Wow

I finally decided to put this blog back up here. After making those first few posts, I decided it was tricky to blog because so much of what I wanted to write about wasn't exactly something I wanted to put out in public. So I took myself off the web and back to my journal, and that is where my personal writing may stay--BUT--I just had to update this because in a little less than four years, I have come SO VERY FAR. Really, those first few posts were the beginning of a life shift for me, the beginning of me confronting my writing anxiety and getting back to the work of writing, the work of confronting the written word on the page.

I am very tired, because it is early (ish) in the morning and I have not yet been to bed (I teach nights and late afternoons), so I won't write much now. But looking back at this blog, here are just a few of the things that amaze me:

(1) I was right about some things, but I didn't realize it.

(2) I was overly committed to that church, and the relationship did not end well. Shortly after that last post, Mark and I ended up changing churches, and the change was so much for the better. I have never sung as much since as I did then, but that is okay with me right now. By the time we left that church, we were both putting in 15-20 hours or more a week, into not only singing but various other activities, and the whole thing was draining us dry. The first day we went to the other church, I sat in the sanctuary and tears rolled down my face, because I'd forgotten what it was like to be loved by God. That other church had pushed and pushed and somehow I'd gotten the feeling that I had to sacrifice everything--including my intellect and sanity--for church. They also confused service to God with service to the church, and that is something I may write about more later, because it's an issue I'm still working out.

(3) Morgan did get into college, and has done quite well. He also moved to a different city, and has flourished. Lisa, sadly, has deteriorated.

(4) My playwriting students DID sweep that competition, and came close to sweeping the two competitions after that!

(5) I am still not finished with my PhD, but am creeping ever closer. Ironically, after that spring, I did turn back to my play, and gave it a major overhaul--as in rewrote almost the entire thing. I submitted it to the Lanford Wilson version of the Edward Albee workshop and was rejected, but my own playwriting student got in. I was devastated for me but very happy for her.

(6) Less than two years later, a neighbor of that same student's walked into her apartment and found her dead. That same month, Evan died. It was surreal, and I'm not sure I've completely processed it. He was my mentor for nine years.

(7) Somewhere in the middle of all that, I got an idea for a book, and began to write it. I finished the first draft in September of 2007 and am finishing the rewrite. The first draft was 359 pages.

8) I have found an online writing community that has been essential to my growth as both a writer and a human being. None of these women are "creative writers" per se, but they all have a passion for the written and spoken word. We check in with each other online almost every day, post our goals for the day and spur each other on. It's quite exciting, and collectively, we have accomplished much.

9) Looking back, I think I was just afraid to write, because of the sheer terror of what I would face. It is not only the anxiety of facing the page, but also the anxiety over whether I am good enough, smart enough, fast enough, or poetic enough.

10) Even now, there are days when I am still terrified, and can hardly face the day. But after I write it all out, things are better.

11) I still have no idea what I want to be "when I grow up," except that I feel like I've fallen into the abyss of my novel and ended up somewhere in the fertile ground of my life's work. For this, no matter what happens, I am grateful.

And that about sums it up. Four years in 11 meandering points. Perhaps I will keep this blog going this time; perhaps not. We'll see.

Funny how God uses my own weaknesses to speak to me. So here I was, feeling inspired to write but still afraid of it and dithering back and forth (I dither a lot). It was also 1:40 a.m. and I knew that if I sat down to write I'd take forever, and at that hour, I really couldn't afford to do that. So I put on Roseanne reruns and tried to get into bed and wind down. And of course, what episode do they just happen to be on but the series finale, where Roseanne spends part of the episode sitting in the dark contemplating her life as a writer and the choices she's made. She even made a comment at the very end that sounded hauntingly like the messages I've gotten from God since I was five: this dream of mine isn't going to come true without a lot of hard work. This happens to me often--I decide I'm going to rest and ignore God and then he comes up right in the middle of the distraction I've used to get away from him. I'm constantly amazed by this.

So I turned off my light (I prefer writing in the dark) and sat on the edge of the bed with an old notebook that was unclaimed semesters ago by a former student and took out a pen and wrote. It wasn't much at all--this time only a few notes--but this is the second night in a row I've been driven to do this. These past few days I've been so swamped with the inevitable madness of the end of the semester I haven't been able to do anything with the notes that I've taken and the half of a scene I wrote last night, but I believe the floodgates are beginning to open. And what's emerging is a brutally, painfully honest account of different aspects of my relationship with God. I'm personifying and fictionalizing them of course; it would be way too naked otherwise and probably not as interesting, but that's what is finally coming out. I remember my friend Alan in Cincinnati once told me that he thought I'd eventually mature into the kind of writer who deals, Blake-like, with the conflict of matter and spirit. I don't know what's going to come of the stuff I've been starting to write, but I suspect he's right.

The bad thing is that all my ideas are coming in the form of a play--actually in the form of a major rewrite of my playwriting thesis from Cincy--rather than fiction. That may be just because I'm teaching a playwriting class right now and not fiction writing, or it may be, that as Edward Albee says, I am really a playwright. I have mixed feelings about this: (1) playwrights generally make no money--even less than writers of short fiction, and there are exponentially fewer stories of marketable success; (2) there's a very narrow audience for live drama, as opposed to audiences for film and novels; and (3) I have spent the last ten years of my life doing very little playwriting, so I feel woefully behind the movement of the genre. And yet, when I took my self-designed comprehensive in American Drama, I had the sense that my best stuff would actually hold up; I've never had that sense in fiction. So now I'm really psyched to work on plays again, but I have this fictional work that I have to write for my dissertation, since my PhD is in fiction. But at least I am writing again, in fits and starts, in strange shorthand notes about the lives of characters I'm reacquainting myself with, and in closeted tearful bursts.

And that's far better than not writing at all.

"You go, girl!" and more

Ha, I can't believe I just wrote the words "You go, girl!" at the end of one of my students' papers. I guess that's what comes of grading at 3:30 a.m. Still, I'm getting a little misty eyed when I think of the end of the semester and saying goodbye to two classes that I've really enjoyed. My students last semester made me question whether or not I really wanted to be in this field, whereas the ones I have now are amazing. I'm feeling very thankful to have them and I am certainly going to miss them. The discussions in the junior level class have approached a level worthy of graduate school, and the presentations have been very polished. And my prisoners' plays have continually astonished me. There's something to be said for the amount of time the prison students have on their hands.

Keith didn't win the competition, but he's happy to have made that final twelve. I told all of the playwriting students that they need to submit to the PEN/Prison competition, because I think if they all did, we would have a chance to sweep the drama category. Of course, I think this every year, and only one or two place, but this year we really have a shot. Besides, even if only one person places in each category, that would still be awesome.

Well, I should write more, but I'm tired, and I have to get up at a semi-reasonable hour tomorrow to finish grading before I pick up Morgan and Lisa and take them to my afternoon class. Lisa and I have decided that Morgan needs to see some college classes so that he will realize that college is not like high school. So I picked them up last week (they don't have a car and she has disabilities) and took them with me to campus. They sat in on my class and loved it; most importantly, Morgan loved it. He wanted to stop going to his last four weeks of high school and dive right into college. Of course, this is a problem for Morgan, because he does not have the best track record of high school attendance, and he has been skipping a lot lately due to senioritis as well as to problems with his health and at home. So I'm going to tell him that he needs to put in all four weeks if he wants to have a chance to go to a decent college. I just wish there was more I could do for him; he was labeled special ed. at a very early age, but he's recently had an IQ test that showed he is borderline genius level. He's clearly been bored throughout high school, and because of that boredom hasn't applied himself very well, which means he doesn't have the best grades. I don't know where he'll end up going to school when he goes, but Lisa is just tickled to death that he at least wants to go to college now. He'd been planning to take a year or two off and get a job, but now he says he wants to go as early as spring semester next year, if not before. Of course he has to apply . . .

Okay, I'm feeling dippy, and the cats are purring me to sleep. I need to crawl into bed and slip off into those good dreams I've been having lately.

my student, Keith

I do want to add that one of my prison students entered Drury University's one-act play competition and is now one of twelve finalists (selected from 224). So at least that's something.

Getting Started (or not)

I began this blog about a month ago in order to work through some of the more difficult decisions/issues in my life. Of course, right after I created the blog, I realized I should have waited a month, since my final comprehensive exam for my PhD was March 21. So now here I am, almost three weeks post-comps, still in the middle of grading hell, but beginning to see the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. I have loads of work to catch up on, but I did just find out I passed my exam, so at least I have that knowledge to keep me going through the long grading days and nights ahead of me.

So now it's onto the dissertation and on with the rest of my life, whatever that is. The thing with comps is that they drain so much time and energy that by the time they're over, most students have little left to give to a long original project. But perhaps I am still too recently post-comps to make that conclusion.

All I know is that my writing is very rusty. I have been writing tons of student critiques, short essays, and, of course, study responses to practice comp questions, but I haven't been able to do my own creative writing for quite some time now, and that really bothers me. What bothers me perhaps even more than the time constraints involved is my lack of creative energy and my lack of drive to create. I used to love to write; now I have to say that it is very painful. And yet I still believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is the path God wants me to take. I guess what's difficult to reckon with is the lack of positive feedback/encouragement here in Houston and the uneasy feeling I have that there isn't an audience for my work. I am a Christian, but I don't write to or for a Christian audience, and my work is often much too dark for a popular audience, especially a popular conservative one. And yet I can't keep my beliefs from influencing what I write; they flower out of me and through me and give every word fragrance, even if some of my Christian friends wouldn't recognize the spirituality behind my work. And yet, I do still have that stubborn belief, that stubborn gut feeling that tells me to keep "going for it," and to keep sending out the work that I have done.

The problem is that the work I have done is now so old--I keep sending out stories that are ten years old, because I just can't seem to get my newer stuff together. And that's incredibly frustrating. It also didn't help that I was several chapters into the novel that was supposed to be my dissertation and had to hear from my director that "the two threads of the novel aren't coming together and I am not interested in either thread." I knew what I'd sent to Evan (not his real name) wasn't working, I knew those threads weren't coming together, but I didn't expect him to kill the book completely, which he pretty much did. Getting over that has been like getting over the death of a loved one; I still really want to work on that novel, but I realize that it isn't going to work as a dissertation, at least not unless I radicially change it. There's also a problem with Evan's health--he's had two strokes in the past three years, and, frankly, I worry that he's going a bit senile. He often forgets who I am and what it is I'm working on. And yet, I can't really change directors, because Evan has been my mentor for so many years, and even though his mind is a little fuzzier now, I think his sensibility is still the closest to mine. It's just hard to reconcile the mentor I had in him when I first came here with the one I have now.

To make matters even more difficult, my other mentor, the woman with whom I work in literary scholarship, withdrew from chairing my oral because she was "no longer inclined to work with" me. That's all she said, Bartleby-the-Scrivener-like, just "I'm no longer inclined to work with you." I assume she was angry with me for not doing the oral last semester when we had planned to, but I knew I wouldn't be ready by then, and I still think I made the right decision to wait. And at least by switching to the creative oral I will get a chance to discuss my actual dissertation rather than work on yet another scholarly article, but it hurts to lose not only one mentor, but essentially two.

So that's why I started this blog, and that's why I called it "Restarting from zero," because I feel like that's exactly what I'm doing. I'm throwing away everything I ever thought about myself, about my strengths and weaknesses, even about my calling in life, and trying to listen to God's voice. The problem is that even after all this, He's still saying "write," and I want to so badly, but I just can't get past the pain of confronting the darkest parts of human nature, of the world, of myself. Every time I start to write I'm in tears, which makes for some interesting moments when I'm on my laptop in the middle of a coffee shop, and I just can't seem to push past the pain no matter what I do. I'm even crying now, when I'm writing this, just this stupid blog, because even thinking about the pain is too much to bear. So I hide, in Christian service, in a church I'm probably overly active in, and in silly TV shows that numb the pain, when really what I should be doing is confronting it.

I just don't want to live my life this way, always afraid to write, always in pain because what comes up is so unsettling. Hell, I'm so good at getting my students to fall in love with writing, you'd think that I'd be able to stay in love with it myself. And I do love it, but I hate it too, whereas right now I don't have so many negative feelings associated with singing, so I prefer to sing, except that sometimes I think I sing when I should be writing. It's so much easier to sing in front of an live and accepting audience that asks nothing more but that you lift up your praises to God. There's something about the moment of live performance--and live worship--that drives me more than sitting in a dark room or trying to be anonymous in a coffee shop. And there's also something to the fact that most contemporary Christian songs fail to address the dark side and therefore what I sing is rarely controversial and almost never difficult emotionally (I find this a weakness in praise and worship music, but I'll address that in another blog).

So right now I lead worship at my church, and people seem to think I'm good at it, and I could potentially be happy doing that, just continuing on teaching writing and volunteering my voice to the church and not writing at all, but I really think God wants more from me than that. Or maybe I should say he wants something different from me. Not that I can't still sing, but I should not be putting that talent first. It's just so hard sometimes, and I am so swayed by the crowd and by positive and negative feedback. I know if I were to audition for a professional singing gig I'd get tons of flack and then probably hate singing just as much as I hate writing, so I'm sure this is just all about the bruising of my spirit and not really about a change of direction in my life.

But where do I start? Or, more importantly, how do I start over yet another time?