Category Archives: Breaking Boundaries

And a Bride in a Purple Dress

26 Sunday Aug 2012

Posted by in Breaking Boundaries, Growing Up, Love, Wedding

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Andrew and I were thrilled to attend the wedding of two of our good friends, Jon and Ellen, early this month. Now, I know all weddings are joyous occasions, no matter the details of the day, and my personal soapbox is that bridal magazines have no right insinuating that your wedding isn’t “original” or “personal” enough if you go the traditional route. You’re marrying your favorite person in the world–isn’t that automatically and irrefutably personal enough? But even with that said, this wedding was something special.

Jon and Ellen are artists, you see, and they’re the cool, down-to-earth type. They like engaging with people and places, meeting the world where it is and creating beauty there. They are also relentlessly creative, finding outlets in paint, cloth, food, music–whatever they can get their hands on. So they convinced their pastor to marry them not in a church but in the middle of the city–in an alley, in fact. And not just any alley. This alley, found just off the corner of Howard and North in Baltimore, is known as a hot-spot for graffiti artists. The walls are covered, and constantly changing (when I took a break outside during the reception, I saw a tag that hadn’t been there during the ceremony an hour before). Some pieces are beautiful, many are tags, some are profane. Jon and Ellen took the very real risk that their wedding ceremony spot would feature some prominently spray-painted dicks, is what I’m saying.

Fortunately, the alley’s artwork seemed occasion-appropriate, for the most part. Maybe the fates smiled, or maybe the groomsmen did a quick sweep shortly before, cans at the ready, just in case. Who can say? But what was so amazing to me was the way the ceremony started to come together, guests standing or sitting, in summer dresses or cutoff shorts (“come as you are” dress codes make for an interestingly mismatched crowd), music I recognized from “Love Actually” playing over the speaker, the groom standing on a black wooden platform, and the bride, just a touch dewy in the August sun, teary and laughing at the same time, walking arm in arm with her father and wearing her lovely, understated but elegant purple dress. It was nothing Bride magazine or theknot.com editors ever talk about, but it made sense. The more traditional readings, the completely unconventional “unity graffiti” they made, taking turns holding the ladder for each other, the laid-back potluck-and-pie reception, all felt right for them, and it was such a breath of fresh air. It was a reminder, too, not to let other people bog me down with their expectations of the right way to do a wedding–or a book of short stories (and possibly some poetry).

I’m now eight weeks away from my wedding and just about eight months from putting out my first book. It’s going to get busy. A lot of people have a lot of expectations. I hope I keep my head straight, I hope everything turns out beautifully, but mostly right now I hope I follow Ellen’s lead in the upcoming wedding season and school year, keeping traditions that sing to me but never afraid to rock an unexpectedly perfect purple dress.

Why I’m an English Major Reading Science Books

25 Wednesday Jan 2012

Posted by in Breaking Boundaries, Reading

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One of the best classes I took in undergrad was an interdisciplinary seminar on science and science fiction. We read Orwell, Huxley, Atwood, and Gibson, watched movies like Brazil and Dr. Strangelove, and a handful of times during the semester, the English professor who led the class stepped down and had a different science professor talk about his or her field. It was amazing because we got to remind ourselves that the traits we loved in ourselves as readers and writers (curiosity, imagination, the desire to tinker beyond the world we knew) are the passions that drive scientists, too.

Flash forward several years and a graduate program, and I’ve fallen completely out of the habit of the interdisciplinary approach. Grad school concentrates; I don’t even have more than one or two literature classes because we’re focusing so intently on writing and publishing. That kind of immersion has its benefits, but lately I’ve been catching myself wondering, “What am I good at? What do I know about, besides the structure of a story?”

There’s no excuse for a writer not to know something about science. There’s no excuse for a scientist knowing nothing about art. There’s no excuse for a photographer not to understand math (“graph” is in the name of their profession, for crying out loud). Animals and atoms and poetry and music and numbers and psychology and dancing and history and stars and tomatoes and everything else you’ve ever seen or heard of in your life belongs together. (Except politics. Eff that.)

This doesn’t mean be an expert in everything, and it doesn’t mean spend five minutes every day dabbling in every discipline you can think of to check them off. It means that when you find something you love, you need to at least consider how other topics might fit into it.

I’m taking a quick break from fiction and getting my nose into some different things. First off is the 2011 edition of Best Science Writing. I’m reading a lot slower than I’d like, but I love the newness of what I’m reading–the influence weathermen have over whether we believe in global warming, or a mistake researchers made when studying estrogen supplements and why they have to start over. I feel like I’m peeking over a fence, and I’m trying to remember that the fence is something I only made up because I thought I was supposed to.

What are your reading (or thinking) ruts? How do you break out of them?

New Directions

20 Tuesday Dec 2011

Posted by in Breaking Boundaries, Goals, Writing

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It’s been quite the learning year for blogging! When I made this blog as my midterm project for my E-Pub class, I wasn’t sure what, if anything, I’d ever use it for. In 2011, I resolved to post at least once a week, using the blog as a reminder to myself to take writing seriously and make progress toward my personal writing goals. I didn’t expect anyone to read it, but while I am far from well-read on the ethersphere (blogonet? i have no idea what the universe where people read blogs is called), I have a few dozen followers, and got enough attention to land me a spot on the Canary Review as well!

What this means, of course, is that I clearly need to step things up here. Through careful research, I have determined that one of the things all the cool bloggers do is write for audiences–as in, act like there actually are people reading this thing that you have posted to the entire internet. Writing myself little pep talks isn’t going to cut it anymore.

So here’s what I propose: since literature and writing are the things that make me feel happy and inspired, and sometimes tangentially related or even seemingly unrelated creative things do, too, I want to make this blog-space that I have a virtual studio, dedicated to stories and inspiration, both in traditional and a bit more unconventional form. Posting goes like this:

Once a week: What I’m Reading, because I want to read 75 books in 2012 and I like talking about them (and, without getting too braggy, I’ve read a shelf or two in my lifetime and I think I can pick some good ones)

Another day in the week: Writing/inspiration. Something I’ve found or that’s occurred to me that is good for creativity, that I think you might think is cool, too.

As many Fridays as I can: Flash fiction. Because writing crappy short-short stories is a good way to shake out my brain, which I will need given how much editing I have to do in 2012 (see: NaNoWriMo).

I don’t want to put down specific days, because I am still doing the 2-jobs-and-grad-school thing and I don’t always know what good writing days my schedule will allow, but that’s the plan for next year. And if you are one of the couple dozen people who stop by sometimes, and you see something really cool, send it my way! Let’s make creative inspiration a community thing.

A Birthday Present and a Door

09 Monday May 2011

Posted by in Breaking Boundaries, Goals, Publishing, Writing

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So I got a Kindle for my birthday, which is awesome because a. with the life and career I’m trying to make for myself, I can’t justify not having one and b. I was genuinely more excited about this present than my family expected. Most of my life, you see, I’ve been the old-fashioned one by far when it comes to the technological. My mom sometimes spins it kindly and calls me an “old soul.” My sisters just shake their heads at the fact that even now I send a text maybe once a week. When Kindle first came out, I was one of those people who started talking about the magic of holding a book, smelling the paper, etc.

So what happened? I was on the Metro one day, people-watching for a moment, and realized that all these people on the car with me with their heads bent over a screen were reading. And it didn’t matter at all whether they turned a page or swiped the screen with one finger, because it was the same story. Lizzie rolled her eyes when I told her that (“You mean you changed your mind about Kindle because you were pleased that society was reading? I thought it would have been the weight, how many books you have access to…”), but it’s true. What matters to me is people reading, is stories making it to people who might be entertained or educated or changed by them. That matters to me more than any feature, although I’m sure as I play with my Kindle I’ll start to pick up some excitement about those, too.

My mom and I ended up getting into a whole conversation about the publishing process and what e-publishing means. How I could get involved in it. Sometimes I focus so narrowly on my day-to-day to keep from getting overwhelmed by my schedule that I forget to remind myself that I’m not in this to be a clerk at a law firm forever. I need to keep looking at the bigger world of what I want to do, and let myself get excited, and maybe even take a leap. Maybe I do need to consider putting together something to publish myself, in addition to sending manuscripts and queries the traditional way. Maybe I use the design knowledge I’ve picked up in classes and internships to help other people make their work stand out. Who knows? In any case, I’m excited about what I want to do again, which is just what I needed to start another year in my life.

Nick and Sheila Pye

23 Wednesday Mar 2011

Posted by in Art, Breaking Boundaries

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So last Friday I was sitting at the front desk in the law firm, answering phones and forwarding calls and signing for deliveries of Cobb salads for attorneys in depositions. I had the empty, vaguely itchy mental feeling that often means I need to read something, so I slid the wheely chair over to where the Washington Post was, did my best to remove the Style section as quietly as possible, and went to read the article on the back so I wouldn’t make noise by crinkling pages (my boss’s office is not far from the front, and her assistant is barely forty feet away from me, and Assistant and Boss are likethis). And there was an image from a photography exhibit at the Curator’s Office, and I had this sudden, overwhelming, ravenous craving for art.

The exhibit was the latest from Nick & Sheila Pye, a husband-and-wife team, newly divorced, who I had never heard of ever before I read the article on the back of the Style section. The article said their work drew from their relationship, but felt universal, that it had dark, Gothic themes but at the same time kept a quality of playfulness and experimentation, that elements of myth and religion and death and love were constant visitors in their photographs, but not heavy-handed. These are all things that match up beautifully with what I like in my reading material and would love to have said about my writing one day, but at that moment the reviewer could have been blathering about whatever she liked and it would hardly matter. This photo was breaking my heart every moment I looked at it, and I couldn’t stop looking. The image was of a dark-haired woman, drifting on tiptoe in from a calm gray sea and a peachy sky. Her hands were by her sides, arms flexed back just a little, like wings. One foot had rope looped around it, leashing her by the ankle to the  waist of a blond man, sprawled asleep or unconscious on the sand. The woman’s toes were just grazing the foam of the last wavelets before she would reach the beach. She wasn’t looking at the man. She looked out at me, and I couldn’t read her expression but I knew I had to see her, bigger and clearer and closer, and I needed it badly.

Like a myth, or an old fairy tale -- entrancing and frightening all at once

I went on Saturday. Andrew, fortunately, was able to come along, too. The whole set-up of the exhibition–newly divorced couple, still so committed to their art if not each other that they still made beauty together–felt like something I wanted to see with my someone, or else not at all, and the craving was so bad I didn’t know what would happen if I didn’t get some art in me. We got there, and realized the Curator’s Office is not a cute name for a gallery. The exhibit was in the curator’s office. We had to buzz her to have her let us up. Two of the photos hung over her desk, and she typed away on her computer while I moved from photo to photo, walking up so close my nose almost touched, or standing as far back as I could in the little room, and hugging my shoulders to keep from flying apart.

There was one other, besides the Aphrodite one of her coming in on the waves, that I loved. She was wearing a red dress, climbing a ladder that stopped in midair, her back turned to me. There was water again, and the black branches of trees just beginning to bud. And it’s so obvious that I would love the picture of this unknown woman climbing her ladder into whatever new nothing it means, here and now when I am working so hard and waiting for careers and proposals and publication and all these wonderful life things to happen. But I kept thinking about what she would do when she reached the top of that ladder, which was made of such old, creaky-looking wood, twisting in the wind. I wanted to know whether she would back out, or back down the ladder, or flail her arms and grab for the twigs nearby to steady herself, and then I remembered how much she had loved her photographer, and how much they both still loved this art to keep even that great pain from stopping them from joining together to make this. She was going to jump when she reached the top of the ladder, put one foot on either stem and push off and jump into that gray water, and the lens of the camera would rush forward to see if she was all right, and her head would surface a moment later, water streaming down her face, and she would look over and see that yes, the camera had caught her, just as she knew it would. And she would be laughing.

We spent an hour there, all in all, for six photos. I couldn’t stop looking. We took turns pointing out things we thought were beautiful, or sitting for ten or fifteen minutes at a time studying one in silence. I can’t tell you too much about what made them so amazing. I know very little about art, less about photography and the many things artists can do to make an actual image surreal, or make the quality of it more like a painting. I haven’t learned the language to explain what it is about light and color and expression that moves me, the way I could point out the beauties of a beloved author’s writing style. I do know I felt full by the time we left, so giddy I was almost skipping past the jazz bars and kebab places in downtown D.C.

I’m learning to trust these cravings, when they come. I had cravings to scribble, before I ever took a writing class, and filled pages of my diary wondering why I felt so antsy all of a sudden without a pencil in my hand. Maybe I need this kind of food, too, the freedom to sit still and look, as hard as I can, as images that show me what I would like to be able to do one day, even if I don’t plan on using a camera.

The exhibit’s still open for almost a month. If you’re anywhere near the D.C. area, please go. Please look. And tell me what you see.

Niche Markets

31 Monday Jan 2011

Posted by in Breaking Boundaries, Uncategorized, Writing

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In the past few weeks, I’ve been doing some serious thinking about where I’m trying to head as a writer–doing productive daydreaming sessions about what I’d like my career life to look like, thinking over what kind of writing I could happily do or not, and writing up 5-year plans (if there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s plans). One of the things that jumped out at me is that if I’m going to get anywhere with this, I need to seriously step up my submission rate. Doing three a week tires me out at this point, and my guess is I need to get at least to about 25 a week if I wanted to consider supporting myself with writing. Goodness.

So I was looking through my Writer’s Market guide, trying to put together a file of potential story and article ideas, and I have to tell you something: there are some strange magazines out there. Like, I understand that people have different hobbies and interests, but we are talking some niche stuff. Here are five of my favorites:

5. Atlantic Salmon Journal: This seems kind of normal–lots of people like fishing, and salmon are pretty neat fish, if you’re into that–but you need to think long term. This is a group of about 8,500 people who are prepared to put money into the promise that every three months, enough is going to change in the arena of this one fish to merit some hundred-odd pages of news.

4. Balloon Life: I’m just really excited this magazine exists at all. It makes me happy to think of the thousands of people who love hot air balloons so much that they can say, without sarcasm, that they have adopted a balloon lifestyle. They are balloonists. You get up in the morning, in your house for once because the new issue’s coming out, grab Balloon Life, hop in the ginormous red hot air balloon tethered to your chimney and head back to your natural habitat. This is what Jules Verne wanted Heaven to be like, I promise you.

3. Toy Farmer: I would expect there to be magazines about collecting toys. I would expect there to be a market for farmers’ magazines. Toy farmers, though? I’m not even sure I knew that was a thing. And I went to the website, and they have a Toy Farmer blog, for when the new issue can’t come out fast enough to keep up with the changes in the world of toy farming, and–AND–they have this link. It’s “Zeke’s Toy Box.” I’m not making this up. And you click it, because how do you not click something as adorable as “Zeke’s Toy Box,” and it gives you even more than you had imagined. “Zeke’s Toy Box” is where kids send pictures to “Grandpa Zeke” of their own toy farming inventions, or their dad’s combine, or what have you, and it is so cute I could cry.

2. Vintage Snow Mobile Magazine: Who knew? I may have been unsure of whether I knew about toy farmers before, but I promise you, I had never before in my entire life been aware of such a thing as vintage snow mobiles until I found out there was a magazine dedicated to them. Two and a half thousand people subscribe to this magazine, too. Think about that for a moment. Two and a half thousand people care about vintage snow mobiles so badly that they pay money to read about them. I don’t even know how many people are out there buying single issues off the grocery stand (in Alaska, I guess? Canada? On which newsstand do you find this magazine?), or just walking around feeling like they’re the only people in the world who are passionate about snow mobiles that have been around for a really long time. How old does a snowmobile even have to be to qualify as vintage? I don’t even have a basic starting point to know a vintage snow mobile if I walked outside and one literally hit me.

Finally, with this last one, I knew what these must be when I read the title, and I think I maybe had a book with one in it when I was very little, but the fact that there is a magazine for this proves to me that it does not matter what it is that you care about: you are not alone. There are probably thousands out there with you, writing articles, taking pictures, hanging out in whatever pocket of the Internet posts breaking news, and painstakingly printing hundreds upon hundreds of magazine copies about it. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you:

1. Miniature Donkey Talk. Oh my goodness. I wasn’t even going to say anything here, because the title alone is better than any words I could give you, but I just read the home page of their website, and you need to see these quotes:

“The best donkey magazine being published!” Dr. Julian Cable, DVM

AT LEAST 4 times greater distribution than ANY miniature donkey publication!!!

…which suggests there are more. I think I’m feeling about the same right now as if I’d just come across incontrovertible evidence of extraterrestrial life. I have actual goosebumps on my back.

I have not yet, I have to admit, submitted any articles or queries to any of these fine magazines. I’m not sure I’ll ever be qualified to swim in those waters. But I’ve developed a whole new appreciation for what’s out there. I’ve already started writing down the more esoteric of my interests. We’re gonna go explore.

The Mendacity of Hope

13 Thursday Jan 2011

Posted by in Books, Breaking Boundaries

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I was a little hesitant to post this for a while. My concept of the What I’m Reading section of this site was to give some insight into what kind of reading material inspires me as a writer, and this isn’t even close. Still, I read it, and that plus honesty in blogging counts for something to me.

A second caveat: I am, I admit, one of those Americans who really doesn’t care about politics. I want to care. I wish I cared the way certain people wished they could stand the taste of coffee. Caring about politics is one of those marks of sophistication; knowing what’s happening in the news is a decent litmus test of savviness, and a kind of adult mentality. I fail every time. I try to watch debates or Presidential speeches, and halfway through I end up shamefacedly reading webcomics, typing the url really slowly in hopes that no one will realize what I’m doing. It’s like inching through a red light in hopes that people won’t recognize that you’re moving til you’re through. Then, as if that isn’t enough, the opinions in The Mendacity of Hope aren’t even ones I necessarily agree with. I like Obama. I voted for him proudly in 2008, and since then I’ve let him be and assumed he’d do a decent job with the country.

So why in the world did I pick up this book to read, if it’s such a literary and political anomaly for me? A couple reasons. I realized an election is coming up in the not-too-distant future again, and since I refuse to vote blindly, I’ll need to put together some idea of what’s going on if I want to participate again. I miss my college Sociology classes. With my double major, I got to spend plenty of time writing creatively, but also plenty of time reading the works of great social theorists, and arguing, living in logic as well as creativity. Nowadays, I’m just in the one program, the MFA. Sure, I’ll read a few articles on spiked.com from time to time, but I missed reading something big, something I didn’t always understand, something that would force me to think hard just to keep up. Jumping into politics with a book on why Obama is disillusioning the country seemed like a great way to get a mental argument rolling. Mostly, though, expanding my horizons is incredibly important to me. I am never happy with how much I know right now, and as long as I can squeeze any amount of time from my schedule and energy from my mind, I’m determined to find a way to learn things. Now, on to The Mendacity of Hope:

The book itself is very well done, I have to say. What I appreciated was how self-aware the author strived to be of his own leanings. The introduction establishes that yes, clearly, Obama is miles better than W., no matter what complaints still exist. Hodge acknowledges that in his quest for directness, he may come off rude, which is nice, and for the most part he doesn’t. He comes off as someone who is frustrated with the American political system as a whole, and frustrated anew by the fact that a president who swore to change how that system operated is not, in fact, doing so. A large portion of the book explores political thinkers when America was a baby: Jefferson and Hamilton and so on. The question of The Mendacity of Hope is less about whether Obama lied to/misled his voting audience, and more about the patterns of power and, inevitably, money in American politics. The great lie at stake isn’t any campaign promise, but the idea that the country can operate according to the “by the people, for the people” dream it was built on at all. It’s not the most hopeful stuff, but it is really interesting. I don’t understand most of the details of what he’s saying, but the whole piece he’s putting together here has some neat questions wrapped in it.

That said, I do have a few complaints. There’s one instance where he basically comes out and says he thinks Christianity is belief in a bunch of fairy stories. I think there was no call for that. He wasn’t talking about voters’ religions influencing anything, or Obama’s, or even the founding fathers. It came off as a stab from his own personal agenda against religion, and without having a properly justified context in the book, I don’t see it having any result other than alienating readers. Religion is still overwhelmingly the norm, and even if many intelligent people are atheists, I doubt they’d stop reading a book if an author failed to make a crack at Christians. There are plenty of other analogies out there that don’t strike at the most important aspect of many people’s lives, and I’m sick of people insinuating that I’m less intelligent because of what I believe.

Besides that, which is admittedly a pet peeve, although also a sloppy moment in a mostly crisp book, I wasn’t convinced by Hodge’s arguments that Obama is to blame for what he feels is a rather toothless health care reform. I seem to remember, even from the political hole I usually live in, that for about a year, anytime Obama mentioned the topic, it would go like this:

Obama: Health care–
Opponents: You want to murder my grandparents!
Obama, No, I just wanted to say that health–
Opponents: You’ll club them to death like baby seals!!!
Obama: Hea–
Opponents (jamming fingers into their ears): BABY SEALS!!!!!

There were people who didn’t make it easy to pass things, is what I’m saying.

At any rate, this was still supposed to be more book review than political rant. Expanding horizons is all very well and good, but if you want to stay smart when you talk, probably stick with what you know! So: did I enjoy The Mendacity of Hope? Yes. Will I become involved in the political news du jour from now on? Almost certainly not. Will I pick up another political book to read sometime soon? Maybe. I’ve only seen the one side now, after all. There’s another story out there.