It's been far too long since I've said anything here, which means that I want to say everything at once and end up saying nothing (or that's been the case for months).
I wrote my last post here at the beginning of what I thought would be a happy time. Nine days later, my father died the day before I was slated to begin teaching at a new college in a new place where I was living for the first time in my life without my sons. In fact, for the first time in my entire life I was living alone and in this amazing ranch that I would be unceremoniously thrown out of during finals week--four months after my last post here. My luck with landlords--I tell ya. Oy. So.
Now that I am beginning to feel a bit normal(ish) again, I've found myself steeped in ideas as of late, but--having been under a 4/4 course load at a teaching-centered college--I'm finding myself starting and sputtering this past week. It's going to take a moment to grease the wheels, I suppose, and I should be more gentle and patient with myself.
After my PhD dissertation defense, which happened 10 days after my father died, my Jewish professor told me that I shouldn't have even been there. I should have been a few days out of sitting shiva with a ripped left breast pocket or sleeve or some other way to say, here--my heart's been shredded, and I'm trying to wait until such a time that I can say it will never be possible to suture it back together again, but I can keep walking just the same.
Alone: not with all but all on one's own. And when aren't we, I think? Ten years ago, I stood just outside of the garage and listened to my then love tell me he was afraid of dying. The wind was wild that night, pulling my hair all Medusa around me, and there were purple fits of lightning in every direction. My mother had been dead one, maybe two weeks. I can't remember if I told him I thought he was stupid or if just thought it, but I felt a little sorry for him and also knew even then that our love would never be the same because how can a woman lie down each night next to another human--with whom she should share all things--if he can't understand that it's not the dying that's frightening. It's the watching others who you love go before you.
The morning my father died, I went out on the deck of that amazing ranch to see if the sun was pushing up over the mountains. I was on the phone with a friend. Maybe she was saying something. Again, I can't recall. As I came around the corner, there was a wall of rain falling straighter than I've ever seen rain fall, and it was falling in only part of the yard--the sun behind it lighting everything into tinsel, like standing inside a rain lamp. That rain stood and fell so silver and still for about one minute, never moving forward or back, and then--it was just gone. I wept not in sadness but in awe. It was so amazing and so brief and I saw only a smidgen of it.
I don't categorize myself. I believe what my gut tells me to be true, and it coincides with no organized religion. I still don't know what to make of that rain. I suppose there's nothing to be made of that rain. Yet in that moment, I felt it was there for me alone--as if the very rain fell to give me a sign. How fucking arrogant, really. I joked that maybe once we're dead we can make it rain. It'd be just like my dad to show off on his first day freed of that unbreathable body he'd been locked in, burning for years.
Of course that rain was a lovely coincidence and perhaps the most apt metaphor for life--something we're lucky to experience in all of its brevity and beauty. To think that rain fell for me or anyone simply speaks to the human need not to be alone. So there, I've said it, damn it--I'm human. I joke, but I'm only now remembering that I'm a walker. Since I was born there has been a storm whirring around me--mattresses, old sweaters, a favorite spoon, two fists--or within me, and I have continued to walk, gashed knees and bruised palms and all.
It's hard to feel alone in a room of people, like yesterday when I sat in my doctoral robes at convocation where I was surrounded by thousands of people but not one of them who truly knows me or loves me, and it's even harder to feel alone inside yourself, such as I have many days in the stretch between these posts. And I'm sad to know that I am very far from alone in that.
SO--before we commence with the wrist splitting--some good news and some people to thank.
First of all--Sean Thomas Dougherty--for accepting my essay "Why to Run Racks," which more completely considers my love of pool and that amazing rain, to be included in the the forthcoming anthology, Double Kiss: Contemporary Writers on the Art of Billiards (Mammoth Books, 2016). And really just for always having my back.
To Marie Gauthier and Tupelo Press for selecting my poem "Never & One Thousand Years"--in which I was finally able to zoom in on one poignant moment of my mother's death and also able to incorporate a line I've been circling for ten years--for inclusion in Thirty Days: The Best of Tupelo Press' 30/30, which will be available for purchase any day now.
To Ron Riekki for including my poems "My Lake" and "Errata" in Here: Women Writing on Michigan's Upper Peninsula (MSU Press, 2015), which is now available for purchase!
To my professors and cohort at the University of Utah--I learned so much from you, and you made the hard road of the PhD (as it was for me and my kids) totally worth it.
I'm also super stoked and endlessly thankful to the folks at the Kenyon Review for featuring some of my poems AND for selecting them as their Poem of the Week this week.
Finally: here is the cover of my first, full-length collection--Errata--which won the 2014 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award and is forthcoming from Southern Illinois University Press in September 2015. I couldn't be more excited. A million thanks to all of the folks at COR and SIUP, and thank you to Eric Wilson for his amazing artwork and to Kelly Brooks for her amazing design eye.
More book related news (and likely more hokey posts) to come in the near future. Soon I'll post news of a website here, and I will begin to list reading events, etc., for any interested parties (and anyone who is patient and/or loves me enough to have gotten this far in this post).
xoxoxo,
LF
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