What I Learned from Peter Pan: In Praise of Crowing

Posted on by Maia
photo by David Jones
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, London
photo by David Jones

One of my first heroes was Peter Pan. He was a kid who could go toe to toe with grownups—pirates, even. I liked the way he unabashedly crowed whenever he was pleased with himself, which was most of the time.  He bragged incorrigibly and unapologetically about the smallest achievement. The narrator doesn’t sugarcoat it:

“To put it with brutal frankness,” he says, “There never was a cockier boy.”

I envied Peter’s confidence. It thrilled me when he crowed,

“How clever I am! Oh, the cleverness of me!”

I longed for that kind of self-assurance, let along the audacity to stand on a chair and shout about it—the way Peter did at every opportunity. Continue reading What I Learned from Peter Pan: In Praise of Crowing

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

Goals, Faith and Magic

Posted on by Maia
photo by ShanaCathEileen
photo by ShanaCathEileen

Near the end of Harry Potter book three, Harry saves himself along with his friend Hermione and his godfather Sirius by managing a complicated and difficult bit of magic. Harry has travelled back in time, where he stumbles upon his past self and loved ones in harm’s way – about to be destroyed by the ghastly dementors. Transfixed by the terrible scene, time-travelling-Harry recalls having seen a shadowy, strangely familiar figure cast the spell that repelled the dementors and saved himself and his friends. Suddenly it dawns on Harry that the familiar figure he’d seen was actually himself. So he does something he’s never been able to do before – conjures a Patronus spell strong enough to drive away over a hundred hungry dementors. When she hears of it, Hermione is stunned:

“‘I can’t believe it…You conjured up a Patronus that drove away all those dementors! That’s very, very advanced magic….’

‘I knew I could do it this time,’ said Harry, ‘because I’d already done it.’”

Harry manages it because he’d seen himself do it before.

I wish I could catch a glimpse of the future me, right now, holding the published Saltwater Twin in my hands. Then I would know I can do it. Nevertheless, despite my inability to see the future, I’m trying to believe unwaveringly that this thing I want will come to be. Continue reading Goals, Faith and Magic

Whose Story? The Ethics of Writing Memoir

Posted on by Maia

I’ve been jittery ever since I found out my essay “The Saltwater Twin” would be published in Creative Nonfiction this summer. peering through curtainI know that’s the objective: I want stuff I write to be published, to be out in the world and part of conversations and all of that. But I don’t think about that while I’m writing, I just write. I sort things out, I investigate what troubles me, what makes me curious and what I don’t understand. Sometime later it sinks in that people are going to read what I wrote and that I’ve written about real people, living and breathing in the world, people who might also decide to read what I’ve written. Continue reading Whose Story? The Ethics of Writing Memoir

Strange but True Stories of Survival

Posted on by Maia

photo by Sean Munson

Summertime update: My essay “The Saltwater Twin” (which the observant among you will notice shares a name with this blog) is coming out in a great magazine called Creative Nonfiction. This month! As in, you can order it now! creative nonfictionCreative Nonfiction, according to their website, “was the first and is still the largest literary magazine to publish, exclusively and on a regular basis, high quality nonfiction prose.” This issue is subtitled, “Strange but True Stories of Survival and Unlikely Events.” Editor Lee Gutkind called “The Saltwater Twin” a depiction of “the author’s struggle to avoid drowning, both literally and metaphorically.”

The essay that appears in Creative Nonfiction is essentially the first chapter of my work-in-progress, The Saltwater Twin and Other Mythical Creatures. While I continue to work towards the goal of publishing a book, a chunk of my time each week has also been spent looking for online and print publications that might be good places to submit chapters and excerpts of chapters. I was initially somewhat frantic about this task and the hours it took away from The Writing of the Book, but it’s actually been a pretty significant learning opportunity – I’m a better writer for it.  Continue reading Strange but True Stories of Survival

I Am Not Trayvon Martin: Some Thoughts on White Privilege

Posted on by Maia
 
photo by LaDawna Howard
photo by LaDawna Howard
A note about this post:
This is a blog about writing. Here, for the past 19 months I’ve documented the experience of working on my first book, The Saltwater Twin and Other Mythical Creatures. I’ve written about research, procrastination, setbacks, pep talks – basically held forth on whatever I’m thinking as I chip away at this manuscript. But sometimes something happens that sort of knocks everything else out of your brain and becomes all you can think about. A colleague of mine has a gardening blog. In a recent post, he reflected on a plant called Snow on the Mountain, green spaces, contemplation and privilege. And Trayvon Martin. So I’m taking a cue from him and allowing myself to express some thoughts that are currently crowding most everything else out of my brain.
 

Last Sunday morning saw a proliferation of hoodies on my Facebook home page. Hoodies and status updates shouting, “We are all Trayvon Martin!” Or sometimes, “We are all Trayvon’s mother.” These were posts by liberal, thoughtful white people — teachers and homemakers, professors and artists. I get the point. It’s a show of solidarity. And even though it’s just Facebook — even though you’re not, say, marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 — still you’re showing up and saying you’re sickened by the blatant racism and brutality of this incident. You’re sickened by the fact that some people are still protesting that racism has nothing to do with the murder of an unarmed seventeen year old black boy. At least that’s what I think you’re saying. But after I closed my laptop and went on with my day, I felt unsettled about all the well-intentioned white people on Facebook shouting “We are Trayvon.” Because it’s not enough. And it’s not the whole picture.

Continue reading I Am Not Trayvon Martin: Some Thoughts on White Privilege

On Writers, Egos and Truth

Posted on by Maia
Foster underpass by Jason Pettus
Foster underpass by Jason Pettus
The writer’s job is to tell the truth…All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.                   
                                               – Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
 

I was thinking about two things on my bike ride down to Logan Square. Well, three. One was a feeling, really: how blissful it felt to be pedaling by the river, music ablaze in my ears, sunshine ablaze on my shoulder blades. Two was contemplating this odd task I’ve taken on of writing about myself – spending hour upon hour thinking about my life, traveling through my past. I was puzzling over why I feel driven to write about myself in this way. Are writers, specifically memoirists, monologuists, poets who draw on their personal experience, everyone who writes about themselves, are we all raging egomaniacs? The third thing I was thinking about was truth. Because when I think about why I write about myself, my life, it comes down to wanting to tell the truth. And I wondered what makes the truth so important.

I put the egomaniac question to Roger, with whom I’ve been meeting to share work and critique. We sat at a bar; I had a beer and a Cuban sandwich (which blessedly involved both plantains and pickles) while the sweat cooled on my skin.

“Are writers in love with themselves?” I asked. Continue reading On Writers, Egos and Truth

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