the busy heart

I've been fighting some pesky depression and anxiety, hence the silence. The first thing to go are my words. I stop writing, stop blogging, stop feeling like I can articulate to Sam or anyone else what's wrong or what I think, even about the smallest things. It's a terrible, miserable way for me to live. The good news is, I got asked to teach this amazing talk at church just before things got really lousy. Having those words in my head as I entered the lowlands was a gift. But I don't really want to say more about it. I want to talk about Henrietta, of course, who is by far my favorite creature on the planet and becomes more so daily. And while I've grown sort of silent and strange, my girl is gaining new words every day, and figuring out what they mean, and figuring out what she wants, and learning how to ask for it. It's been an absolute miracle to witness. I think I knew I would like this part--this language acquisition part. But I wasn't quite prepare...

Late one night I came downstairs in my pajamas, excited, asking Sam if I could just read him a little bit of something. He was still up, tending his fire, watching a movie that he kindly paused so he could listen. At which point I read him more than a little bit. I read him most of an interview with Laurel Thatcher Ulrich , a woman who is actually a dear friend from my ward in Cambridge. She's famous, in part, for penning the sentence that shows up on bumper stickers and t-shirts all over the place: "Well-behaved women seldom make history." She won a Pultizer Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship, she teaches a killer Sunday School lesson, and she's my hero. Anyway, I had gone to bed worrying about how I would do everything I wanted to do, how I would do something that mattered to me and also take care of my baby. It was in the thick of my posts about figuring out working and motherhood, and it was such a relief to read her interview, which answered pretty much everythin...

It's a little amusing to me that I used initials yesterday for our friends' names, and today I'm going to share a good deal of their business, so let's just say now that their names are Kenneth and Emily, and we were friends with them here in Boston, and we plan to be their friends forever and ever. They are the best sort of people, and they've been trying to start their family for eight long years. I'll let you insert what you know of infertility, and pretty much nod that all of that was involved. And now, to their surprise and gratitude, they're expecting a baby girl in ten weeks. As I said, they came up last weekend to visit and I threw a small shower, and in what I think must be the curse of a lot of Pinterest activity, I was stressing about making it fabulous. Didn't I need favors and decorations and games and all of that? It turns out I didn't really need any of that, since it was more of a luncheon out at a restaurant, and only a few of ...

When I got pregnant again, I began to long for stories, for people to whisper in my ear what this felt like, so I could check it against my own feeling, and open up the experience for me. I didn't exactly know I was craving this until I found these three books and felt myself relax into them, and hold them dear in a way I haven't held books dear in a long time. In case you're in the market for a pregnancy read, or really just a good book, all of these were wonderful. Magnificent even, in some spots. * Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother by Beth Ann Fennelly.  I've read (and really loved) Beth Ann Fennelly's poetry, so I was excited to discover this book, which is a collection of letters she wrote to a young friend and former student who was pregnant and far away from family. They're loose letters, meandering through her own experiences as a mother to a young child, and her memories of becoming and being pregnant (as well as of a miscarriage). They...

Sometime earlier this year, I got an email from Tyler Chadwick, who asked if he could include several of my poems in Fire in the Pasture: Twenty-first Century Mormon Poets , to which I said, um, yes yes you may. The book is out now, and I just got my contributor's copy this week, and I have to say that it's beautiful.  I don't mean that my poems are beautiful, I mean the book itself, as an object, is gorgeous.  If you're so inclined to see what's going on in contemporary Mormon poetry (and how could you not be?! ;), I recommend this book.  On a related note, if you're more interested in seeing what Mormon fiction is up to (and again, how could you not be?! I hope it's clear I'm kidding ...mostly), Dispensation: Latter-day Fiction was a great read.  In all seriousness, I can say that Mormon Literature goes well beyond Jack Weyland.  There's some really good stuff out there.  If you're interested in recommendations, shoot me an email.

this is honestly my idea of a vacation: you go to a beach. you sit on the beach.  you read a book.  that's it.  that's all i need.  in mexico, in addition to that, we had the perks of comfortable chairs and sun umbrellas and people bringing us fresh limondas and "coca lights."  we had big plans to go parasailing this day, but once we realized we'd have to actually  stand up , we opted to stay put and read some more.                                                  [cool. dude.]                                      ...

Due to moving, health trouble, and a picky computer, it's been over a month since I posted.  Which is a real shame since I have a lot to say, and a lot of pictures. I finally figured out how to get those pictures onto a computer that doesn't take an hour to upload, so I'm going to try to post some of them.  (Incidentally, how do you folks handle your pictures?  How do you organize them; what program do you use to edit and keep them, etc?  Do tell.  I'm sooo annoyed with Picasa and with everything else I've been trying.) I might as well begin with the most recent pictures, which I took last night.  Here's Sam reading a book to Ms. Sprouty the Cat.  She had come up for her nightly snuggle, and seemed to be quite interested in his book, so he pulled her up close and read her Coetzee in his best reading voice.  His reading voice is pretty good.  Is it weird that it made me look forward to him reading to our someday-children?

I love Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis. Love it. If you're unfamiliar, the main character, Gregor Samsa, wakes up one morning as a giant human-sized bug. I can't explain why this tugs on my heart so much, except to say that I think it's one of the most gorgeous, odd, true, terribly sad accounts of what happens when disease, mental illness, or addiction changes us beyond recognition. It's about what happens to families when someone is sick, how it breaks and remolds everyone involved. And I love it. My students, on the other hand, do not. They have in the past. I taught a class where they ate.it.up. and wrote about it in their papers and I could feel in what they wrote that it felt true to them, that Kafka struck something. But not this semester. "This story sucks," they said at the end of class today, after a week of talking about it. I wish that sentence didn't bother me so much. I wish it didn't make me feel like weeping, like a failure. ...

But I'm so taken with this line from Jean Rhys' book, Good Morning, Midnight and I updated my goodreads review of it to include this, and I want to record it here, too. So's I remember it. Not even sure why I like this bit so, but I do: "I want a long, calm book about people with large incomes--a book like a flat green meadow and the sheep feeding in it." Maybe I like it because it's so not what this book is like--it's about a very poor, sad, desperate woman--and there's something delicious about saying that within its walls. Maybe its because I know that feeling--not just of wanting to read a book like that, but of wanting to BE a book like that--a calm book about a person with a large income, with something akin to well-fed, drowsy sheep. If only.

Several years ago, I watched Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress . It doesn't happen in the book, but there's a scene in the movie where these villagers write the names of people they love on little paper boats and send them out onto a lake. The movie is good. That scene was incredible. I thought maybe the boat thing was just in the movie. But I'm ignorant. Turns out it's a Buddhist ritual to remember the dead. It also turns out that a nearby cemetery participates. Sam and I went tonight. We had no idea what to expect. As Sam said, "When it's called a Lantern Festival we should have expected a festival." There were hundreds of people gathered around this lake, eating picnics, listening to traditional music, surrounded by lanterns they had decorated for their loved ones. Sam and I neglected to bring a blanket, so we perched by a tree and ate our dinner--falafel wrap for me, cod wrap for Sam--from our favorite little healthy food place. We got a lanter...

I've become increasingly aware that I never really talk about reading or writing on this blog--the stuff I'm doing and thinking and teaching about all the time, or whenever I get a chance. This seemed like a problem. But it just didn't come naturally for me to talk about it here. So ... time for another blog. This one you have in front of you will still cover everyday sort of happenings--my cats, my husband, outings and excurions and cookie-driven angst. But hopefully on the other one I will I'll post bits I've read that have struck me, stuff from podcasts and audiobooks I like, links to literary journals, maybe even stuff I'm writing. It's called picking up handfuls of birds , from a line by Herbert I've had on my sidebar here. In case you don't get the birds, I'll post the entire poem over there at some point, and perhaps that will illuminate. Anyway, happy Sunday. See you at the other blog, if you feel so inclined.

What am I supposed to be doing right now? Deciding what to say to my 2:30 class, that's what. But I can't. I won't. I ... can't. Today is a no-good teaching day. Tried to teach Whitman this morning and had nothing to say. I mean, what is there to say? He's my dead boyfriend. I love him. His words are shiny objects that feed my soul. And you want me to like, say something about that? Why? Why can't we all just read and smile and giggle and swoon and bask in the loveliness of it? Sometimes, school, as a thing, seems so lame. I stood like a moron at the front of the room, flipping throught the pages, begging God to supply me with some brilliant question to ask that would fuel discussion for another 45 minutes. The heavens were closed. Nothing arrived in my head. It was awful. AW-FUL. It triggered all sorts of who-am-i, what-am-i-doing-here, how-did-i-get-this-job, i-sucksucksuck feelings. I'm brimful of self-loathing. But tonight, Sam and I ar...

I rocked the teaching today. Totally rocked it. And I say this not because I think I'm really cool, but because I've been so un-cool, really, in the classroom, and it's nice to have a decent day. I also assume that next week (or tomorrow) I'll have an uber-crappy day, and I'd like to record here, now, that I don't always suck, so that I don't forget. I had them read this beastly long essay on "bipolar unities" in Whitman. Truthfully, I hadn't read it before I assigned it, which is a giant teaching no-no. I barely survived the experience of reading it yesterday, and I was trying to get them pumped up this morning (8:30am), give me some interesting thoughts about it, and they just wouldn't. They were un-pump-able. They looked at me like I was reciting the alphabet in Chinese, backwards, very slowly, over and over. Did I panic and stutter and clam, as I've done every day since I started this job? Oh no. Not today, mon ami. Instead, we shou...