I’m excited to be heading east tomorrow for the Cuttyhunk Island Writers’ Residency. But this morning, I’m excited to share an essay I wrote on The Rumpus. It’s about friendship, Facebook, loneliness and nostalgia. Have a look if you’re so inclined.
Happy June!
I mentioned this spring that I had an excerpt from The Saltwater Twin published in Hayden’s Ferry Review. It’s in Issue 56: The Chaos Issue, and it’s called “And Now, the Octopus.” It’s about faith—having it, losing it and sometimes finding it again. It’s also about octopuses.
Here’s where I wrote about writing it—way back in June 2012.
Hayden’s Ferry asked me to provide some contributor’s remarks for their blog, which you can read here. In them, I discuss my inspiration for the essay and what Einstein called “holy curiosity.”
And here, for your delectation, is an excerpt:
I was fourteen the summer my aunt and uncle got cable, expanding our formerly limited selection of afternoon entertainment. Moby Dick couldn’t hold a candle to MTV, or such classic films as The Pirate Movie, Grease 2 and Clash of the Titans. Every afternoon my sisters and cousins would crowd onto the sunset-orange, velour sofa bed in my aunt and uncle’s spare room and watch Clash of the Titans over and over, mesmerized by the cartoony violence, naked ladies and Harry Hamlin’s suntanned torso and pouty lips. Continue reading On Octopuses, Faith and Holy Curiosity (And Half Pint)
Hello! I’ve got an essay up over at themanifeststation.net. It’s called “Home.” Yes, it’s another excerpt from The Saltwater Twin. Take a look, share, let me know what you think… Continue reading Home
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? ― Mary Oliver
I like having a February birthday. February needs something—it’s a rough month at this latitude—and Valentine’s Day just does not cut the mustard. Mardi Gras often falls in February which helps mitigate winter malaise. (In 2021 it falls on my birthday, which might be solid justification for a New Orleans trip in six years. Laissez les bon temps rouler, ya’ll.) But, anyway, I’m a fan of birthdays, in general, as opportunities for both merrymaking and taking stock.
As it happens, February is this blog’s birthday month as well. I didn’t plan it that way. It must just feel natural to me to start things in February. I came in just under the wire with my first post on February 28, 2012. It featured one Mr. Rocky Balboa, and it was basically a pep talk to myself. Continue reading Birthdays
I’m thinking of adding an appendix to The Saltwater Twin and Other Mythical Creatures. I enjoy the idea of supplementary material: glosses, annotations, illustrations, maps, footnotes. This appendix would list the mythical creatures that appear throughout the book.
The title of the collection comes from a story I told myself when I was eight, about a neighbor who drowned—a girl my age. The myth and accompanying undersea world I constructed for her gave me a way to escape the family in which I was submerged: Continue reading mythical creatures
That’s a quote from Coco Chanel that I used last week to kick off a theater/social studies residency with eighth graders in Evanston. We’re exploring the 1920s and ‘30s through theater and creative writing. The first week we looked at changing images and roles for women in the 1920s; then, the students investigated their own relationship to fashion by writing about an article of clothing that was significant to them in some way. The quote sparked a discussion about clothing and culture and the connections between the two, both in the 1920s and today. (Also, 1920s slang is the bees’ knees.)
As an eighth grader myself, I was fond of quotations and tended to season my writing liberally with them—drawing from top 40 songs as well as my mother’s trusty Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, which is apparently the longest-lived and most widely distributed collection of quotes there is. Its first publication was in 1855. (Side note: when I was in eighth grade, one couldn’t call a quotation a quote without risking the wrath of one’s English teacher. Quote was the verb, quotation the noun. Now, apparently one can although it’s considered informal usage.)
These days I feel like we’re inundated with pseudo-meaningful quotes photoshopped in every font imaginable onto pictures of sunsets or snowboarders. On coffee mugs. Reusable shopping bags. The internet is rife with sites devoted to cataloguing quotes on every subject under the sun. There’s even a primer on how to come up with a good quote of your own that offers up these helpful tips: Continue reading Quotes!
I mentioned a while back that “The Saltwater Twin,” the first chapter of my book, is included in this year’s Best American Nonrequired Reading. Well, it’s in bookstores now and you can go out and get one for yourself!
They sent me a contributor’s copy, but I couldn’t wait. I had to go out and get one the day it came out earlier this month. I tried to act nonchalant at the bookstore, but wound up telling the cashier I was in the book. Oy. I will never be one of the cool kids. Continue reading Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014
I’ve been thinking it’s time for an excerpt. This is from a chapter called “Law of the Jungle.” It was published last year in The Chattahoochee Review. I suppose it’s not surprising that there is a fair bit of animalia in a book called The Saltwater Twin and Other Mythical Creatures, but this chapter, in particular, investigates some of my fascination with the four-legged world.
Now this is the Law of the Jungle— as old and as true as the sky; And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die. – Rudyard Kipling
They’d been tucked between the electric hued running shoes and the prim ballet flats: a pair of Coach wedge sandals the color of cognac. They were almost seventy percent off. And they were leather—which is why I shouldn’t have tried them on in the first place and why I’d been carrying them around for a good quarter of an hour trying to make up my mind whether to take them back to the shoe department or up to the register and accept that I was a hypocrite. Continue reading Law of the Jungle
I’m working on a chapter called “Bad Pen Pal.” It’s going to be chapter 13 in The Saltwater Twin—or maybe chapter 12. The impetus for some chapters is a story, for others an idea. The flicker for this one was friendship. I wanted to write something about how we learn to make friends and how intense friendships can be when you’re young. I wanted to write about the heartbreak of losing a friend and the less intense but still potentially ache-inducing drift that sometimes comes with time and distance. I wanted to describe the way some lost friendships still weigh on me at times, keep me wondering where and how and why we foundered.
The title comes from the first time I lost touch with a friend. I was eight. Actually, my friendship with Bonnie never truly got off the ground. We spent one day together, while our fathers attended a conference. Bonnie lived in a different state, but she suggested we stay friends. We could be pen pals. I liked the sound of that. It sounded exotic to have a pen pal. I liked how letters were little packages. I liked that my name and address printed on the front meant that it would come to my house, of all the houses in the United States, all the houses in the world; it would come to me. I liked the marvelous way envelopes were sealed with spit, their folded triangles, the magical canceled stamp. But the content of Bonnie’s letters left me unmoved—maybe because we just didn’t know each other that well. We hadn’t any history. I recently discovered I have one still in my possession, a Christmas card that reads, Continue reading On Bad Pen Pals, Loneliness and How We Keep in Touch
I used to read one book at a time. These days I seem to have several going at once: a novel, perhaps, for bedtime and dog walks, another for my book club, something for research on the chapter I’m writing and a biography I started in the airport over Christmas but haven’t gotten back to.
My writing is taking a similar tack. I’m careening toward this self-imposed deadline of completing The Saltwater Twin by the end of March, and feeling quite a lot of anxiety about making it. In the past, I’d work on one chapter at a time, revising again and again until it felt finished, a process which typically took several weeks. However, as this deadline hurtles into view, the notion of x-ing off March 31st on my calendar and having one or two or three chapters not even sketched out feels daunting. Nauseating, even. Continue reading Brain Science and Kerouac’s Scroll: Can a Writer Multitask?
the saltwater twin 