This is my day to mimic the great poet (and happily, my teacher) Dean Young who has a style all his own in getting his poems from point A to point Q in a non-linear fashion that is so entertaining and yet, that dreaded word, educational:
“The kids are out of school this week for spring break, only one of them has deigned to read a book, the other two are alternatively moping about, watching Tom and Jerry cartoons, and then chasing each other down over an imagined slight. I’ve had to define and “use in a sentence, please, mom” the words fastidious, nonplussed and sanguine in the past twenty minutes, answer the door for the plumber, find a safety pin, make coffee, and empty the dishwasher. The entire left side of my body has hurt since I got attacked by one of my kids’ rolling backpacks just before the break started and did a gymnastics flip-roll-fall combination move that people my age really shouldn’t be doing without stretching first. One of my BWW buddies has checked-in (thank you) and forced me to remember that after I make the next six telephone calls to set up the next six non-writing-related errands I must do today before I’m allowed to go back to bed, I owe him and six other people in the BWW Workshop pages, many pages, from my novel in progress, Shadow Gardens. If only I could use the pandemonium that is in my real life and transfer it in to my novel….Wait! I can, because I’m actually working on a second book, When the Dolls Leave the Dollhouse…And although we are having a rather lively ongoing discussion about word count and what constitutes the difference between a novella and a novel in terms of length, we have all safely (well, safe for me) agreed it is a book; and it’s a tongue in cheek book about a harried soccer mom losing her mind slowly as she largely raises her kids by herself since her husband is out of town all of the time. Unfortunately for me, it’s not my week to turn in pages from my dollhouse book, so I’m left with the problem of having to draft and, well, maybe, or, revise pages for workshop. And I was all set to that this morning and then I ran across a column from my writing hero, Jhumpa Lahiri; I do understand that this piece came out two weeks ago but as a nonplussed soccer mom I’m way behind in my reading, I barely know what year I’m in, what month, don’t know exactly what day of the week it is but I do understand my vote counted and that Obama is now president. Ms. Lahiri’s column was in The New York Times and is part of “Draft,” a series about the art and craft of writing and it discusses among other things re-reading one’s own work and fastidiously reworking that which is not perfect, and eventually being sanguine about letting the work “go” into the world. If only I had the time to re-read my work (especially the piece I’m currently writing this minute) and if only my work really had some place to “go” out in the big world…And if only I had time to burn to re-read Ms. Lahiri’s piece again because I didn’t really understand all of the mixed-metaphors. If Ms. Lahiri’s piece is considered a “state of the union” piece, then Mark Follman’s blog in Mother Jones should be considered the official response from the other side. As someone who has really enjoyed sentence diagramming since Mrs. Heath’s English class in fifth grade, I was pleasantly surprised to read that I wasn’t alone in bewilderment. And Mr. Follman is correct, someone at The New York Times should have given her a better line edit, because even if you’ve won the Pulitzer Prize, it never hurts to have yet another stranger look at your work with a stranger’s eye. I will happily include myself in needing a line edit, but not a lesson in punctuation techniques (thanks, Mrs. Heath) and now I will conclude by saying my non-linear day has reached point Q and I must stop this blog to go make lunch for the kids who are bored on break.
Devi Laskar is a founding member of the Book Writing World. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University, is a rabid Tar Heel basketball fan and will be reading some of her work on April 9 at the Sacramento Poetry Center in CA.
Devi, love this and relate to it – yes, Spring “Break.”