We now return to our regularly scheduled programming

I spoke too soon. I always do. The first warm day always does this, the first buds, the first bees. We saw bees on Monday, bees greedily visiting our pocket of crocuses by the rose bushes, and my mind turned to spring, turned sharp and sudden. It couldn’t last, of course, this is March in Switzerland; we can get – have gotten – snow on Easter, after all. I know that, after all these years I know that a warm day can be followed by snow. But that first day, that first post card from spring, always sets my head spinning.

I’ll take it

2009 was the year I decided to take myself seriously as a poet. 2009 was the year I gave myself permission to try. 2009 was the year I made some writing goals, made them specific and public the better to hold myself accountable to myself.

By my reckoning I made a good year of it. I did not write fifty-two poems but I wrote forty-six things that I am able to call poems under my bizarre internal standards and I’ll take that. I wrote a lot of things that went nowhere, and I’ll take that too, and in the process I learned something about saving the two lines that seem worth saving and moving on and I’ll take that most of all. I sent out fifteen packages and in the end had eight poems published in five journals (with two submissions still pending): my novice self will very much take that, thank you. I subscribed to or requested sample copies of a few new journals, and though I’d love for it to be journals-a-palooza around here, the logistics of the back-and-forth communication about how much extra the journals cost when shipped overseas (because I know journals run on tight budgets and want to be sensitive to this point), and the growing on-line availability of back issues, made it easy for this one to slip by the wayside. I lost count of the poets I added to my collection and am too lazy to go to my studio shelves to figure it out. Suffice it to say I am better read now than I was one year ago. I did not attend a writers’ workshop.

Now it is 2010 and my writing goals are much the same:

• Write (at least) fifty-two poems this year
• Send out (at least) twelve packages
• Attend a writers’ workshop (I’m already registered for this one am applying to one very ambitious one and one slightly less ambitious one Stateside). 
• Continue to read, read, read. Read more, read more widely, read more critically, read more openly. Read more stuff I never thought I’d read. Read more stuff I’ve already read. Read more stuff I don’t like. Read.

My writing life had a good year. My writing life passed the test I had set up for myself: give it a year and if at the end of the year something from the year is still glimmering, then give it another year. And things are glimmering. I’ve published some pieces that I’m proud of, pieces I think I’ll still be proud to have my name attached to a year from now and a year from then. I’m reading more poetry, and that’s just good for a person’s heart. I’ve found a thing outside of me, outside of my small boys, that is hard and shiny and good. That is mine. This is me, now, this fresh-baked stumbling poet. Maybe not, as Bethany so perfectly put it, for a living, but for a life, yes. For a life, this stumbling poet is me, and I’ll take that.

Mortar and pestle

Last night Small Boy and Boychen were taking turns smashing crackers in my mortar and pestle – I was not cooking anything that required the mortar and pestle but they wanted to use it, so I put some crackers in for them – when Small Boy asked me which was the mortar and which was the pestle. In twenty years of using a mortar and pestle, it never occurred to me to wonder this, though somehow I knew, when I thought about it for a second, that the bowl is the mortar and the stick is the pestle. But I have never actively considered it: it has always simply been my “mortar and pestle” and I use it to make pesto and crush walnuts and grind up a masala.

But of course the Small Boy would ask: there are two words, and there are two things, and he wants to know which noun belongs to which object. He wants to know these things. And so he makes me slow down and look actively at the objects around me and name them. With precision. Which is what I am supposed to do as a poet; yet it takes a four-and-a-half year old to make me look down at my moss-green mortar and pestle set that came across the ocean with me, really look down at it, and make sure that I have a clear picture in my head of which is the mortar, and which is the pestle.

* * *

In other news, Small Boy has crafted his first couplet:
Fly away
bird of prey
He got meter and rhyme in one fell swoop.

Down on the farm

It didn’t take long before we were in each others’ pockets; it’s the boys, mostly, who promote this by running up Grossmütti’s walk and through her front door at all hours. They want to play with Grossmütti, and they want to play with her dog, and they have made their grandparents’ house an extension of their own.

I see my brother-in-law J more than ever, just about every day in fact, and hear myself inviting him to dinner. The Boychen has fallen utterly and completely in love with his uncle’s horses (the first words out of his mouth in the morning, after his brother’s name, are “Lay-dee. App-uh.” and he will not rest until we have brought apples to the horses) and J is kind and patient and gentle explaining the horses, showing the boys how to hold out an apple flat on your palm with your fingers close together and bending towards the ground. The boys sit on the steps and watch their uncle lead the horses from their stalls to the pasture to graze; they help him give them their hay in the evenings. They become part of his routine and he accepts these little boys running tag behind him.

But it’s not just the boys knitting these houses together. It’s me, too. Half-way through cooking dinner one night I discover that I don’t have any tomato paste and I send R over to his parents’ house to borrow some. When my mother-in-law goes away for a weekend, I invite my father-in-law to dinner. Sometimes the boys and I eat lunch over there. This morning I sat in their living room and watched the Bundesratswahl (election of a new member of the seven-member cabinet that heads the Swiss Parliament) with them. They knock on our door for something, I go in search of J about a truck that has arrived to pick up a construction container. We borrow their car when I break the driver’s side rear-view mirror on ours, I ask them if they need anything when I make a dash to the grocery.

I’m enjoying this, this being part of an extended family, learning how to do it for the first time in my life. I like getting to know my brother-in-law. After being married to R for a few weeks shy of ten years now, I feel like I am finally getting to know his brother. I’ve seen him nearly weekly for years, at Sunday dinner or Sunday brunch, but this is different somehow, this calling out hello as The Boychen and I take our morning tour around the farm, this watching him muck out the stalls, drive the fork-lift back and forth to organize the barn, this seeing him come and go and live his life. 

I love seeing my sons with their grandparents. I love that they can have this, their grandparents across the drive, their uncle a huge part of their lives, and through them a connection to the rest of R’s family – cousins in his mother’s home village – that I would never, on my own, cultivate. Two weeks ago I sat with my mother-in-law in the garden of R’s aunt, with one of R’s cousins and her children, and Small Boy played with his first cousins and chattered happily in Swiss and I was happy to be there, part of this big messy family. To my great surprise, I am having such a good time getting all tangled up with this big messy family.

Blue paint

Outside it is raining, the sky grey and compressed by low-lying clouds. Inside I am painting the walls the color of my childhood, the color of my heart, the color of my father, the color that comes as close as I could find to the “high blue windless skies”* of an early Idaho autumn without flying to Ketchum and cutting a swatch from the sky to bring to the paint shop.

I am painting the walls of the room that will be my private studio in the house that will be our home in two weeks. We are moving to the countryside, to the farming village where R’s parents live, to a second house on the farm property. It has been a long time coming, this move, something R and I have walked around slowly, circling closer each time it comes up for discussion. I have loved this neighborhood, this city, these views; I have loved this urban life but it is time for a change.

I am excited: excited to paint, to decorate, to have my own studio. Excited to have a garden. Excited to have space, inside and out, to breathe. I am anxious: I have been an urban creature for so many years now. Before this Swiss life, I lived here and here. I will miss things, I know, I will miss this city I have come to love. But the move will be good.

And my walls will be the color of an Idaho sky.

* Ernest Hemingway

Well how about that

I found a little notebook today. Actually Boychen found it, pulling it out of a desk drawer along with a roll of clear tape, a black binder clip, a sheet of labels, some correction tape, and a 2008 agenda. I don’t remember when I used this notebook – I didn’t date it – but it was inspired by this post, so it would have been some time after that. So May or June of last year, maybe. I spent about a month listing each day a small handful of things that I really, really wanted. The very first line in the notebook?

“I want to publish my poetry.”

And here I am, one year later, with two poems in an on-line journal, four more coming out later in the year, and six currently under consideration.

Tonight, when the boys are asleep, I’m going to flip through the book and see what else I asked for. See what else I got.

Budding

New writers are often called “emerging writers.” I like the term; it makes me think of a butterfly breaking out of its chrysalis. But that image is too dramatic, the transformation too complete, to apply to what’s happening to my writing, to my writing self. I like to think of myself as a budding poet. I have had four poems accepted this year (two of them were published here, the other four are coming out later in the year). It’s not enough to call myself a professional poet, it’s not enough to turn into a book. It is not the sudden transformation of pupa to butterfly overnight. It is more like a budding, the slow greening of spring when suddenly you wake up and there are blossoms everywhere and you’re not quite sure when it happened. It is like that. Slow. Gradual. Subtle. But irrevocable. Once spring starts, you can’t close the door on it. That’s what this feels like. There is no closing the door on this writing life, this budding writing life.

December wrap-up (updated)

I set some goals for myself this month, wrote them down and put them out there on the internet for anybody to see, goals that were, for me, pretty ambitious. The month is drawing to a close now and it’s time to check in and see how I did.

1. I’ve got a poetry submission still pending – as of December 8 I’m allowed to inquire as to the status. I need to find a secondary market for this package so that if it’s rejected by the people holding it now I can turn it right around and get it out the door the next day. I’ve found the next journal for these poems, but I haven’t followed up on their status. I’ve never done that before and I’m not sure how to word the request.
2. I have two poems that sit nicely together. They need a market and a companion. (Two poems is generally too few for a submission). I think I’ve found the market, but I haven’t found/written a companion piece. Updated to add: Actually, I think I do have a complete package here.
3. I have a submission package ready to go out the door. I need a good cover letter and I need to just send it already. I’m holding back because I think this is a journal I have a good chance with – I mean, we feel like a really good fit – and I’d love to know about that pending submission I mentioned so that, if it’s an acceptance, I can put that in my cover letter. The fact that this journal’s reading period is open until May is not helping my inner procrastinator. I didn’t send this package out; still waiting to hear about some poems and now waiting until a prose piece that’s been accepted is actually published.
4. I’m revising a prose piece to submit to Brevity. This, my friends, is hugely ambitious but it’s a good piece. A really good piece. Discretion is the better part of valor. This was an overly ambitious choice and I decided not to burn any bridges. Perhaps next year.
5. I’m working on a prose piece to send here. Their deadline is 15 December. I sent it. And they’re going to publish it. I’ll let you know when it’s out.
6. I want another poetry submission out the door by the end of the month. New or newly revised I don’t care. That would make a total of three packages out this month, which is low for somebody who actually wants to publish, but it’s three more than zero as my father would say. Didn’t happen.
7. I have got to organize my market research. I’ve got lists and excel spreadsheets and journals and piles of sample pages from on-line archives scattered between desk and filing cabinet and computer. I did a lot of market research and organizing and it will make my goals for 2009 that much easier.
8. I want to order sample copies from five or six journals, now that I have straightened out the disaster that was my US bank merging, or being acquired, and setting my account to “dormant” without, as far as I’ve been able to determine, actually telling me, resulting in my bouncing checks to no fewer than five literary magazines. Can you begin to imagine the horror of bouncing checks written to the very journals with which I hope to place my work? Can you? I straightened out my banking mess, wrote new checks to the journals I’d ordered off of the old checks, and sent for some additional journals as well.

A modestly successful month. I could make excuses, like the holidays, or the fact that my entire family threw up more than once in the week leading up to and including Christmas. Even the cat! But instead I’m just going to say that for somebody who is still new to all of this, for somebody who is still figuring out the writer-mother-wife-self balance, for somebody as thin-skinned and thrown off stride by “thanks but your work is not for us” letters as I am, I did fine.

I’m doing fine.

Elsewhere

I bring Christmas presents to the post office this morning, stopping along the way to recycle some glass jars and the first batch of aluminium that has been piling up forever because my husband and I, for all of our different virtures, share many of the same faults: procrastination, disinterest in many simple household matters, an out-of-sight-out-of-mind tendency and we do have the lovliest storage space for rendering the recyling invisible. After the post I visit the neighborhood organic butcher and buy beef for soup tonight; then to the whole food store where I pick up locally grown carrots still dressed in the dirt that nourished them. At home I feed Boychen lunch and do some laundry – bibs and face cloths, I am forever washing bibs and face cloths from the Boychen – and hang it outside: it is cold but there is sun that might bleach out the pureed carrot stains. I strap the Boychen into his Three-Wheeled-Bike-on-a-Stick and we head to the storage room where I gather an armful of Small Boy hand-me-downs. The Boychen is growing, I need the next size up. I am once again grateful that my boys are both winter babies and so sizes and seasons change in step. I throw the darks into the laundry, just a short cold wash to freshen them up, and vacuum, pushing the Boychen in his trike with one hand and the vacuum cleaner with the other. When he naps I make the soup, beef barley and the smell is filling the house now.

I try to find some virtue in this day, in the making of the soup at least, but I cannot. I am elsewhere today and these small domestic circles frustrate me. I think of a life in which I work a job – staff at a bookstore or waiting tables at The Three Bears in West Yellowstone, Montana – and return home to a little apartment where I pull on an over-sized fisherman’s sweater and read and write with a bowl of soup – yes, beef barley, I’ll carry the beef barley forward – at my elbow. It’s not hard to imagine. I’m a loner by nature and the simple chatter with customers would be, most days, enough to satisfy me.

These are the days that exhaust me, the days when alternate lives seem to step out from behind every tree; these days when they look good to me. Even with the smell of the soup, the soft hair of my sons, my husband stepping through the door there are days when those lives look so good to me. Then I feel like an animal in the zoo, pacing back and forth, and I look for the things in this life that would look so good if it stepped out from behind a lodgepole pine in West Yellowstone, Montana, and whispered to me as I walked home to my fisherman’s sweater and my soup.

But the truth is, I am elsewhere today.

December

I meant to blog last night. I liked the way NaBloPoMo made me sit at the end of the day and think of something to recapture, something to convey. I liked the way it made me take the time, if only for five minutes, to think about what might have been inside my head that day. I meant to blog last night, but it was one of those days. And, since it was December first, I took the opportunity to fall onto the couch at the end of the day and watch the first episode of The Starter Wife, which just started on Swiss television.

I was thinking about my writing goals for the month, the goals I set out on my little sabbatical last week, and I’m starting to think about my goals for next year. I had a lot of goals for this year, poetically speaking, and I didn’t come close to the half of them. I lost a lot of the year to post-partum depression. Sitting here now, realizing it is December, realizing that my baby has turned one, I’m beginning to understand how much of the year I lost. I’m glad to be on the other side of it, and I’m ready to turn the page and be done with it. I think I need to sit for a day or two over the holidays, when R is around and I have the time, and process how much PPD really stole from me last year, but after that I am ready to turn the page.

I’m forgiving myself for all the goals I missed this year. I got by. My sons got by. My baby is thriving and looking at him nobody would ever guess that he started his life under a cloud of sadness. He is one of the happiest children I’ve ever known. His default setting seems to be “Wow! This life stuff is going to be so exciting!” I’m eternally grateful for that. My older boy – well, it was different for my older boy. He was old enough to know something was wrong, to see me cry, to understand all the different emotions that passed over my face. The PPD rolled off my baby like water off a duck’s back, but I think some of it stuck to my older. To my sweet Small Boy. I need some time to think about that.

I’m letting go of last year. I wrote some stuff. Some of it was good. Some of it was bad. Some of it got rejected. (Most of it got rejected.) Some of it got accepted. Under the circumstances, that’s maybe more than I could have expected. I’m looking ahead now. I’ve got a plan, a sense of how to move forward. Carolee – who’s mostly password-protected these days but I’m all about the link-love – has been posting her weekly or bi-weekly writing goals for a while now; it’s been motivating and enormously instructive in how to go about the practical side of submissions and market research and thinking about how to get there from here.

I’m not in a position to make weekly goals – I’m still trying to find the 12.5 hours a week I figure I need in order to achieve the bare minimum of what I hope to achieve. But monthly, monthly I can do. I’ve got quite a list for December. For somebody in my position it’s ambitious but I’m learning that falling short and forgiving afterwards brings me further than setting “realistic” goals that I acheive every time. So I’m aiming high. I’m sure some of you could tick tick tick off the following in a day-and-a-half but the thing about goals and ambition and what’s hard and what’s easy is that it’s all relative, conditioned on the life of the goal-setter. For me, for my life, this is a big list for a month.

1. I’ve got a poetry submission still pending – as of December 8 I’m allowed to inquire as to the status. I need to find a secondary market for this package so that if it’s rejected by the people holding it now I can turn it right around and get it out the door the next day.
2. I have two poems that sit nicely together. They need a market, and a companion. (Two poems is generally too few for a submission.)
3. I have a submission package ready to go out the door. I need a good cover letter and I need to just send it already. I’m holding back because I think this is a journal I have a good chance with – I mean, we feel like a really good fit – and I’d love to know about that pending submission I mentioned so that, if it’s an acceptance, I can put that in my cover letter. The fact that this journal’s reading period is open until May is not helping my inner procrastinator.
4. I’m revising a prose piece to submit to Brevity. This, my friends, is hugely ambitious but it’s a good piece. A really good piece.
5. I’m working on a prose piece to send here. Their deadline is 15 December.
6. I want another poetry submission out the door by the end of the month. New or newly revised I don’t care. That would make a total of three packages out this month, which is low for somebody who actually wants to publish, but it’s three more than zero as my father would say.
7. I have got to organize my market research. I’ve got lists and excel spreadsheets and journals and piles of sample pages from on-line archives scattered between desk and filing cabinet and computer.
8. I want to order sample copies from five or six journals, now that I have straightened out the disaster that was my US bank merging, or being acquired, and setting my account to “dormant” without, as far as I’ve been able to determine, actually telling me, resulting in my bouncing checks to no fewer than five literary magazines. Can you begin to imagine the horror of bouncing checks written to the very journals with which I hope to place my work? Can you?
9. Can you?

Looking at it now it doesn’t seem all that ambitious a list even to me, the one who right now has a feverish child coughing in his bed and the bowl he vomited in sitting in the dishwasher. And yet I know it is. Ambitious. For me. Baby steps.

The Boychen walks now. He loves to walk just for the sheer pleasure of it. He’ll make it ten feet until he plonks down, then he’ll get back up and keep on going with a huge grin on his face. I’ve never seen anybody take so much pleasure simply from being ambulatory. So when I say baby steps, I mean it in the best possible sense. Teetering and tottering and landing on my butt but smiling every bit of the way.