Writer / Poet and Author of <i>Arc and Hue</i>

I do not do well in heat. I’ve managed to do some reading today, some writing. Some days that’s the best that you can hope for, but I’ve discovering that temperature extremes break my concentration completely. For the past two days, the only thing that has seemed to help me is water and sleep. This is why I’ve never been excited about bikram yoga (AKA hot yoga) because I am always on the verge of passing out in a bikram class.

I want to write about something sexier like designer bags or my favorite television show, but really, I’m thinking about starting another semester. I plan to turn in the syllabi tomorrow and finish reading some new poems from young sister poets. Today, I read Amy Gerstler’s book Dearest Creature. Since I read her book Bitter Angel and some of her other poems, I’ve been wanting to read Ghost Girl, Medicine, and Crown of Weeds. I’ve often sought out every book by a poet that I can find so I can so I can track their progressions or how they shift from one book to the next. I just appreciate when a poet exercises imagination, which Gerstler does well. I’ve always felt like a poem needs to tell a story and challenge some aspect of how we see poetry or the world, or both.

In the meantime, it seems incongruous with my desire to watch R&B videos or my wish that I had written lines from my favorite poems on the blacktop of our parking spot throughout the summer that is gone all too soon. In spite of my varied acts of pop confection and verse-inspired silly, I’m going to try to finish reading a few books every day and write every day. Some people think writers write every day, and they don’t. Really, there are fallow periods for some of us. I find myself thinking of writing at all these random moments. I even find myself dreaming about it. At other times, I find only music, books, and conversation as a stimuli for when the writing does come.

I used to write every day and do morning pages for a minimum of 30 minutes. I’d usually write in-class with my students, but I’ve found that they write for shorter time periods. Part of me wonders if there’s just so many distractions that make writing seem like a random act that is spurted onto the page without a need for revision. After all, stream of consciousness is genius, right? I’d say no, if the stream isn’t channeled.

So, if you want to share some of your favorite summer readings, I’d like to hear about them. I shared a few of mine on The Basin Blog earlier this summer. I’ll be sharing more with you soon.

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One of the things that I enjoy most about writer’s residencies and workshops, even as I publish more, is hearing about other books that I haven’t read. Sometimes, it’s a bit like cracking open a watch to examine its gears, or even better yet, positing another portal or thread in the growing webs of narratives and ideas in my head.

While attending VONA, author Aurora Levins Morales suggested Joanna Russ’ book “How to Suppress Women’s Writing” which is a thinly-veiled science fiction treatise about the “Glotolog” who use various stratagems and threadbare reasons for why another group’s presence and language is faulty. As the book progresses, Russ leans more toward her own voice and struggles in placing women within the canon in terms of getting access to books and dismissal by colleagues who doubt the validity of women writing a variety of texts. Although this book is dated in parts, it has some strong quotes that I’d like share that strike me as resonant decades after the original publication of this particular book.

“The idea that any art is achieved ‘intuitively’ is a dehumanization of the brains, effort, and the traditions of the artist, and a classification of said artists as subhuman.” (p.91)

“When the memory of one’s predecessors is buried, the assumption persists that there were none and each generation of women believes itself to be faced with the burden of doing everything for the first time.” (p.93)

“Without models, it’s hard to work; without a context, difficult to evaluate; without peers, nearly impossible to speak.” (p.95)

“To read the visionary’s blazes of illumination as faulty structure, fantasy as if it were failed realism, to read subversion, as if it were nothing but its surface, is automatically to condemn minority writing, among which is the writing of women. When critics have to deal with a different English, there is also the ploy of reading the difference as if it were failure.”
(p. 127-28)

“There is a false center to ‘literature.’ It’s not only male, white, and middle class (or above) but also European East Coast. Whatever happened to that splendid burst of conscious American-ness which produced people like Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Carl Sandburg, Sinclair Lewis, and (somewhat later) Thomas Wolfe? Criticism seems to find them embarrassing nowadays and prefers the expatriate Hemingway, the expatriate Eliot, and the expatriate Pound. It seems that the ‘universal’ does not include ‘American.’” (p. 128)

“But remember, one can’t get minority work into the canon by pretending it’s about the same things or uses the same techniques as majority work. It probably isn’t and doesn’t. (I would argue it does at times but plays with the constraints.) It may very well look like nothing ever seen before on earth. When science fiction first entered academia, the mistakes made about it by critics were grotesque. They continue to be, from time to time. This was due not only to a lack of scientific background–for example, some critics saw classic alien-background stories as nightmares, being unaware of the accuracy of the background and the delight in this as the story’s point–but also to a lack of any knowledge of the field’s history and conventions (including lack of the knowledge that it had a history and conventions). (p. 130, The first note in parentheses is mine and the italics in the last line are ones that I emphasize here.)

“If you don’t like my book, write your own.” (p. 130 It sounds a bit like teasing, but I think more of us should, whether sanctioned by academia or publishing houses, or not. In any case, it stresses the point that we should be finding as many ways as possible to document our work and our presence.)

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