Hey, Mom, Dad? Can I go wit you to Disney World next week? I’m all ready! See?

My apologies for not posting the Friday foto on time. After rowing 12 miles (and leading team-building exercises after lunch) and then coming home to puppy poop on the carpet (we think he has an intestinal bug… the vet appointment later today should tell us more) I showered, ate, and then passed out around 7:30 pm and didn’t wake up until this morning. At which point I realized my ENTIRE body was sore, especially my neck, shoulders, back, and butt bones.

1. Riley passed. Totally didn’t deserve to, but his trainer (Steve) is awesome, and we all agree he’ll probably deserve to pass legitimately in a few months.

2. I am about two seconds away from buying a Macbook Air on impulse. MUST. CONTROL. THE URGE.

Earlier this afternoon I met with Michael Griffith, a writer and professor of creative writing at the University of Cincinnati. (Side note: The UC campus is beautiful!! So much interesting architecture and beautiful lawns/lounge space. Definitely made me miss campus life.) Anyway, I wanted to ask Michael about writing in general, writing in Cincinnati, going for an additional degree (MFA or Ph.D.), and being a professor. I figured he might know a thing or two about all that.

His novel SPIKES and collection BIBLIOPHILIA both seem to have been well-received, and I liked the excerpt I read of the latter. But more important than his credentials, he was extremely friendly and willing to help me. We only got to speak for about forty minutes since he was meeting with Ph.D. students about their dissertations all afternoon, but he offered a lot of great advice and even his assistance in the future. I left with a mixture of happiness, warmth, and motivation surging through me.

I mean, sitting at Starbucks and talking with someone who’s doing what I want to do — writing, reaching out and mentoring fellow writers, (maybe) teaching, and somehow still staying involved with family — gave me this feeling that I can do this. I WILL do this. Even a complete stranger thinks so!

It was also cool that he knew of Hilary and Terrance.

A few times during our discussion I felt a little silly/stalker-like because I had looked Michael up online. (”I actually only took one workshop in my undergraduate career–” “From Joyce Carol Oates!” “Yes… How did you know that?”) But I didn’t want to go in knowing nothing and seem rude! Thankfully he was cool about it.

(Because I’m NOT a stalker.)

Speaking of JCO, I’ve been saving up a few excerpts, including one from her. In an interview with The Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER
What are the advantages of being a woman writer?

JOYCE CAROL OATES
Advantages! Too many to enumerate, probably. Since, being a woman, I can’t be taken altogether seriously by the sort of male critics who rank writers 1, 2, 3 in the public press, I am free, I suppose, to do as I like. I haven’t much sense of, or interest in, competition; I can’t even grasp what Hemmingway and the epigonic Mailer meant by battling it out with the other talent in the ring. A work of art has never, to my knowledge, displaced another work of art. The living are no more in competition with the dead than they are with the living . . . Being a woman allows me a certain invisibility. Like Ellison’s The Invisible Man. (My long journal, which much be several hundred pages by now, is titled Invisible Woman. Because a woman, being so mechanically judged by her appearance, has the advantage of hiding within it — of being absolutely whatever she knows herself to be, in contrast with what others imagine her to be. I feel no connection at all with my physical appearance and have often wondered whether this was a freedom any man — writer or not — might enjoy.)

The Paris Review also had a (more recent?) interview with Vladimir Nabokov, but now I am wishing I hadn’t read it (well, skimmed it) until after I finished reading LOLITA, because his arrogance and condescension was so off-putting that now I feel like not reading it just to spite him. But that would be silly.

I just won’t link to the interview instead. :P

Anyway, my meeting with Michael and my foray onto UC’s beautiful campus, combined with this magical weather (sunny, 80s, with a cool breeze), has made this a wonderful day. Tonight we have Riley’s last Advanced Training class, which means he will get the Canine Good Citizen test. Cross your fingers and hope he’s really, really tired, because otherwise he’ll be too darn hyper to pass!

A while back, Alex told me I had to read THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE. I looked at her like, What, you’re regressing back to our scifi days? Are we going to bust out with the Star Trek dolls — sorry, action figures – and play make-believe again?

Then she hit me over the head and said, No, you dope, I’m just trying to get you to read one of the most awesomest books ever.

Well, it went something like that anyway.

The book of course turned out to be fabulous — and not really scifi, although there is obviously time travel involved — and so when I stumbled across Writer Unboxed, I had to read their interview with the author, Audrey Niffenegger.

I figure writer’s block is a signal to stop working on something straight on and go at it sideways for a while.

I’m trying to put some order into my life, and not do everything for other people before I do my own work. It’s very hard to beat back the needs of other people, because taken singly, they seem so small and doable. Taken en mass they completely engulf me. So I am in the midst of attempting to make a new way for myself.

That reminds me SO much of myself, and the way I’m always dropping my own tasks to do what others ask of me. Work, parents, friends, Andy, Riley… (”Play! Let’s play! Take me outside! Wanna play?”) I always think, Oh sure, I can handle that, no big deal. And if it were just the one thing, or even the two, I probably could. But it’s never just one or two things.

It’s hard training myself to be more selfish — and more importantly, to not think of being “selfish” as bad. Really it’s more about focus, and priorities, and realistic expectations of self. I am not Superwoman, sadly. I am just me, trying to be an author.

Since Andy’s been gone (no Kelly Clarkson pun intended) all this week in Germany on business, I decided to send him a little surprise, similar to what he did for me before.

I can’t even say “Dad” or the poor little guy goes bonkers looking for Andy, sniffing at the door, etc. Thank goodness he can’t spell.

Tonight I dropped Andy off at the airport because he is spending the next week in Germany on business. In truth, I’m lucky: thanks to his summer intern Raunaq, he had to cut what was originally a two-week business trip in half so that he could be here for Raunaq’s final presentation and evaluation. Thank you, Raunaq! (Who doesn’t read this blog, I’m sure…)

Anyway, I thought this would be easier than last year’s one-week trip to Germany, because now we have Riley, and the BlackBerry (free international calls!), and Netflix. And I guess is is easier. But it’s still not easy. However stupid that is.

(Yes, I know he’s coming back, and yes, I know it’s only a week. Facts and feelings are not always aligned, you know?)

To stave off the loneliness, I watched a couple episodes of Hannah Montana, the last half of 10 Things I Hate About You, and all of Monster-In-Law. (Mmm, Michael Vartan…)

Then I went back to the thing that got me through my whole only-child-hood, the thing that made me never feel lonely growing up: reading.

So continuing my earlier post about letters from established writers to us young hopefuls (as published in Atlantic Monthly), here are a few excerpts from “To a Young Writer” by Wallace Stegner (the guy who founded the creative writing program at Stanford University):

For one thing, you never took writing to mean self-expression, which means self-indulgence. You understood from the beginning that writing is done with words and sentences, and you spent hundreds of hours educating your ear, writing and rewriting and rewriting until you began to handle words in combination as naturally as one changes tones with the tongue and lips in whistling. I speak respectfully of this part of your education because every year I see students who will not submit to it—who have only themselves to say and who are bent upon saying it without concessions to the English language. In acknowledging that the English language is a difficult instrument, and that a person who sets out to use it expertly has no alternative but to learn it, you did something else: you forced yourself away from that obsession with self that is the strength of a very few writers and the weakness of so many. You have labored to put yourself in charge of your material; you have not fallen for the romantic fallacy that it is virtue to be driven by it. By submitting to language you submitted to other disciplines, you learned distance and detachment, you learned how to avoid muddying a story with yourself.

How often the writing of young writers is a way of asserting a personality that isn’t yet there, that is only being ravenously hunted for.

… how love lasts, but changes, how life is full of heats and frustrations, causes and triumphs, and death is cool and quiet. It does not sound like much, summarized, and yet it embodies everything you believe about yourself and about human life and at least some aspects of the people you have most loved. In your novel, anguish and resignation are almost in balance. Your people live on the page and in the memory because they have been loved and therefore have been richly imagined.

This is Riley’s “Momma, aren’t you supposed to be writing novels right now?” face.

Yesterday I nearly ran over a turtle.

I was on my way home from Panera, and he was so small I could hardly see the little guy! I turned my wheel to avoid him, and checked in the rear view to make sure he was okay. He was, but I decided to back up and figure out how to get him out of the road. In the process, I scared and/or annoyed the heck out of some woman behind me. Sorry, woman, but adorable endangered turtle trumps your angry squinty glare.

See for yourself:

Adorable, yes? Endangered, no more! I saved him. I picked him up and put him in my car on the passenger side floor. I am a turtle hero.

When I got home, I let Riley sniff him, and then I set him down on our patio (and took some pictures, obviously). I considered keeping him in our bathtub so Andy could see him (because Andy loves turtles) but then I decided that would be (a) weird, (b) mean, and (c) really, really weird. Instead, I got out Andy’s old Golden Guide reference books and tried to figure out what kind of turtle he was. After comparing him to the pictures on every page (twice) I determined that I had absolutely NO idea what kind of turtle he was.

So now the little guy is now roaming free in my backyard, perhaps enjoying a swim in the creek or a stroll through the tall grasses. And me, I’m still a turtle hero. TURTLE. HERO. That noise you hear? It’s the turtles, singing my praises. Pretty, no?

…

Well, okay, the little guy didn’t exactly pop out of his shell and do a song and dance, but he did give me a gift.

He pooped in my car.

Thanks, little guy.