Link Day

In April I visited North Yarmouth Academy, and here's an article the students wrote after interviewing me. As usual, I'm surprised to see what I blathered about.

Tomorrow is the first day of June, which means that Frost Place season is nearly upon us. Here's the summer's reading schedule. Remember that all readings are free and open to the public; so if you find yourself in the White Mountains this summer, swing by and listen. By the way, the teaching conference is almost full! Hurray! But that also means that you procrastinators had better hurry up and apply.

Here's an excellent job-hunting letter, composed by a callow young man named Robert Pirosh, who later wrote for the Marx Brothers. Perhaps I will try a version of it myself.

And finally here's a poem by my friend Gray Jacobik as well as an interview with her about how she wrote it. 

I started off the day with a rejection letter, and I'm glad to say I'm feeling indifferent about receiving it. Of course that might be because the journal rejected me for inclusion in a thematic issue for which I hadn't submitted. Oy.

The vast majority of literary journals make my head ache. I wish I could love them, but I just can't. I do feel fortunate at this point of my so-called career: because I now have a book trail, I don't need to publish in journals to prove to anyone that I'm a "real writer," whatever that means, so I've been sending fewer and fewer poems into the aether and limiting essay submission to journals that have already shown an interest in my writing. On the whole this has been good for both my writing and my self-confidence. Anxiety about publication darkens the creation of work; so when I read about friends who, say, focus on submitting work every single day, I feel sad. I understand why they have this compulsion, but I also understand that it damages the solitude of writing--the necessity of sitting quietly among the words, of letting them amass, instead of perpetually requiring oneself to hawk them.

There's an ambiguous line between a longing to communicate and a longing to be noticed. I daresay none of us negotiates this line as well as we might.

I'm home again, and I'm even sort of awake. While I was gone, the remaining boys went hiking together, mowed grass, cleaned the bathroom, made hollandaise sauce for dinner . . . which is to say, they enjoyed each other's company but also went out of their way to make me happy to come home. Which I was.

Still, it was a good trip. By the end, our country mice were shooting through subway turnstiles and cruising up and down platforms like urban professionals. I was proud . . . even though, for some reason, these kids sing really loudly wherever they go: "Don't Stop Believing" on a crowded bus, "She Don't Know She's Beautiful" on a city stoop, "Happy Birthday" in a packed restaurant during a stranger's birthday, and on and on.

In the midst of all this juvenile hoo-hah, when I had forgotten I was a writer, I received an email from a poet I greatly admire. She had read the manuscript of my next collection, and she understood what it was saying, and she wrote down words about it. And my eyes filled, as I sat there on a rumpled pull-out couch in a hotel next to the airport, with my snoring son's elbow poking into my ribs.

And here I am in a hotel beside the airport. Our room is littered with middle school paraphernalia, by which I mean hair stuff, wet bathing suits, and a million socks. Girls are running down the hall. After having pretend chicken fights in the whirlpool, the children are consuming five large pizzas. One of them has borrowed the shoes off my feet and vanished. Fortunately here she comes, bouncing out of the elevator, ready to return them. But oh, look: she accidentally dropped them in the bathtub. She's very sorry. Well, not very but adequately. And now she needs to go eat more pizza.

You may not hear from me again until Tuesday morning because tomorrow, at 4:30 a.m., I am embarking on a whirlwind trip to Boston with 10 giddy 8th graders and 7 other parents. We will be riding the Amtrak, taking the subway, exploring the science museum, going on a whale watch, eating strange food at restaurants, cramming uncomfortably into hotel rooms, and swimming in the hotel pool. My assigned task, as Person Who Understands How Urban Mass Transit Systems Work, is to figure out how to transport 18 silly country mice from one event to the next. I'll be sure to tell you how that works out. And who knows?--I may have a chance to share a few stream of consciousness observations while the giggly girls under my command are busily watching Glee or putting on nail polish or whatever it is that 8th-grade girls do in hotel rooms. Also, I'll be eating at McDonald's for the first time in at least 30 years. I'm sort of depressed to think that my long streak will be over, but even I draw the line at getting up at 3 a.m. to make breakfast for 18 people.

Two graduations looming, not to mention a middle school semiformal, four days in Boston with a herd of eighth graders, several large family-and-friends parties, and a suddenly complicated baseball schedule for which I am the only driver. Did I mention that I'm also the guest speaker at the eighth-grade graduation? Or that I'm supposed to write a book review by June 11 but haven't yet received the book? Or that I might have to figure out how to fix a girl's hair for the prom? Ay yi yi. I can't even fix my own hair.

In the meantime (I use that word too much, don't I?), I'm still sad about poet and teacher Michael Macklin, who died suddenly in Vermont this week while chaperoning students at the Breadloaf Young Writers Conference. Here's his obituary in today's Portland Press Herald, a reminder that a modest, dedicated person can matter enormously to many, many people.

After an insomniac night followed by two hours of stunned sleep, I am feeling as if the physical world has assumed a slight transparency. A robin is singing a truncated melody outside my open window. The air is thick with almost-rain. I am sticking stamps on the envelopes and recovering from stupid boy arguments.

"Here's the deal: if you want me to drive you to school, I get the shower first every morning."
"No."
[Stomp.]
[Snort.]
[Etc.]

(Also I am wondering why the beginning of this blog post has such bizarre paragraph formatting. It makes me look as if I'm quoting someone else instead talking to you myself. However, repairing the problem seems to be impossible, so my inner page designer will try not to care.)

I've been reading a review of Anne Tyler's new novel and have begun another that considers Cindy Sherman's retrospective photography show at MOMA, and neither is helping me feel more at ease in this morning's world. When Joyce Carol Oates writes, "This is a spare, quiet, understated little novel, a slender autumnal tree from which most leaves have fallen. . . . It makes no great claims upon our imagination or our emotions," I can't tell if she is praising or criticizing the book. All I can say is that I  would hate a comment like that.

Likewise, when, in the first column of his review, Sanford Schwartz apologetically calls Sherman's photographs "emotionally detached, even a bit bland" and refers to the "objects in themselves" as "merely serviceable," "chiefly at the beck and call of Sherman the mime," I have no idea whether he plans to upend his opinions with a cathartic discovery of her greatness or to use the remaining pages to catalog her mediocrity. In both cases, I feel trapped in a fog. Where is the fiery grandeur that will burn it away? For now,  I'm having trouble believing it will unmask itself in the pages of this week's New York Review of Books.