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/

Nature Poems: Final Revisions (For now)

The Trouble with Charlotte

A rage in her center, she pulses,

beats outward, veins reach

the wilds of South Carolina

a city willfully bellows,

sucks air in

scratches our throats

in flat lines and hill sides

in four wheels and Escalades

On the bank side

North side oozes cholesterol, thick

ozone and particulate matter,

erect heads, not even pestering

carpool lanes to IBM, Wells Fargo,

Bank of America

spreading, sprawling,

like a galaxy of half walls and gray carpets

scented with blue shirt starch,

steam rises from chain restaurants

while lifting burnt forests with a ball point pen

so upper-middle class homeowners

can drive forty-five minutes to Brazilian

steakhouses that fly seafood in.

Sink a fork into eighty-three pounds per person

vehicular emissions

South side bides its time in country clubs

licking up tidbits of the sewage treatment plant

over by the mall

and carrying the 3,325 pounds of waste

per annum, per body,

per Pottery Barn home delivery.

East side dredges up the past, talks about roads

and mass transportation and needing

a way out,

a way in,

abandoned store fronts down

Independence Boulevard,

riddled with squatters and dealers and

the last lonely head shop in a strip of

former drug stores and mom and pop diners.

West side gentrifies, newly develops, props

better government housing,

puts a fresh coat of paint on re-use, mixed-use,

smart-use development, writes its spin,

a small town kid wanting to be “world class,”

desperate to fit in

the trouble with Charlotte is

all that breeding and importation

of the bodies and the breaths of

those born here or north or west and looking

for a better way of living.

The Pavilion

Resting on the rear rock wall

where old movies are shown in summer—

Cary Grant slaps women,

Marilyn skulks in throaty whispers,

slipping in and out of great plumes

of smoke and depression—

my legs numb at the knee.

I sit cross-legged, shielded from rain

Watching from inside this frame of arches

a place ordinarily viewed from picnic blankets

On the hill side, under night skies of chardonnay and pinot;

no movement on yellowed grass,

no swallows perched on stripped branches,

a quiet unease

envelopes cracked stage floors

I wrap my fists in my sweater and think of you—

a wink and in a moment

the filter was removed and I bent

with you into the queasiness of presence

under the clapboards of rain and echoes

into droplets on the squirrel’s back

and the pecan shells falling.

The Coats of the Imperials

-for TC Boyle

We used to make terrariums

up in the Blue Ridge

before my father’s weekends

stopped coming;

we’d look for mosses

and salamanders, how to arrange,

create pools, place the British Soldier

in the glass ecosystem,

my fingertips pressing earth,

careful not to smush their spears.

He is with me

on this blunted mountain,

this sweaty February day,

he is the absence of that British

soldier lichen, crimson-tipped,

the coats of the imperials

I have been looking

all these years now

but this

canno’t survive

the cities—

this Cladonia christatella,

is rare to perk is tilted head.

But I cannot find salvation in the trinity,

My hands shake to cradle the wild—

an injured dove, its snapped leg,

hunkered in holly branches, I break

down into the bleak skies,

shoulders hunched, feet tucked.

Yet TC Boyle sits on a metal chair

in red socks, looking like

an 80s rock star so there must

be some kind of hope

A thing, a mighty thing

Singing in the last of us

To know lions.

A Bridge

I can still taste

the tail end of winter,

feel its fur

swirl in my mouth,

wood smoke in my tonsils,

feel the engineer’s hands working

in stone’s rise and fall;

chills soak through my legs

a bluebird calls tur-a-lee,

a magpie preens

At the horizon, the gravel road curves

Footprints stain sand

but my feet grow mortar, dig in

thinking of the old man

in a sea hat,

whose ears sweat,

encased in Sherpa,

Arrested by his leafy, salt smell

his jowls, his thickened pink nose

I go guttural, stumble over vowels

of protest, tell him no,

I’m not coming to the wedding.

A Glimpse

Barely twenty,

skinny, with a hymn

of golden brown skin.

She says to me,

as she looks me over,

you don’t have children,

do you?

My hips are not swollen

neither are hers, she says

I could never feel her pain, I

see her fingernails

chewed down to the quick.

She tells me her breasts are engorged,

She hasn’t released since 7 o’clock—

It’s nearing 9pm.

I glance down,

looking for circles of wet

nothing shows

behind her uniform.

Jealous of her ease of talk,

I glimpse this club of mothers

for a moment

I am part of it, this femaleness

but then I remember

what could be a nursery

is a cat room.

Staving It Off

She’s had this colostomy

Since I was a girl

Folded at her leg

Pinned tight against the skin.

I can’t imagine what it is to

Carry that stuff with you

For all to see its bulge

Smell its smell

Hear the air bubble leak

And the need to plan

Trips to the grocery store

To McDonalds

How to buy underwear

When the racks are filled

With thongs and bikinis.

I watched her cleaning

The open wound when I was young

Before I knew the anxiety

And thought it was just something

Grandmother’s had.

I wondered if I’d get one, too

So I paid attention to the

Way she applied the glue

How she snapped the belt

When she finished.

Thirty-three years of this

But without it she’d

Die slow and painful

Gutshot by her own organs

Trying to escape.

To the Turkey

I held their difference like cotton,

Mesmerized by their simple lifestyle

Until your time came.

I wish I could tell you,

how I swore then to give up meat

when you hung

by your feet, tied

to a thick branch, a bare forest,

feathers flying from the struggle

on this Thanksgiving spent with

a family of artists and teachers,

Jewish and living above

the father’s glass-blowing studio,

compact and soda free

his beard, his hand, veiny and exact

the knife to your throat,

the jerking, the quieting, the stillness,

the syrupy red puddle, steaming

but I didn’t realize then the poverty,

the connection between your body

and their salvation.

There is life, still

In your belly licked clean of fur

In your rough patch of skin

Where the needles go

In your snow washed feet

And lioness blaze

In your hazy jade eyes

In your missing teeth

And pungent gums

In your doctored paws

In your puckered cheeks

And striped tail

In your glucose levels

In your black pads

And brownish pink nose

And keratin coated tongue

In the brown spot on your hind leg

In your scabby skin

And your half tongued meow.

The Smallest of the Tiny

Your brown eyes and wisped tail

Make me want to believe,

To recognize divinity,

Sanctity in your climbing,

Your presence on that branch, solidified

In the crinkled leaves and busy creek

In the smell of fresh water,

Metallic and mossy.

I want to speak to you

The milkweed, silken filaments

rounded, sticky, toxic,

And the creek’s spacious trellis

of sediment catchers

Along the banks

The rocks: human-placed,

Reticent against the currents

That I have lost my faith in greater things

And put it in the smallest of the tiny

In the pool that holds two mallards

Looking out for each other,

Taking turns tucking their beaks,

Pacing the rim, standing

On one webbed foot.

But you chickadees—

Your minute bodies

Your chirp, your black cap, your gray

Your fee-bee-fee-bay,

Your stillness, your rootedness,

Your charity, your dive and return

Test my failing faith like humans

At the fourth wall, flailing, climbing,

Begging to get in.

Prompt Blog #8: Considering the Impact

When I started this class, I had read little nature writing outside of Thoreau and Emerson. Over the course of this semester, we encountered a range of voices more diverse than I would have thought possible. From the lyric to the cantankerous, the serious to the comedic. Through the process of these readings and the writings here on this blog, I have learned to slow down and notice the small things. I think Pattiann Rogers had the most profound impact on me. She broadened my idea of what nature and nature writing are and could be; it is everything. I have become a great fan of her poetry and I hope to do similar types of work. I appreciate the brutal honesty of her work. I have found that I really love the nature poem in all its vastness and smallness. One can say so much in a nature poem. I hope I have with mine. In my fiction, I have started using more description of weather and small things as well. One of my toughest characters is beginning to soften her edges by being outdoors, hoeing the garden and planting seedlings. Birds are making their way in to my stories. My stories are becoming more alive.

I have learned to appreciate Charlotte for what she has -a canopy of trees nearly unparalleled by other cities. This project has helped me to accept our move back here. It has helped me wash away a lot of the negative attitude I had about being in Charlotte by connecting me with the physical world here. I have learned to love the quiet spaces and the urban nature that surrounds me. I have learned that Freedom Park is not just a social gathering place. It has moods, shades, aspects when you stop to pay attention. When I started this project, I thought I knew the place already. After all, I had grown up in Charlotte and I have memories at the park from childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. But Freedom Park had been a relative I saw on holidays or special occasions; it wasn't a relationship, not really. Now, I know I can go there on a weekly basis to help myself stay grounded, to relieve anxiety, to appreciate the joy of being alone or being among sunbathers and guitar players, caterpillars or ladybugs, squirrels and geese. Yesterday, I felt closer than ever to my place. Two mallards came up out of the water and walked right up to me. This was after I wrote my blog in the hours I stayed there, reading my book about Turkey, pondering what's to come on the next adventure. I knew I would be picturing that moment as I walk on shores half a world away in a few weeks.I will think of the sound of leaves rustling. I will think of the honking of geese. I will think of the wide reach of the willow oaks, of the way the cherry trees looked in March. I won't give up this relationship. I will maintain it.