MFA Adventures- Day 2

            It took me over an hour to make a twenty-minute drive today.  Traffic had nothing to do with it.  Turns out, Venice blocks every important road in town for a huge group of runners and bikers.  As I’ve mentioned, my GPS has seen better days.  As I cruised down my normal one-way street, looking left at every cross street, I saw nothing but yellow tap and orange roadblocks.  I reached the next large crossroad to meet only more yellow tap and orange roadblocks.  Luckily, a cop guarded that intersection.

            I got out of my car, “What can I do to get out of here?”   

            The Hispanic man answered.  I, of course, had no idea what he said.

            “I’m sorry, what street is open?”

            “Dewey,” he said, I thought.  “Go back.”

            “Go the wrong way down the one way,” I asked.

            “Yes,” he pointed, “other way.”

            “There’s no such street as ‘Dewey’,” Walt said, from the other end of the phone line.

            “He said Dewey,” I insisted.

            “There’s a Dudley Street,” he said.

            I agreed that maybe he was right.  I reached Dudley and when it reached my main street that I needed, it was blocked as well.  My hope dwindled and my lip quivered.

            I turned down the next one way toward my main street, it looked clear.  An Asian woman shouted at me.  I couldn’t hold the tears back any longer.  I burst out in loud, gasping sobs.

            “Are you crying?” Walt asked.

            “Yes!” I heaved.  “I’m lost.  And a lady just yelled at me.  And I just want to go back to my apartment and wait until this stupid running thing is over.”

            The Asian woman seemed to be approaching my car.

            “The lady who yelled at me it walking toward my car.  I need to turn around.”

            “Gross,” she yelled, “Gross is open.”

            “Gross is open,” I told Walt.  “Who names a street ‘Gross’?”

            “Rose,” Walt said.  “Rose is the next street.” 

            I pulled up to the next roadblock; the cop guarding the intersection pretended not to see me.

            “How do I get out of here?”  I asked.  “I need to get to the 90.”

            “I’ll let you through here,” he said, lifting the yellow tape.

            That helped me cross my main street that I needed to cross, but I still didn’t know where I was, I’d been driving for twenty minutes and nothing looked familiar.

            Finally, I flipped a U-Turn to try to make my way back to my apartment, I’d just miss the first lecture of the day.  A cop pulled behind me in an amazing feat of car gymnastics.  On flipped the lights.  I tossed my phone into my cup holder, hoping the cop hadn’t seen my phone.

            The cop rolled down her window.  I’m used to male cops.  They don’t make me feel like I’m a wimp for wanting to be a writer, not a female firefighter or police officer.

            “The only reason I’m not giving you a ticket is because I don’t have time,” she said.

            “I’m really lost!” I exploded, more of the sobs I couldn’t control.

            “Then you should pull over and get directions,” she said.  “Where are you trying to go?”

            “The 90,” I said, holding my breath.

            “Just get on Lincoln,” she said.

            “I can find Lincoln!” I’d reached the point of no return.  I was now publicly sobbing to a local cop.  I’d been searching for Lincoln for thirty minutes.

            “You can’t be talking on your phone,” she said.  “You’ll hit a pedestrian.”

            I nodded frantically.  If I were going to hit a pedestrian, I’d do it whether I had one hand, two hands, or five hands on the wheel.

            She sighed and looked ahead to the street, “Follow me.”

            I followed her, and in a few turns, she had me on the street that I needed to enter the freeway.  She pulled up beside me and yelled through her open window, “The 90 is straight ahead.”  I didn’t understand exactly how shouting with her across car windows was safer than me talking on my cell phone, but I was grateful, nonetheless.

            I pulled into the parking garage, still breathing and ten minutes before the first lecture was set to begin.  Allegrophobia, for the win, again.

           

            After a nightmarish start to the day, things went great.

            The first lecture of the day was about the American road novel and how writers can explore the idea of self-discovery through a road narrative.  She offered tons of self-discovery novel recommendations with the road as a central theme and mapped a diagram of the process that the character evolved through.

            The next lecture was well-attended, shocking even the professor.  “Teaching Academic Writing,” he opened, “why are you all here?”

            Everyone joked that we all needed back-up plans for writing.  We’d need to get jobs eventually.  The detailed the “conversation” that’d been happening in the education circles since the 1950s and how thinking had evolved since then.

            The first of Lunchtime Student Readings was today at lunch.  I’m pretty bummed that I didn’t get on the list to read this term, but I’ll be here four more times, so the opportunity should come up.

            This afternoon ushered in panel conversations by an instructor from each of the genres about using non-linear constructions to tell a traditional narrative.  Loved it.

            Tobias Wolff guest lectured for us today.  He’s an amazing writer who doesn’t contain his talent to one genre or one format, writing short stories, novels, memoir, and a bit of poetry, I think.  He revealed a lot of his secrets and gave us all kinds of tips for various genres through explaining how he worked through any problems that he encountered and reassured us by admitting that nothing he writes happens easily.

            The night wrapped up with a graduating student group of readings and a reading by Tobias Wolff, “Her Dog” and “Bullet in the Brain.”

            To wrap up an almost-perfect day, I found my way home and used the same combination of roads as I did last night, a first for the trip.  Great day, minus the surprise marathon roadblocks this morning, of course.

            

MFA Adventures- Day 1

            Day One was fabulous!  Because of my fear of being late, (allegrophobia is the fad non-clinically-approved word for it) I was an hour and a half early for the first lecture today.  Yep.  I typed out hour-and-a-half to make sure the full weight of it was obvious.  That’s twice the length of the first lecture that I’d prepared to attend.  This being unthinkably early got me a seat in the second row though.  Late-comers sat on the floor, leaned against walls, and ended up having to write on white-boards for the presenter because they were in his way.  Ha!  Allegrophobia for personal gain, for the win.

            As part of the requirements for graduation, students in their final term give a fifty-minute lecture about a topic that usually goes hand-in-hand with their final manuscript/thesis.  This morning’s topic was how to write convincing and vulnerable humiliating scenes in creative non-fiction.  I was most excited about this lecture over anything in the residency guide, for obvious reasons.  I can’t kill my own spiders, spend more time talking to my dogs than most humans, and I can’t navigate myself out of a paper bag.  Humiliating, yes.  Humorous, usually.

            The next senior lecture was terrifying.  The only person brave enough to participate was another student in his final term (Heliotropes, they’re called.  Each class is named after a tree.)  Here’s the title of the second lecture I attended:  Fabular Histories: Metahistorical Romance's Challenge to Historiology and Expansion of Historical Fiction.  He joked that he was competing for the lecture with the longest title.  If that were a real thing, he’d have won.  He explained (for most of the time) the technicalities of what it takes to create historical fiction and the difference between historical fiction and a “period piece”.  Turns out, historical fiction is only created if the main character’s entire being is effected by the events of the time.  A period piece occurs when the person is living a life and just happens to be living in the dark ages or something.  A discussion broke out in the last fifteen minutes about how much fiction can be put into historical fiction and the conversation went from issues with ghosts to religious visions to dragons, an amazing progression, I must admit.

            I met my “Buddy”, a fellow creative non-fictioner for lunch and flowed from orientation to orientation to workshop orientation in the afternoon.  YC really prepared me for this experience more than I could have ever imagined.  Although I haven’t developed as many workshop pet peeves as the seasoned veterans of the AULA workshops, but I kept up with the vocabulary and the direction that I hoped I could take my work.  Needless to say, I felt like a rockstar.  We’ll see how I feel when we actually start workshopping. 

            They fed us all three meals between classes today, which is pretty cool and pretty rare.  Lasagna dinner for all students and student readings concluded the night.  The student readings were incredible.  It’s amazing how many different styles of writing I’ve come to love.  There were some really great readers tonight, and batting clean-up, Jervey Tervalon, a brilliant fiction writer, and semi-new faculty member, who draws inspiration from the cities of New Orleans and Los Angeles.  I love this place.

            What I still don’t love- driving.  As soon as I get confident and start imagining myself already in my apartment, typing away, I’m crossing a bridge and being blinded by the lights of downtown Culver City or Marina del Rey.  My Garmin and I are not friends right now.

MFA Adventures- Orientation Day

            I already mentioned that I got here early yesterday, but I failed to mention exactly HOW early I got here.  Check-in was at 3:00 (and that was a very strict check-in time, I discovered).  By "check-in is at 3:00", the woman meant that she wasn’t even going to tell me where my rented parking space was located until 3:00.  So, I parked at the dog park in what I assumed was the general area.  I spent two hours envying the people taking their dogs to the park, and trying to avoid eye contact with the homeless man pushing a wheelchair full of his belongings.

            Besides being early for my apartment rental’s check-in, I ended up being early for my school’s residency, by a long shot.  New Student Orientation (which I only have to attend during this visit) isn’t until 6:00 PM. 

            Caught up on my readings for the residency, bored with cable, and worn out by facebook, I thought I’d explore what the landlady called “one of the safest neighborhoods in the area”.  The online photo advertising the apartment that I’m renting shows a picture of the alleyway from the apartment’s front door to the beach.  It’s an accurate picture, beige brick walls framing a boardwalk-side umbrella and the ocean in the background.  I ventured down the alleyway to what I hoped would be a string of brightly-colored, privately-owned shops and cafes.  I rounded the corner onto the boardwalk and tucked my purse a bit tighter beneath my arm. 

            I thought I knew what to expect.  I watch Nip/Tuck and they showed Venice Beach in the latest seasons in LA, and my professor (an Antioch alumnus) joked to not trip over any homeless people on my trip.  I stopped in the first tourist-y shop I could find to purchase batteries for my camera.  The Asian man behind the counter seemed to be laughing at me as I turned around and ventured into the open boardwalk area.

            Luckily, it was early, so the place wasn’t yet swarming.  Vendors were setting up tables and neon-colored signs advertising everything from caricatures to tables and tables of toe rings.  I passed the vendors and pretended not to see (or hear) the man playing a full-sized music classroom-style piano on the sidewalk.  My friend from the dog park was sitting on the sidewalk next to him, nodding to the music, his hand still resting on the armrest of his wheelchair full of belongings.

            I was one of about five people on the boardwalk wearing clothes that had been washed recently and not sporting dreadlocks.  I knew I’d just kick myself if I was in LA for 11 days and didn’t even get to the beach, so I pulled my purse in even tighter and walked a bit more briskly, keeping my head down. 

            As I neared the sand, I noticed a bright orange plastic fence stretching along the beach, midway between the sidewalk and the ocean. 

            “Oh God,” I thought.  “Someone’s been murdered and they blocked off the scene.”

            The signs on the fence mentioned something about “Authorized Personnel” and the waves being dangerous today; I breathed a sigh of relief.  Thankfully, I wasn’t looking at a murder scene.

            The walls surrounding a concrete seating area swam with graffiti.  The eight palm trees near the walls were all plastered with graffiti.  What kind of person defaces a palm tree?  Palm trees are the coolest.

              I looked around cautiously and pulled out my camera, now equipped with batteries, and snapped a picture of a batch of unpainted palm trees and two pictures of the ocean through the plastic orange fence.

            I said hello to the person who nearly ran me over with a skateboard, being that I was on the wrong side of the directionally divided sidewalk, and high-tailed it back to my apartment.

            Luckily, I am staying up the only alley that looks presentable from the beach.  In my leisurely mindset, I hadn’t even looked at street signs or markers.  In a panic, I found the one umbrella that looked like my online picture and booked it uphill.

            I clomped up the narrow wooden stairs to the adorable apartment I’m renting.  I muted my TV to read and I can hear the TV of my temporary neighbors.  They must not be braving the boardwalk either.

            I guess that equating “one of the safest neighborhoods” in Venice with “safe” in general is about as naïve as believing that “reduced fat” and “low fat” are the same thing.

           

            I’m keeping my pepper spray in hand when I go to my car around 3:00 to drive the 6.21 miles to school and be on time for my 6:00 orientation.  I mapquested from my apartment to school avoid highways, and it’s only a four minute difference from the highway route.

Alright, so I didn’t leave three hours early, but I did leave two hours to get there.  It was unnecessary.  I couldn’t have picked a better driving route.  I’m on Venice streets for a couple of blocks, smoothly merge onto a “highway” for a quarter of a mile, merge onto one of the shortest freeways in the state, exit when the freeway ends, and park on one of the levels reserved for students.  Easy Peasy.  I only got honked at once, and it was because I made a few poor decisions on the surface streets. 25 minutes.  Yeah, buddy.

            I’m really excited about how this program works.  It consists of five residencies (times that I’m in LA at the school, actively engaging in writerly things with others) and four project periods (times that I’m at home, doing writerly things and corresponding with a mentor in my genre and hiding away with my computer).  I’m considering doing a dual concentration (pretty much a double major) but it will take an extra semester.  By then, I might get some financial aid (fingers crossed), so maybe.

            Also, I might have been the only person in the room whose excitement actually heightened through the mention of the critical papers and annotated bibliographies that will be required, but I’m okay with it.

            I’ll have more information about the new and exciting things I’m learning for tomorrow’s post, but for tonight, one more diatribe against driving.

            I’ve only used a few streets more than once since I’ve been here, which is making things interesting.  My apartment’s address is actually on a “walk street” and my parking space in on a one-way street whose entrance intersects with a street that I can never seem to find.  My mapquest directions don’t take my parking space into account and tend to lead me on a crazy wild goose chase.  My GPS may be dead forever, so I’m relying on a combination of written directions, hazy mental maps, and a text message from mapquest.

            Tonight, I got ½ block away from the street I needed to be on before I gave up and decided that I was in the wrong place, turned around, and called Walt to be my GPS voice over the phone. 

            Now, I know to just drive until I hit the ocean and I’ll be close to where I need to be.  I was finally nearing the impossible-to-find street while traveling on a different one-way street when the unthinkable happened.  A person whose parking skills make me look like a master parked on the right-hand side of the street, her (we’ll assume it was a female driver) gold car’s big ass sticking out in the road.  That alone would’ve made this awesomely narrow street a challenge, but a yellow box truck parked on the left side of the street, at an angle.  The truck was in a tow away zone, so I put it in park and decided to wait for the driver to return to his truck.  I reconsidered that idea and climbed out of my car.  I would not fit through that space.  No way.

            On the phone, Walt keeps saying, “Karly, I know where you are.  Just go straight.”

            “Walt, I can’t go straight.”

            “No, really.  The street you’re on says you can go straight.”

            “It’s blocked,” I repeated.  “Blocked by illegally-parked cars.”

            The guy in the car behind me climbed out of his car.  His silhouette provided generously by the three cars backed up behind him made me lock my door out of instinct.  He’s going to stab me for not fitting through this gap, I thought.

            “The guy’s getting out of his car,” I told Walt.

            “Just go straight,” he said again.

            The guy from the car behind me walked to the nose of my car, “I’m going to help you,” he said.

            “This guy’s going to help me,” I told Walt.  I sat down my phone.

            He guided me through the gap (which was exactly not the size I thought it was) and told me to have a good night.

            Go figure, people are mostly good.

MFA Adventures- Driving Day

            I hate driving.  Like, I really, really hate it.  After living in Phoenix for two years, I still refused to drive any routes that involved highways.  I lived on the surface streets.  While taking classes at Scottsdale Community College, I drove on surface roads for forty-five minutes rather than the eighteen-minute trip on the interstates.  My driving anxiety is intense.  Once, I parked in the aisle of a busy lot and demanded that Walt switch places with me, find a space, and park. I once closed my eyes when I felt like my car wouldn’t fit between the semi next to me and the rock wall on the other side.  I’m the person who stays in the left lane going the speed limit because her turn is coming up in the next ten miles, I brake while changing lanes, and think that tailgating saves me time.  You get it.

            So, why oh why did I decide that driving to Los Angeles for my writing residency would be the best idea?  It was cost-effective, yes (3/4 of a tank of gas to get here).  Good for my health, not so much.

            I took off from Prescott this morning at 7 AM, four red bulls in my front seat I originally planned to leave at 8 AM to check in with my vacation rental in LA at 4:00, an hour after their standard check-in time of 3:00.  Walt suggested that I leave an hour earlier, in case I hit traffic, hence 7 AM.  Because Arizona doesn’t believe in Daylight Savings Time, for some reason, I forget that time zones still exist (and they do).  So, I gained an hour on my drive and didn’t account for it. 

            My GPS was cranking along with me the entire way, alerting me to the speed limits as they changed, mocking me with the changing estimated arrival time when I went below the speed limit, and warning me for upcoming turns.  Like a Beverly Hillbilly, I cheered and clapped at the first sight of skyscrapers.  Traffic wasn’t too bad.  I began wondering if LA’s traffic was overrated, like Seattle’s rain (I’ve been there.  It only rained once the entire trip.).

            The GPS showed me the series of complicated exits, keep lefts, and lane endings.  Then it shut off.  I pushed the power button and it sputtered to life.  It told me to merge onto CA-60.  Then it shut down for good.  Turns out, my Blackberry charger fits the GPS but it doesn’t provide the same amount of power.  Dead GPS.  I cussed at it and alternated tapping the screen and power button.  I wanted to cry.  I inhaled a few sharp breaths, trying not to cry.

            Luckily, mom had sent me the directions in a text message when I left this morning.  Still, I was left with only one form of direction, a form of direction that didn’t know how to speak to me or re-calculate if I took the wrong exit.  I couldn’t have been more relieved to take my last exit and pull into my rented parking space in front of my rented apartment, two hours early.

            Well, I’m settled in now, my Space Bags are unpacked, and my wrinkled clothes are hanging in the closet.  It’s strange to have cable, colorful walls, and a blanket without a single piece of dog hair on it.

            Just as I was planning my schedule for tomorrow and thinking about how much less time I’d need to allow to get to school because of the traffic overrated-ness and all, an old Phoenix friend posted this photo on facebook with the caption, “This is the not-so-fun part of LA.”

Yipes.  I think I'll be allowing three hours for my 6.21 mile drive tomorrow.

      

Thoughts on Dialects

It seems that everyone in Arizona came here to escape somewhere else. And, why not? Arizona rocks.

When I lived in Tempe and people asked where I was from, I answered, “Kansas,” the following question was almost always, “Oh, where in Kansas?”.

No one actually knows “where” things are in Kansas. As the “Two by Four State,” it measures only 211 miles by 417 miles. If you know one town, you know all towns. And, in most cases, if you know one town, it’s only because you’ve lived there.

But, I’ve always participated in the conversation, with the bizarre hope that this time the person cam from where I used to live. “A small town in South-Central Kansas,” I’d say, baiting them. Only if they responded with “Oh, near________ (Liberal, Great Bend, hell, even ‘the Oklahoma border’)” the conversation could continue.

When I traveled Phoenix, northern AZ, and Las Vegas for Tae Kwon Do tournaments, the question was more easily answered by the lettering stitched to my back. I represented the Tempe branch of Lee’s Black Belt Academy.

One recent Vegas trip, I was asked by a bartender where I was from, “Pre-skit,” I said.

“You must’ve been born and raised there, huh? You say it like a local. It’s spelled Pre-scott.”

“I grew up in Kansas,” I said shortly, turning from the bar with my rum and coke. I mulled over the question of when I started pronouncing Prescott like a pro. I just did, at some point in the last two and a half years.

It’s easier to pick up on dialectical differences and adopt them than explain where I’m from every time I use the word “supper,” pronounce “orange” without an “r,” or make “roots” sound like “ruts”.

Majoring in interdisciplinary studies, I studied a little bit of everything as an undergrad. I blame/thank my brief love affair with linguistics for the alterations I’ve made to my Kansan speech habits.

I had no trouble completing a regional dialect project in my linguistics classes. I’d simply call home and make note of things that I recognized I’d changed in my own speech. Dad says, “roded,” as in “I roded the tractor just down the road.” Roo puts an “r” in “wash.” And, lastly, mom will forever use the word “dinner” to mean a noon-time meal and “supper” to mean an evening meal. My professor found my report charming.  I have to say that I feel the same about my home state.

I’ve been out of Kansas for about four and a half years now. And, it’s time.  It’s just time to go home for a little while.

So, around the start of the year, I’ll be re-learning how to use “dinner” and “supper” properly, so as not to confuse meal times. I’ll probably go back to leaving the “r” out of “orange” and stick it right back in the word “wash”.

I guess you could say that I’m going back to my ruts. And, I couldn’t be happier.

The Language Barrier

                I can’t understand anyone with even the slightest accent.  Much to Walt’s dismay, this has caused me to turn off such epic movies as Snatch, Terminator, and any James Bond movie featuring Daniel Craig.  Thick accents don’t sound like English to me. 

                The best nail salon in town is tucked away in a corner of Wal-Mart.  The husband and wife who own it are Vietnamese.  Walt and I went to a ballet for Valentine’s Day this year, and I wanted a manicure to go with my dressy outfit.  The woman who works the nail salon is nearly impossible for me to understand, and I gladly waited for the man to finish with his customer.

                Eventually he ushered me into the small salon.  Gesturing toward the wall of nail polish, he implied that I could pick a color for my fingernail tips.  I chose a dark red.

                He clucked his tongue and took the bottle from me, replacing it in the nail polish rack.

                Alright, I thought, no red.  I walked back toward the wall to choose another color.  The small man took me by the wrist.  He pointed to a piece of cardboard on the counter by his station.  The cardboard held various colors of long fake fingernails.  He pointed to a similar shade of red.

                “Okay,” I said.  “But, I want just the tips.  And, I need them to be short.”

                He nodded vigorously, “Yes, yes.  Tips.  Short, square-round, you say.”

                “Okay,” I agreed again, wondering why we weren’t yet seated at the nail station.

                “These hold color better.  See her nails?” he pointed to the girl whose nails his wife was working on.  I looked at her nails, noticed her knuckle tattoos, and looked away.

                “Yes, I want them to look like hers.”

                “No.  She come back all the time.  Her nails not hold color.  You pick this,” he pointed again to the cardboard.

                Holy crow, I thought.  Should I just leave now?  This could be excruciating.  Maybe he’ll just get frustrated with me and not talk at all; he’s got to get tired of talking to customers all day every day.  I’ll give him a break.

                I decided against bolting from the scene and sat down across from him at his nail station.  He pulled my hands toward him, beneath the desk light.

                “Whoa!” he said, feigning that my engagement ring blinded him and shielding his eyes.  “Pretty,” he said.

                I laughed politely, “Thanks.”  He clipped, filed, and cleaned my nails in preparation for the fake tips’ attachment.

                “So, what you do?” he asked. 

                “I’m a student,” I said. 

                “What you study?”

                “English,” I told him, “I’m going to be a writer.”

                “Oh!” he said.  “You write my story!” 

                Oh gosh, I thought.  I don’t think this is going to be a nod-and-smile-my-way-through-it kind of story.  I focused all of my attention on the man.  “What’s your story?” I asked.

                “I come from Vietnam when I was nineteen,” he began.

                His mother sent him away so he could create a better life in America.  He crammed into a tiny motor boat with dozens of other people.  There was no room for anything but people on the boat, he had only a picture of his mother with him.  Their boat left from the coast of Vietnam under the cloak of darkness.  Soldiers patrolled constantly and were commanded to shoot anyone trying to leave the country, no excuses, no explanations.

                The men in the boat used the clothes they were wearing as sails to get the small boat far enough from shore to start the motor to lessen the risk of being caught by the soldiers on shore.

                “Longest hour of my life,” he said.  “Only one in ten people who try to escape actually survive.  The ocean is so cold, and so many people want us dead.”

                He bent down to pick up the case of acrylic nails by his feet.  Behind him I noticed pictures that I hadn’t thought much about before.  In collage-style frames sat pictures of his son’s and daughter’s birthdays complete with lit candles and party hats.  Another frame held a collage of the family smiling from beneath Mickey Mouse hats and large sunglasses in front of Cinderella’s castle.  He sat up and I looked away from the photos, pretending to study my nails.

                I’m such a girl in that everything makes me cry these days, so I held my breath for a second.  He continued his story, a story whose details I’d kill to remember.

                He concluded, “I never see my mother again.  She wanted better life for me, so she send me away.  She stay there with rest of family.  We talk on phone and I send her pictures of family,” he gestured to the framed photos behind him.  “But, I never see her again.”

                A woman draped in a tent’s worth of zebra print with a mouthful of Bubbilicious clicked her nails on the counter next to us, “Are you open on Sundays?” she smacked.

                “We open every day,” he said.  “Every single day,” he repeated, quieter the second time.

                The self-checkout lanes spoke to the customers, and the babies in the carts of overwhelmed mothers screamed.  At that moment, it dawned on me that I hadn’t even noticed the man’s accent.  I’d hung on to his every word through his hour-long life story, and I hadn’t faked my rapt attention once.                

Inspiration

Blogging has been challenging for me this semester. Although I can talk your ear off in person, I feel like I’m running out of written words. Between business writing at work, blogging, journaling for one writing class, writing poems weekly for another class, creating text responses and fiction exercises for yet another class, and working on my MFA manuscript (20 pages at a time), recently, I’ve felt like I’m running out of words. This is not a good feeling for someone who hopes to do this for a living.

Luckily, I had the pleasure of attending the YC Faculty Reading on Thursday evening. One of the coolest things about this series of readings is that in the end of the event, the students/community members/attendees get to ask questions of the writers. The faculty reading always brings the largest audience because, quite frankly, they rock. Each writer on staff is currently teaching, publishing, and still touring for readings on a regular basis. They’re a great group of role models.

It’s a funny thing, gathering a group of writers. If listened to individually, we’d undoubtedly be treated as patients of multiple personality disorders. Every writer that I’ve heard read or had a conversation with has referred to the “voices” that he or she hears. The “voices” are what make them write. The writing for the “voices” keeps them sane and balanced in life.

While I sat in the audience thinking about the readings I’d just heard and whether “voices” ever speak to me, Walt unexpectedly raised his hand to ask a question. Not only does he hate it when I drag him to literary events, he doesn’t particularly like reading, so I stared in shock at his raised hand. One of my instructors called on him and smiled at me.

Walt specifically addressed my professor who’d published one book in June and one in August of this year.

“How many things are you usually working on at once?” he asked. The panel of writers nodded, great question, especially for a book hater.

“I’m usually working on at least four different things at once,” said Laraine. “Obviously,” she said, “not all of those things I’m working on make it to completion or are even worth completing. But, I have to write them anyway.”

Instant inspiration.

I failed miserably with the juggling kit that I got for Christmas in third grade, and I can rarely read more than one book at a time. This passion of mine is going to be a challenge. But what passion isn’t worth that challenge?

Exercises in Character Development

                I just can’t get enough of Yavapai College.  Working here for two and a half years, I’ve been taking classes for a year and a half after graduation.  I can’t quit learning. 

                Three credit hours in two weekends of writing workshops sounds like a great deal for someone starving for credits.  For me, it ended up being an eye-opener.  I’ve worked with dozens of writers at varying stages of developing the craft over the past couple of years.  We’ll call the beginning writer of this learning experience “J”. 

                The Saturday of the first day of workshop class, I woke up early so I could feed my Red Bull addiction on the way to school.  I’d need a few of them to last 9-4 Saturday and Sunday.  I looped my canvas bag over my shoulder.  I’d decided against taking my laptop, as the class was in a computer classroom.  I stocked up on smooth-writing, fine-tipped ink pens (my most recent obsession), and lab-style notebooks.  Geeked-out to the max, I skipped up the stairs to my first Saturday class ever.

                I was ecstatic to discover that many of the former writing classmates were also in the weekend workshop class.  We’ve formed a sense of community that makes workshops run smoothly and productively.  We know one another’s weaknesses and nab on to them while the writer is still reading a piece.  Everything said in class is constructive and useful.

                I ended up sitting next to an older man with a cane named J.  I met him while working in Registration over the summer, but I’d never been in a class with him.

                We shared our impromptu character development exercises around the circle of desks.  Kaitlyn shared her piece about a high school protagonist that sounded eerily similar to herself.  Dino read his piece about a Nordic man from a rural area moving to the big city.  Kristen shared her novel opener for her Goddard College MFA program about a twenty-something library science student with a passion for Victorian literature. I read my first experiment with a challenging point of view.  Anyone who’s read my work will point out details of my characters that aren’t only similar to me, they are me.  Therefore, I wrote from Koda, my boxer’s point of view.

                Finally, it was J’s turn to read.  He wrote from the point of view of a homeless man living under a bridge in our town.  The man painted murals, drank beer at 8 AM, and made friends with anyone who took a moment to speak to him.  The character seemed interesting, and far from anything or anyone I’d ever encountered.  J’s language, however, felt recycled.  He’d listened to a roomful of experienced writers and forced metaphors and similes where they weren’t needed.  He wanted to sound like a writer.

                Dino encouraged him to free his authentic voice.  “Just tell the story in your words,” he prompted.  “Don’t try to dress it up or polish it for this draft.”

                J felt honored to have so much attention paid to his work.  He thanked us profusely and promised to only use his own voice for the rest of the workshop; he didn’t want to sound like anyone but himself.

                The next day, J presented the class with half a notebook full of his own voice.  He wanted to tell his story.

                “Old Man Winter” he called the man, with his white head of hair and icy blue eyes.  Old Man Winter lived beneath a bridge in a beautiful part of town, just across the street from a Starbucks, where, J commented, “People spend five bucks for a cup of plain coffee.”

                A community developed beneath that bridge, and friends alternated taking turns venturing downtown to the liquor store to gather “forties” of Steel Reserve, the cheapest of the cheap beer, for the gathering masses.  Between the Steel Reserve and the cans of spray paint, the community spent any donations accumulated from passers-by.  They loved their life beneath the bridge.

                With the cans of spray paint, the community, with Old Man Winter as its leader, created a mural that stretched the length of the bridge’s internal structure.  The intoxicated artists threw their empty paint cans at any tourist daring to call their artwork “graffiti”.  The hostility attracted Prescott’s police force.  Officers patrolled the area regularly, occasionally arresting the most intoxicated members of the bunch and citing them for the destruction of public property.

                Eventually Old Man Winter was arrested and taken away for good.  He faced a notoriously no-nonsense judge.  Old Man Winter convinced the judge to take a look at his community’s artwork before determining that it needed painted over.

                The judge, despite his hard-ass reputation, determined that the mural was “art”.  He let it be.  However, no one in the community knew what became of Old Man Winter.

                J concluded his story in telling that the wall has since been painted over.  Old Man Winter is still missing.  J really tried to drive home his point that all of this is happening in Prescott, nicknamed “Everybody’s Hometown”.  The bridge is a very popular walking destination in a public park downtown, and J made sure to tell us his story.  A few of us had no idea that anything like that happened here.  We were ranked number four on CNN’s “25 Best Places to Retire” list, and all of this happened under a prominent walking path in a city park.

                Monday, on my way to work, I stopped at Circle K, a gas station often referred to as “Gangster K” for its reputable patrons, to grab my daily Red Bull.  Something on the checkout counter next to me caught the sunlight.  A silver label on a forty ounce bottle stared back at me. 

                Oh, please, let that be a bottle of Steel Reserve, I thought.  I rocked on my heels to nonchalantly get a clearer view.  Steel Reserve, indeed!

                I wallowed in the irony alone.  I glanced to the patron purchasing the bottle at 8:30 AM.  Blue eyes peered at me behind shaggy white bangs.

                Old Man Winter, I thought, exasperated.  I finally felt like he’d adverted his glare, and I peeked at his elastic-at-the-ankle sweatpants.  There were no signs of spray paint, maybe he really was an artist.

                So, maybe it was him, maybe it wasn’t, but I pulled into work that day feeling like I’d just encountered a celebrity of sorts.

                I’ll savor that irony for years to come.

               

Lessons in Breathing

My first night in a writing class I’m taking, I noticed my teacher drinking from a Mason jar. (At work, we joked that drinking from Mason jars leads to dreadlocks, walking barefoot all the time, and of course, a lifetime membership to Greenpeace.)

When she responded to her neurotic students’ pleas for information about assignments not due until November with, “We’ll see how we feel when we get there,” I relaxed. I realized that we had a free spirit in our presence, someone that I secretly longed to be, but could never actually reach because I’m not fully-evolved or not quite self-actualized to show up to yoga at my gym or read the meditation book that I bought on Amazon after reading Eat, Pray, Love.

The professor walked in tonight, Mason jar in hand, and proclaimed that tonight’s class would take place in the sculpture garden. Half of the class looked puzzled because they had no idea that said sculpture garden existed on our middle-of-town campus. I fit in with the other half of the class that wondered, after being chased to class by bees, why we needed to have class in the sculpture garden when we were already sitting in a perfectly good classroom.

Proudly, our teacher stated, “We’re going to learn how to breathe!”

The sixty-something Bronx-raised Irish Catholic was the only person gutsy enough to laugh on our otherwise silent walk across campus.

Ahead of us sat our yogi teacher who’d been asked to teach us serenity in our two-hour-and-forty-five-minute-long class. Naturally, he was barefoot and sitting cross-legged on an environmentally-friendly canvas mat. Beside him sat his Mason jar. (Folks, they’re stereotypes because they’re true.) He motioned that we join him on the stone risers.

We spaced ourselves evenly, setting down everything we brought with us. Instantly, I felt materialistic. Instead of being Julia Roberts minimizing her life in an ashram in India, I was carrying my noisy cowgirl purse, a bag of “goodies” from my alma mater, and my backpack holding my wasteful plastic water bottles. My environmental irresponsibility was sure to earn me some bad karma points.

The yogi suggested that we spread out more. I moved down to a lower level. Without thinking, I’d moved right beside the yogi.

Way to go, Karly. Right up front. We better damn well have to close our eyes for this.

“Close your eyes,” said the yogi.

Yes! I thought. Eyes closed.

The yogi taught us belly breathing, “Release your belly,” he said. Even the impossibly slender volleyball player beside me chuckled.

Yeah, that’s not happening.

He explained that babies breathe to their bellies naturally, but as we age, our natural breathing gravitates upward, to our chest and throat. He coached breathing and I pondered, remembering to Friday night.

I’d babysat a friend’s infant. Did the baby’s belly rise and fall as she breathed?

The baby's little tummy protruded from her elastic pink pants, but I didn’t remember the baby doing any belly breathing.

Back to the yogi’s soothing voice. We were up to ribcage and throat breathing. We were to think of our body as a bowl and fill it from the bottom, our belly, to the top, our throat.

Filling the bowl, I thought. A cicada dive-bombed me.

Focus, I thought. Visualization. Blue air, filling…my…body— yellow, I want the air to be yellow; it’s more enlightened than blue. Sky— blue. Sunshine— yellow. I chose yellow air, filling a bowl from bottom to top.

The yogi was ready to move on to a kind of breathing that began with a word that sounded like “naughty” but probably wasn’t spelled the same.

We were told to make a gun with our pointer and middle fingers.

I wonder if this is in my Meditation for Dummies book. Oh my Dog, did I put that on my living room bookshelf? No, I think it’s with my writing books.

We put the barrels of our finger guns to our foreheads. This was to practice closing a nostril at a time with our non-barrel fingers. The yogi demonstrated what could be best described as a graceful farmers’ blow.

Ew.

Others around me were equally shocked at what we were supposed to do.

Then it was our turn. Breathe in one nostril, out the other. A woman sneezed.

I decided to fake it. My fingertips barely touched my forehead so as to avoid the breathing class equivalent of chemistry goggle imprints. I breathed through my nose, but I sneaked the breath out through my mouth.

The yogi concluded our breathing crash course and everyone clapped. As much as I joke, I’ll be Googling nature sounds and trying to memorize my silly Meditation for Dummies when I get home. Maybe some of it will stick.

For a week or two, at least.

Miss Roberts's Neighborhood

“She doesn’t like strangers,” I say, embarrassed, partially because Koda does like strangers. She likes almost everyone.

The stranger eyed my sliding glass door, the only thing between himself and the seemingly ferocious boxer dog and yellow lab.

I knocked on the glass, “Koda!”

It’s always Koda that causes the ruckus. I could hear Sonnie’s contentment as she lay down and crunched on her dog food. She’d tired of the situation and moved along with lunch. It takes everything short of a natural disaster to upset Sonnie.

Koda pounced against the glass again. Better to instill fear in people who shouldn’t be in my house for long, I supposed. Still, it was embarrassing to shout conversation over her angry barking. I looked like a parent who couldn’t control her children.

Dogs are supposed to soften their defenses once they realize that their owner is no longer in danger, right? Never mind that animals, unlike humans, don’t have the ability to reason; logic means nothing to them. If Koda were able to reason, in theory, when she met the seven-foot-tall Denzel Washington that fixed my internet today, she would’ve assessed the situation and gotten comfortable, seeing that there was indeed, no danger at hand. The man was reaching for the bad splitter that was keeping me from my beloved internet. He was at no point, reaching to do harm to anything around him. Through the entire transaction, the testing of the Internet, the unhooking of the Internet, the removing of the splitter, the re-hooking of the internet, and my thanking him at the door, Koda’s barking made up the soundtrack.

Admittedly, when I pull into my neighborhood, I fight the urge to sing the Weeds theme song, “…little boxes all the same…”. Sometimes I give in to the urge and belt it out as I round corners at the whopping twenty-five mile per hour speed limit. The houses are cookie-cutter identical, yet the neighbors within them are not.

I’ve only met two of my neighbors. One, an older woman wholives on the corner, walks two Maltese, identical miniature balls of white cotton, and pushes an empty blue stroller for half of her daily walk. On her return journey, the dogs ride side-by-side in the stroller. The woman can’t walk more than two blocks roundtrip, but apparently the fluffy little dogs can’t handle the trip all on their own. Another neighbor with whom I’ve shared a moment lives right next door. One night, I was talking on my phone and walking toward the mailbox. In a moment, the neighbor’s garage door opened and the truck within honked in response to its remote. I glanced at the truck but was distracted by the sixty-something-year old man standing in the garage. His tighty-whiteys glowed in the light of the garage door opener. The man waved enthusiastically.

In response to both neighbors, I simply pretended that everything was normal and raised my hand in reply. Outside of these interactions, I’m not friendly with my neighbors. You’d think, that because our houses are identical but reversed, my neighbors would care a bit about my well-being. As we answered everything in the early ‘90s, NOT.

Walt’s friend Noah once left his motorcycle in our garage and promised to retrieve it at a later date. No one was home, so Noah got the motorcycle on his own.

He removed the screen from the kitchen window and climbed into the house. He opened the garage and moved his motorcycle onto the driveway. He went inside and closed and locked the kitchen window. Lastly, he exited through the garage, jumping over the door sensor and leaving the house just as he’d found it. Not a single neighbor brought this to our attention. We were only aware of the motorcycle’s disappearance because Noah told Walt the next day.

Fast-forward six months and two more housemates.

Angelo moved in on Monday. His stuff has been here all summer, but he and his dog arrived to a locked house after a fourteen-hour road trip. I was in class and Angelo’s key was rubber-banded to his bedroom doorknob because I thought I’d beat him home. I sent him a message that I’d be home around 9:30. He could meet me on campus and take my key, or he could just wait. He informed me less than ten minutes later that he’d broken in. Neighbors could have cared less. No neighborhood policemen, not even a “citizen on patrol” car was sent our way.

I’d spent all summer in Walt’s absence assuring myself that any noise in the night was simply our over-worked air conditioner filter, clanking against its filthy frame. I’d religiously locked every door and window nightly so I could lie in bed and not worry about anything once I locked my bedroom door. Angelo’s break-in destroyed my sense of security.

I guess that all I can hope is that any intruders I may encounter resemble Denzel Washington, otherwise, my dogs won’t even bark.

Lessons at the Fairgrounds

I don’t have thick skin; I never have. I don’t apply for jobs that require pushy sales or require dealing with copious amounts of rejection. I just don’t deal well. And, I have far too much time to dream up wonderfully multi-purpose comebacks. I've been taking everything personally lately, so I give you, for the first time ever in print, Karly’s Restore-Your- Faith-in-Humanity Story.

At a very young age, Kelsy and I discovered that our parents would do anything for us. We especially capitalized on the fact that they didn’t mind carrying their sleeping children into the house from any one of the family Suburbans that we inhabited over the course of our childhood. Fake sleeping is a valuable skill; it must be learned. We learned it well. Small for her age, Kelsy milked the technique and used it years beyond my fake-sleeping bit’s shelf life.

I was ten-ish and Kelsy was six-ish that particularly fateful day. Kelsy was being piggybacked around the Pratt County Fairgrounds because she forgot her shoes at home. (Even the pre-tornado fairground was not a safe place for bare feet.) As we piggybacked our way to the makeshift county extension office, spirits among us were low.

I was learning a lesson about loss and responsibility. Mom was speaking gently but purposefully, empathizing for my loss but warning that I may never see my 4-H earnings again. 4-H earnings, besides my allowance paid weekly in beanie babies, were my only income. I made money based on everything from my highest prizes, blue ribbons on sequin horses and rocks painted like ballet shoes, to participation ribbons for my cooking. Even the snake-shaped shortcake with strawberry eyes, whose sugar-laced intestines were accidentally laced with salt, earned me a few dollars that year.

I’d organized and counted my cash obsessively. I ordered the bills so that the smaller ones were on top, working their way up to twenties. Then I’d sandwiched the twenties between the lower bills, the ones and fives guarding their superiors from outsiders. To a ten-year old, one hundred fifty-six dollars was a fortune. (At twenty-three, one hundred fifty-six dollars is still a fortune.) While visiting the livestock and ogling the year’s ride selection, my fortune had gone missing. Purses were far too girly for my tomboy overalls, and the envelope containing my perfectly ordered cash was an ill fit for my pocket.

“It could be gone, Karlybelle. So you can’t be too upset okay?”

“Okay,” I’d mumbled.

“We have to take care of our things,” mom said.

Mom nudged me forward. I lost the money, so I needed to ask if anyone had found it.

“Has anyone turned in some money in an envelope?” I asked.

The woman smiled at us, “Can you describe the envelope, sweetie?”

I launched into my description, barely breathing, “The flap was blue and it had white paw prints on it and it had money in it.”

“How much money?” she asked.

“One hundred and fifty-six dollars.” I was mid-way through describing my hand-writing and my dollar sign with one line- not two- when I was interrupted.

She pulled my blue-flapped envelope from a drawer in her desk.

I climbed into the very back seat of the Suburban and Kelsy’s “forgotten” shoes shifted beneath my feet. I ordered and reordered my one hundred fifty-six dollars. Someone had found- and returned- every last dollar of a ten-year-old girl’s sequined-horse income.