One Week to Go to Race Day

But first I will veer wildly from course, cutting buoys with my thick hull. I have just finished and returned to its owner a bad bit of my dog and me memoir which number one makes me mad, this being the woman's seventh book, and how the he** does she get her work published when what my work receives on my meager enveloped outings into the world of publishing is mostly a typed reply with no ink from a human being? Number two was going to be that I too had a full and charmed relationship with my dog, but I ran out of steam as I began tumbling into my actual first topic of the day which is that I got an envelope in the mail yesterday from Artist Trust. It was a thin envelope, which was not encouraging, but I still hoped I had received one of the bi-annual fellowships. As I opened the envelope, I could see that it contained a photocopied list of recipients rather than an individually addressed letter. There were three hundred something applicants for 22 fellowships, in crafts and I don't know domino balancing, as well as literary, which was my, and I do mean that I thought it would be my, category. I had told friends that I felt winning the fellowship would validate me as a poet in a way that I need.

I'm in a disappointing place in my teaching career what with the leaving no child untested climate of WASL and the direction my main artist in the schools job source has taken. With writing, I think what is important is what happens in the gaps. That's where the astonishment lives. I once had a novice writer in the schools shadow me. When I checked in with him during a lesson I saw that his notes tracked my actions minute by minute. 11:23: Laura holds up funnel and says, (whatever the h#@ I said.) He wrote down everything but had no sense whatever what was going on in that room. The Seattle School District has gone to a writer's workshop model that comes from Columbia University's Teachers College. Swell and good. But not for those who work as I do, which is not to dependably travel from point a to point b in a straight and predictable line. My teaching credo holds that I resist such certainty in service of surprise, which I believe is essential to creativity. I hold to joy in the work. The writing and the teaching. I want to be where the juice is, pulp is, rich and squishy, smelly and alive. Opening that Artist Trust envelope, I felt flattened and dead.

So peeve number two after the big rejection and the competently written but not so scintillating dog memoir is the novel I picked up at the lady store based on a blog its author wrote after a big break-up. It too contains okay writing. It also adds page count through expanses of text from the blog, which I guess was famous and that's fine. I just don't understand why she's published and the dog lady is published and I'm rejected for the big fellowship that was going to buoy my confidence and instead I have to buoy my own confidence with the usual why care what others think write for and from yourself blah blah blah.

To punish myself I will now write that my output has nothing like the page count of dog memoir lady or blog babe. Okay, okay, they write prose. I'm writing prose this minute! Could I scissor it into a book-length manuscript about me and what is important to me and how everybody wants to know what is going on with me including my wardrobe, at this moment orange cashmore fleece top (Title Nine, no idea of price as Julia worked there before she went to coach women's rowing at U of Miami, leaving the top here because it is 90 humid degrees there in October), brown cords (Fury Consignment $16), brand new vintage glasses (Ottica $150 plus lenses covered by my insurance), Smartwool socks (Mirage Shoes, $8), and Keen green sandals (Mirage Shoes $82 with $5 off coupon because I buy lots of shoes there)? Does anybody remember why there is a question mark at the end?

There may be something age appropriate in all this behavior. I've been reading The Wisdom of Menopause which has its appealing moments even though its author reads a bit smug for my taste. "When I can't sleep, I go downstairs and brew myself a pot of chamomile tea, then pop back into bed," which, along with skin of gherkin and three butt hairs from a Tibetan rat is about what I do. The fifties, when I was born and the age I am. That's all. I just wanted to write that phrase. But back to the book which features I may have mentioned in a previous blog a ginormous photo of its author as I don't know free mountable photo for over the fireplace maybe. I've dropped reproductive hormones and with them the scrim of happy attachment to going along, getting along, a state of being I had a tad tentative hold on in the first place if you ask anyone in my family. The angry "now I see life as it really is" clarity of PMS has hit the fan all month long for me at fifty five.

There are themed blogs and then there is mine where I get to rant into the ether and push PUBLISH POST which since I read the world is publishing to me. By the way, I have foregone any attempt to punctuate in a standard manner. I blame this on the fact that I am in the middle of reading through and grading eighth graders' short stories. Notice we have now entered a fifth or sixth topic which is not the Head of the Charles Regatta.

A paragraph about the Head of the Charles. I am scared though I prefer to frame it that I am excited about and giddily anticipating the challenge of coxing my eight through this three mile head race course. Last night I hosted a movie night for the boat. Four starboards and two ports attended. We ate pizza and popcorn, drank wine and beer, ate brownies from a heart shaped mother brownie and sweet spicy pumpkin muffins, talked about the race, watched the HOC safety video and then Bend It Like Beckham to inspire us to great girl athletic action. As one of the starboards (who had to leave early) noted, we could very well do very well in the race. We have no idea who the other competitors are. Nineteen of the thirty-one were invited, the other teams, like us, were chosen not for prowess but by lottery. Last year our 40 4+ boat, who came by lottery, was surprised to come in third. We could do that!