inspiration for a cover page

fascinating!

Feeling like Annie Dillard

the maple bug tree

see the little insects with their little wings
hiding on the underside of the leaf
shelter from the rain and sun
each day they multiply, never seem to fly away

Emerson's husky hair, soft as cotton when his undercoat sheds, the birds snatch it from the grass to make their nests, his springtime "blow out" and the subsequent big brush-out filled a entire bucket with airy, fluffy fur...I set the bucket on top of the fence next to a tree branch as an all-you-can-get buffet for the birds

that collective 15% Midwest is from North Dakota

Your Linguistic Profile:

80% General American English

10% Upper Midwestern

5% Midwestern

5% Yankee

0% Dixie

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

Rib Space

Now I want to be whoever I was at that moment
when I discovered my own breathing . . . .

— Malena Mörling, Ocean Avenue

. . . the soul
is nailed to us like lentils and fatty bacon lodged
under the ribs.

— Jack Gilbert, The Great Fires

. . . let me learn for myself all the desires
a body can hold, how they grow stronger
and wilder with age, tugging in every direction
until it feels my sternum might split
like Adam’s when Eve stepped out,
sloughing off ribs.

— Julia Kasdorf, Eve’s Striptease

(epigraphs used to intro my thesis poems)

cool

http://www.openpoetrybooks.com/calendar/

Sunday, June 05, 2005 at 04:00 PM EASTERN WA. MFA STUDENTS

For some years now, representatives from EWU's graduating class of MFA students have made the trek over the mountains to share their work with those of us on the wet (well, it used to be) side of the state. Charmingly and insightfully presented by their professor Jonathan Johnson, the readers this afternoon will be Amy Silbernagel, Jeff Dodd, Shannon Amidon, Agatha Beins, Elise Gregory, and Emily Benson.

Thesis is done!

... and all copies were delivered by Wed. afternoon to my readers (who are my thesis committee members). Phase I is complete...such a good feeling!

Even Emerson is happy!

Thesis Book List (final version)

1. Julia Kasdorf - Sleeping Preacher
2. Denise Duhamel - The Star-Spangled Banner
3. Malena Mörling - Ocean Avenue
4. Dorianne Laux - Awake
5. Ann Townsend - Dime Store Erotics
6. Kim Addonizio - Tell Me
7. Richard Hugo - The Lady at Kicking Horse Reservoir [1]
8. James Wright - The Branch Will Not Break [2]
9. Galway Kinnell - The Book of Nightmares
10. Jack Gilbert - The Great Fires
11. Tony Hoaglund - What Narcissism Means To Me
12. Mark Halliday - Selfwolf
13. Phillip Levine - What Work Is
14. Franz Wright - The Beforelife
15. James Harms - Modern Ocean
    

[1] from Making Certain It Goes On: The Collected Poems of Richard Hugo
[2] from Above the River: The Complete Poems

Alternates:

• Paul Guest - Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World
• Sandra Alcosser - Except by Nature
• Campbell McGrath - American Noise
• Richard Hugo - Triggering Town (prose)
• ­Elizabeth Bishop - Geography III (from The Complete Poems)
• Mary Oliver - Dream Work --or-- New and Selected Poems ©1992
• Jeffrey McDaniel - Alibi School

raining again today

This weekend saw unusual amounts of hard rain...and I mean really hard rain, just pouring, which rarely happens here. So it's condusive for reading inside, going to the mall and doing registry stuff, working on a book of poems, reading books of poems.

I've seen only glimpses of the Spokane Falls while driving over the Maple Street bridge. The speed limit is 40 mph on the bridge, but I steal glances to the right to see them crashing just near the Monroe Street bridge. I'm very excited for that bridge to be done with its renovation project. It's been going on since the very first time I scoped out Spokane in July of 2003. So, the river is high, the falls are powerful, the drought conditions are not so bad anymore ... waterskiing conditions this summer should be good.

almost finished

(amy’s thesis title goes here)

A Thesis

Presented To

Eastern Washington University

Cheney, Washington


In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Degree

Master of Fine Arts, Creative Writing


Spring 2005

* * *

...need to figure out the final order of poems. I am going to lay them all out on the floor or stick them to the wall and pray that a title arises from the lines, and an inspired table of contents is born. Was up until 4:30 am tinkering, revising, organizing, and printing it all out, trying to do what a tired but still fairly high-functioning creative and inspired mind could do.

Open Books

Eastern Washington University MFA Poetry students will be reading from their thesis books on Sunday, June 5th at 4:00 at Open Books in Seattle.

6 poets will be reading, including me.

(still not sure if I can make it over next Tues. to see Franz....thesis is due that Wed...gotta finish the formatting, revise about 5 more poems, + revise another 5 with minor tweaking, and read/skim a few more poetry books to make final decisions about what will be included on my thesis reading list...oh, and I need to come up with a title! whew!)

slow-motion

Ever have one of those days where it feels like you can't move fast enough? Where it seems like everything is taking longer than it should be? Like your mind is moving a faster rate than your body is willing or even able to do? You're continually planning out and envisioning the next 60 seconds of your life and you just can't keep up?

Well, that's what today felt like. It seemed like I couldn't even refill my dog's water bowl as fast as I wanted to. I was impatient with each present task, knowing there were so many more to do. There was no seconds to waste.

Thesis anxiety is kicking in as the final 8 days approach to the deadline to give a complete photocopied manuscript to each of my committee members. At that time, I also need to provide them with a confirmed list of my thesis book list--15 titles in all. My oh my.

It will all get done...the optimistic corner of my brain knows that and repeatedly chants this to myself. I might be wearing the same cycle of clothes and not brushing my hair very often over this next week, but the thesis will get done. It has to. Sleep can always be sacrificed.

Yet, the quarter still moves on...and I'm attempting to keep up with the reading for my NF form/theory class. I'm liking Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, however, I'm only getting her in short doses so far. Tomorrow, I'm planning to read the book in larger chunks of time. On Saturday evening as I was reading the book and marking passages and lines I liked with a newly-sharpened pencil, my fiance's 4-year-old niece Emma (and my future wedding flowergirl) came alongside my chair and said to me, "You're writing in your Bible?!" I guess it is a pretty thick book...but I explained to her that it was a story book for school. "You go to school?!" she exclaimed. Emma goes to pre-school and has recently learned all about ladybugs--their wings, life cycle, etc. (Her rich and vibrant vocabularly rivals the men in the family.)

As I explained that I go to college, just like her mommy and daddy went to college, she paused to exclaim (most statements are a genuine exclamation for Emma), "My mommy and daddy went to college?!" I'm not sure what Emma's concept of college is.

Considering that Dillard is fairly spiritual (I learned that she was raised Presbyterian than converted to Catholicism as an adult), Emma's question about me writing in my Bible is interesting.

Nonetheless, I was quickly swayed into playing with Emma. What adult can resist a cute little girl asking, "Do you want to play with me?" She led me downstairs to the playroom and we enjoyed multiple rounds of "Simon Says." She let me go first at being "Simon" and she rotated our turns equally. My favorite of her requests, "Simon says: pretend like you're buckling your shoes." Then we played hide-n-seek, my personal favorite. The first time I was "it", I had to count to 5 and 1/2. I tried to pretend like I didn't know where she was hiding, though it was obvious from the sounds that she was behind the chair in the same room we were in. So, as I pretended to look for her under the table, she squealed, "I'm behind the chair!" The next time it was my turn to count, I had to count to 33. Obviously, she had a much tougher hiding place in mind. But before I could really look for her, she called out, "I'm in Papa's closet!" Oh, the joy of being four years old. That sweet, simple exhiliration of hide-n-seek. The suspense of waiting in a special hiding place and then the "surprise" of being found.

As a result, Dillard received little of my attention the rest of that evening.

This week I'm also reading Paul Guest's first book of poetry, The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World. Paul has a recent poem on Slate, and also has a blog! So far I'm only on page 33 of his book, but am enjoying it--as Jonathan said I would. I'll discuss it more with him on Thursday for our second thesis advising meeting this week.

Good night! It's one of those rare evenings in Spokane where it's raining really, really hard. It's like Seattle. Ah.

parody

I read about this in the paper, and had to visit the Wal-Mart parody website for myself. Great job to the college kid who did all this!

I read Nickeled and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America in the spring of 2003. I rarely shopped at Wal-Mart anyway, but after reading Barbara Ehrenreich's book I made a more informed decision to not support their corporation every again. (Sadly, the great novel and movie Where the Heart Is ends up glorifying the business in a spoof-like way.)

I admit, however, that I've shopped there at least 2 times since reading the book: once because I received a $50 gift card for a Christmas present and I bought much-needed groceries there, and another time I bought the Friends DVD there for my fiance's birthday present (it was the cheapest price I could find, except Amazon but I didn't have time to buy it from them), Valentine's Day boxers, and a pint of raspberry sorbet. (Really, what other store would allow me to purchase all of these items in one trip? Okay, maybe Fred Meyer.) I felt sort of bad about this second purchase, but it was also a financial relief to my budget in a way. However, I'm happy to say I've been "Wal-Mart Free" for over three months now, and I don't plan to go back. That's right. Never, ever again.

I've been trying to get my mom to stop shopping at this mega-retail giant and read Ehrenreich's book because she's a big Wal-Mart fan, but so far I've been unsuccessful. The store was next to the "Super Mall" so what could I do? And now a new one opened up this winter that's even closer to her house! Wal-Mart is the new K-Mart. I didn't grow up with Wal-Mart like kids in the South did, or like my nieces have now. Washington state kids in the 1980's didn't like to admit their mothers shopped there, and we took our P.E. clothes to school in the best plastic bags we could find (The Bon or Nordstrom were the coolest, the specialized bags from their junior departments). I remember quickly grabbing a bag from the pantry and only finding out later when I was at school that it was a K-Mart one. I was mortified and made sure no one saw it!!

bad poem

Just for the record, I don't think "Kissing John McPhee" is a good poem. It would get an enthusiastic rejection from me if it were to be submitted to Willow Springs. It's sentimental, melodramatic, and its predictable details about McPhee's life as a writer sucks any intriguing tension that might otherwise exist between the speaker and the situation. I don't think it's trying to be ironic or sarcastic, it seems to be a sincere attempt to be a form of author-worship, which makes it all the more cheesy. And the fact that McPhee wrote for The New Yorker, and just recently had a new essay published in it, makes it all the more cheesy. But, I must admit, you gotta admire a writer who writes poems for other writers and submits them to a magazine as big and prestigous as THE NEW YORKER!! And then documents (announces?) those submissions and rejections on her own blog! Now, that takes guts. (I'll keep my bad poems and rejection slips to myself, thank you very much.)

After NF form/theory class tonight and Jeremy's presentation on McPhee and his book (The Survival of the Bark Canoe), Jeremy suggested I write my own version of "Kissing John McPhee." I considered, but instead thought I'd rather write a poem called "Kissing Henri" (pronounced "on-ree", for those like me who aren't familiar with French names). But now it's late, and I can't muster the energy to write it, even though I drank Mountain Dew during class.

But if I were to write about my experience of reading McPhee's nonfiction book for class, it might go something like this...

Kissing Henri

Maine's wilderness and Thoreau, and now this:
sympathetic portrait
of twenty-five year old Henri,
lonely in his art, unmarried and still living
with his parents in his New Hampshire hometown.
He carved wood, remembered the best trees,
was obsessed with only this.
A white man seeking
mastery of the Indian bark-canoe.
I know it's hard to let go what you create.
Green beef jerkey breath,
faint orange stain
of Tang on your lips
and pressed
into the side creases
of your mouth,
please paddle faster for me.

Nonfiction Book of the Week

Subgenre: Research-Based Literary Nonfiction

• the details, the author and his writing life, and a poem called "Kissing John McPhee"

MFA choices

If I had to start all over, if I hadn't been at Eastern the past two years, I would strongly consider this program. A very intriguing philosophy. At the same time, any MFA program is what the writer makes of it. In my MFA program, I've been fortunate to have a number of classmates who also write from the foundations of the Judeo-Christian belief system. Though I wish there was greater opportunity for more organized discussion about this, it's come up. In Poetry II, Modernism Form & Theory, some of these ideas came up. And anytime a text alludes to Biblical themes or characters, this has been discussed.

One thing I know for sure, I love the residency MFA program. Moving to a new city to join a community of writers (while also making a newer community, as the incoming group of students), the bi-quarterly "Voice Over" events, the visiting writers, the after-parties, meeting for class each week, the internships (the university press, teaching/Writers in the Community, and literary magazine editing), the literary magazine editor meetings, meeting classmates for coffee, going for runs together, being immersed in the culture of writing...this is only possible with a program where we all come together face to face to live the writing life...especially for someone like me, who I would consider to be not such a traditional graduate student. I started grad school at age 28 (almost 29) after having a full-time public school teaching career for 5 years + a one-year sabbatical (hiatus/escape was more like it!) from the English classroom to work at a Christian camp for a year (marketing & promotions) . I didn't come right from my undergraduate studies, or come after obtaining a different master's degree first. I needed the routine, the motivation of community, the regular social interaction with professors and classmates. I have a friend in a low-residency MFA program for creative non-fiction. It wasn't her first choice, but her and her husband had established jobs in Seattle (hers already involved writing...to pay the bills).

Unless one chooses the research-based UW program or the UW certificate-program (not a credited degree, and far from an MFA course of study), then the choices were limited to low-residency programs. Now, Seattle area writers who want to pursue their MFA can choose from SPU's newly-created MFA program, the low-residency at PLU (which only began in 2004), move to Bellingham and get a MA in English with a Creative Writing emphasis at WWU, come to Eastern, pursue an out-of-state low-residency program or move out of state for a residency MFA program.

Sadly, I'm not quite ready for my experience to end. I now know why it's not such a bad thing to extend the thesis another quarter.

More MFA food for thought:

• "How to become the next great American novelist: A look at MFA creativewriting programs and other waysto make it as a writer"
• The Writer's Survival Guide:Chapter 5: The Education of a Writer

Franz Wright is coming to Seattle

Franz Wright, winner of the Second Annual Denise Levertov Award from Image Journal of the Arts and Religion speaks on Tuesday, May 17 at 7:30 pm at the Seattle Art Museum. Free. Public reception, celebration and booksigning follows.

For more information, see http://www.imagejournal.org/news/local.asp

"Image journal and the Department of English at Seattle Pacific University established the Levertov Award to honor one of the twentieth century's greatest poets. Levertov, who spent her last years in Seattle , embraced the landscape and culture of the Pacific Northwest. Levertov's identity as a Christian believer—a pilgrim whose faith was inextricably entwined with doubt—became another important facet of her work, particularly in her later poetry.

The Levertov Award is given annually to an artist or creative writer whose work exemplifies a serious and sustained engagement with the Judeo-Christian tradition."

Bloomsday 2005

tranquil Riverfront Park, the day before Bloomsday

clothesline: Sunday, May 1 @ 8:30 am

our view from the starting area

the look of a first-time Bloomie!

going up Cemetery Hill

entering Spokane

approaching Doomsday Hill

finish line

Judd took our "finisher" pictures...we all looked marvelous and had a wonderful time. Check out the upcoming June issue of Northwest Runner magazine for my Bloomsday article and an interview with Don Kardong, this year's new Race Director and Bloomsday Race Founder/former Olympian.