Five Things that Don't Suck, Turquoise Birthday Edition

1. turning 50*
2. laughing until you think you'll pee your pants
3. not actually peeing your pants**
4. how much light she poured into 45 years
5. love

*theoretical
**much

Five Things that Don't Suck, Book Book BOOK BOOK BOOK Edition

1. having the book I wrote for Turquoise picked up by a publisher
2. on Turqi's birthday
3. withdrawing the ms. from other publishers
4. how happy I am that it's found this particular home
5. losing sleep for all the best reasons

Five Things that Don't Suck, I Must Go Down to the Sea Again Edition

1. the constant arguments at the beach house over whether "go" was originally included in that line or not
2. cribbage
3. blatant cheating at cribbage
4. long walks on the beach at night
5. coming home soaked

Five Things that Don't Suck, Turquoise Taylor Grant Edition

1. music
2. comedy
3. talent
4. love
5. how after 3 years it's easier to think of these things

Five Things that Don't Suck, Turquoise Birthday Edition

1. irreverence
2. intelligence
3. hilariousness
4. good hearts
5. love

Five Things that Don't Suck, Back to the Beach Edition

1. spending the second anniversary of Turquoise's death on the same part of the RI coast where we spent so much of our time together
2. having lunch with an amazing, hilarious friend
3. having three separate invitations for lunch today
4. champagne
5. beach glass

The Big Poetry Giveaway

I'm excited to be participating in the 5^th annual Big Poetry Giveaway. What's that, you ask? Excellent question, I reply. Here's the deal:

I'm giving away three books (two chapbooks and a full-length collection) to celebrate National Poetry Month (otherwise known as April). To win, all you need to do is leave a comment and contact information on this post. Ta da! You're entered. During the first week in May, I'll use a random number generator to choose three winners, get in touch with you for contact information, and mail you the book. It costs you nothing—no postage, no handling, no selling of your soul to some sort of spam-generating mailing list.

If you're a poet and want to participate in your own giveaway, head over to Kelli Russell Agodon's blog The Book of Kells to see what's what. I wouldn't be doing this without her. Here's (part of) what she says about the reasoning behind the Big Poetry Giveaway: The goal is to share our favorite poets with others as well as to visit different blogs and see who others are reading. Sounds good to me.

The rules state that I must give away a copy of one of my favorite books, so I'm giving away Fugue for Other Hands by Cider Press Review's own Joseph Fasano. 

I know, I know, I'm one of the editors for it, but you know what? If I can go through the whole editorial process with a book and then come through the other side still loving it, it's a pretty damn good book. Joe's imagery is staggering, and there are poems in there that I get caught up in every single time I read them. If you win and you're already a supporter of CPR's work (i.e. you already own this amazing collection), I'll send you a different book, possibly something from CPR, possibly something from my own collection. I guarantee it will also be a book I love. Surprise package! It'll be just like playing Let's Make a Deal except you won't have to wear a costume, and nobody will ask you what's in your handbag.

I'm also giving away copies of two of my chapbooks. I'll even sign them for you if you want. The first, Dear Turquoise, is the first chapbook I ever put together. I've posted about it widely on the blog, so I won't go into detail here (feel free to click the "Turquoise" tag to pull up posts). It's also available through dancing girl press. (That link, by the way, is to their catalog page, not to my chapbook specifically--take a look at everything they've got over there. You won't regret it.) Or through me!

The second is the first chapbook to come from my own press—Ghost Stories. It's not all about ghosts—although there are some ghosts in there. Let's say that it involves ghosts and other ways of being haunted. It's so new I don't even have a clean cover image for you, but here's a quick picture I took of the first test run on my dining room table. If you win this chapbook, I'll give you the choice between a copy from the print run (hand numbered and signed) or, if you want to take your chances on striking it rich after I'm famous (and dead), I'll send one of the test run copies (also hand-numbered and signed, but marked as a test run).

It's also possible I'll be in the process of printing a second chapbook by the time the beginning of May rolls around. If that's the case, I'll throw in a bonus copy of whatever that chapbook is, one for each winner. What? I can hear you asking. A second chapbook, also for free? Is she CRAZY? Yes. Yes, I am. If I were any crazier, I'd need to be filming this blog post so that I could rapidly zoom the camera in and out to demonstrate how crazy I am. Let me say right now that I have no idea if this will be one of my own chapbooks or one by someone else. I also have no idea if I'll have one. NO PROMISES, PEOPLE. (But I'd really love to be able to do it!)

So, in case you followed someone else's link over here, let me tell you a little bit about myself:

I am a poet, writer, editor, English professor. I'm the Managing Editor for Cider Press Review, and as I mentioned above, I just started playing with printing my own chapbooks. Over the next several months, I'll be expanding into printing chapbooks from trusted friends/fellow poets, and hope to eventually be able to print awesome chapbooks written by awesome strangers who will become trusted friends/fellow poets.

I am married to a man who is a serial hobbyist, and who used to claim I didn't have any hobbies. That was before I started baking all of our bread and covering our dining room table with paper cutters, various card stocks, binding thread, and the like. Pretty much as soon as we bought a house, we started looking for a dog, and we found a retired racing greyhound who moved right in and made himself at home. We named him Neruda, but he answered to Rudy. We now live with two retired racers, Butler and Gracie, named after Yeats and Paley respectively, and love the breed. We also keep bees, and I like to think of them as "practice chickens." If we can figure out a way to be gentleman/woman farmers, I think we probably will.

I love gathering people in my house and feeding them; running; dessert (too much); figuring out how to do things (a.k.a. learning); figuring out even better ways to do things (a.k.a. improving); teaching; old black and white horror movies; bees; that moment when I'm cooking or baking something brand new for the first time and I realize it's happening exactly the way it should; animals; compost; becoming good at something that initially intimidated me; grandfather clocks; Thom Gunn; hanging out with writers (seriously, while not all writers are funny, some of the funniest people I know are writers); the Oxford comma; the word "buoy"; Italy; the water; piña coladas; getting caught in the rain.

I had to break up with the ocean for a few years because it was too painful for me to be there, but we've been coming to terms over the past year or so. We'll see what the summer brings. I'd still rather ride a wave to shore and stand up a little bloody after scraping myself against the sand than float placidly on a lake in an inner tube, but I'm more than happy to do the latter as well.

If everything is going well I have enough time in my day to get a little restless. That's where my creativity comes through. I'm really good at time management, and can sandwich different steps of multiple processes together in order to be as time-efficient as I can. I get comically excited when I figure out a faster way to organize a process. It's more than a little geeky. But it's not because I'm a fan of being super-productive; it's because I'm a fan of being lazy. I work best when I have some time--ideally, lots of time--to be lazy, so I try to get all that other stuff done as quickly as I can without having quality suffer.

I have been known to take a really good book into the shower, leaving one hand outside the curtain to hold the book (I've never really mastered this, though, and now our shower has doors on it, so it's impossible to do this without soaking the floor); close just one eye at a time while reading in a vain attempt to stay awake long enough to finish a chapter; write lines of poetry in the condensation on the shower door in an attempt to remember them long enough to get them down on paper.

And that's about it for now. One book, two chapbooks, three chances to win. Leave your name and contact info (unless I have it) in the comments to enter. Good luck!

Bonus: One of the Dear Turquoise Poems

I'm ridiculously pleased to have one of my Dear Turquoise poems up at Redheaded Stepchild, one of my favorite online journals. Take a peek if you like. And I've got a new post ready to go up here on the blog soon--probably tomorrow.

On Thankfulness, Pie, and More Thankfulness

Yesterday, Jed and I hosted our fourth consecutive Thanksgiving dinner. We've been hosting Thanksgiving since our second year in this house, and each year we invite anyone who wants to join us—family, friends, an assortment of international students who would otherwise be spending the entire weekend in the almost-totally-empty dorms on campus. I'm a good baker and a good cook, and Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. I love cooking for it; I love hauling out both sets of good china and the silverware; I love owning 30 matching napkins. I love the whole turkey-filled shebang, and I feel strongly that this particular meal should be cooked by someone who feels the exact same way. Every year, we get together with people we love and just enjoy some community. While I suppose there are multiple ways in which this could go wrong, it doesn't happen here—the family members absorb the friends (or "chosen family," as we like to think of them) and the students. The students are charming and often hilarious. The dogs get extra belly rubs. There's pie. Everyone seems to enjoy themselves, and when it's all over and I've come home from dropping the students back at campus, I put on some PJs and pour myself a glass of wine and enjoy having my feet up.

When I was a kid, we went to my grandparents' for Thanksgiving, and for every other major holiday for that matter. Some of my happiest memories are of the cousins sitting around the same table. The kids had their own table in the living room; the adults ate in the dining room. One year, Turquoise got promoted to the grown-up table and was back with us by the time dessert rolled around. One year, after my grandparents had moved to the beach house full time, and we were all basically adults, and the cousins all still sat at a separate table, two of the younger cousins set off on a mission to secure an entire pie for the kids—what followed was an elaborately yet spontaneously choreographed dance, with Jonathan grabbing the pie while Eric distracted the adults, then a hand-off while Jonathan chatted innocently with an uncle, then another hand-off and another conversation, on and on until we erupted in cheers in the sunroom when the two of them arrived, victorious, with the pie. (Note: it was the cheering that did us in, because my dad heard it and came in to see what the fuss was about. Grown-ups: 1; Cousins: 0.)

I've been trying to think if Turquoise was there for that Thanksgiving—I think it was before she moved to California, but I'm not sure. For that matter, I'm trying to remember if it was Thanksgiving or Christmas. If it weren't for the pie, it could have been almost any time—we often gathered in groups at the beach house, and for all the family's struggles, those times were always filled with laughter. The cousins grew up cracking each other up around the same table, whether we were wearing towels wrapped around our swimsuits in August or sweaters in December. But there was pie, so I know it wasn't summer. I hope Turquoise was there.

I can tell you this: Turquoise was here yesterday. In one of the last conversations we had before she died, she asked me if I would take her wedding silver—she wanted it to be well-used and well-loved, wanted it to go to someone who wouldn't find it a burden, to someone who got the same emotional recharge by gathering people around a table, to someone in the family. It was the same pattern our grandmother had, and she loved it. I told her I'd take it, and it arrived in April, almost a year after Turquoise died, in a small box along with a pair of pearl earrings. After a lifetime of postal correspondence—well over 30 years' worth—this was the last time I would go to my mailbox and find something from Turquoise. The package came, and I unrolled the felt bag that contained the silver. I took out a table knife and weighed it in my palm, then put it back. I opened the little plastic zip-bag that held the earrings, which were a surprise. I left the silver on the kitchen island and carried the earrings into the bedroom and put them, along with a necklace she had given me on the last day I saw her, on top of my jewelry box, where I tend to lay out the jewelry I plan to wear the next day.

And I stood in the bedroom and cried. Her death was as fresh to me as if it had just happened. There are always moments like that after a loss—I wake from a dream of her and mourn her again as I come back to reality, or I come across a picture of the two of us that captures something of what we were to each other at our best and my chest thickens and hardens until I want to howl. It doesn't happen anywhere near as often as it used to, and thoughts of her are likely to make me laugh instead of cry, but I am still astonished by her death, gobsmacked by the idea that someone so ludicrously vibrant is somehow not here anymore. Perhaps I've said this before, but I've begun to think some people are simply too big for this world to hold.

There are people who believe that the dead watch over us, that their appearances in our dreams are visits, that they leave us pennies or special birds or songs on the radio. I would find the thought very comforting if I thought it was true, but I don't. I really, really want to, but I can't. What I believe is that I have had the last contact I will ever have with Turquoise, that the rest of my life stretches out ahead of me without one of the people who helped define me from the moment I became aware of the world. Whether I believe in an afterlife or not—and despite the fact that I was raised with faith in one, at times of desperate grief it's easy to think of Heaven as a convenient lie invented to comfort the bereaved—it is now likely that I'll live as long without her as with her.

At the same time, she was here yesterday in a way. One of my sisters-in-law was wearing a bracelet made of pink stones. I have one just like it in green, a gift from one of Turquoise's closest friends, who gave it to Turquoise and then got it back after her death. Sue gave it to me because she couldn't bear to wear it, but I find it comforting. I wasn't wearing that bracelet yesterday, but I did wear the necklace Turquoise gave me during that last visit. And I asked my mom to make sure she set out Turquoise's silver at my place at the table—it was the first time it would be on the table since it came to me, and I wanted to be one of the first people to use it. I'm not sure why it mattered—Turquoise certainly wouldn't have cared; she just wanted it to be used, and used in a gathering like yesterday's.

Maybe because it's my grandmother's pattern, the silver felt natural in my hand. I have no idea how many times I've cut a piece of turkey with a knife weighted exactly like that one, or put a fork shaped exactly like that one in my mouth. For the most part, after I picked up the fork and knife for the first time, I didn't think about it at all. A student cracked a joke. Another smiled at me from halfway down a table so long it stretched past the length of the dining room and well into the living room.* Jed's mom called it a Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving. My dad helped someone finish off her pie. My brother-in-law and I discussed the secret of including mashed potatoes if one wants to create the perfect leftover sandwich. One of his sons handed me a turkey he made by tracing his hand on a piece of brown construction paper. I ate and laughed and tried to spend a minute consciously taking it all in.

I still think of Turquoise every day.  That will probably change eventually, but like most as-yet unfulfilled inevitabilities, I can't imagine it now. I do know that yesterday was our kind of day, hers and mine, and that she would have loved it.

*There's no kids' table at my house. Whether that's because I no longer qualify to sit at it yet would hate to be left out or because having 2 table-tall dogs precludes leaving the kids to their own devices is another essay for another day.

Bonus: Guest Post at Lisa Romeo Writes

Hello there, poetry friends, process junkies, and various people who think I'm funny. I've got a guest post up at the great blog Lisa Romeo Writes. Technically, it's about how to handle working with a series, but if you know me, you probably know it's more about how impossible it is to handle working with a series. I hope you'll take a look.

Bonus: Books and Books and Books

Hey, all, guess what? My chapbook, Dear Turquoise, is out. You can read a sample poem (and order a copy if you want) from Dancing Girl Press. I'm proud of the poems, and I love the cover that Kristy Bowen designed.

I realize it's been pretty quiet around here lately, but it's all for good reasons. I've put together a second chapbook, called Creature Feature, which should be out soon. It's a collection of poems centered on the Universal monster movies of the '30s and '40s. I've been writing new work and trying to get it out in the world. I've been working on editing an anthology for poets and workshop leaders (more on that later), working on writing my own part of that anthology, editing two upcoming poetry collections from Cider Press Review, reading my way through my poetry library, and teaching. I've also been working on two guest posts for other blogs, and I'll post links to those when they go up. In short, All-Poetry Autumn has been amazingly productive so far, and I'm trying to go with it, mindfully and with gratitude. On top of that, I've been managing to get some running in, despite nursing a minor injury for the past couple of months (don't panic, Mom. It's nothing serious).

Which reminds me: I also have a couple of poems in the upcoming anthology Bearers of Distance:Poems by Runners. A portion of sales benefit the One Fund, to support the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing, so it's a worthy cause and a worthy book. And it got a review on NPR's show Only a Game. Cool, huh?

I do have a lot to tell you about, and I will. But for now, follow one of the links up there. Read a poem. Get a copy of the book or the chapbook if you like. Or go crazy and get both—I'm not gonna stop you.

Five Things that Don't Suck, Happy Birthday to Turquoise Edition

Note: today is Turquoise's birthday. This list is full of things she loved or things that made us laugh (or both). It doesn't begin to cover it.

1. playing Scrabble using only proper names (50 bonus points for spelling "Rutger")
2. blatantly cheating at cribbage (or Scrabble. Or Trivial Pursuit. Or, or or...)
3. Eric the half a bee
4. making fun of vapid pop stars (Shaun Cassidy, Debbie Gibson...doesn't much matter who)
5. writing ridiculous songs about pretty much anything

Why Does It Matter Where You Come From?

I'm in the early stages of writing an essay—an actual academic essay, not a blog post—about poetry and place (don't panic, non-poets—there's not a ton of poetry talk here. Not today, anyway). As preparation for this, I've been reading a lot about place—essays by Emerson, the fabulous book The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard (who, even though he died seven years before I was born and looked like the love child of Santa Claus and Tolstoy, has become one of the dear loves of my life), essays on poets.org, you name it. But I've also been thinking about my own sense of place. If you've read more than two of my poems—and maybe if you haven't—the following essay won't be much of a surprise to you. Mostly, I'm trying to get my head around how I feel about place, in an attempt to get a handle on it for the essay. I figured I might as well work it through here.

"Why does it matter where you come from?" –random question from the internet found while looking for articles on place

"No matter where you go, there you are." –quote from The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8^th Dimension, here largely because I couldn't resist including it. My blog, my rules.

Image, for me, almost always begins in place—a room, a house, a yard, a body of water, a shoreline. My own work is so grounded at the water that I have trouble escaping it. The most evocative place in the world for me is the shore—a salt water shore in particular, and a specific stretch of beach in Rhode Island where I spent my summers growing up, if we're going to get particularly particular.

In a lot of ways, everything I am comes from that beach—from the house that my great grandfather built, from my grandparents who lived in it, from the family they raised and what remains or is lost of that family. My understanding of the world grew with my understanding of that house and what took place there. A large part of my relationship with Turquoise was formed there, for example. Sometimes it feels like all of my arguments and and all of my losses and all of my solace are there. Plus, probably a lot of other things.

It is only recently that I have begun to differentiate between the shore and the coast—I have always been drawn to "shore" as a word, and while I haven't deliberately defined it as that thin stretch of land where the water ends and the land begins (as opposed to "coast," that thin stretch of land where the land ends and the water begins), I think the difference in definition is something I have always understood. I know also that I am of the water, that I belong in it rather than on it or beside it, that whatever vaguely terrestrial nature I possess is a lie. I feel, at most, amphibious much of the time. For a stretch of years, the shore lost its solace for me—the losses piled on too quickly and deeply and I couldn't take comfort in the scent or the ease of my movement in the waves or, really, anything at all. It became an incredibly painful place for me to be. I say that I tried to break up with the ocean, but it wouldn't let me go. And while I knew that I needed to find my own place, to restore or create my own sense of home, I couldn't find my way to it. As it turns out, the ocean and I have kissed and made up in recent months, but I can't tell you how it happened. And I still know that I need to create my own home somewhere on the water. There's time for that.

The attraction of the shore is, for me, the same one that calls hatchling turtles out under the moon, but it is also one of being at a place where nothing is stable. There's so much water in the sand that it moves underfoot, and if you stand where the waves can wash over your feet, you will find yourself slowly sinking. Bits and hints of the deeper world show up there, and pieces of ancient history. Shards of glass get softened from daggers into jewels. All the interesting stuff happens when we start mixing things up.

The same is true of people. The people I find really interesting are the ones who struggle. Struggle is the greatest affirmation of life—if we didn't care, we wouldn't fight, yes? The struggle, for me, is itself full of hope. The point of describing the dark is that it is an attempt to map our way through it, because we have no hope of fighting without a map. When water and ground try to occupy the same space, things get dicey. We sink or stick or ruin our clothes. Not earth, not sea—it's the most difficult place to stand upright, and yet there's not enough water for us to lie down and swim. The shore is all struggle and shift. It's contradiction and, because of tides, not the least bit constant. The shore at 4PM is literally in a different place at 8PM and yet another at midnight. In August, in Rhode Island, the sun can be scorching, but the water is almost always cold enough to be painful at first. My beach is boulder and stone and sand—it doesn't choose. It mingles. It changes. Last May, I stood with a friend on a flat patch of sand, drank a toast to Turquoise, and poured the rest of the champagne into the water. In August, the same stretch of beach was almost impassable—the sand gone, everything was rock and algae, slippery in the rising tide, with whole and partial blue crab shells littering the pools. Same beach, same point in the cycle of the tides, wholly different place.

The ocean hides and exposes. It pushes and draws. It dulls colors and reflects them more brightly. It does all of these things simultaneously. I know there are other places on Earth where I can be outside and feel the enormity and insignificance of the planet and my place on it at the same time. I'm sure that if I stood in a field in the Midwest or in a desert in the Southwest and looked toward the horizon, I would have a similar experience of being able to see farther than I can actually see, see until the world curves down and away from my vision. And maybe it would be the same in some ways as standing in the wash, looking out past the point where I can differentiate between waves. I know that I can sit in the sun at a freshwater lake and put my feet in the water and feel chilled, that fresh water can buoy me, that it can hide a world away from me, and that experience sometimes—sometimes—feels something like being at the shore. I know that I can stand in amazement in a forest or at the side of a river or in any number of natural, largely untouched places because I have done these things.

And I like the creepy-crawlies of the earth, generally speaking. I, for example, fucking love slugs—that's right, just saying that I love them is not enough. I need a swear. I think some of them are gorgeous and they're so weird and alien and slow and deliberate and fragile and destructive. Just like us. Jed and I started keeping bees this year, and we love them—I feel a deep love for the bees, for their complicated survival, for how gently they'll explore me when I approach the hive and how cluelessly they'll bounce off me if I happen to wander, Mr. Magoo-style, through their flight path. I love land-bound creatures and flying creatures and creatures that move in between land and water. I love trees—really big ones, tiny saplings, it doesn't matter—and, yes, flowers (especially the ones with bees!) and ferns and mosses and butterflies and ladybugs and worms.

But the fact remains that the other day on my run, I crossed a little patch of driveway that was littered with acorns. Many of them had been crushed; some of them hadn't seen the difficult side of a tire; some of them were halved, somehow, and hollowed. The one I noticed, however, had been pressed down from the top until it cracked into arched segments, then laid on its side—sort of like how a pumpkin shell would look if you were able to peel it in a single strip from the flesh and lay it down, skin-side up. Except I didn't think of a pumpkin. I thought, "Squat lobster." Then I thought, "Or maybe trilobite." I try to write about bees and end up writing about how they've turned our birdbath into a beach—they've really turned it into a watering hole, but that's not the way my brain works. It's not my imagery. I see fireflies and think of them lifting in glittering masses over the salt marsh. I see myself in shadow, on a walk with Jed, and my hair is bouncing up and down, pulsing. I call it "jellyfishing."

Where I come from matters because where I come from is who I am.

On Returning and Being Returned

This is not the post I started writing yesterday. I returned from a week-long poetry conference yesterday afternoon, and have spent the hours since trying to describe this singular experience. I don't know that I can, partly because its singularity involves so many aspects: it's homegrown and self-managed (we have no leader, though we do have a fulcrum who knows who she is even if she doesn't want to admit it); it's the most respectful—and therefore trustworthy and therefore trusting—group of writers I've ever been privileged to work with; have I mentioned the sheer talent? and brains?; it's focused but free; it's serious but never self-important. These are some of the smartest, funniest, most talented people I've ever met, and it's a blessing to be included in their company. We started at the Frost Place in New Hampshire, and developed our own conference from there. We just completed our third year together in this configuration, and we have the dates set for 2014. But the ins and outs of the way the week works (and it does work, beautifully) are not important to anyone but those of us who were there, and perhaps some of the people who love us.

If you've been reading, you know I've been struggling to come to terms with my cousin Turquoise's death last spring. I have had times of clarity and times of utter bafflement, been knocked down by how funny she was and how beautiful, been blindsided by waves of grief that come from nowhere in the middle of an otherwise pleasant encounter—while reading a book, say, or having a laughter-filled conversation with friends. It's been further complicated by the fact that Jed lost his dad almost exactly a year before Turquoise died—a death I also grieved, and continue to grieve, deeply. When Turquoise died, Jed found himself asked to relinquish his mourning in favor of mine—not a spoken request, not even an implied request, it was simply his understanding of what I needed. Neither of us was capable of fully making this switch, of taking on the roles in the grieving process into which we would have naturally fallen otherwise.

As a poet, the past couple of years have left me a little stranded. I spent an intense two months writing poems for Turquoise, as if I needed to get everything said as quickly and fully as possible despite the fact that time suddenly and terribly became a non-issue at some point during that process and the fact that I never had any intention of her reading them—though addressed to her, they are about my grief, not about her, and I wanted our last interactions to be about her, or at the very least about us. The writing was an internal drive, one that I didn't bother trying to understand or direct. And then I was done. The relatively few poems I've written since then are decidedly different from what I think of as my "regular" work—more sparse, more desperate, more exposed (as are the poems I wrote for Turquoise). I knew as I was choosing poems to bring to the workshop part of the conference that my recent work made my struggles clear in a way that I was not sure I was comfortable with, but I also knew that I trusted the people I'd be working with to respect the work, and to handle it with a view towards making it as strong as possible. Lesser poets, even—or perhaps especially—ones who love me as these poets do if such a thing is even possible, might have been intimidated by the task of doing justice to the material without hurting me on a personal, not artistic, level. Not these poets. Treating me like the dangerously fragile person I was trying not to become would have undone me, the way a hand placed in solace on an arm or a shoulder can make me cry when I am trying not to, only, I feared, in a much more fundamental and potentially permanent sense. I knew these poets would treat the poems not just as they should be treated, but as I needed them to be treated. And so I sent them. And when it came time to choose poems to read for the group, I saw again how stark I had become in my work, how much tension my poems held in an effort to contain grief and fears and my own conviction that some things needed to be spoken aloud (as it were), but that doing so had the power to unravel me beyond repair.

God, I've been depressed, I thought.

I spent an hour or so one afternoon sitting with a friend by the frog pond at the retreat center, talking poetry—his, mine, some of the work we'd seen in the workshop that day. As we talked, I realized that part of the difficulty I was having with these newer poems was my inability to distance myself from them in the way I usually can. I firmly believe that there is a clear and essential difference between the speaker of a poem and the poet, and that to assume otherwise is a recipe for disaster as a reader. I flaunt this belief as often as possible, creating personas who allow me to explore other perspectives—even the poems I have written about real events and real losses often contain lies or details included because they strengthen the poem, because they make the poem feel more honest even if they are not themselves honest. Those invented details are often enough to give me—the poet—a distance from the work. And I have poems where having a non-me speaker allows me to explore human failings in a way that I would not be able to if I had to rely on my own direct experience, again because it creates a distance between me and the page (and if you know me at all as a poet, you know that I do love me some human failings).

The poems I've written over the last year and a half or so do not contain this distance, and most of them have no persona, no "speaker" that I can point to and say, "That is not me." And when I realized this during the conversation—a realization that came almost simultaneously with the emergence of the words from my mouth, as if someone else were speaking for me—I was flooded with the enormity of the potential of what I'm doing now. I saw possibilities in the work I'd created, and the tiny cracks of insight that had been forming on my work as a whole as I try to craft it into a new manuscript began to widen with a ferocity that was a little intimidating but also comforting. I am high from the relief of it, from the sudden certainty of what I am doing (although the how of it continues to elude me, and might well do so until one day I realize that I've simply done it and how doesn't matter).

It was good to be with poets who know me and my work, and who honor in me things I don't always honor in myself. It was good, for example, to be shown the hope in my recent poems—hope I did not deliberately include and did not recognize. It was good to be returned—and allow myself to be returned—to the giddy creativity I'm capable of when I am in the right place at the right time, and when being in love with the universe feels right and true instead of like a burden that carries with it the constant awareness of the overwhelming potential for staggering losses. And, on a side trip while driving my friend to the airport, it was good to return to the ocean, to my ocean, to the place that has been the seat of much of my grief, yes, but also the place that has been my source. There is solace there again, and maybe even peace. Yesterday, as we climbed around on the rocks, picking up seashells and stones, there was even joy. At any time over the past two years or so, if you had told me I had forgotten joy, I would have said you were wrong. But I was the one who was wrong, as I learned repeatedly over this past week. As we were leaving the beach, my friend thanked me for sharing it with him, this place that is my home ground and unmistakably the home ground of my poetry, and I told him I used to bring all the people I loved there. So above everything else, it's good to be able to do that again. You come, too.

The More Things Change...

Today is the first anniversary of Turquoise's death. A lot has changed in the past year. A lot has remained stubbornly the same. Monday morning, for no reason I can pinpoint, I thought of last Easter, when I told some of Jed's family that Turquoise was dying—specifically, I thought of his brother, who despite my momentary calm immediately seemed to understand the vastness of this impending loss and put his arms around me. I remember the way that realization swept over his face, how quick it was, and how encompassing.

Then I remembered my mother's reaction, the previous year, to Turquoise's diagnosis. My parents were visiting from Florida when Turquoise sent me an email telling me that her cancer—which had disappeared from the original site after radiation therapy—had metastasized to her liver. Before I responded to the email, I looked up at my mother (a retired nurse) and asked her what she knew about secondary liver cancer.

"Not much," she said. "Why?"

"Turquoise," I said.

There was a brief pause, and then she said, "Oh, God."

That was the moment I knew that Turquoise was going to die.

It took me a while to figure out how I was going to deal with it, outside of trying to be supportive of her. I didn't realize, at first, how advanced her cancer was, and she didn't tell me. Even when I knew she was in serious trouble, she sent contradictory messages. One, about two months before her death, said that an MRI had come out great. In an email an hour or two later, she told me that there was nothing that medical science could do for her. I asked a couple of times during her last six months about coming out to see her after my classes ended ("late spring/early summer"). She didn't respond, and it wasn't until I went through the emails to make sure I had the details straight for this post that it occurred to me that maybe she didn't want to tell me that she didn't think she'd live that long (she did, but barely, and only because I'm on a college, not K-12, teaching schedule).

I would like to be able to say that I was focused on her, that I didn't contemplate my side of her illness until later. That would be a lie. Turquoise was my compass—part big sister, part bad influence, part inspiration, part troublemaker, part lifeline. We were often each other's chief supporter and chief competitor and, while it might have complicated some aspects of our interactions, we always understood where we stood with each other. We made each other laugh until we got sinus headaches. During the periods in her life when she struggled—and she did struggle, desperately and heartbreakingly—I foundered and, I suspect, let her down in ways and at depths I do not wish to contemplate, all because I didn't know how to bear her pain and didn't want to risk getting it wrong. I got it wrong.

I tell myself that I got enough of it right that the wrong doesn't matter, but I think that might also be a lie.

When I found out about Turquoise's diagnosis, Jed and I were about halfway through the first year following his father's death. We were both working our way through mourning together, and doing fairly well, relatively speaking—we had the usual ups and downs, but seldom at the same time, which meant that we could prop each other up when we needed to. I had discovered that the whole situation was easier if I focused on getting Jed through this, as if losing his dad were some kind of cave that I just needed to navigate him out of (and, I suppose, me with him). I knew at the time that this was bullshit thinking, but I also knew that if bullshit thinking was what it took to get us through the day-to-day for a while, it would have to do. Get up, get to work, get groceries, pay bills, walk the dogs. Lather, rinse, repeat. Jed was mourner-in-chief and I was second in command and my job was to take care of him. And then I got the email from Turquoise, and a thought began to form in the back of my mind as I processed my mother's reaction and started to research secondary liver cancer, and that thought was this: We can't do this now.

Helpful, right? I give myself credit for not fully giving in to it, but there it was. I had no idea how on God's green Earth we were supposed to do the things we needed to do in order to bear this situation, both of us in a grotesque yin-yang of mourning, each trying to balance our own grief at our loss with the perceived larger grief of the other's (because make no mistake, I grieve deeply for my father-in-law as Jed grieves for Turquoise). Hell, I didn't even know what those things were—how was I supposed to know how to do them?

Sometime after that thought arrived, I began to make decisions. I don't know how many of them were conscious, but they were in fact decisions. I've talked about a lot of them already, and I'll talk about more of them in future posts. They often came by degrees and they often concern eating or exercise or something I call "getting my head straight," although I'm not really clear on what that's supposed to mean, exactly. But they pretty much boiled down to this: I decided that if I didn't feel like I had any emotional strength, I could at least teach myself physical strength. I started walking, and then running, because I made, somewhere along the line, the decision to be physically strong, in large part so that I wouldn't be falling apart on both fronts.

I liked the way counting the running and walking intervals gave me something to focus on. I liked counting the push-ups and the crunches. Numbers were good. Numbers were not words. In the days following my father-in-law's death, I often felt like I couldn't bear language. I turned off NPR because the constant talking was almost physically uncomfortable. I turned off the local college radio station because I didn't feel like I could process anything new. The only thing I could stand to listen to was oldies—unsurprising melodies, comforting harmonies, lyrics so familiar that they were often stripped of meaning for me. When I came home from California, having seen Turquoise for the last time, I hit the oldies preset on my car radio. On the treadmill, I did pretty much the same thing with my iPod, and I counted, and I logged my progress, and the next day I did it again. I took days off when the schedule told me to. I took two days off when Turquoise died (I tried to work out on the first day, as part of my attempt to make something make sense in the world, but I don't think I lasted through the 5-minute warm-up). And then I got back on, moved my feet, listened to songs that were older than I was, counted. Counted some more. Kept counting.

It would be facile to say that Turquoise saved my life. It would imply, for one thing, that I was dangerously unhealthy because of my weight, which is not the case (although it very well may have become so). It also creates a single route through the cave, as it were—Turquoise died, and through her death I found a way to save myself. Call Lifetime and get me a film deal!—which is a terrible oversimplification. The fact remains that losing Turquoise could have killed me just as easily as it saved me. I could have turned to food, or followed the lead of so many of my family members and turned to alcohol or drugs. I could have nurtured and coddled my grief until it became depression. I'm not going to pretend I didn't struggle there—grief and depression are definitely on speaking terms, and I also don't mean in any way to imply that depression is something one can choose to allow or not. I'm just saying that I tried to deliberately take actions to prevent myself from becoming depressed. I tried to remain aware, and I asked a few people to keep an eye on me, and when they voiced concerns I took them seriously. A couple of days after Turquoise died, I started writing a list, every day, of five things that didn't suck, and posting that list on Facebook, and, eventually, here on this blog. That was June 1, and on May 31 of this year, I'll make the last regular FTTDS posting on Facebook (I'll still be here on the blog every day). For whatever reason, I ended up here instead of there, and I doubt I will understand the mechanism by which this occurred.

So now it's been a year, and everything is different, and nothing is. I weigh less. I eat better. I think some things through a little more. I'm more centered in some ways, less so in others. I run. Some days, it still brings me comfort to count, so I count. I have not yet figured out a way to put Turquoise into words in a way that satisfies me, so I have not yet eulogized her, even for myself. I have not yet discovered how to live in a world that does not contain her, despite the fact that I've been doing so for a year and will continue to do so for the rest of my life. That very notion still stuns me. I can still be smackdaddied by the enormity of what I have lost. There are times when I feel like I stepped out into the road with my back to a bus. There are times when someone makes a reference to a joke that Turquoise and I shared and it makes me laugh and laugh. And sometimes I realize that at some point I've begun to cry. And it's all okay. The day she died, and for days afterwards, I found myself repeating, "I'm okay, I'm okay, I'm okay," into an empty room, or to the dogs, or to Jed, or under my breath in the shower. I learned to keep saying it until it began to be true.

Five Things that Don't Suck, Turquoise Edition

Note: Today marks the first anniversary of Turquoise's passing. This list is full of things that she loved. I could write countless lists for her, because she was full of love, but I'm stopping at these (random) five.

1. the sea
2. beach glass
3. grapefruit (and basically the whole gamut of uses for grapefruit)
4. creativity in almost any aspect you can think of
5. Angela Lansbury

On Being an Inspiration

Note: When I started working on this post, I didn't know that I'd be posting it just a couple of days before the first anniversary of my first run. On May 14, 2012, I ran eight one-minute intervals, interspersed with 90 seconds of walking. I told myself that I would not quit until I could run a continuous mile. By the time that happened, there was no way I was going to quit. The following post isn't about that time, except in the ways that it totally is.

I'm going to change some names here—all of them but mine and Jed's—because this is a discussion about shame, and I don't want to shame anybody. I love the people involved, and I'm engaging in speculation, and it's best for everyone if we keep it private. At the same time, it is very much my story, and mine to tell at that. It's important, and I've been looking for ways to talk about it for a while now. In fact, I've given the daughter in this story my middle name—her mother might as well have been talking about me a year or so ago. And, now that I think of it, probably was. But, really, this conversation could have happened between me and any number of people, or between any number of other people about me.

The other day, a woman I know complimented me on my running, and mentioned her daughter. "I hope you'll talk to Ellen the next time you see her," she said. "Maybe you can inspire her."

I didn't really know how to answer this. It was supposed to be a compliment, an encouragement of me, an expression of pride in my accomplishments. But what I heard was this: "I hope you'll talk to Ellen because she's unacceptably fat like you were and now that you're not as fat, maybe you can help her decide to be less fat because I don't like how fat she is."

I wasn't even, at the time, upset about the implications for me ("You used to be unacceptable, too, and I'm so glad you're almost not unacceptable now."). All I could think about was Ellen who has, for various reasons that aren't terribly important to this part of the story, put on a good deal of weight in the past few years. I haven't always been fat, although I was often treated as such as a child, and I understand what it's like to wake up one day and realize that your body is out of your control. I also know what it's like to have people criticize me, be it to my face or behind my back or—my personal favorite—via some sort of backhanded compliment. I know what it's like to have people pause for a minute when they talk about other fat people around me. I know what it's like to have an awkward silence fill the room.

I should be clear about the fact that Ellen’s mom loves her—and loves me, for that matter. It’s not a question of love. It would be nice if unconditional love meant unconditional acceptance, but I’ve already talked about how unrealistic that is. Ellen’s mom loves her, and would be heartbroken to think she was hurting her in any way. She doesn’t see it as part of her nature to hurt anyone, much less her own children. But she does. She does hurt the people she loves, as we all do, as every person who has ever been loved has done since whenever humankind first stepped foot upon the Earth. It’s not pretty, but it’s true.

Fat in this country is treated like a moral failing, despite a 2010 CDC study which states that almost 70% of Americans are either overweight or obese. Even fat people condemn those who are fatter than they are, or are secretly grateful to not be the biggest person in the room (I suspect that if you've never surveyed a room full of people to determine whether you're the biggest person in it, you've probably never had a weight problem. Or maybe you're just way more comfortable with yourself than I will ever be. If that's the case, good on ya, as my friend Sugah says). Fat people laugh at fat jokes to prove that they’re not injured by them, and it perpetuates the idea that it’s okay to do so. After all, we are fat because we're uninformed. We are fat because we're lazy. We're fat because we're gluttonous. We're fat because we lack self control or impulse control or willpower.

Let me tell you this: the people I know—and there are a lot of them—who struggle with weight do not do so due to a lack of willpower. People with weight issues, both those who weigh too much and those who don't weigh anywhere near enough, have some of the strongest willpower I have ever seen. Problem is, it's not a question of will. It's far, far more complicated than that. Those of us who have unhealthy relationships with food are fighting a battle with a necessary substance. We cannot survive without it, plain and simple. One of the women I talked to while I was preparing this post told me she "loved it" (and even though we were chatting online, I could see the eye roll) when people said to her, "Just stop eating!" I told her she should tell them to just stop breathing. It simply doesn't work that way.  I believe this complication is one of the reasons why what I think of as "un-food" diets—plans that require pre-made meals or meal replacement shakes or some sort of appetite suppressant—are so popular. I believe—and I've asked a couple of them about this—it's also one of the reasons why some of the friends I have who chose bariatric surgery found success with that route. If we can remove food from our lives, the way an alcoholic can empty the contents of the liquor cabinet down the drain, then we have evened the playing field enough for our willpower to be enough. It’s also the reason why those plans and even surgical options, so often end up failing: we cannot exist without food, and the plans themselves don’t change our wiring. They can however, if participants are lucky, give us the space we need to do so.

After I had this conversation with Ellen's mom—whom I'm going to start calling Alice for no particular reason than that it's my own mom's middle name, and it'll help me keep the fake names straight—I said to Jed, "I hope Alice doesn't make Ellen feel like shit about her weight. But I think she probably does."

Jed agreed, and then said, "I never know what to say—to Ellen, to [one of our obese friends] Jacob. I didn't know what to say to you. I just kept quiet and hoped that you'd figure out a way to start taking care of yourself before it caused you any serious health problems."

And here's a longer, more detailed version of what I told Jed: There is nothing to say. I can talk to Ellen, and I probably will the next time I see her, about my own process and about the almost magical way I managed to get my own head straight. I can tell her about what I went through as I was starting my running program. I can tell her that I was never successful at figuring out my own relationship to food until I started eliminating processed foods (especially artificial sweeteners, but also frozen meats and factory-produced breads) from my diet. I can tell her about my constant battle against my own perfectionism and the various methods I have of letting myself know that I don't have to be great at everything: I only have to be enough. She might know all this already. She might read the blog. She might follow the posts on Facebook. I don't know. But I'm pretty sure she'll ask me about it, and when she does, if we have some time and maybe some privacy, I'll tell her about it.

What I can't tell her—and what trying to "inspire" her is sure as hell not going to help—is how to figure that part out for herself. My ability to figure it out as much as I have is a mystery to me, and I'm well aware that I could lose my grip on it at any time. I don't know how I put the various pieces together, how I somehow managed to take my stress and grief and turn it towards gaining control instead of mourning the control I was losing. I don't know why I turned to running in the face of Turquoise’s impending death, or why I continued to run after that death, and I don't know why this appears to be the time—after an entire life of trying to fix my relationship to food and my relationship to exercise—that it's sticking. I know what I have to do to hang onto it—keep with a program, be open about my exercise so that I'm accountable, continue to make conscious choices about what food I buy and what food I eat, repeatedly remind myself that success comes in accepting life as a normal person and that normal people sometimes take a day off or eat dessert. That food is neither reward nor punishment, that enjoying food isn’t a moral weakness, but that it also, most likely, is not the solution to whatever problem I may be facing at the moment. I also have to remind myself that it’s not all that much more healthy to replace a personality of food excess with one of exercise excess. Mostly, I try to keep in mind that I can have anything I want, but that doesn't mean I can have everything I want.

And I can commiserate with her about people—like her mom—who don't have an unhealthy relationship with food (or at least not in the same way we do), who make it clear by the way they approach us that they don't understand what our problem is or how it works. Because if they don't have a stake in this particular fight, then odds are good that they don't understand us at all. Maybe they think it's a matter of willpower or maybe they think that we're putting our own pleasure ahead of whatever the hell they think we should or maybe they're just so happy to be feeling superior to us in this one particular aspect of life that they don't really care about what we're experiencing. Maybe, like Jed, they are pained and keep silent anyway and wait.

I'm well aware that this won't be a popular stance, but I'll tell you this: that's the best thing they can do. Stay silent and wait. And I mean actual silence, not disapproving silence, not pointed silence, not the kind of silence where everyone involves knows what they're thinking. The other thing they can do is offer genuine support. Jed has never argued with me about keeping sweets out of the house, about rearranging our schedules for workouts, about how I eat or when I eat. He joyfully joins me for ice cream or some other treat on occasion, but never suggests it. He signed up for a 5K with me, and ran it, despite being unsure he would be able to finish (he finished). When he hugs me, he'll sometimes pause contemplatively and say, "Hm. Littler." And he has done this year after year, through various abandoned plans and regimens, for almost all the time we've been together. And the times when I've fallen off-track? He has voiced his concerns—gently, and in brief—and then he has returned to keeping his mouth shut.

So here is my advice for those of you who do not struggle, and for those of you who once struggled and have now figured your way out, and for those of you who are somewhere in the middle of the process: be loud in your support. Be vocal and cheerful and tell the people you love that you love them. Be the one place they can stand without judgment. Be proud of them for all the reasons you love them in the first place. Be honest (telling an obese person s/he is not fat doesn't do anyone any favors), but only when the conversation is opened to you. Be kind. And be that person for them for as long as it takes. Their task is difficult; yours is almost impossible, but it is desperately important.

I'll See You In My Dreams, For All The Good It'll Do

Well. I made a student cry this week. Sadly, it's not the first time. The first-year writing course I teach is called Writing About Multicultural Lives, so we get into a lot of stuff—religion, politics, money, gender roles, race…the list goes on and on—that tends to come with stories, personal stories. Whatever the students' views may be, I try to get them to look at the other side, even if I don't agree with it. Maybe especially if I don't agree with it. I want them to look more deeply at the world, more critically, and that's tough to do if they don't expand their outlook. The class attracts students from across the cultural spectrum, and is a particular draw for international students which, I think, benefits the American-born students as much as anyone else.

So we're starting to talk about myth this week—religion, super heroes, monsters, you name it. I make a point of saying that when I talk about faith as myth it's not because I'm trying to denigrate it; I was raised Episcopalian, and still identify as one, even though I have no idea when the last time was I stepped foot in a church that didn't involve someone getting baptized, married, or buried. That's a long tangent of a story, but the short version is that for various reasons I lost the church I grew up in, and never found another congregation that fit me the same way. All this to say that I approach faith, in the context of the classroom, as myth in order to keep it all on the same footing: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Greek and Roman myth—we're talking about the places they hold in our lives, not the faiths themselves most of the time.

At one point, the conversation turned to different views of the afterlife: the idea that our matter returns to the earth and ends up in something or someone else, as well as the question of what happens to the soul—and if a soul, as such, even exists, or if it's a way of talking about the electrical impulses in our brains combined with our own experiences and memories. Questions for the ages, questions that different faiths—or lack of faith—answer in different ways. And I mentioned Turquoise—that she had died less than a year ago, how terribly I missed her, and that sometimes, even though I know better, and even though she spent close to the last two decades of her life on the opposite side of the country from me, I still think I see her out of the corner of my eye. I turn my head, and the reality is sometimes comical—once, it was a tree; another time, it was my own reflection in a window at night; once it was an elderly man. And intellectually, I said, I know it's ridiculous. I know that she is not there. She died, and her body was cremated. It cannot, by any measure, be her.

And yet it is her.

For as long as it takes for me to turn my head to look at not-her, it is her, and she is there.

And I told the students this—briefly, even less eloquently—in an attempt to…I'm not sure what. Open a discussion about the ability for us to hold contradictory notions, for one thing. Help to describe one aspect of how complicated faith is, for another. Spend a little time thinking about how we hold it all, and how it shapes our ability to understand each other, and—yes, it's an ambitious 50 minutes—how we create what we think we want, be it through wanting others to share our beliefs in an attempt to convince ourselves that we're right or through creating our own comfort. It all tied together in ways I'm not articulating well right now. Themes that we've been discussing all semester, about identity and identification, about acceptance and attempts at understanding, about moving our world view past our own foreheads in the hopes that we'll gain a slightly better grasp of the world and what we believe to be our place in it, all of these themes came together in the way that I always hope will happen during the second half of the semester. And during it all, one young woman had started to cry.

I suppose it wasn't unexpected. She told me at the beginning of the semester that her father had died during the winter break, suddenly, in an accident that she didn't completely understand. And when I spoke of seeing Turquoise while simultaneously knowing that I couldn't possibly be seeing Turquoise, this student knew all too well what I meant. I apologized to her after class—seriously, the last thing I want to do is make a student cry—and she amazed me with how gracious she was about it.

One of the things she told me was that her father has been coming to her in dreams. She said, "They say that we need to say goodbye, and that sometimes that's what the dreams are, if someone dies suddenly. We need to say goodbye, and once that happens the dreams are supposed to stop."

Thing is, there is no "supposed to." I wish there were some sort of schedule, that I could say, "Okay, it's been three (or four or a thousand) months, and now this part is over and this new part starts." And I told her that, as if it would help anything at all, as if she didn't already know. By the time she left the room, she seemed to be okay. But I know she's not.

I want all this to circle around somehow. I want to be able to tell you that I brought that student comfort, and that in doing so I found some of my own. Or that the times when I’ve seen Turquoise in dreams—especially in the dreams that leave me happy, as if we’ve just had a long visit—are helping me to understand what happened to her or what my life is supposed to be like without her. Or that I've somehow reconciled myself to seeing Turquoise in places where she cannot be, or even to the fact that she cannot be there. She is everywhere, she just is. She is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, and I haven't quite figured out what to do with that.