More than a mile

When it comes to the joy and necessity of walking a mile in someone's shoes, To Kill a Mockingbird does a pretty good job of explaining:

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view--until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”

Nonetheless, I personally prefer this quote from Joan Aiken's Is Underground:

“She thought about Penny teaching her to read. 'What’s the point of reading?' Is had grumbled at first. 'You can allus tell me stories, that’s better than reading.' 'I’ll not always be here,' Penny had said shortly. 'Besides, once you can read, you can learn somebody else. Folk should teach each other what they know.' 'Why?' 'If you don’t learn anything, you don’t grow. And someone’s gotta learn you.'

Well, thought Is, if I get outta here, I’ll be able to learn some other person the best way to get free from a rolled-up rug.”

There are worse reasons to do what I'm doing.

Replacements

This morning, I put a posting for my current job up on the Center’s social media pages. This afternoon, I submitted an application for the agency to receive another Project 55 Fellow. Full circle.

I’ve changed a lot and a lot has changed since I took this position. I’ve changed a lot and a lot has changed since I showed up on the first day of my fellowship. Finally, a lot has changed since I reached the end of my fellowship and, filling out the Project 55 exit survey, checked the box indicating no, no I would not recommend that they send another fellow there. Not in a million years.

There were worlds beyond my classroom. I knew this intellectually, but I finally realized it to be true when I arrived at my quiet desk with the computer and the filing cabinet and the phone extension. There are worlds beyond that desk, too, and over my years as a grant writer at the Center my involvement in projects and discussions beyond my job description have intensified. I frequently tell people that even on the days it frustrates me, I still like the job, because it's fascinating. Why do we do things this way? Why is she taking this so personally? Is this all nonprofits, or just us?

 
Adults are no more logical, no less fallible than children, but the adults I work with (generally) wouldn’t run at you with scissors, expose themselves to a classroom of their peers, or only respond to shouted commands. (Being me, it was this last I found most challenging and dispiriting.)

There are other things I love about the organization, too, that I didn’t get a whole lot of exposure to in my after school classroom: home visiting, bilingual immersion, the e-mails that happen behind the scenes when a family loses everything.

I changed my mind. I think, given an engaging, intellectual post for them to fill, I would certainly send another fellow. I think that, sitting where I’ve been sitting for almost two years now, they’d get that view of the big picture that can be so essential to understanding why you’re doing what you’re doing. I e-mailed and explained, and today I submitted the application.

I’ll be gone by the time the Fellow arrives. I’m wrapping up here at the end of May, the better to spend all of June in Paris with the Aged Ps before starting the MFA (final location decision pending--watch this space!). I want to make sure we’re in touch, though. I want to be able to tell them about my experience, and I want to hear about theirs. Because as much as I hated every other minute of it, I will always be grateful for my crazy, miserable, eye-opening fellowship year. It made where I am today--and where I’ll be next year--possible.

"I went out the front."

I was a junior in high school. My grandparents were visiting. The five of us decided to go catch a movie and grab dinner.

The movie was Capote, and it left me stunned.

We sat in the front row, and the whole time I was watching, I just kept thinking, "This is so good, this is so good, this is so good, this is so dark, I can't believe I'm watching this with my grandparents, oh my goodness, this is so dark."

The movie hit me hard because, at the time, I was also trying to write something based on a real-life story with no conclusion. I thought I knew what the most dramatically satisfying outcome would be, and it was the one I would never have wished on my characters, let alone their real-life counterparts. Watching Capote (brilliantly embodied by the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman) wishing for a speedy conclusion to In Cold Blood really shook me. He knew what a speedy conclusion would mean for the murderers he'd befriended. Befriended. That was another thing. More and more and more shades of dark, dark grey. I could not believe I was there with my grandparents.

The credits rolled and we sat through every single one. The lights came up and we filed out of the theater in silence. What now? I wondered. What could we possibly  do now?

"That was good," said my grandfather. "What's for dinner?"

I trailed behind everyone next door to the restaurant. ("He'll get an Academy Award," my dad was predicting. Everyone was nodding in agreement.) Was this my first brush with a conflicted, sympathetic, difficult protagonist? I doubt it, and I doubt that the crime itself threw me, although that certainly was a doozy, even for the seasoned Masterpiece Mystery and forties film noir consumer I was even then. Whatever the reason, this was one of the first movies I felt right down to the soles of my feet.

Roger Ebert had this to say: "The movie In Cold Blood had no speaking role for Capote, who in a sense stood behind the camera with the director. If "Capote" had simply flipped the coin and told the story of the Clutter murders from Capote's point of view, it might have been a good movie, but what makes it so powerful is that it looks with merciless perception at Capote's moral disintegration."

And I wondered, at age sixteen, whether any work of art would ever be worth that much.

So the movie got to me, but what stunned me was that "What's for dinner?" When I tell this story in person, this is where I inject the humor. "'What's for dinner?!?'" I say. "How can they be talking about food? I AM SHAKEN TO THE DEPTHS OF MY SOUL."

(I say it in all caps, just like that.)

I can point to Capote as the moment when I realized that no two people ever watch the same movie.

More than that, it would be impossible for me to watch the same movie today that I watched nine years ago. But I will never forget this particular line, "It's like Perry and I grew up in the same house, and one day he went out the back door and I went out the front," and I will never stop citing it all the time, and I will always love the movie. It's beautifully shot and well written and, yes, amazingly acted.

I'll be watching it again tomorrow.

Desert Island Discs

Today was our third of (presumably) four days we've had off of work in 2014 due to dangerously cold temperatures. Not going into work has been especially good news for me, since my aging Subaru is completely, 100% frozen, and I don't want to risk my delicate Irish skin on the El in this weather. So I've been hunkering down and catching up on the reading, writing, and podcast-listening that has gotten away from me in the past months.

One of my favorite podcasts to drop in on is the long-running Desert Island Discs, a staple of British culture. Its premise is that each castaway has to choose eight pieces of music, a book, and a luxury that they would take with them upon being exiled to a desert island. This morning, I listened to Hugh Laurie's selection, and thought that it was high time I made mine.

Music
1. Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, Ralph Vaughan Williams
2. The Bagman's Gambit, The Decemberists
3. Non, je ne regrette rien, Edith Piaf
4. Night and Day, Fred Astaire
5. Heart in a Cage, The Strokes
6. Feeling Good, Michael Bublé
7. El Tango De Roxanne, Ewan Mcgregor, Jose Feliciano, and Jacek Koman
8. Help I'm Alive, Metric

Book
Oftentimes, castaways will ask for "the complete works of Dickens." This seemingly counts because each castaway is automatically presented with The Bible and the Complete Works of Shakespeare. So, along those lines, I am going to ask for The Lymond Chronicles by Dorothy Dunnett. This is a series that would bear up under the extreme scrutiny resulting from an English major being marooned on a desert island.

Luxury
I would ask for a computer with a magically long-lasting battery, for writing the masterpiece that will eventually arise from listening to so many inspiring songs on repeat.

Thank you for tuning in.

Know Thyself

I did it.

Just under a year ago, I had a conversation with Dad at the Duke of Perth. I decided that the summer of 2014 would be my last summer before grad school. And it will be.

It was a decision with a lot of steps, and I followed them all. This was unusual, because I've been tumbling from one decision to the next since midway through senior year. First: What did I want to do? Second: Where did I want to go? Third: What would I have to do to get there?

In the end, though, there was no real decision to be made at all. There's only  one thing I've really wanted to do since I was in fifth grade.

What I couldn't explain to my mother, and scarcely to myself, is that I have come to see that I know more than I think I know and that, however sparse and seemingly unserviceable my memories, this doesn't matter because you don't put yourself into what you write, you find yourself there. And for a writer the life you don't have is as ample a territory as the life that you do. -- Alan Bennett, "Cocktail Sticks"

I applied to MFA programs in creative nonfiction, and on Sunday I was accepted to my first one. And there was much rejoicing!

Happy Thanksgiving!

My new(ish) apartment, where I can actually get a good night's sleep; my job, where I am valued; my parents' home in Kansas, where the light is just right; Chicago, where friendships of two, five, ten, and seventeen years are still going strong; San Francisco, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Champaign, and Iowa City; the cabin, where I spend time with my family, with friends, and with myself; all the writing I've been doing, because that's where I live.

A year is a long time...

...but it can fly by, too.

Today is the Arlingtonniversary! K and I started writing together a year ago and we haven't stopped.

From the "I am tired of working with idiots" that launched the whole thing to the, "...and I suspect it's you," that brought it all back; from the late night cheering at the arrival of a new, dramatic installment to the resulting insomnia; from the beginning to the not-even-remotely-done-yet juncture where we find ourselves now; and from writing to editing and editing and writing...this has been one of my best years.

This is, verbatim, what I said about how today makes me feel over at Facebook, since there's no reason to try and top myself when this is exactly what I want to say:

A year ago this evening, I came home from a long day of work to find an e-mail waiting for me from [K], and we were off to the races. The writing slump was over and fiction was happening. To say it was a good year is a gross understatement. Life-changing would be better. Vocation-affirming. Freeing. If anyone wants to really know what it's been like writing intensively with another person for a year, I would refer you to Langston Hughes: "I catch the pattern / Of your silence / Before you speak."