Excerpt from Beauty: An Adoption.

It has been nearly six months since I began this book. I wrote that bit about Philippe and the cave, and the merchant’s impending betrayal, and quit. The semester ended. Christmas happened. The new year came and went, my father’s health improved, and then I went to Chicago and was nearly undone by a dull, painful double vision in each eye. When I tried to focus the images, I felt overwhelming nausea.

That was March 1, 2012. Three cities, four doctors, an Emergency Room scare, a panic attack on the floor of a Walgreen’s, and nineteen days later, I ceased to be a medical marvel and finally received a diagnosis from a neuro-opthalmalogist who assured me that with daily exercises my vision would be 100% restored by July.

At its worst, I could read only a page or two before a small pain began to hum and buzz beneath and behind my eyes, accompanied by nausea and light sensitivity, the need to cover my eyes with a hot heavy compress, the familiar feeling of being unable to breathe, panic rising in my chest and swelling in my throat. The inability to perform the simplest of tasks—answering an email, reading the back cover of a book, surfing the Internet—driving me slowly crazy. After a few hours of rest, I could try it again.

Inevitably a time came when I did not want to try at all.

The counseling center on campus referred me to a psycho-therapist and during our first session, why not, I told her about the panic attacks. I told her I had one Xanax left, and when she gave me the option I told her no, medication would not be part of my treatment. I told her that after years of heavy drinking I decided one day to quit and would not start now with pills. I told her about my fear of death, my phobia of dead animals, decomposing animal parts, severed body parts. I told her I did not remember my childhood, did not remember anything up to the age of 15, did not remember my sister. She told me to pay attention to my body, said, The mind may forget the trauma but the body was there, and it remembers.

For two weeks I paid attention to my body and asked myself, again and again: What is it I don’t want to see?

And then—not without warning, not without the past fifteen years’ worth of warning—I remembered something obvious, something that explained quite easily my years of memory loss.

But I have decided not to make this book about that. It was never supposed to be about that, and it won’t be now just because I have the recall. In place of this reveal, I offer Jeanette Winterson’s instead: 

“There are so many things that we can’t say, because they are too painful.

“[. . .] I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.

“I needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven. He or she has to learn to forgive him or herself” (Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal, 8-9).

So I have taken myself on vacation. It is beautiful here. You can’t go out without sunscreen and dark glasses, even at dusk, which is when I walk the dogs.

My skin is turning brown. My hair is frizzy, wild. My shoulders are as dark as the soles of my feet are bright, luminous. I write by day and by night, and I sleep with the windows and doors open. I hear the same bird make the same strange squawks at the same time every evening. I hear the insects in their darkness, in my darkness. I sit at night on the unlit terrace, my bare feet on the still-warm bricks, and listen to the wind rush through the huge, papery palms above. I smell the sea and look to the stars and feel connected with something large, something human and age-old—what a homesick sailor felt, perhaps, a thousand years ago, lost in his own solitude, the scents of the sea rising up and surrounding him, surrounding me, the stars his guide, and mine for a different journey, the wind on his face, same as the wind on mine these centuries later, rustling the palms.

Yesterday I ventured out of the villas and into the village for the first time and enjoyed a cold glass of wine that sweated as I sweated. I watched the sailboats come and go. I did not stay to see the sun set behind them. It would have been too sweet.

Tonight I am treating myself to a fancy dinner-for-one on the ocean, only slightly aware of the seaside wedding and the other tables around me set for two or four or more. Seafood stew: tomato broth, shrimp, mussels, scallops, squash. The heat of the stew and my wine, and the rough and steady breeze from the unending ocean waves and their relentless, raging roar, feel incredible. I have the strength in me to destroy something, but for the first time in fifteen years I don’t feel the need to. The sun sets, and my fellow diners and I raise our glasses to it and to each other.

I go to the pool almost every day. I read a chapter in the villa, where it is cool, then a chapter outside, on a raft under the beating sun. I read at least a book a day, and write at least a line. I write as many lines as I have inside me, waiting to get out.

My eyes are becoming able again, gaining strength by days.

Winterson: “Every day I went to work, without a plan, without a plot, to see what I had to say. And that is why I am sure that creativity is on the side of health. I was going to get better, and getting better began with the chance of a book” (Why Be Happy, 173).

Duras: “Solitude also means, either death or a book” (Writing, 7).

It is the same for me. I believe this with all my heart: either death or a book. 

So here I am, fighting for at least the chance of this book. I have taken myself on vacation to a place where I feel alive, where I feel a deep longing for creativity reawakening within me, and I am fed by moments—catching a lizard in the villa and setting it free outside, its tiny lungs heaving beneath its iridescent skin, the discovery of a mama bird atop her nest just above my front door, the way her two black eyes watch my every move, and the ever-always moment of that noisy, human-less silence of the living that goes on and on, whether with us or without.

“Because I decided here was where I should be alone, that I would be alone to write books” (Duras, Writing, 4-5).

The Kindergarten Teacher

Now somewhere past its second draft, my "teacher story" exists now in the realm of potentiality. It could be something, it might be something, and it is this sense of possibility that is exciting. There is still so much work to be done, but it's a writing project I'm committed to and excited about. 

I made a crucial change. The main character is now a kindergarten teacher instead of a junior high teacher. This opens up a lot of space for her to grow and evolve into a new person, away from my initial inspiration. I think this may have been the hardest part of getting here to this point: really digging at this existing figure and trying to rethink her in order to create a new space, the right space, for her to occupy -- a space that she is truly at home in, a space that will betray her, a space she must reclaim eventually, and a space that can support and sustain the length of a novel. 

Big thanks to Blythe, who suggested Jerome Stern's Making Shapely Fiction. I think that the conversation we had leading up to the suggestion that I read this book was revelatory, and then, of course, reading the book and taking certain credos to heart also got me here to this place, which is at once a creative place as well as a working place. It feels good to be in it again and good to be doing these things that for so long I've been missing: working, creating.

I feel like, additionally, now that she is a kindergarten teacher, I understand more about her. She is the kind of woman who leads a quilting club at her local women's shelter so that the women can take these coverings with them when they go. And she volunteers as the choir director at the senior citizens' home and gets them out into the city, where words are not enough and song is how they can express their deepest sentiments. She is also the kind of woman who, in the car on the way to school every morning, listens to The Chordettes.

I feel like she has strong maternal instincts, which is not as obvious as it sounds. What I mean is that even though she nurtures all these children in her care all day, all week, year after year, she is growing ever more aware of a desire to have her own children. And that what she wants most is to love. In everything that she does, in everything that she touches, all she leaves in her wake is proof of her love.

I feel like, more than ever, I need to be writing a character like this. 

But of course there needs to be more.

What I've got so far is something like this: When a little girl from her kindergarten class dies one night at home in her sleep, and when the teacher begins to obsess over the idea that any of her children could also die in their sleep during afternoon nap time and in her care, in her classroom, this haven she has made for herself and for them, her entire world goes dark. Not only will she feel that she has failed that one little girl, that she could now fail any or all of them with her inability to keep them safe, but she will also question her ability to mother. She will do inexplicable things and lose herself. . . . 

So this is it: this is the new book. It is an exciting time. 

P.S. Do you see that little braided flower up there? The kindergarten teacher made it. She made it for you. 

"The teacher lived near restaurants but chose to cook for herself."

I save image files on my computer -- photographs of things that make me sad or smile. Occasionally I wonder if I should join Pinterest or Flickr or Tumblr to have a more comprehensive experience, but I like how with FFFFOUND you don't have to be social.

Something I decided I'd do today, to inspire my "teacher story" revision, is make an image folder just for her -- images representing snippets and snapshots of her life, her world. I want to let the photos do the thinking for me; for example, consider the vintage quality of the ladles pictured above, and how the photo's lighting suggests memory, the past, history. 

Maybe these ladles belonged to the teacher's grandmother, and maybe they are special to her, maybe they inspire certain memories of her childhood, and maybe they hang now in her own home, in her own kitchen, where of course she never uses them but sees them every day.

I think with this approach I could feel freer to just start writing, to write anything, whatever I see or feel, and find a way to attach it to the teacher. I could end up with hundreds of little snapshots and maybe when I think I've got the whole of her covered, well maybe then I could start to put it all together, find and make connections, tell the story.

I blame the books.

The countdown begins -- not just for spring, which evilly feels as if it could be just around the corner -- but for the madness that is AWP, inevitably descending upon us once again. This year I'm going to stay sober throughout. I don't know if that's asking for trouble, but seriously I haven't had more than a drink and a half (which made me feel gross) since the last time I was in Chicago (for Printer's Ball), and let me tell you how Chicago sent me home hurting, huddled like a small wounded animal. I swore no more but here I am, forced to return to the scene of the crime. I think it's best to try to be booze-free. I hope anyone who sees this and sees me there will support my cause. 

Moving on, The Lit Pub got a makeover. Check us out! I'm pretty happy about it and feel, for the first time ever, like it's something I can do, want to do, and may even look forward to doing. Truth: I don't know what the hell it was before, some weird globulous result of fix after fix after fix of trying one thing then another then another. Failure failure failure. If AWP doesn't kill me the ghosts of Lit Pub past just might. (Probably shouldn't be blogging this for everyone to see, but I'm OK with it: I believe in try, try again.)

I'm so behind in everything else: reading reading reading writing writing writing: I owe stacks of papers and truly believed I'd be so much farther ahead with them by now. I'm not. I blame the books. If you have ever taken seven unedited manuscript documents, copy edited said manuscript documents with their seven respective authors, collaborated with cover and interior designers in order to prepare seven print files, and somehow managed to produce actual physical book objects fresh from the printer in under 45 days, while simultaneously remodeling a new home page for a website that desperately needed it (see above), while simultaneously attempting to maintain real-world responsibilities like work and bill-paying and eating and bathing and caring for small animals, my heart goes out to you. We deserve delicious ice creams at the very, very least. 

"A throbbing. A certain pulsing."

Of course today's title comes from AVA. I plucked it from the shelves just now and Wittgenstein's Mistress and My Happy Life with it. I want to read lines -- sentences, fragments -- I want to read a 300-page poem with a first-person narrator who makes me bawl. 

Have you ever sat at a blue country table wanting to write your guts out? I don't often but tonight I find myself dreaming. 

I thought I had it together for the CSU Open but I won't be submitting. It isn't a matter of last-minute re-ordering. It's not a one- or two- or six-month fix. It's the desire to not have one dud in the bunch, and I had more than one -- whether for sentimental reasons or the need to cling, I had losers in the pile. Now that I see it, I've cut and am under 48.

Something I'm glad to know: I will wait years for a few good poems to find their way. There is no rush. 

Tonight I plan to finish Julie Otsuka's The Buddha in the Attic, which I began writing about here, and The Great Gatsby, which I'm ashamed to say I started in high school and never finished. How do books find us and why, when they do? Is there something in them we're meant to know?

Strange to think that after three? four? years away, I'm back to fiction again. I have no plans for it. I wonder what it will be. All I know is this: I've always loved the teacher. More and more, she demands rewriting. She wants her story told and I don't know what it is or why. I have only bits in fragmented language that won't be right this time around. For instance: 

The teacher brought the father inside and bathed him in her gigantic tub. He had never seen a tub so big. He held her thighs with his thighs. They ate nothing and drank too much coffee. Black. They made love. No. Fucked. No. Some sort of savage love. Yes. No. He held her breasts in his soapy hands. A pair of castanets makes two sounds he said. The female hembra is held in the right hand. He held her right breast in his right hand. Lifted. Gently. It is smaller and higher pitched than the macho. He lifted her left. Which is held in the left. She laughed and he continued. One translation of macho y hembra is hook and eye. Her smile fell. You she said. Fit into me. Sounds like an order he said. Cast a net does too she said. But safer.

Who can resist an Atwood reference? Of course it will be cut. What I want to preserve is that moment her smile falls. What's packed there? Who is this woman with a stranger in her tub? Who is this woman who laughs one moment and becomes, in the next and all at once, sad, demanding, accusatory, scared?

And this:

The teacher took to eating one meal a day. Usually lunch. An appetizer. Something fried. Or cheesy. Or both. Like jalapeno poppers. If they were spicy she cried openly without shame. She would have a cocktail. Orange vodka with soda water. She would go home and have a bottle of wine and dessert that she brought with her from the restaurant. Sometimes she went to a bar in time for last call and waited while a stranger finished a draft beer. Sometimes she asked the stranger to walk her home. If the stranger did she invited the stranger in. The stranger always accepted the invitation. It was why the stranger walked her home in the first place. She knew this. It was why she asked the stranger to walk her home in the first place. One night the stranger was a woman named Iris. In the morning Iris stroked her hair. Hyacinth the teacher said was Apollo’s lover. He died from a discus to the head. Nobody ever said it was his due for being a homosexual. Instead he was immortalized in the form of a flower. Though it was probably an iris. Not a hyacinth. 

Why does she need spice and public space to cry? Why alcohol? Why now? Why the constant late-night need for bodies?

I tell you I have loved the teacher since Philadephia, where I discovered her and first began to tell her story. I was a different woman there. So much has changed. So much time has passed. And now -- why now? -- she reaches for me across time and distance, asking me to do this thing, to find the rest of her story and tell it. 

The teacher went to Amsterdam and tried hallucinating on absinthe but it didn’t work. She went to the Red Light District and touched her fingers to the glass of one window where a young woman in a red teddy stared at her with sad painted eyes. She went to the Van Gogh Museum and thought of a poem she had read and taught: & what if she would’ve just taken the ear. And what if the great Mughal emperor really did cut off the hands of the men who built the Taj Mahal. By then she was in Agra where she let a tour guide tell her about Mumtaz Mahal and how she died giving birth to her fourteenth child. The teacher thought for the first time about how she didn’t have even one. She took the tour guide as her lover and stayed for seven years.  

What are those seven years like? What happens to her? Wouldn't I like to know! So here it is; this is why those poems up there can wait: it's time to try "a larger canvas."