a table off to the side of part of my mind that writes. I have consolidated the scattered pieces into 4 or 5 main groupings that still  need to be connected in the middle and finished off in satisfying way that has yet to appear.

Last year I made a half hearted start at NaNoWriMo, but my life was too stressful and overwhelming at the time. I never really got started. This year I am fairly stress free thanks to a great new job and feeling of optimistic creativity to go with it. So I am embarking once again on the journey of 50,000 words. This also will fulfill one of my goals for 101 in 1001, writing the first draft of a new novel, killing 2 birds with one novel (these are strictly metaphoric cats, birds and jello; no real animals or gelatin products will be herded, nailed or killed in the making of  these novels.)

Today I am off to a good start. I will be posting my efforts as pages, but I warn you they will be rough and skip around some as I will write the pieces of the story as they inspire me. Each piece should be between 1000 and 2000 words and may be posted in batches. I will appreciate any feedback or ideas as long as they are thoughtful and constructive. I will try to maintain my once a week pace for blog entries this month, but the novel will definitely come first.

 

 

Another Year, Another Journal, and a Dream Poem

The year contained in this journal has been like last of a long struggle. I have finally reached surface from the dark, chill of abyssal depths. I am still adjusting to the light and air, but things are coming into focus. I have a new job that allows me to be an effective educator which reduces my stress and lets me be more positive and balanced in my creative moments. I am, as usual and forever, battling my negative moods, but I have relieved at least one source of distraction. As I start a new journal I feel it will be filled with less with stress, and more with wonder and possibilities.

From an observation of my work as a teacher of dreamtime children.

“Field Concerns for Medical Gladiolas.”

Her voice followed

the  butterflies of her hands

dancing  up the curve of her

experience

and away into the future

“That’s what my teacher called it.”

The distant butterflies transformed

bright leaves drifting back

loosely settling

in her lap.

It’s been a while!

My life has been experiencing some glitches and internal rewiring due to some very positive changes. I am now one month into my new position as a coop preschool teacher of the paperwork free variety. I document by photos and conversations, and I am in charge of the program, but not the administration. All I have to do is develop relationships with children and parents and provide a safe stimulating environment that responds to their needs as individuals and encourages social interactions. I am very good at these things. Parents who put their children in this program are aware of our policy of child centered, play oriented learning so I don’t have to sell them on my philosophy and style. And best of all I do not have to do social service work and spend half of my time writing down what happens every day. We just do things. Mostly I inspire, observe, set limits and provide caring and conversations.

Now that I have transitioned into my new schedule and dealt with all of the feelings that come with the change of community. I did not move, but I left some friends and comrades in arms at my Head Start job and some families that I had grown close to. Whenever I make these transitions I go through a period in which my priorities fly up in the air, and I am not very good at juggling. I tend to be a one task at a time person. So writing remained up in the air for a while. Now I am feeling the rhythm and have started to catch all of my flying priorities. I even wrote a poem though I am not sure why it has such a strangely fatalistic tone. I am feeling very positive about most of my life even though things get a little overwhelming at times. But hey when a poem comes in from wherever they come from, I just write whatever comes through.

One More Day

Another chance to move

about in this small space,

Sweep a corner clear,

Chalk an outline of where

I will fall

With small

Adjustments that amount

to millions of still frames,

most of which I will

forget,

keeping only the ones that

mean the least,

flat, transparent images

unable to hold feeling,

as if they belong to someone else,

who is like me,

but seen from a distance,

flickered movements strobed

onto my mind screen,

an eyeball, a razor, a black-bearded man in a

tutu endlessly repeated,

infinitely varied,

until all possibilities are

exhausted.

Fictional Characters Rarely Make Good Dates

I remember one of my professors in college trying to explain to a student why we should read about characters we don’t like. It was the main character in Dostoyevski’s  “Notes from the Underground”, or was it one of Saul Bellow’s, in either case, a thoroughly pathetic and mostly unpleasant character. The exchange went like this:
“Well, why do we have to read about this loser anyway. I don’t understand?”
” I don’t want you to date him. I just want you to try to understand him a little.”
Some of the best stories I have read are about people I wouldn’t want to date, but were written well enough that I could understand them a little and see something human in them. I think that is what good literature does; it gives us glimpses of humanity and chances to understand pieces of what it is to be human as well as engaging and entertaining us. Most of the characters in Dostoyevsky novels are like this. Maybe I wouldn’t have liked people who lived in Russia around 1860, but thanks to Dostoyevsky, I can see connections between these people and myself as well as everyone else I meet and talk with every day. In the last few years, I have been reading a lot of a Japanese author, Haruki Murakami. It is fascinating to see the inside of another culture presented so clearly. It is like being an internal tourist. He describes the feeling of being Japanese in the late twentieth century so well through the thoughts and interactions of his characters. I feel like I understand what it is to be Japanese at least from the authors point of view. Or consider what Ursula LeGuin does with totally fabricated cultures.
I am off to work  with some real characters. They are little and young and filled with ideas. I wonder what we will be doing today. I have my vague plans, but I am sure theirs will be better.

Why I Write Poetry/Getting Inside Another Cocoon

“I am mainly preoccupied with the world as I experience it, and at times when I would rather be dead the thought that I could never write another poem has so far stopped me. I think this is an ignoble attitude. I would rather die for love, but I haven’t.

“I don’t think of fame or posterity (as Keats so grandly and genuinely did), nor do I care about clarifying experiences for anyone or bettering (other than accidentally) anyone’s state or social relation, nor am I for any particular technical development in the American language simply because I find it necessary. What is happening to me, allowing for lies and exaggerations which I try to avoid, goes into my poems. I don’t think my experiences are clarified or made beautiful for myself or anyone else, they are just there in whatever form I can find them. What is clear to me in my work is probably obscure to others, and vice versa. My formal ‘stance’ is found at the crossroads where what I know and can’t get meets what is left of that I know and can bear without hatred. I dislike a great deal of contemporary poetry—all of the past you read is usually quite great—but it is a useful thorn to have in one’s side.

“It may be that poetry makes life’s nebulous events tangible to me and restores their detail; or conversely, that poetry brings forth the intangible quality of incidents which are all too concrete and circumstantial. Or each on specific occasions, or both all the time.” —Frank O’Hara

I found this here, and thought it was pretty close to the way I feel about poetry, only I am not as driven to it as Frank O’Hara, and I find more good in contemporary poetry (Though much of it alludes me) and the past is alright some of it inspirational, but much of it a little too dramatic and not enough momentary for my taste.

I feel like poetry should represent a way of feeling and perceiving in a moment as we all live life moment to moment each in our own little cocoon of senses and thoughts. Poems are an attempt to reach out like a little tube that can slide into other cocoons and communicate on more intimate level. Anyway parts of  O’Hara’s reasons for writing and the reasons he disavows line up with my reasoning pretty well. I am not out to make a grand statement or be famous, and I think that any poet who is is really searching too hard for disappointment. There are many easier and quicker ways to fame and glory. Poetry to me is one moment explained well from my point of view in a way that might connect to someone else enough to continue a real conversation. When I read poetry I find that much of it does not speak to me, but when I find a poet that speaks to me, it is like that person is speaking to the inside of me, breaking into my cocoon and whispering to my deepest self.