Meeting Resistance: On Writing, Workouts and Endurance

Posted on by Maia

worn-out-shoes

I’m out of shape. I’ve fallen out of my not-exactly-Olympian but relatively consistent get-up-and-move exercise habit. I need to get back into it because 1. it’s good for my health, 2. it’s an indispensable mood elevator during long, dark Chicago winters and 3. it builds endurance. That third thing, I’ve found, has much farther-reaching benefits than just logging mileage on the treadmill.

As a kid, I lived very much in my head. I built forts and sandcastles, I swung on swings and climbed jungle gyms—but really taxing, sweaty, whole-body-limbs-and-heart engaged movement, not so much. Team sports sent me into a spiral of panic. I didn’t really come home to my body until I signed up for jazz dance in high school at Feet First! (The exclamation point was part of the name.) Our teacher was pixie-sized; we danced to Prince and Duran Duran in black and electric blue spandex. In college I picked up my roommate’s running habit, bundling up on winter afternoons and running past fields of rasping cornstalks. Continue reading Meeting Resistance: On Writing, Workouts and Endurance

How I Got Over Being Afraid of the Dark

Posted on by Maia
photo by keijar
photo by keijar

I love Halloween. The costumed reveling, bowls of candy, jack o’lanterns flickering on stoops. I especially like the way we mark the beginning of this season of slipping into the long winter nights, by striking matches and lighting little lights against the big, big dark outside.

A few years ago I discovered – to my great chagrin – that I’m afraid of the dark. I was at Hedgebrook, a writer’s colony on Whidbey Island in the Puget Sound. Each writer had her own little cottage in the woods. I had a sleeping loft and a wood-burning stove; a lavender and sage scented bathhouse with a claw foot tub was a short walk away. There were blackberry bushes heavy with sweet, dark fruit, a fig tree, an herb garden, and a cat who wove her scent around your ankles when you walked down the path to the main house for supper.

And at night, it was dark. Continue reading How I Got Over Being Afraid of the Dark

squirrel toy rage rocket lemon

Posted on by Maia

Levi Mingus computerFirst, some good news: the first chapter of The Saltwater Twin and Other Mythical Creatures was named a finalist for Fourth Genre’s Michael Steinberg Essay Prize! I’d post an excerpt, but I’m still working on actually getting it published somewhere, so the curious will have to wait.

Meanwhile…Levi Mingus computer 2

It feels like summer today. Lawnmower in the distance, fluttering curtains, susurration of leaves, chatter of birds and squirrels outside my third story window. Right now I’m doing research. Not the kind that requires library or internet or the kind that necessitates phone calls home to ask who taught me to suck the honeysuckles that grew along our backyard fence or whether it was a tire or a wooden monkey swing at that one house we stayed in that summer. Nor is it the kind of research that winds up with me on the floor amid stacks of notebooks or letters dug out of cardboard boxes from the hall closet. Today’s research involved plugging in an ancient (like over a decade old) laptop (time capsule) and meandering through its contents.

Some things it contains: Continue reading squirrel toy rage rocket lemon

Writing Road Trip

Posted on by Maia
Pittsburgh
photo by Jordan LaSalle

May 28, 2013. It was a Memorial Day weekend of firsts: first trip to Pittsburgh, first writers’ conference, first seitan taco.

The Creative Nonfiction Foundation in Pittsburgh publishes books and a magazine dedicated to literary nonfiction and offers workshops, mentoring and online classes. It’s entirely possible there’s an excerpt from The Saltwater Twin in a pile on someone’s desk in their office from my last round of submissions. Several weeks ago I decided to sign up for their Best of Creative Nonfiction Conference and started planning a road trip to Pittsburgh.

road trip j and mMay 24. My friend Jordan and I left Chicago around noon and made our first pit stop somewhere in Indiana at a really outstanding rest stop where we bought some friendship bracelets for ourselves and our Pittsburgh hosts – those kind made with the embroidery thread. I’ll never get tired of them. Jordan snapped my photo (wearing my new bracelet) next to the pouty McDonald’s girl and we fortified ourselves with some chocolate.

photo by Jordan LaSalle
photo by Jordan LaSalle

Continue reading Writing Road Trip

words to lift your hat to…

Posted on by Maia

Thesaurus“Now there’s a word to lift your hat to…” – Emily Dickinson

When my third grade teacher, Mrs. Broadhurst, showed me a thesaurus for the first time, I was thrilled. I started peppering book reports with words like assuage and recondite. Which word was the right one? Which would say just the thing I needed it to say? I used to stare at a leaf or a wall as the day faded and ask myself, what color is it now? And moments later – now?  What pigments would I mix to get it to look like that? What word says what color that is? And when darkness took away all color, there were sounds – the rustle of sheets, a gurgle deep in the belly of the house.  A distant car outside, someone awake going where, why, at ten thirty, eleven thirty, twelve thirty at night?  There were words somewhere to say what was happening at any moment any place in the world. Continue reading words to lift your hat to…

Missed Connections: Meet me in a field of snow.

Posted on by Maia
English: Snowy field
English: Snowy field (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I started this blog to document the process of writing my first book, The Saltwater Twin and Other Mythical Creatures. If you’ve spent time here, you know I mostly write about what’s going on in my brain as I write, revise and obsess over this massive project. I spend as much time as I can on the manuscript. But in the meantime, a girl’s gotta eat. So, today I’m going to share a story from my day job. I mentioned a few weeks ago that I wait tables a couple nights a week. But by day I’m an interdisciplinary teaching artist, which means I work with students, teachers and community members in schools, healthcare centers and jails on all kinds of writing and performance projects.

I’m currently working with a seventh grade class at a Chicago public school on the South Side through one of my favorite arts ed organizations, Urban Gateways. My students are creating a performance that investigates connection – the people, places and things they feel connected to and how they are impacted by that web of connections. Seeking material to inspire student writing, I started thinking about the missed connections ads in the classified sections of local papers or on websites like Craigslist. I thought that could be a fruitful place to start an exploration of connectedness. A little digging brought me to a beautiful site called Literary Bohemian, an online journal of travel writing where I found a prose poem called “new york craigslist > personals > missed connections>” by Megan Falley.

My students and I talked about the concept of a missed connection ad. I likened it to a flyer you might see stapled to a telephone pole or tree for a missing pet or person. We talked about the people we might miss a connection with – a friend or relative who died or moved away, a fictional character we could never meet in real life or someone we hadn’t yet met, but hoped we would someday. We talked about dreams and being weird and how in poems you can use images that are dreamlike and surreal to say something about a relationship that is hard to say in words. Here are some of the poems they came up with. I think they’re pretty brilliant. We’ll use these poems and more to compile a script the students will perform at the end of May. I can’t wait to see how it turns out. Continue reading Missed Connections: Meet me in a field of snow.

In between

Posted on by Maia
four moonIt began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.                                      
                                                                           — Diane Ackerman

I’m waiting tables again. This past fall, a couple gaps in my teaching schedule left funds a little thin, so I picked up a couple nights a week at a place not far from home. Waiting tables has always been something I’ve done between other jobs, between teaching and writing and life. Often, the restaurants where I’ve worked have been staffed by artists and students and immigrants – people on their way to doing other things, people working two jobs or three to support families, put themselves through school, pursue creative projects, people between countries, languages and cultures. On top of all of those betweens, there’s the contrast between the staff racing around, keeping tabs on tables and drinks and entrees and the customers at rest, eating and drinking, catching up with friends.

Waiting tables makes me think about these collisions, these betweens. It also makes me want to go have a drink after work. So, the other night, somewhere between one day and the next, I was sitting at a bar with a couple new friends from the restaurant. Continue reading In between

Why I Write

Posted on by Maia

fun-with-dick-and-jane-title-pageI don’t remember learning to read and write. The way my mother tells it, she discovered me at age three reading an ancient copy of Fun with Dick and Jane I’d unearthed somewhere, and I’ve been writing almost as long. Reading and writing were a continuum, not separate from one another. I loved the shape of letters – the teepee of A, the crawling snake of S. I loved stringing them into words and sentences. I loved the escape of books. They were magical objects, portals into other worlds. I didn’t think about how they came into being, the mechanics of someone sitting down to think about character and setting, cross things out, scrawl notes in the margins of typewritten pages. I didn’t dream of writing. I just wrote.

I put on plays in garages and backyards. Frankly, the audience was kind of secondary. It was the characters I was in love with. I practiced getting their voices right. IMG_0125

Tom Sawyer said, “You there” and Dorothy sounded plaintive; Peter Pan was cocky and Hook flamboyant. I wrote poems, too, about zebras and the ocean and pollution.

IMG_0126

I liked meter and rhyme. I liked typing and illustrating. Writing poems was play.

As a teenager, my poems moved from paeans to bubblegum and spring toward more personal subjects. I was polite, though, correct. I wrote for the A even when I was writing for myself. My journals were wilder. Sometimes I swore like a truck driver. I detailed dreams; I wrote blush-worthy, cringe-worthy things. In these pages, a different, darker, truer kind of writing began to take shape. I took just one writing class in college – poetry. I wrote pretty terrible stuff. But I was practicing. And I continued to read voraciously. I started to think I’d like to write and teach. For a long time, when people asked what I did, I put it that way, as verbs. I write versus I’m a writer. I wasn’t ready to identify as a noun. Continue reading Why I Write

early Valentine

Posted on by Maia

Winter chicago snowy streetI can’t help it, sometimes I’m susceptible to a little bit of magical thinking. Supposedly, this isn’t a bad thing. It’s not unusual, at any rate. Human beings are wired to see patterns, connections, to create narrative and ritual out of the raw material of our lives. We can’t help but seek meaning. In fact, a neuropsychologist in Zurich has actually linked a lack of magical ideation to a reduced capacity to experience pleasure. People who don’t exhibit any signs of magical thinking are more likely to be depressed. So, a little magic in the heart of a Chicago winter may not be a terrible thing. It’s cold, it’s dark, the holiday hullabaloo is a distant memory, and all that remains are slushy, grey streets and long, long nights. The twinkly lights have been put away and those of us in the northern hemisphere are in for thirty-one of the coldest days and longest nights of the year. The world is crying loss, loss, loss. At least, that seems to be my January lot: loss. Jobs, relationships, pets – for two years running, January has appeared determined to kick my ass. (I know it’s February now. Believe me, I’ve been counting the days.)

This past weekend I was having one of those moments when you simply cannot take any more. I was scoured out by worry and sorrow, bone-weary and trying to get out the door to meet a friend – and I couldn’t find my cell phone. As a consequence, I was walking around my apartment yelling, “It’s not fair!” (My poor neighbors – I hate to think what they overhear. I sing to the dog to get him psyched for dinnertime or walktime – never mind the fact that, being a dog, he’s already pretty psyched about those things; I howl like a banshee because the world is not going according to my plan.) Anyway, there I was, desperately seeking my cell phone, when I heard music mysteriously coming from the bedroom. Continue reading early Valentine

Start Now

Posted on by Maia

dorothy writing

10 Steps to Becoming a Better Writer
Write.
Write more.
Write even more.
Write even more than that.
Write when you don’t want to.
Write when you do.
Write when you have something to say.
Write when you don’t.
Write every day.
Keep writing.
 ― Brian Clark

 

I started this blog last February, a couple weeks after my birthday, to document the experience of writing my first book. As I approach these anniversaries — birthday and blog — I can’t help but take stock of where I am (writing, writing, writing), how I got here (see here) and where I’m headed next (I want to sell The Saltwater Twin and Other Mythical Creatures before 2013 draws to a close). Last week I wrote about pep talks. I kind of feel like this blog has been a yearlong pep talk to myself and anyone else who’s working hard at a creative project — or maybe just working hard at, like, life. These posts have been my inquiry into how to balance plugging away on something that’s going to take a while to finish and manage at the same time to feel some measure of contentment with life as it unwinds. Continue reading Start Now