Blog Post 9: 3/19/15

This week has been very filled with insomnia and sleep. The yin and yang of life sometimes. I find that when I go many days without sleep, my writing becomes a haze of nonsense that I can only begin to decode after the crash happens. I write and write and write no matter what, just to keep myself flowing through life, and then make sense of it all later when I am more coherent. I have found that it's interesting to write in all different states of consciousness; when tired, when awake, drunk, mad, sad, happy. I produce such drastically different pieces of writing in each different emotional state. Playing with that helps me figure out what kind of writing style I have so I can easily transfer thoughts from each state into different pieces of writing. I guess it's a perspective thing. This week was the bathhouse event. Unfortunately I couldn't go because I had to work and I really wish that I could have. Instead of going, I looked through both of the featured poet's writings and explored them a little bit. Today I am going to talk about each of the poets.

CA Conrad is a very intersting fellow, with even more interesting pieces of work. He has completely lived off his writing, which I find really amazing. Most writers must get a second job because writing can't ALWAYS pay the bills, but CA Conrad has done just that. He has forcefully immersed himself into the world of writing and creating, and I think he has been rather successful about it. One of the most interesting things I have come across with him, is his use of SOMAtic writing exercises. These exercises intertwine the body and the mind and ask for a lot of strange actions. The idea is to connect the mind with the body and for you to use the experience of doing the exercise as a creative outlet. He also gains creativity from writing the exercise. It's like a complete process from start to finish. I read an interview about these exercises, and a lot of what he had to say was really amazing. He finds inspiration in everything, and his creativity is a form of his own protest. A quote that he said that I really liked was: "Creativity is our only true revenge. Being creative is the revenge against all the bastards trying to break the spirit of our fellow humans." This is so true to me. Being creative is also being comfortable. Allowing yourself to give in and caring less about the judgement you may or may not receive. Creativity should have no judgement.

Dawn Lundy Martin was the other poet speaking at the bathhouse event. I also really liked her poetry when we read some in class. Her style is one that I really like. Intentional breaks and lots of spacing. In the one of the poems called 'The Morning Hour", she uses brackets in between some of the lines. I like this because it is sort of an intentional thought space. It shows how she developed her poems and what kind of thoughts took place. I also think it goes nicely with the poem because it is about the morning, when our thoughts are often jumbled and out of focus. This whole poem really reminds me of the morning. Even when she is talking about things that don't relate to the morning. There are two sets of lines that I particularly enjoyed. One was on page 32; "What is familiar is the warm spice of a girl oiled in lavender". This line has so much imagery and I can almost taste the spice of the lavender on the tip of my tongue. It reminds me of my grandma, who always smells of lavender, and of the balm she would rub onto our cuts and bruises when we were little. I love imagery of scents, because they seem to stick in your mind better than any thought. It's like tasting something you haven't had in a long time, it takes you back to the last time, and you can remember like it was yesterday. The other set of lines I really liked was on page 33; "The footsteps are wet. Desire is wet. Is going step by step- the ash trail is wicked. The thicker wept." I love the way it flows when you say it out loud. It really flows, and the rhyming gives it really good dynamics. I also like the sentence 'Desire is wet'. It's the truth to me. Desire is something that makes you salivate. You want, you crave. Desire is there to hold you and not let you go. It is what you don't have and will make you sweat until you do have it.

This week was a challenge for me, but none the less challenge makes you a stronger person. Therefore, my writing is strongest in the toughest times. I want to develop my writing a lot more. It all feels really incomplete, so hopefully I can grow and be able to let my pieces grow with me.

Blog Post 8: 3/12/15

This week we read two new short stories, and worked some more on creating our own.  We were given some postcards of different places and told to write about them, and then create a story from that.  I wasn't here during the day we were given the postcards, so I chose some off the internet that I liked.  The one I chose to write my story about was from Wichita, Kansas.  I'm going to talk about the short stories that we read, and one of the stories I created.  

The first short story we read was from Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo.  The story follows a little girl who likes to play the fiddle in her own way.  She refuses to get lessons because she likes the way it sounds when she plays random sounds in her own way.  Her mother is not fond of this and doesn't allow her to play in the house unless she has proper lessons.  This doesn't stop little Indigo and she keeps on teaching herself how she wants.  She ends up finding success in this, and plays at a local business her own tunes.  When she plays songs written by other people, she never gets the same reaction that she gets when she plays her own made up songs.  She is also African American at a very bleak time period.  She realizes through her experience with the public that it's tough to grow up when you are African American.  This makes her want to get rid of her dolls so they don't have to grow up and experience what she deals with.  The story really shows her character and what kind of person she is with very few details.  We know from how she refuses to learn the fiddle properly that she is stubborn and stuck in her ways.  We also know that she has a very strong personality, based on how she interacts with other children her age.  Her mother can see this, and I think in the story it is sort of implied that the mother is the same way.  She is harsh and set in her ways about her daughter getting the lessons she needs.  I like this aspect of the story because it feels very much like real life.  We learn and mirror our parents, so it makes sense that she would be this way.  This story really gives good character details as a whole, without actually describing.  I'm starting to get used to this when I write my own stories.  It's just so much more effective if you want a captivating story.  

The other short story we read was called Night Women.  It is about what we assume is a prostitute mother who works at night in her home while her son sleeps.  The house is described as small and damaged, and we can tell she is dependent on her work for survival.  Her son is also assumed young based on many of the details in the story.  There are a lot of sexual references, even on things that wouldn't necessarily be seen as sexual.  There are a lot of things you can tell about her character in this story.  She talks about love in a very abstract way, so I can tell that she doesn't have a traditional view on love and marriage.  Also, you can tell by the way she describes her life that she doesn't like what she has to do, but also feels kind of ok about it because she knows she is doing it for the right reasons, as in having a son.  There are lots of poetic "magical" images as well, which to me show that she is kind of in a dream state with her life.  She wishes for better and can imagine better, but it doesn't seem to ever be there unless she is with her son or telling him about life.  It's almost as if she believes what she is telling him.  I liked this story a lot, because the stark details were very beautiful.  Even if something wasn't particularly 'good', the way it was described was vivid and imaginative.  I was particularly captivated by a line on page 86 "My fingers coil themselves into visions of birds on his nose.  I want him to forget that we live in a place where nothing lasts".  To me this describes the story's meaning as a complete whole.  

I wrote a story about a girl who has a damaged mother who moved to Wichita, Kansas to get away from all of her problems, including the girl.  She is left with all the blowout that her mother left her.  Her father left long ago and she doesn't know where he is.  I haven't gotten too far on the story yet, but I want it to be her journey to her father.  I added lots of little details about the mother without saying too much.  I described her lifestyle, and how it affected the main character.  There's so much I can do with this story, so I'm hoping in our small groups I can get some more ideas.  I choose to write about hard situations because i have a lot of experience in my life dealing with hard times, so it feels good to be able to write out on paper how it feels.  It's very different on paper than in your head.  I feel like you can't really effectively write about something you haven't you yourself experienced.  You might be able to capture a little bit of certain elements, but it won't feel real.  There are certain little details that you see and feel when it is actually happening to you.  I can't wait to get through this story and try and take it somewhere.  

This week was very powerful for my writing.  I didn't get very far, but the ideas are really flowing and I can finally see how to develop a character without listing out details.  I think by the end of this class I will just be getting started as a great writer.  To me that's a very good thing.  I want to feel very improved by then.  

Blog Post 7: 3/5/15

This week we were asked to write and share our own stories, and to read a new one called "The Girl With The Blackened Eye".  As we are moving forward with fiction and all of the elements to a good short story, I am really starting to see how best to put my ideas to use.  I never really thought about how to write a short story, I always just went with my gut.  This can be good sometimes, but I am really liking knowing some different techniques.  When we were asked to write a story, we used a fiction exercise to get our ideas flowing.  I am also getting really good ideas from the various short stories that we have been reading.  They have shown me that a story has many different definitions and ways it can go.  The Girl With the Blackened Eye was very different from what I am used to reading, but I really enjoyed it.  It's really weird to me that something painful sounding and terrible could be so good to read.  I'm going to talk about the short stories I have been working on and "The Girl With the Blackened Eye".

The fiction exercise that we did in class asked us to describe a place, emotion, and thing without saying what it is.  This was way harder for me than I thought.  I liked it though, because it gets the brain in the habit of using show instead of tell to describe things.  It also really got a lot of ideas in my head about what kind of story I was going to write.  When I did the exercise, I sort of wrote each thing in some form of prose instead of doing it 'high and dry'.  I love poetry, and feel like I can't write a story without at least a little bit of it.  I'm hoping it will help me be able to extend what I wrote, because of the two stories I have, they are both extremely short.  The first little buds of a story will hopefully be translated into something more developed.  I chose to describe anxiety as one of my emotions because I suffer from it.  It's so hard to describe, but because I feel it everyday, it is a bit easier.  This emotion really gave me good ideas for character development as well, because I could use the emotion of anxiety to describe the person.  Not saying 'anxiety' also really makes for good development.  I'm really interested to see where I will go with these two stories.  I feel like they are in the middle of a story instead of having a clear beginning, middle and end, so hopefully I can work on this.

The Girl With the Blackened Eye was a really powerful story.  It had a lot of terrible images, but perhaps that's why I was so enthralled in it.  I couldn't look away the whole time I was reading it.  I had to know what was going to happen, even though I knew the main character was going to survive.  The imagery played into this a lot.  When an author is good at describing stuff, it doesn't really matter what the story is about, as long as it is done effectively.  Everything we have read has played into this, which further reinforces me to write like this in my own stories.  There was a line in the story that really stuck out to me on page 207: "When you give up struggle, there's a kind of love." For some reason when I read this I knew exactly what she was talking about.  Giving up struggle is relieving in some ways.  Even if it means the end is near, that struggle is no longer there to bother you.  I've dealt with this a lot in my short life so far.  It's difficult to describe.  It's like an idea that you feel really strongly about or something you are constantly fighting yourself about that finally comes to you just letting it go.  Realizing that you have no control.  Then you are satisfied, even if the end result is not getting what you want.  It's strange to feel satisfaction in failure, but I think that's exactly what the person in the story is trying to get at.  It's not love, it's a wave of relief because you don't have to defend yourself in some way.  It's acceptance in your situation.  She talks about how she didn't really know how long she was gone, she just lived.  Night and day didn't exist to her, it could have been 80 days for all she knew.  That is the most raw form of living life to the fullest.  She did even thought it wasn't for good.  Her life existed as a mono day and night.  Survival was a blessing, the next minute she was alive was a relief.  I can't imagine any of those feelings.  I feel like we as humans live our lives for the next day.  We think about what we need to do for the next day instead of the day we are presently in.  It's so frustrating to just want the days to pass instead of being able to enjoy every moment and be grateful that the next one came.  

This week was really intense for me as a writer.  My stories are starting to come alive the more we read and do fiction exercises.  I really can't get enough of them because I truly want to create something great.  I know it takes time, but I want the effort to show.