Kiss the Corpse: Finding A Novel

Yesterday.

Built of water and desert, I was in that place every artist I’ve ever met dreads. The what the hell do I do next? place.  I’ve been pushing rising acid down for months now. Just keep polishing what you have, I told myself. Something will come. It has to. The best thing I can say to those who are perhaps starting out in art school, no matter the form, whether on the graduate or undergraduate level, is that you have to get cozy with uncertainty.

It’s not like I haven’t generated new work this summer. I worked on an essay I’m currently sending out into the world. I revised and finished my first novel. I continue polishing it. I’ve started sending out queries to agents with some promising results. In August, I wrote 6 flash stories with potential, one of which I had a crush on. I don’t know if it’s normal to have a crush on something at this early stage, but for a month now, I thought, it was just that. The piece would exist in its 920-word form. I didn’t take the story seriously as anything with long-term prospects.

But like a facial tick, the big bad totem, the fiend, the shriveled cynical madwoman who looks, in my head, like the dead woman Jack makes out with in The Shining, kept showing up. “But what about your next novel? What if this is all you have? What if the first novel got all the good stuff and you’re scraping the bottom of your brain barrel from here on out? Succumb. Give in. Kiss the corpse.

Yesterday.

Middle of the beach sand. Not too wet. Not too dry. The right temperature underfoot. No hangover. Rain. Leaves. Chores. I had no ideas. I submitted a few short shorts. I received a complimentary and personal rejection from a major literary agent. I knew this didn’t happen often. Wilting, I went back to one of the flash stories, pulling at its strings, picking at its scabs. Cutting paragraphs. Inverting sentences. Changing verbiage. I tried to get my head around a smell I couldn’t describe. I’ve always wished I could paint. I think some things cannot be expressed through written language. It hovers just above. But I found a sequin in it. I could see handprints in dust on furniture in an abandoned house. And about that time, I had to stop.

I had to go to the doctor for follow up blood work. Damn. Being a lazy vegetarian for 20 years has left me with an Iron deficiency that must be monitored. I do, however, have a tendency to faint when open wounds, blood, or needles are involved.  It’s a good thing I don’t live in a time period when women were expected to wear corsets. I’ve even garnered a concussion or two from this unfortunate trait. My faints also include convulsions. Good times for everyone. I did okay at first. Tiny veins or not, the nurse thought she had it. With my head turned to the side, another nurse asked, “What do you do for a living?”

Tough question. I don’t make a living, but I still claim my profession as writer.

“What do you write?” he asked.

“I wrote a novel. I write short stories. Fiction, mostly.”

“What are your stories about?” he asked, squatting so he could look up at me.

“I have no idea,” I said.

The needle wiggled in my vein.

“This one’s not allowing me any blood. Gonna have to try another.”

“Keep talking to me,” the guy said. “Look at me. Breathe. Nose. Mouth. Breathe.

“I’m getting really dizzy now.”

Nose. Mouth. Nose. Mouth. Nose. Mouth.

Black.

Sounds faraway moved in. Climbing out from whatever hovers beneath, when the blood drains, I saw the male nurse. All white. A lot of other faces. Somebody held my head in their hands.

“We’ve got you,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

“My ears are ringing.”

I’d passed out with the needle in my arm. My blood smeared down my arm, on my shirt, and collected in a small puddle on the tile floor. After he was satisfied that I was okay, my doctor walked me to my car.

Yesterday.

The Unchained Tour started in a little less than two hours. Artists known from The Moth like Peter Auguero and Edgar Oliver, in addition to the ever-popular Neil Gaiman were part of the night of storytelling. In the darkness, I fell into their words. I did not kiss the corpse.

In a gathering, we puddle into each other.

Listening to these artists tell true stories about sad Christmases, a drawer filled with the sea, losing dreams, and falling in love –without props or decoration from memory jarred something loose.

Word. Story. Sound. Collective longing.

The audience was invited to sign up for a lottery to come up on stage and tell a one-minute story. I put down my double fisted red wines, signed my name, folded the paper, and dropped it in the suitcase.

I was not called.

The act mattered.

Today.

I woke giddy, but still sort of a watery image of myself –from crawling out of the black and into others’ voices.

I walked Desmond and Mae. Persimmon trees full. Close to bare Cherry Trees. Dry skin. Sore, blue arm. Nina Simone. Fleetwood Mac. The XX. The Decemberists. Kate Bush. Walking in rhythm. Grass clippings. Churchyard. Cold feet. A Carolina blue autumn sky that shredded every part of me.

I found novel number two. It’s in the 920-word story. I’m not finished with this character. He has more to say. And so do his friends. Self-taught/outsider Southern artists. Let the research begin. Let the slow, glorious process of excavating this story begin.

If you or someone you know is a self-taught/outsider artist, please send me contact information. Of course, I will be conducting plenty of secondary research, but I am looking to get down and dirty with first-hand research as well. Interviews. Apprenticeships. Observations. While I’m open to all art forms, (writers, musicians, cooks, visual or performing artists) I am particularly interested in art that works with found objects. Artists can be either known or unknown, but must have some sort of Southern affiliation.

http://theunchainedtour.org/

A Sandstorm Settles

In an effort to understand the settling sandstorm that has been my MFA program, I have ignored writing and reading for the most part for the past few weeks. I have spent my time trying to reawaken my body to the pleasure of tender muscles by planting growing things. Tomatoes. Green Beans. Bread-seed Poppies (which are the kind of purple that make your knees weak). Sweet Basil. Dill. Sage. Jalapeños and a few other things I’m not sure will cooperate. I’m going to buy a few plants from the farmers’ market every weekend. I will try to plant something every Monday. This is only second summer in this house and the first I’ve had to devote any time to playing in the dirt.

I have prepped soil with cow manure. I piled stray bricks around my garden beds. I still hope to get a rain barrel and start composting. But right now, I’m focusing on getting things planted.

I have also been walking my Border collie and my Papillion –both of whom have put on a little extra chunk since before I started my MFA program. If it hadn’t been for Nature Writing last spring, I probably wouldn’t have ventured outdoors at all. Thanks to Mel Fox for a wonderful class –for reminding me that being in the natural world was a vital part of my creative process. I start each day now with a walk, followed by gardening, and then I fiddle with these pesky words. This is the life I have always wanted, and somehow, I’ve managed to create it.

At the end of this intense few years, I meditate on what I’ve wrought with the thesis project (now novel project) and others and from whence these creatures sprung.

I started traveling early in school. I was a total geek, into history and all the academic clubs. With that, came travel, and my world expanded beyond the South, beyond Charlotte and the neighboring Union county, beyond fields and forests and roadside vegetable stands and playing in the back of my grandpa’s truck. It was a world beyond shucking corn and snapping beans. Between travel and the other worlds of books, I grew to hate my surroundings. The more I learned about the South, the more I hated it and longed for escape. But I never got away. There was always some reason to stay. I had a lot of resentment. But over the years, I started to realize I appreciated a great deal about my upbringing, my story. By the time I was accepted to the full res program at Chatham, I was ready to leave, but sad to go. But circumstances kept me in Charlotte. I realized I would probably never leave the South. And once I got to the ten-day residency in Pittsburgh at the start of my first semester, fellow students from Pennsylvania and beyond encouraged me to embrace this apparently quirky and edgy Southern sensibility of mine.

I guess sometimes you need to be immersed with people with different stories to really see your own.

I had told a new friend in the program, “I don’t want to write Southern fiction.” People looked down on it from my perspective. I don’t like genre and sub-genre titles. They seem to limit understanding and audience. Fiction is fiction. Good writing is good writing; there’s no need to get snobby about categories. Yet, the more I studied myself and Southern fiction, the longer I worked on this project, the more I realized there was something going on here that I wanted to be a part of –that I was made to be a part of –and that is this affinity for malaise, history, hope, food, rebellion, and the illustrious beauty of all these Southern subcultures.

Southern fiction is nuanced.
I am nuanced.







My friend said, “But you’re so Southern,” and finally, it clicked. How did I not see it? What arose from this was an attempt to illustrate both the uniqueness and the universality of characters in the South and to come to terms with the fact that I would probably never escape and that maybe, the most frightening aspect of all, that I no longer wanted to. My thesis/novel is my attempt to capture these emotions and the complexity of emotions that goes along with growing up here –the intense pressure on women in particular and the fragmentation and desire to find home that comes with being an exile. Exile is a term that can encompass more than just geographical exile as Salman Rushdie says. Exile is a state physical and emotional, present and past. I traverse these lines with this project and find it as the general backbone of longing to my nonfiction and poetry as well.

While I originally intended to construct my thesis as a collection of interrelated stories, the committee kept telling me to resist defining it along the way. I wanted to force it to fit a construction –a mosaic, if you will and in my mind I saw only one way to do that –through linking stories; however, the longer I worked, the more the same voices kept speaking. They had more to say and more to work out than I originally imagined. The themes circled around this feeling of exile in a universal way. It was about being exiled in the land from which you hail. About being exiled from faith. About being exiled from family. From history. From self. And trying to reconnect on all those levels, pulling all those threads together. It is about unraveling and trying to repair the fabric. In the end, I hope this work will act as a meditation on what it means to tackle the emptiness and desire for connection that goes with not only being Southern, but being human.







I believe I have accomplished what I set out to, despite the fact that it was not my intent to write a novel. I remember Sherrie saying she thought I might be afraid of the novel and I guess I was. I guess the idea of staring down something in that long of form was intimidating, but I found myself having to rein it in by the end. I had two more chapters and a prologue more than I needed. I guess that shows I have passion for these characters and my subject matter. I think my characters have come to life. I can see them clearly. I can hear them. I almost live in their all-encompassing world. Reality eludes me but the fictional family and friends created in this text have become a solace for me –my own little made up community of friends. Before I started this project and my MFA program, I was afraid to face certain aspects of my personality, my past, my family and my place. I can honestly say that I wrote without abandon. I lifted the veil and never put it down. As Matthew Weiner, the creator of Mad Men once said, “I am just as much Betty as I am Don.” For the first time in my life, I am comfortable in my own skin. That is because of this project.

I also believe that I have entered the larger conversation of what it means to write Southern fiction, to be Southern, to exist in this strange new world that is just as much megastore, strip mall as it is steeped in history and tradition. The South is getting homogenized. I am interested and think I have captured aspects of the South that carry on. That overwhelming sense of duty to family, the special connection we feel to the land and to place, and the cultural scars which leave a sort of self-loathing, guilt-ridden and angry sickness over its people. The malaise, which seems to be fed to us with our cornbread and beans. I believe I have captured the aftereffects of trauma. My book is a ripple.

In writing my thesis and continuing the work as a novel project, I have learned I can sit down and face the demons everyday and come away better for it. I can create. I can focus. I can move the camera in and pull it back. I can write a sentence. I can write a paragraph. A chapter. I can write over 200 pages with the same characters. I can figure out plot. I can figure out metaphor and symbol and subtext. I can meditate on words for hours. I can still drive a car and be in my novel world. I can make myself cry with my work. My work can piss me off. My characters can do things I don’t expect and behave in ways that make me want to smack them.

I can drink more than I thought.
I can completely block out the world as long as I have headphones.
I can read the whole thing out loud.
I can edit on my walls.

I have learned to fully embrace the social aspect of writing. Nothing happens in a vacuum and so many people have helped me along the way. It’s much easier to write when you have support from family, friends, and colleagues. I’ve learned sometimes you have to write a chapter even if you cut it immediately thereafter. It helps you understand character. Above all, I have learned that we are all characters just trying to make our way. I’ve found my place. It’s in fiction. To quote one of my favorite books on my reading list, Cavedweller, “Rot was not what Cissy saw. Consummation, the slow alteration of what people thought they knew, that was what Cissy saw in the cave” (Kindle location 4810). That is what I see when I look back at this project –the slow alteration of what I thought I knew about my environment and myself.

Kale and Cheese: Reasons to Get Up Early

I am a lazy vegetarian. I don’t mean to say that I slack off and sometimes land mouth first on a slab of bacon; no, I mean I grab a croissant while slurping down cup after cup of coffee and maybe, if my husband and I are lucky, I’ll make dinner. I buy organic produce from my big box store or if I’ve massaged my writer’s brain into a near catatonic state, I might even make instant soup. Dried potato squares. Powdered cream. Just add water.

I get involved with my work. I neglect food and sleep.

At my doctor’s behest, I strive to be a better vegetarian. I started going to farmers' markets on the weekends. Atherton Mill Market was my first because it stays open later than the others. There, I discovered Chapel Hill Creamery and their fresh farmer’s cheese. As soon as I get home, I cut off three soft hunks and dollop raspberry preserves on top. It’s as close as I can get to the cheese I had in Turkey last summer. This cheese gets me motivated.

This Saturday, I am up and in line at Starbucks by 7:45. For a crotchety writer, this is no small feat. Since I read Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, I am back on the serious end of being a vegetarian. I had almost forgotten the reasons I quit eating meat 19 years ago. I remind myself that industrial food is unhealthy and inhumane as I shiver walking out behind Renfrow Hardware to the Matthews Farmers' Market and pull my thin jacket tight. I forget how cold it can be so early in the morning in March.

The sun hits the white tents. The grass wets my feet. I have my giant reusable bag, my husband’s camera around my neck and I’m suffering from an overwhelming sense of shyness (otherwise known as the morning grumpies). It’s just so quaint. I’m too pissy for quaint at this time of day.

But the market works its charms. A young girl looks at me taking pictures, says, “Mommy, she’s got a camera. It’s cool.” Her chocolate-covered face softens me. I notice the chocolate chip muffin in her hand. I stand back a bit. I see fresh herbs, dried tomatoes, and some frilly lettuces at the Hot Pepper Herb Farm stand. The scent of oregano and rosemary settles my shoulders. I buy tomatoes and lettuce.

I walk over to Nut Hill Farm’s stand where I see a table full of leafy greens, radishes, green onions and parsley. Jim Mundorf mans the table. He tears leaves off kale, mustard greens, and spinach for me to try. He hands the kale to me stem first, says, “You won’t believe how tender this is.” Despite the cloak of coffee on my tongue, I take a bite. It is crisp and mildly bitter. For the first time in my life, I buy kale. I think of my grandfather’s coarse hands as I look at Jim’s. I relax some more.

When I turn around, I see the baked goods stand. A young boy and his dad buy a treat. I’m guessing it’s a bribe for being up so early on a Saturday. I buy two chocolate chip muffins myself. “You a photographer?” the lady asks.

“No, I’m a writer,” I say, “working on a piece about the market.”

“I tell ya, I’m glad to see more people caring about where their food comes from these days,” she says, handing me change.

I try to engage but I go quiet thinking of my grandmother. She’s in the hospital. She’s nearing the end of her life. Her bones are powder. She is malnourished. I think of mornings at her house, the pancakes she made me in the iron skillet, the vegetables from the garden she and my grandfather worked together. I should have had her teach me how to can, to preserve. I am powerless.

I must take better care of my husband and myself.

I stand in line for pastured chicken; he’s agreed to avoid factory-farmed junk.

In my grandparents’ generation, they went to the butcher or raised the animals themselves. I worry over our disconnection with food. Wendell Berry said, “The industrial eater is, in fact, one who does not know that eating is an agricultural act, who no longer knows or imagines the connections between eating and the land, and who is therefore necessarily passive and uncritical - in short, a victim.” I would add to that, perhaps, these are willful victims. I am trying to be an advocate. I do this by putting my feet on the floor earlier than I would like and supporting local farmers.

Later, I tell my grandmother about my morning. I think she understands.

Matthews Farmers' Market only sells products that are made or grown within 50 miles of Matthews, NC.

For further information:

http://www.matthewsfarmersmarket.com/

http://www.chapelhillcreamery.com/