In Celebration of Routine (and the Wisdom of Pets)

I used to joke that my pets used me—they come when I am making lunch, or dinner. They come when it's cold and want to be warm. I marvel at their routines, as they wait in the kitchen, same times each day, awaiting their dinner or their treats, and I marvel that their lives comprise primarily these little moments. Do they not know grief, loneliness, despair, happiness?

I am sure they do. After all, they are rescue animals, and perhaps routines are the greatest happiness they can imagine. Every day, their owner has not renounced them, still feeds them, allows them a place in her distracted life. They know great loss, being shuffled to strange homes and shelters, skin clinging to their bones, and now they know that if each day is the same, they will not know this loss again, at least for today. And they look forward to tomorrow with the same hopefulness—a place to eat, a place to snuggle, a place to really call home.

I have my routines. I cherish them just as much as my pets do theirs. Because between the great scales of love and loss, the real joy is in knowing each day of routine is one day removed from loss, one day until joy. And I am thankful that it took a collection of discarded pets to help me realize this.

New Work Up at "This Zine Will Change Your Life"

I loved Harriet the Spy as a child. In fact, I still read it every couple of years, along with The Long Secret. My Harriet story, "Excerpts from the New Adventures of Harriet the Spy," is up at This Zine Will Change Your Life. I hope you don't think I did Harriet M. Welsh a disservice; above all, I always loved her combination of stubbornness, indignation, but naivete about the world.

Best of Baltimore!

It's official: City Sages is a Best of Baltimore!

Looking Ahead

I am happy we've booked the Wonderland Ballroom for the dogzplot/jmww/wigleaf/Sententia off-site reading at AWP in February 2010. We're looking at 12 contributors to read, and it'll probably work much like the slam earlier this year at the KGB Bar.

I know we'll still be living in Baltimore until February, because (1) AWP and (2) I'm teaching another writing class at the Creative Alliance around that time. But that's as far as I'd like to think ahead—too much can happen between now and then.

I got another really nice rejection from one of my favorite journals. These rejections hurt more than anything, when your story is "great" and "so close" but not quite the "right fit." I never understand the "right fit" thing. Everything is the "right fit" for jmww if it's a good story, whether it be a romance, a historical romance, sci-fi, or western. As long as there are satisfying, literary elements (although I admit, these combinations are rare) in it, it can be about anything.

So I have to wonder how much of my story is that it wasn't really as good as it could have been, not that it was a good fit, per se. The story of mine in question takes place in World War II and is actually an excerpt from my in-progress novel (although it was a story before a novel).

I must admit, I miss cable a little bit. There's only so much "Antiques Roadshow" and "Wine Country" you can watch on PBS.

Reading Events, Baltimore, June 19-23

Another City Sages reading this week:

CITY SAGES: BALTIMORE Reading Party at the Creative Alliance

"There is a saying in Baltimore," Mencken said, "that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good." CityLit Press’ popular new anthology, City Sages: Baltimore (CityLit Press, 2010), includes Baltimore’s best writers gathered by editor Jen Michalski, including greats Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, and F. Scott Fitzgerald; contemporary writers Laura Lippman, Anne Tyler, Madison Smartt Bell, and Rafael Alvarez; and upcoming writers.

Sage writer Jen Grow hosts an evening of music and performances by Sages contributors Rafael Alvarez, Joe Young, Jen Michalski, Michael Kimball, and multi-talented Geoffrey Becker, who’ll also be playing acoustic guitar. MC’d by Gregg Wilhelm, founder and Executive Director of CityLity Project, this evening will include special guests Deborah Rudacille and actors Charley Scalies and Benay Berger from The Wire reading from Gertrude Stein, Mencken, and others. $5 mbrs. (Free popcorn for mbrs!)

Thursday, July 22nd 7-9 pm
Creative Alliance
3134 Eastern Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21224
Copies of City Sages: Baltimore available for purchase and signing

More information on Facebook:

Purchase City Sages at Amazon

City Sages Reading Video, Atomic Books, 7/15

Here's the video from last night's City Sages reading at Atomic Books. Thanks so much for coming out!

City Sages: Baltimore review

Here's a succinct little review of City Sages: Baltimore in Baltimore Magazine.

If you've picked up a copy and like what you've read, consider taking a minute and writing a little review on Amazon. We much appreciate it!

Extra Credit

I had the pleasure of speaking to Tim Wendel's fiction workshop class at Johns Hopkins for an hour last night as part of his guest lecturer series. When I was thinking about what to discuss (which basically was my bio as a writer/editor/organizer in the community), I remembered all the great writers and editors and Baltimoreans I've met over the past five years, and I wonder if anything I've done could be replicated in another city, whether it's the special magic of Baltimore's intimate size and generous, quasi-Southern charm. Whatever it is, I feel truly blessed that I know so many talented, hard-working people in the community. Anything is possible in Baltimore, as long as you have dedication and persistence and, most of all, passion. People can spot phonies and resume builders a mile away.

Speaking of the academia, Just finished Denis Johnson's The Name of the World. I thought the writing was wonderful, ruminating, and reflective but that the book as a whole lacked an emotional resonance. A recollection of a professor, Michael Reed's, last semester at a mid-Western college, he finally escapes the bubble he's been trapped in since the death of his wife and daughter four years earlier. His muse comes in the form of a female student, an eccentric redhead named Flower Canon, but his metamorphosis feels plotted and clunky and unfulfilled. I never got the sense of his wife and daughter, and even when he breaks through his emotional paralysis, his memories of them and his longing for them never really spring to life. Without this passion, we're left to wonder the whole validity of the prison he's been living in.

But read it for the character profiles of the other professors—great stuff. Although it seems odd that Reed is never shown teaching classes or interacting with any other students than Flower Canon.

So I just started Tim's new book, High Heat, about the fastball. Just in time for baseball season, eh?

Time Management

I only wrote 5 more pages of the new novel this weekend, bringing the first-draft chaos to a mere 127 pages. Finding time to write can be challenging for any writer, I know, but it's always more difficult when there is family involved. Of course, I don't have children, but I do have a partner, and I'd be lying if I said we never had minor tiffs about the time I spent on my writing projects. Not that my partner isn't incredibly supportive of my endeavors, often lending a hand to various projects, first in line to proofread and comment, but I often feel guilty while I'm writing, selfish, self-absorbed. I don't know if it's the time spent writing so much as the time spent in this rich, inaccessible (to the other person) inner world. I often wonder what is the right balance, to be fair to myself and to be fair to everyone else.

But I think everyone has (or should have) hobbies, and this is mine (although I believe it to be more than a hobby). How do other writers in marriages and relationships, with or without children, manage?

(I was even so good yesterday not to watch the World Cup final so I could at least get those five pages on paper). Viva la Furia Roja!

My Big Fat Dream Wedding

I dreamed last night about getting married. The only problem was I didn't have a groom. The wedding was very elaborate, my mother was very happy, as was her undefined sexually ambiguous close female friend (this person does not exist in real life). Relatives and cousins I don't have attended. At one point, someone took a picture of me and my brother, who I thought briefly was my groom, but at the end of the dream I was still looking for a groom, someone to be in the other half of the picture. I wonder if this dreams signifies traditional female achievement versus modern female achievement. In the dream I was happy to get the attention and never wanted the day to end, yet I also felt the attention was undeserved, at best, incomplete.

Well, I'm glad I had my wedding in a dream. I'd hate to plan one in real life.

Postcards and Rejects

My life has been updated on a postcard.

I got a rejection from the New Yorker the other day (unsurprising) that was actually kind of personal (surprising). It said

"This is a compelling story, but not quite right for The New Yorker. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to consider it, and we ask that you send along more material."

I know—if that's personal to me, I should have greater expectations. It's been years since I've submitted to TNY, so I don't know if this is a kinder, friendlier rejection letter they've been sending out and I'm getting my hopes up for naught. But thanks for sending it, TNY—I will send you more material. As soon as I figure out what material, even after subscribing for years, exactly you like.

City Sages Reading and Book Party at Atomic Books!

The next installment of City Sages readings will be at Atomic Books as part of their Atomic Fiction Series:

Thursday, July 15, 7 PM. Free.
Atomic Books.
3620 Falls Rd.
Hampden, Baltimore

Readers:
Jessica Anya Blau (The Summer of Naked Swim Parties)
Maud Casey (The Shape of Things to Come, Genealogy, Drastic)
Adam Robinson (Publishing Genius, Adam Robinson and Other Poems)
Joseph Young (Easter Rabbit)

Hosted by Kathy Flann. Books available for purchase and signing.

For more information, go here:

"Boy Stuff" at New Yinzer

Hope you had a great Independence Day weekend. I read some John Cheever at the beach and at the pool (although ironically I did not read "The Swimmer."

The lovely New Yinzer magazine picked up my story "Boy Stuff" for their summer issue. You can read it here. It's also available in the anthology City Sages: Baltimore.

Good News

So, yeah, the news I've been sitting on. First, my novella MAY-SEPTEMBER has been chosen as the co-winner (a first) of the Press 53 Open Awards Contest and will be published in October 2010 by Press 53. There's even a nifty plaque involved and an awards ceremony in North Carolina!

The judge, Amy Rogers, said this about my novella:

“May-September is confident, resonant, achingly heartfelt, gorgeous—and surprising in a much different way. The writing is spare and elegant. This story of unspoken desires is beautifully layered, thick with tension and full of passion."