How many MFA students does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: It's unlikely they would be concerned with such quotidian matters.

Update

There was much less drama in Wednesday's class than I hoped. There was actually no drama at all, unfortunately, save for me climbing a large window to pull down the shade. If you're wondering how one can climb a window, picture a really large 30-foot window in a classroom in an academic hall-type building. The window shade pull cord was probably 15 feet off the ground, so it involved me stepping on a chair, climbing onto the windowsill, and reaching. If you're wondering why I did this, it's because I was challenged. I believe the professor made some comment about how I should be able to reach it because I was a rugby player. I used to think that I climbed things because I was drunk, but really I can't turn down a climbing challenge, even if it's midafternoon and I'm sitting in a graduate literature class.

Class Should Be Interesting Today

Sidenote: The book (ah, I almost just referred to it as "the text") we are discussing is not A. B. Yeoshua's The Lover that we were so fortunate to read in 10th grade history class.


On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 6:17 PM, David Shields wrote:

I'm intrigued by idea of focusing microscopically on how individual books
work. Any thoughts re: how to proceed? Kristen will focus microscopically on
a portion of The Lover--eg, pages 20-40 or whatever--but I'm also open to
slowing down to a crawl and looking at fewer books, but looking at them line
by line. Even looking at books we've already read, eg, Bluets, and seeing
how they work on a line by line basis. This may be an overcorrection. We
could keep moving fwd as we are doing. Or we could, after the halfway point,
change our MO a bit and focus on far fewer books and take them line by line
so that we understand their collage composition. The risk of the latter
approach is that it could become somewhat tedious, but the possible reward
might be immense. I'm open to reactions. ds


From: Kristen Young
Sent: Wednesday, October 20, 2010 9:55 AM
To: David Shields
Cc: Piper Daniels; Elizabeth Cooperman; Cecilia Kiely; Kate Lebo; Kathryn S Linn; Paul Vega; Erika Wilder

Subject: Re: MO for class.

Hello!

As I was reading and rereading The Lover, its muted cries of passion and hushed overtones of violence brought me again and again to the power of silence. Below are some questions I will be asking during our class; we may not arrive at answers but the seeds could bear some future fruit.

Silence is power. How do we harness its potential and kinetic energies?

What gains strength in the withholding, until the tension breaks the dam of separation between the story and its readers and the story pours forth from their own minds?

When does Duras fall silent? And when does she speak?

Silence performs a greater function than separation in collage: it connects.

How do her silences control us?

How do they free us?

How can we know when to introduce a silence in our own work, i.e. when should we as writers fall silent?

Others who have mastered both the potential and kinetic energies of silence: Ernest Hemingway and Miles Davis.

Incredible review of Duras’ life and work:

http://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/20/magazine/the-life-and-loves-of-marguerite-duras.html?scp=8&sq=Marguerite+Duras&st=nyt

See you in class!

-Kristen


On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 10:53 AM, David Shields wrote:

Kristen, These are interesting questions, and you should lead the discussion however you wish, but in my view these are rather abstract (unanswerable) questions, and I’m not sure how useful they are for us as we’re trying to contemplate the nature of collage composition. I’d urge us to focus with great specificity on individual passages, eg, pp. 1-20 of The Lover, and we can thereby learn how collage actually “works.”


From: Kristen Young

To: David Shields
Cc: Piper Daniels; Elizabeth Cooperman; Cecilia Kiely; Kate Lebo; Kathryn S Linn; Paul Vega; Erika Wilder

Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2010 11:17:23 -0700

David,

My plan is to focus on her use of silence to draw us into The Lover on pages 1 - 20; I have specific passages in mind. I don't believe those questions are unanswerable in this text. And as for our own answers, they will come out in our writing. We cannot know how collage works until we know what is not being said, what function the liminal spaces play; to me, those spaces require a more intimate relationship between the reader and the writer than even the words because they invoke greater leaps of imagination as the connective tissue.

See you in class!

-Kristen

Week 3

It's already the third week of school, and I really don't have any interesting stories. In a lot of ways, it feels less like being at school and more like belonging to an overly ambitious book club. That reads exclusively literary collage. And happens to be led by David Shields, who, as far as I can tell, invented the term literary collage.* (On a side note, I really like him so far, and he is, in fact, as bald as his website would lead you to believe.)

I need to maybe find a good definition of literary collage because I am pretty sure that's what I want to write. That's what I have been writing, I just didn't know it was a real thing. Since college, I've been throwing around the term "creative nonfiction" when people grill me about what I actually write (and by "grill," I mean ask the logical follow-up question when someone says I'm a "writer"). And now I get to sound even more pretentious by saying I write creative nonfiction, primarily literary collage.

To give you an idea of some of the things on our reading list, I'd say read Bluets by Maggie Nelson, but the Seattle Public Library system did not have a copy, so it might be hard to find unless you want to buy it. Other books on the list: David Shields Reality Hunger (which is a manifesto about freeing writing from the constraints of narrative and made a lot of sense to me-- maybe because I've never been able to invent characters who do things or tell stories in a linear way). Ann Carson's Plainwater. For the Time Being by Annie Dillard.

*And by this I mean he seems to be the genre's leading proponent. Meaning there aren't very many Google hits for "literary collage," although it is an excellent description. 

Getting Oriented

Apparently this will involve wine & cheese. The Creative Writing Orientation starts at 3:30 pm, followed by a happy hour gathering at what is the official English grad student pub, which I used to frequent as a member of the UW Biology grad student softball team. "Frequent" might be too strong a word, as it might have happened two or three times.

I'm sure there will be stories.

6,000 Miles

Hit 6,000 miles on the Speedster (my bike, the nice one) 2 blocks from Marriah's new house (that she calls the boat because it looks like it has been pieced together room by room-- it's hard to explain but it really does feel like a boat; the porch has a carpet on it.) This means that in the five years I've had my bike, I could have biked to Boston and back.

Monday Night

Enjoying my last fake Sunday night. Last week of work and then, as a student, I will enjoy real weekends (as in not working on Saturdays). In fact, I will only have class on Monday and Wednesday afternoons, so I will have to be careful to leave some room for actually doing my work and not take off on four-day weekend trips every week.

I was a little nervous about actually going back to school, self-doubt creeping in, so I decided to focus on one aspect of returning to the world of academia that I knew I could handle-- extracurriculars. Right now my top choices include, but are not limited to:

-Cycling team
-Climbing at the indoor rock wall
-Intramural basketball (although I am slightly intimidated playing basketball at a university of 50,000 students where statistically there are thousands of ex-varsity high school basketball players who could kick my ass, and I'm not sure how successful I will be fielding any type of sports team from the English Graduate department)
-Joining the UW Yacht Club where I can pretend that I know how to sail dinghies
-Rowing club
-Yoga classes

And for a team sport option, I might even look into ultimate and see if I could compete. That could be fun now that I'm retired from rugby and could use a field sport that involves running and much less contact.

Seasonally Affected

It's fall. Or really it is fall right now because it's 8:30 PM. It's dark, there was just an amazing sunset, and now it's chilly and crisp instead of damp and cold. It was winter this morning, though (I woke up to a steady rain and 50-ish degrees), and I assume it will be winter again in a few hours as has been the pattern-- grossness until 5 PM when the sun comes out, blinds you for an hour and heats the air about 15 degrees just long enough to make you question your wool sock decision. I've stopped looking at the forecast.

I've only just realized why the weather has been affecting me so badly, especially this past year. It's embarrassingly obvious in retrospect-- the main perk of my job has been that I get to work outside. Clearly, however, this is only a benefit when it's not rainy damp and miserable. I'm pretty sure in a few weeks when I will be excited about what I'm doing with my days (/life), my mood will be less weather-dependent. And biking in the rain to somewhere warm and dry will be undoubtedly more pleasant than biking in the rain to a drafty, leaky, unheated houseboat office.

Right now, though, I am enjoying the fall. Even if it is coming in isolated chunks. Yesterday I picked up our first box of veggies from our CSA share with Helsing Junction Farm. The pickup was at a house in our neighborhood, so I stopped by on my way home from work and walked the 10 blocks home balancing the box on my handlebars. I felt very Seattle.

We even get a few fresh flowers every week as well.

Last night I made summer squash soup with cilantro, and tonight I used most of the rest of the cilantro in a tomatillo avocado gazpacho. My favorite part of getting a random box of produce is googling new recipes.

Yesterday was better than today because yesterday I started my day by waking up early and going to yoga. Today I woke up early and went to the dentist. Yesterday the workday went by quickly and I did lots of random little projects, like replacing mainsheet blocks and fixing door latches, while listening to the first chapters of Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought. Today I spent the entire day staring at the computer screen, spending way too much time changing around our e-newsletter template because I'm sick of the old one.

As you can see, there is not much to report. But I'm trying to be better about blogging.

Back To School Shopping

Of all the clothes I have purchased at secondhand stores in my life, yesterday was the first time I ever found something in the pockets.

This is what I discovered in a pair of jeans I bought at the Ballard Goodwill:


No joke. It's what it looks like. (And a guitar pick, too.)

Tuesday

I found $1.63 in change on two different boats today. I used a dollar to buy a Baby Ruth at the fuel dock. Also, Eric found a glass bottle that is perfect for bottling kombucha. I told him I would give him some home-brewed kombucha in exchange, then realized that most people don't like kombucha or have never had it. He hadn't tried it, "Isn't that a fungus drink?," and I figured I should get the process down before I go offering tastes to the uninitiated since my last batch was a little watery and I don't want to be responsible for a bad first impression of my favorite fungus drink.

Other than that, not much to report. Gave my official notice on Saturday, so I'll be leaving Windworks in one month and one day. I also realized I will be starting school in one month and eleven days. And that I haven't written anything in several months.

I will try to start writing. I don't know what to write about anymore.

Summer Reading (and whales)

It's kind of amazing what I will do to avoid cleaning my room. This week's extracurricular activities included fixing and then breaking my bike again, driving around Issaquah for the better part of Wednesday night trying to find northeast facing darkness to see the Northern Lights in what would have been at best a 1 in 200 chance of seeing them but was an even longer shot given the clouds and the iPhone's inability to lead us up Tiger Mountain, baking chocolate chip cookies using Karen's secret recipe, completely dismantling (and fixing!) the vacuum I broke over a year ago when I sucked up a superlong string my old roommate used to leave on the floor for her cat to play with, and cutting whales, lobsters, and goldfish out of construction paper because I decided we needed to have an old school (or should I say, "old library") summer reading club.

The August Reading Club is currently accepting members in all locations, so please let me know if you'd like to join. Our theme is preppy New England sea creatures.


P.S. Thanks for the comments, blogger friends (i.e. Tom and Kate, who actually update their blogs)! Yes, it was a long overdue facelift for ye olde nonblog. But I can't take credit for the background photo (but maybe I'll put some time into trying to figure out if I can switch it with one of the many mountain photos I've taken because that would be much cooler).

Two Reasons for an Update

1) A Threat

Chloë: you better update your blog

or im gonna delink it from mine

Valid. I am a pretty delinquent blogger. But at least I am doing better than the other blog she found called "Not a Blog," which appears to have a single post written in May 2006. So I win based on both recency and quantity. Also, from what I can gather, the post appears to be about tips for MSN chat?

Haha, I just translated it using Google translator. And 1) I was right about the topic and 2) I think it's funny. And speaking of finding new blogs, you should check out Chloë's.

2) A Sign

The other day I got really excited about going back to school in a couple months and decided to look up the reading list for the lit class I'm enrolled in. One of the books is called This Is Not a Novel and it appears to be much more of not a novel than this blog is not a blog. Which I suppose we will discuss--it being a novel that is not a novel, that is, not comparing it to my sub-par blog. This makes me more than a little nervous to think that less than two months from now I will be expected to not only write, but also think. Think about things like whether or not novels that are not novels are actually novels and really what is a novel.

The Neighborhood Project (plus overdue updates)

Today was a beautiful day for a motorcycle ride so Diana & I decided to make some progress on our latest undertaking, which we refer to as The Neighborhood Project. This is our attempt to visit every single neighborhood in Seattle. There are a lot of neighborhoods in Seattle, and it's hard to find a comprehensive list. The best we've found is the official City Clerk neighborhood map here. But that doesn't even include the lesser-known sub-neighborhoods, like Puget Ridge and Pigeon Point, which we passed today on our quick drive-through of most of the Delridge area. Anyway, we're about halfway done and it just occurred to me it would have been a good thing to blog about. I haven't yet gotten around to writing up the highlights of the day. (Most neighbhooding days include cupcakes & trying new drinks at Asian markets. Sometimes these drinks include white fungus, sometimes they look delicious but prove too complicated to open.)

But I did start a Google map of our stops this afternoon (and I do plan, of course, to update it with past adventures). Check it out the new Neighborhood Project Map.

And, while we're at it, here are some more updates:

1) I got into UW's fiction MFA (Master of Fine Arts) program. I'm excited to be able to stay in Seattle and get to go back to school.

2) April will not be the best month for me to renew my dedication to blogging since I will be taking a course to get my 50 Ton Masters license (a Coast Guard license that is better than my current limited masters which only allows me to drive launches and duck boats). This means I'll be working from 9am-6pm then in class from 6pm-10pm every weekday for 5 weeks.

3) I am almost 28.

4) Did I mention I am going back to school this fall? Crazy.

5) I am currently working on a chapbook of recent writing. It has the same name as a mix CD I made a few years ago. I will post details when I am done.

Thanks for reading!

2010

Not sure how many times I've resolved to actually blog. It's a little scary how long this non-blog has been around (almost 5 years . . .)

This new year will include a lot of writing. Hopefully this will spill over to this little outlet, in case anyone is still reading.

Happy New Year.