sleep depravation

I don’t sleep well. Never have. Mind turns faster when it should be slowing down. Thoughts multiply when consciousness should be subtracted. Pillow a brick rather than a pad.

It’s been this way for decades. Sleep comes when I can’t physically get enough rest to make it worth my while. Wake up with an upset stomach and two briquettes of Coleman charcoal for eyes. Repeat.

I don’t have much of an explanation. Started when I was eleven for no reason that I can recall (though it may have been my grandfather’s death that started it). There are times when it happens less, others more, neither predictable. No trigger without a plural. No rhyme to find in a reason. Stopped trying to figure it out awhile ago. Figure it’s just the thorn in my psychic flesh.

Or something along those lines.

Heard a song recently that comes pretty close to capturing what it’s like. Maybe Jon Foreman gets it. Maybe I’m not losing sleep but sleeping on loss.

Remember that kid with the quivering lip
Whose heart was on his sleeve like a first aid kit
Where are you now? Where are you now?

Remember that kid, didn't know when to quit
I still lose my breath when I think about it
Oh, where'd you go? (Oh where'd you go?)

Oh oh/I feel like I'm dreaming
Oh oh/Staring up at the ceiling
Oh oh/It's four in the morning
I can't sleep and it feels like a warning

Oh oh/You wouldn't believe me
If I could say it just the way that I'm feeling
Oh oh/The words that I wanted to say
I feel them slipping away

I know this isn't what you wanted
Past words in the present are haunting us now
And on and on and on and on
My heartbeat could tell you it's urgent
I try to shout but the words don't come out
I feel I'm slipping away

“Slipping Away” Jon and Tim Foreman

I can’t tell yet what I’m supposed to do with this perspective. But I’m likely to have time to think about this when I should be sleeping.

existential crisis, no waiting

As long as it is, the Ocean Beach pier comes to an end. Sometimes, the end
of one part of life and the beginning of another feels like climbing up on the
railing and deciding whether or not jumping in is the best option we have.

One of my students has been wrapped up in a very necessary and necessarily unproductive dialogue about productivity and skill recently.

As a senior, he's experiencing that crushing convergence of the future becoming the present as college comes to an end before it has actually ended (read: every day brings a new question about what he's going to be while there's still a lot of heavy lifting left to do in the classes he has left).

That moment. It hits us all at some point, whether or not we went to school. In an instant as short as a minute or as long as several years, the potential of our future moves, almost instantaneously it seems, into a much closer orbit with our present reality, upending those tides within us that we've grown accustomed to. We've learned their rhythm, their cadence, their constancy.

But the end of college, like other ends we have or will experience, presses against our shores insistently. All seems immediate, seems pressing, seems imposing. And this, I believe, is where my student is treading water at the moment. Between now and then, awash in the lack of either.

And what I want to tell him is to stay there as long as he can. Because, if what he's discovered recently is any evidence, there is something in the discomfort that is preparing him for what comes next.

An example. Recently, he tweeted me the following: "The biggest thing I learned from our department was producing good writing instincts/habits can't be quantified, only shown."

This sounds like a small discovery until you realize the arduous road young writers travel to find their voice and purpose. Unlike math, where the proper formula likely exists for the work you're doing, in writing there is merely the desire, not an established path, to become what you will.

A comparison - a degree in accounting, when discovered, never leads to the question, "So, what are you going to do with that?" A degree in writing is, in itself, an open question that, in some ways, will never be answered. At least, never in convincing fashion.

So, for writers, the first existential crisis comes early. What can I say? We're precocious that way. And the discovery that my student just made - that the internal measures of a writer's work come before the external - is one of the most critical steps forward in the face of so much uncertainty.

It's also, in some ways, a form of bravery to admit so much depends upon our red wheelbarrow. Here's how I responded. I'll paraphrase a bit to compensate for Twitter's character limitations.

Learning to write works best when conceived as a long, solo hike in the wilderness. We are alone until we meet others on the trail. When we do, we should walk a ways with them, talk with them a ways. But we also need to part with those we meet regularly, intentionally taking in long stretches of the trail alone in communion with our own experience.

Blogging After Blogging

So, I shut it down in terms of blog posts in December as the end of the semester crush dumped on me like a full set of waves. The intention, as it always is, was to get through the break, paddle in and rest a few weeks, and then start up again with the new year.

Someday, I’m going to learn that resolution writing is for suckers.

Anyway, here it is, almost February, and I’m finally getting back to blogging in a consistent way. And it’s not that I have nothing to write about. There are a bunch of great conclusions I’m drawing from my hybrid class in the fall. Additionally, the Writer’s Symposium is a month away and there are exciting talks from Anne Lamott, Jeannette Walls, and Samuel Freedman coming up to look ahead to. And, I have some announcements to make about publications in fiction, nonfiction, and a book I’m under contract on as an editor to discuss.

Beyond this, I’m looking at a few guest posts I’m looking forward to putting up, along with the work of some talented young writers I’m working with right now. I might even have some new original material of my own should I get a couple minutes to work on it.

In short, it’s time to get at this again, and I hope you’re ready and willing to catch up with me.  

sunrises are for suckers

This is what sunset looks like from my office. I'd offer a picture of sunrise
over the San Diego skyline, but, well, no...

Due to a ridiculous amount of work in my life, I've been in the office before sunrise twice this week and gone home hours after sunset. This is not healthy, but it reminded me of a piece I wrote a few years back on the topic of sunrise/sunset personality types. So, as a hump day throwback, please enjoy "Sunrise, Sunset."

According to George Washington Carver, “nothing is more beautiful than the loveliness of the woods before sunrise.” As much as I love peanut butter, I have to disagree. Not completely. In an earlier blog, I concluded that sunrise is most beautiful in the mountains, but sunset is more beautiful over the ocean. 

Being back in San Diego, however, has reminded me of one of life’s true-isms: in a wrestling match, sunset on the Pacific beats sunrise anywhere over the head with a steel chair every time.

Don’t agree? Here are three reasons you should.

1. You don’t have to get early up to see it.

This isn’t a morning person/night person binary. It’s just common sense. I mean, seriously, early risers get everything – the worm, a quiet house, the best waves, an unfounded reputation for being go-getters. They also get a sense of ownership over the beauty of the moment, that self-serving pride that says “I deserve to see this because I set my alarm clock and didn’t ignore it when it went off.”

Slackers need a prize, and that prize is the most beautiful part of the day. We know we don’t deserve it. We know we’re unable to lay claim to having a hand in the experience. Maybe we just have a better understanding of grace because we have a much harder time convincing ourselves we should be given any based on our actions.

2. The death of color is always more vibrant than its birth.

Apologies to Robert Frost (and Pony Boy), but nature’s first green isn’t gold. (Irony alert: Microsoft Word’s grammar check identifies this version of his famous line as grammatically problematic. Guess humans are still better than machines at a few things, even if one of those things is not winning Jeopardy). No, nature’s last gold is gold. Just before they die, greens give way to the deepest, richest colors. And so it goes with the sunset. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve watched the light of the sun coming up and thought “those colors are amazing.” I can count the same number of times I’ve uttered those words as the Big Orange dropped into the ocean in the last ten days.

3. The Green Flash.

If you don’t know what that is, it’s probably because you either haven’t spent much time in Southern California or you’ve followed the age old of wisdom of not looking directly into the sun. But out here, we do it anytime the day is clear and the water is calm on the off chance we’ll get to see fingers of green light splay out across the water just as the sun dips below the horizon. It’s a rare event, but when it happens, you know you’ve been given a gift (unless you were also up to see the sunrise that same morning, in which case you assume you’ve earned a bonus for working overtime).

I’m sure some of you disagree. Please do, in the comments section below. While you do, I’ll be outside watching the sunset.

This post originally appeared on Relief’s blog.

A little bit like life...

The beginning of my first attempt to climb Mt. Whitney.
At the time, it felt like a failure when I didn't make the summit.
A few years later, I could see it for what it was. My beginning.

The best part of a new piece is the potential it holds. A story we're just beginning to write could, just maybe, turn out like we hope it will. We know it won't, but we suspend our disbelief at least until the first surge of words that drove us to the page begins to ebb and the old questions press in like the tide against our shore.

I have a file full of these starts. They all have merit. Potential. A particular bounce to them.

And they're all mostly just starts. No ends. No middles. Just first steps down paths I hope to return to someday when the next wave of inspiration/time/manic energy strikes me. In many cases, I never will.

But I keep them around, like headstones on the graves of people I could have known but didn't get the chance to follow though on building any kind of relationship. They remind me that I need to keep writing. That I need to push past the gleam of the new beginning to the dirt and mundane that comes with the uplift and connection of our closest connections. That I need to put in the work to really see whether they will break my heart or help it expand beyond the limits I impose on it myself.

In essence, there really is no such thing as a false start. There are only the starts that end so I have the time and focus to make the ones I really need to pursue.

Speaking of children speaking...

My boys. Even the power and beauty of the ocean cannot stop their talking.

I'm working on a theory derived via a major difference between my sons, one who is six years old and the other two.

Hey, if it was good enough for Piaget, it's good enough for me.

Here goes. Both of my boys are enamored with words...their own to be exact. From the time they wake up to the time they can no longer move their lips, this place is non-stop talking.

Non. Stop.

I am told (all the time) that this was how I was as a child. In fact, my siblings argue that I talked more than my boys combined. But they're older than me and prone to faulty memory, so I don't believe them.

Anyway, here's my theory: words are currency. More than money. More than precious metal. "More than even Legos!" as my older chatter box says.

What's interesting to me is how these two purveyors of mouth noise spend their words in completely opposite ways. (This way of looking at how one opens his or her word wallet has invaded my daily interactions. If you're talking to me, it's a safe bet I'm working like an accountant with your vocal ledger.)

Anyway, my older boy is an introvert with the sensitive clown gene. Precocious with his vocabulary, he likes to know and explain things to EVERYONE. This kid would give a go at explaining multiverse theory to Stephen Hawking, convinced the guy really just needs to see it from his perspective for it all to make sense.

But put him in the store and have the woman at the register ask him which superhero is on his shirt? Nothing.

Then there's the younger kid that keeps hanging around my house. At two, he's the guy at the party with everyone gathered around him, talking about the time he and Channing Tatum came up with the parody of Jean Claude Van Damme's Volvo commercial. He's the extrovert's extrovert with the performer's need to speak and act in such a way that you can't help but react to him.

He doesn't care whether you understand him or not, just that you love him and laugh at the appropriate times.

When I think about it, here's what my two pocket orators are teaching me: the value of words for both of them is in the forms of control they wield over what they are saying. In this is control; in this is the power to shape and direct meaning, and both of my boys understand this in very natural, unschooled ways.

In one, words manifest as a shield built of explanations and the ability to engage only those people he feels comfortable with. For the other, the same verbal skill set is a microphone and a stage that provide an audience for the things going on in his head. In essence, the way my boys speak is a better character inventory than any Myers-Briggs inventory I've ever seen.

In fact, that might be true for all of us when we think we're "just" talking.

Mary Karr on Wrestling with the Real

https://youtu.be/t9qYvJF7qx0

To begin this piece, let me be frank: after meeting her, I am an unabashed fan of Mary Karr as a person.

Being a fan of her work is easy. Her first memoir, The Liar's Club, is credited by some with altering the rules of the genre. Her poetic line makes her nonfiction pop and her honesty drags that same poetry's toes through the mud so its arms can reach to the sky.

But what strikes me most about Karr is her pugnacious pursuit of real, carnal human representation. And this, I learned when she visited campus, begins and ends in her orientation toward life and grace as close-quarters combat. That is, if she's going to engage something - or someone - no punches are pulled, in writing or in conversation.

I think it's that drive toward real, personal experience that drives the authenticity in her work the most, at least from where I sit. When I read her third memoir, Lit, I suspected as much in passages like the following in which she describes her father’s final physical decline and her sense of culpability:

The day I moved Daddy to the hospital, he grabs my arm as we cross the lawn. I’m carrying his piss jug again. The checks I sent home never paid down the guilt I tote today for having disappeared from the pace he’s dying in, which is –in turn– a place dying in me….

Daddy’s last upright appearance was on the bar stool in the VFW, where one final shot of whiskey felled him the way German snipers had failed to. In an increasingly skeletal form, he kept breathing, though each week he’s sanded closer to the bone. But he’d been floating farther from me, starting when I’d left him–he’d left me? I never could decide–more than a decade before. 

The ambulance door seals me inside with him. Daddy’s good hand wipes his wet face then swats my hand away (117).

But it was in her remarks in a 2010 interview in Busted Halo where I found confirmation of my suspicion that Karr's confrontational honesty is the result of a deal with herself; it's the product of the same desire she found to get sober and turn toward faith.

"I think for me, my faith has been about realizing not that the suffering doesn’t exist, not that there isn’t evil….but now I accept mystery. There was no mystery for me before; I really thought I had it all figured out. And now I at least know I don’t know. I do believe that there is a loving and benevolent God who is omnipotent and all-powerful, and yet I believe Haiti happened. And I also believe at the nexus of suffering is where love is."

That's one of the best writing tips I took away from Karr's visit. Dogged honesty can't merely be the stuff of a writer's characters, but of a writer’s character as well. And for that to be the case, the writer must be willing to wrestle with their own dishonesty first before they attempt to bring truth to the page.

This is the fourth in a series of posts with reflections on writing from past participants in the Writer's Symposium by the Sea, an annual event at Point Loma Nazarene University where I work. This year's guests include Siddhartha Mukherjee, Jeannette Walls, and Anne Lamott. For more information, visit here. 

Others, significant

As a writer, I find myself growing more and more concerned with significance. Not merely my own, but within the worlds and actions of my characters. The notion of meaningful action and influence is like an itch I can't scratch away.

Please note here my distinction between significance and prominence, professionally and fictionally. Our culture has an unhealthy habit of assuming the former in the latter, to our personal and general detriment. Prominence is given and taken away externally. Significance is ours to create.

Here is an unfiltered shot of our campus amphitheater, The Greek.

Like most first drafts, it has promise but needs some work to reproduce what I saw.

What is most interesting me, then, in relation to significance is the way in which I'm searching for it in the small moments of "small" lives. When I think about my characters, I want all of them - even the most static and instrumental - to operate in the paradigm that every moment carries the possibility of significance and that true tragedy is to live otherwise.

Finding the significance in the lives of main character is easy. But what about the guy cleaning the taco shop's drink machines? The woman selling phony skincare products to friends? The motorist who drives on rather than offer assistance?  

And here's an altered version of the original that went through several
digital drafts to finally approximate the colors and the contrast my limited human eyes saw as I walked to my car at the end of the day.

This is why we revise and revise and revise. We work like the photo editing program I used to work on the picture above. On the left is the first draft, if you will. On the right, the "same" photo with layer upon layer of filters and contrast shifts and tint correction until what I wanted to hold the eye is better designed to do so. 

In essence, this is how I want to treat the small characters who do not, in their own right, seem significant. But, and maybe most significantly, these are the characters most like us. They live, they breathe, and they have the chance to do more for the world than the most "significant" among us.  

And that is the beauty of story. Unlike life, in which moments and people are gone long before we see what we could have done to make them matter or what they have done to impact our narrative, fiction allows me a space where I am forced to see that every moment and person is of consequence. I have limited time and my readers have limited attention. As a result, the real estate of the page is precious and not to be squandered.

And increasingly, this is the way I'm trying to live off the page. I find myself increasingly agitated by wasted time (and I've always been one to feel guilty for not making the most of my decreasing store of minutes in this place). I've always been a pilgrim in search of significance.

But now, I want to redefine my terms and stop substituting perception for human response, in my stories and my daily life.

Labor Pains

This is another entry regarding the student-driven hybrid fiction course I’m piloting at the moment that is testing both my notions of teaching and my students’ understanding of how the classroom is supposed to look. From time to time, I’ll reflect here on what I’m learning along the way.

I spent a large chunk of last year designing the hybrid fiction class I’m piloting this term. 

How much? Well, taking into account the 15 month May to August gestation period. I calculate that I spent more than 350 hours on the process from inception to the beginning of the current semester. That time includes researching network theory, collaborative learning design, LMS and technology experimentation, meetings with training staff and colleagues, reading, shooting video lectures for YouTube, and of course writing all of the components of the class into a set of digital storehouses.

But more on that writing process. I totaled the word count from all of the files I created for the class to work: all the explanations, assignments, modules, syllabus, and transcripts. The grand total? 65,428 words.

And that doesn’t take into account the scores of emails I wrote to anyone involved in the process from the provost to the people outside of education I used as sounding boards for some of the crazier ideas I had. There were also conversations about the class I haven’t included in the hour count above as they were informally connected to the work I was doing.

So, what’s the net-net out of this situation?

There's a good reason I haven't gotten much done on my current novel project. I used up all the words and time and creativity I had for it on this class.

The Great Ones Punch in Combinations

In his writing and his clothes,

Talese is all about the details. 

As a journalist and essayist, Gay Talese is famous for his exhaustive research. When he takes on a profile, he is relentless in talking to anyone who has any connection with the subject, down to (literally) the guy who shines his shoes.

His most well-known piece, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," is a remarkably personal portrait of Sinatra at what seems to be the moment where he is teetering at the apex of his career. Never will The Chairman be more influential or vulnerable in the same moment, and Talese manages to hold these two disparate conditions in the center of the frame throughout the entire piece with a simultaneity that is beyond impressive.

What's more impressive - he never spoke with Sinatra. You'd never know it from the essay, though, as Talese's penchant for deep research is on full display in a clinic on how open the lives of celebrities can really be, despite their efforts for control the public perception of their image.

But for my money, some of the best writing "advice" that can be derived from Talese's body of work comes from the 39 articles and profiles he wrote about Floyd Patterson over the course of his boxing career and beyond, culminating in his classic Esquire essay "The Loser." During their relationship, he saw the champ in triumph and defeat, in the ring and the training facility, in public and private, in general and specific detail.

In short, this is a different type of research, one we don't pay enough attention to - the four seasons approach. That is, see a place in all four seasons before you decide to move there. As Talese puts it in the foreword to his book Fame and Obscurity:

"And so it goes. The obsessions of a writer surface and reemerge in an unpredictable spiral; the techniques evolve, but the fantasies linger." 

The same mentality is absolutely critical when it comes to writing, despite what general culture tells us.The exigencies Web culture and increasingly short news cycles privilege the immediate response. But the long view cannot get lost in our rush to publish. Twitter does not provide the platform for introspection any more than a bumper sticker. And while there are times when immediacy is the necessary medium, it is also important that writers choose to move a little slower when the situation is complex and research a subject over time.

Take a page out of Talese's book and write in combinations.

Here's the video of his conversation with us at the Writer's Symposium in 2008.

https://youtu.be/wQZT19waiDs

This is the third in a series of posts with reflections on writing from past participants in the Writer's Symposium by the Sea, an annual event at Point Loma Nazarene University where I work. You can find the first two posts here and here. This year's guests include Siddhartha Mukherjee, Jeannette Walls, and Anne Lamott. For more information, visit here.