Now playing: “You and I” Wilco / Feist

A huge thank you to the weather for finally allowing comfortable outdoor writing again. I’ve been back on the porch, watching cabbage butterflies flit, and the neighbor’s cute black dog act unruly and adorable, and honestly, isn’t that the best kind of doggy?

Reader, I’ve been wary around dogs since childhood. I was bitten by the family dog, not a strange dog, mind you, but our family dog, which makes it worse and probably explains why the fear lingered.

Still, I’ve grown braver. I can read dog body language better now, though basso profundo barking still makes me shiver.

A man and his dog, a boxer named Otto, came by the cafe, and the dog licked my feet under the table. Yes, really. Years ago, I might’ve fainted. But instead, I was grossed out and laughed in equal measures. I even pet him. Word Raccoon might’ve nudged me to do it. Or maybe it was something else. 

Just because I’ve been scared of dogs doesn’t mean I don’t like them. The nice ones. Especially Otto, now.

Now, none of that was what I meant to say. I blame the steroids. (Side effects possible. Watch out, world.)

My doctor prescribed a steroid for my fingers, which I started today. The pain’s lessened a bit and typing this is easier.

Might be the acetaminophen I’m also taking, since I threw out my back on Friday.  Sigh. 

Still, I made it to the café yesterday to write, where the cook greeted me with a warm “You’re back,” and a berry banana bowl.

The barista kindly opened my pill bottle for me. (Embarrassing? Yes. Was I grateful? Also yes.)

On Monday, writing outdoors at the Monday Cafe, I was hailed by a stranger who asked, “Are you Drema?”

Obviously, yes.

She quoted part of a passage from Victorine, my first novel, something unforgettable, she said. Something true. It was about mothers and daughters, parents and children, so we started talking about mothers and daughters. She’s a writer, too.

Here’s what she quoted (well, part of it because who would memorize something that long, right?):

I almost didn’t include that last sentence here because it takes it from the universal to the particular, but also, I want to show that for all of her understanding (and I stand by my words), Victorine still longed to understand and to be close to her mother.

Back to the encounter. 

The woman and I traded poems, poets, TV shows, and writing resources. She recommended a poet to me (Andrea Gibson, amazing – how have I missed their writing?), and I gave her a book rec. We connected on Facebook, though she’s of the generation that barely uses it now. She thought I was her age. I told her my actual age. She’s 40.

I wish I were still 40.

(It reminded me of turning 40 myself: my classmates sang to me, one student brought homemade biscuits in to celebrate, and the professor didn’t seem to mind. Sweet memory.)

All of that to say: I’m not telling this to humble-brag about my writing (okay, Word Raccoon admits, maybe a little), but because it meant so much. To hear that your words made a difference to someone? That’s an author’s dream.

She doesn’t live here, the woman who stopped by my table, but she has family who does. I felt as if I knew her with just that limited interaction. I hope we cross paths again; I have a feeling we will keep in touch. 

I wrote a new poem yesterday, “I’m Best Friends with My Brain,” though the title might change and WR is protesting that she’s my best friend. It’s miles from being finished.

Also revised “Gone Gray.” It features Syd and Nancy. It’s getting closer; it’s one of those I want to get just right, if I can. I may have moved the words around too much today. Did I save the first draft? 

I also created a Google Drive folder for my Sears poems (no chapbook title yet). 

One’s about a childhood game with the Sears catalog I did that spoiled the Christmas magic a little. (I was just too smart for my own good. Good news? I don’t think anyone figured out what I was doing.) 

Another’s about my first bra, a Wonder Woman bra from Sears, with patriotic colors and white stars that I was proud of, but was also told to hide (because “young lady,”) which I did, though not without mental protest, anyway. It was cute!  And how come Wonder Woman got to show HER outfit?

Though come to think of it, I might’ve had more restraint then. A decade ago, I showed a new pink bra strap to my director at work, “Look how pretty this is!,”I said to her, not noticing a male coworker sitting nearby. Oops. We laughed. 

Word Raccoon says she wasn’t there so I can’t blame the strap showing on her and, for the record, doesn’t want a damn dog. (I think she’s jealous.) Also, she might be the one experiencing the steroid side effects.

My husband’s been warned to stay alert for the next few days just in case I turn into She-Hulk.

I think I saw him quietly lining up some outdoor projects. And he said “yes” very fast to a last-minute Saturday night gig. Not that I blame him. Who knows what the next few days hold? 

Whatever happens, it’s on WR, who keeps saying stop that! She refuses to take responsibility for this post or any superhero antics. LOL.

I won’t go Saturday, but I also won’t write more Bonnie & Clyde flash fiction while he’s gone. That’s not going to become a habit just because my chest stops up sometimes with prolonged absence and won’t let me type some nights.

(Though I will write on Saturday evening. Because, obviously. I will just demand a conference with the muse so I can write. Ha! As if it were that easy.)

Word Raccoon had a conversation with poetry last night.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. “What do you want?”

Poetry wants a room in the house, it said. Not the whole thing. Just a room.

It knows I’m a novelist first. But it wants to stay a while. It’s asking for something, not everything.

My sun porch has already been claimed, though there might be some room for a pallet, if you ask real nicely. The swing is a cozy resting place, too.

Let the negotiations begin, Poetry. Apply in person, preferably. Paper airplanes acceptable, if necessary; experienced birbs only.

I brought Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town to the beach. I’d never read it, and what better time? A classic, or so I’d been told, a book about the poetics of place. (The title kinda tells us that.)

I read it under a blue-and-white cabana, spreading the pages with delight. Nodding along.
The first page brought me to tears.

And then someone pulled a man from the lake.

Later, at the hotel, I wrote a poem.
(I’ve tried writing this in prose, but the words won’t stay put.)

White Lake Fish
after Richard Hugo

Richard Hugo says not to choose
the topic,
not to write a poem because
it feels like it should be written.

But has he ever been on a beach
when a man’s body is fished
from the lake,
served on a paddle board,
and rushed away in an ambulance?

Has he
sat, stunned, unsure:
Life?
Death?

Was it a final departure or
a resurrection,
and why are the boats…

Oh God, are they searching?

Or just patrolling?

Visions of a child,
dragged under,
of a man
who tried to save her.
No.

No?

No one’s saying.

A tent rises and falls,
opens and closes,
desultorily waving, mawing,
something else hungry
denied (we hope, both) today.

My mother, her nose looped
with the oxygen cannula,
gasped like that,
mouth wide for her
eternal breath
last month.

I stare at my pale legs.

White.

Forgive me if I skip some time in my story here.

Back at the hotel, Hugo’s book stared up at me like nothing had happened.

So I took him to bed with me, which led to arguing with him, which wasn’t entirely fair. I might have had a better experience reading him if I hadn’t just witnessed what I had.

Even still, his voice was charming, authoritative, often wry. He writes like an orator, full of clever asides, and I didn’t mind it.

(Word Raccoon says she has no idea about those.)

He preached the gospel of place in poetry, and I was ready to say amen. He wrote of craft, of not listening to anyone if their advice didn’t serve your process. Another amen.

I don’t let people touch my writing unless I trust them. Even then, I only revise with their advice if it actually makes the piece stronger. Unless I know you’re better with my work than I am, which is rare, duckies, then I yield. I might curse inside, but I yield. 

Still, as I kept reading Hugo, I noticed the absences.

Maybe I was spoiling for a fight to relieve the sorrow clogging my chest.

So I wrote another poem.

While I won’t give away its premise (or title), I’ll say this: the women in Hugo’s book fall into a few predictable types. Wives. “Whores,” he calls some. The one teacher who didn’t shame a teenage boy for writing about a bordello he fled in fear.

There. I did just give away a chunk. I guess that’s okay.

Word Raccoon is shooting a very unladylike finger up at Hugo right now, and I’m not going to stop her because I don’t want her to be a lady, I want her to be real and take no BS.

A certain someone near me when I was reading the book made the mistake, when I vented, of starting to say, “He was of his time.”

Word Raccoon shut that shit down. Fast.

Women can say that. Men? Absolutely not.

And while we’re here: if a man in the ’60s or ’70s chose not to be a condescending ass, was that really such a notable miracle?

Oh, thank you, kind sir, for noticing I am a human being and not just a vessel for your…

Anyway.

I’m not saying Hugo is evil. I’m not even saying he’s beyond redemption.
To be honest, I wasn’t as pissed at him for his casual erasure of women as I probably should have been, because I was curled on a hotel bed trying to erase the image of what happened on the beach from my mind.

It was one pretentious line that made me kick him out of my bed.
If you present yourself as the poet who notices what others don’t, Hugo, and then drop a line that mostly says, look how tender I am for noticing, and it ends up highlighting your own damn misogyny? That breaks the spell.

Without saying it, you were all, “Oh, see, I asked the question no one else asked.”
Newsflash: I would have asked that question, Richard.
Out of genuine curiosity. Not to signal my sensitivity.

I know you were making a point. But in context? It was dehumanizing, budro.
(I’m sorry I can’t share the passage, but my poem speaks for it. Sharing both would ruin the effect.)

I squirm writing this, because I did find many of his tips helpful. And you know when you’re reading something and you keep saying “yes” instead of attacking it with red ink? Yeah. That.

When I’m most frightened and annoyed, I fight on the page.
So I wrote.

I had to write White Lake Fish. Then the next one about him. Not because I thought Fish was a “worthy” topic. He would’ve scolded me for picking it because it was “intense” or “interesting.”

But I wrote it because if I didn’t, it would have wriggled in me and done damage.

So maybe don’t tell people what they should or shouldn’t write with one breath, and then tell them not to listen to you with the next.

Doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose of teaching writing?

That’s not my central argument here.

Is it?

I feel judged by a dead guy. The poet.
I’m judging myself.

But I swear, I didn’t write the poem to be dramatic.
I wrote it because I had to.

Even now, thinking of the man on the board, my stomach knots.

We’re going to the cemetery tomorrow to weed my mother’s grave.

And I’m pressing up against my (other, unshared) poem’s title again by saying this much,
but this still haunts me in a way even highly targeted internet searches can’t resolve:

No one ever said what happened to the man on the beach.

Friday night, August 1, Barry and I found ourselves at the Wunderkammer Company in Fort Wayne, Indiana, breathing in incense and music. The lights were low, the ceiling high, and the air hung full of reverence. We had come to hear Emma Swift.

But in a way, this story started years ago. Before Emma’s pandemic-era livestreams with her husband, Robyn Hitchcock, Barry first followed his music. Robyn, for the uninitiated, is a cult hero of British psychedelic and post-punk rock, known for fronting The Soft Boys in the late seventies and The Egyptians through the eighties and early nineties, before moving on to an impressive solo career. He is the kind of songwriter who makes other songwriters feel both inspired and slightly afraid.

Back in 2017, we went to see Robyn play a solo show in Indianapolis at the White Rabbit Cabaret. Setlist here. Barry introduced himself and Robyn finished Barry’s name. That is what social media does for you nowadays. The intimacy of art, met halfway by the strange recognition of the digital age.

Also, that night Robyn sang my favorite song of his: “My Wife and My Dead Wife.” Not to mention playing “Virginia Woolf.” That made my evening. 

It was Barry who introduced me to Emma Swift’s music, too. I remember hearing her voice waft out of his music room one afternoon. Dylan’s achingly good lyrics carried on a voice that stopped me with its iridescence, its earnestness. Arresting. Unforgettable. 

The album was Blonde on the Tracks, and I was hooked.

During lockdown, Emma and Robyn began livestreaming concerts from their Nashville home, and we “attended” those regularly, grateful for their music, their chemistry, their warmth. 

One landed on Barry’s birthday and Emma wished Barry a happy birthday when I snuck a note in the comments saying it was.

And now, years later, we were second row at Wunderkammer Gallery, close enough to see the earnest look on her face as she sang, not tempted to close her eyes as some singers might be, at least not often. 

The space itself was magic. Incense-thick, lit softly, with high open ceilings and a massive steel girder overhead like a spine. It felt like a place built for spellwork and sound. Word Raccoon, for one, approved.

The entryway ceiling was decked in crochet, as if a hippy van had gone upside down and stuck. 

The night’s set was a haunting mix of old and new. Songs from Blonde on the Tracks and previews from her upcoming album The Resurrection Game, due out September 12 on Tiny Ghost Records. We heard Dylan reimagined with clarity and ache, and we heard something altogether her own. Born from breakdown, from from resurrection.

Her covers of “I Contain Multitudes” as well as “Queen Jane Approximately” were outstanding. And her own “Catholic Girls are Easy” was haunting, lovely, and a little funny. It’s a given it’s irreverent, right? 

The song that moved me the most was her “No Happy Endings.” The line, “I’ve never done things by half measures” sounded like a certain WR over here. 

Emma’s new work is raw, radiant, and rooted in survival, something she talks about on her website when she mentions a seven-week breakdown which required hospitalization.

It could be said her work is salvific in multiple ways. (I know, the word is likely overused, but dammit, it fits here. Read on.) 

With this new album, she wanted to create something gorgeous from what she went through. 

She did.

Enchanting, absorbing…I don’t know what all to say except I am so happy to have heard her. 

She wore a classic long-sleeved black blouse with an orange polka dotted mini over black hose and heeled ankle boots. So cute.

She moves youthfully: hands at sides when not holding a mic, leans, her blonde hair draping itself beautifully over her arm. 

While her music was transporting, there was something incredibly honest and open about her performance that elevated it beyond even her voice. (And she has quite a voice!) 

Her guitarist, Rick Lollar, newly married and away from home, played with impeccable style and soul. I told him he was sharply dressed, because he was. (A crisp black button down, cuffed jeans, black leather shoes, I think.) 

His playing was top notch as well. 

Barry chatted with him while I wandered the gallery, incense curling through the air, admiring paintings that did not mind being weird and wonderful. 

Barry and Rick, Emma lost in the. light. Barry and Rick talked side by side for quite a while; this was right before we left.. There are better pictures but I don’t have them just now. Do note the ceiling, please!

Emma asked how my writing was going. I was happily stunned she had asked. When Barry said I have been writing poetry these days, I found myself saying simply, “We lost my mother.”

She placed her hand gently on my arm. “That’ll do it,” she said.

It was artist shorthand, what I said, and her response. The perfect exchange. Nothing wasted. All feeling.

Did I mention Emma sent me a photo privately of my first novel and her stuffed animal. I can’t remember the name of it now, but a lobster I think, during the pandemic? She bought my novel, y’all! AND let me know it.

She asked about my writing at HER show!

I was also blown away that she knew who we were without having to tell her Friday.

“I didn’t know you were going to be here tonight,” she said.

Now that’s the way to be greeted, though so unexpected. Word Raccoon preened.

We were there for the ache and balm of live music, and that’s what we received. The sense that art, even now, even again, can stir the sludge in the soul. 

I’m so grateful for her presence so near our town. It was a night to remember. 

Word Raccoon insists on having the last word. She has been hunting for polka dotted everything online since Friday, when she watched Emma, absorbed the paintings behind her, and let the music rattle something loose in her. 

She has not written whatever that might be yet, but last night she was singing that song that causes her heart to squeeze.

And we all know that poetry and song lyrics are kissing cousins, don’t we?

Want to hear Emma’s music? Maybe even buy her latest? Do, chickadee, do!  

Now Playing: “Don’t Know Why,” Norah Jones

Word Raccoon can’t get her words to stand up straight today
She tried a poem or two, but they laid down on the job

Then she wrote more flash fiction about those two doomed darlings

Bonnie and Clyde

who seem increasingly unstuck in time

which was amusing and alarming to write

because what do you do when the timeline won’t behave?

The words felt sideways
She kept circling the phrase “my shape of love”
It wouldn’t settle
Wouldn’t stay put
It wanted to haunt instead

There are days when writing poems feels like

chucking tiny pieces of her soul into the void

Today she doesn’t want to mosaic anything
Today she doesn’t want to submit, flinging that clinging word stuff to anyone, anywhere, else
Today she doesn’t want to “stay weird” thank you kindly to the off-map journal that said so
Today she wants to…what?

Doesn’t matter.

Tonight, Word Raccoon wants to sing
Not perform
Not posture
Not press her ear to the earth for answers

“Don’t Know Why” is playing
the Norah Jones version she sang once barefoot

and maybe too earnestly at some little gig

no one remembers now though the rehearsal was recorded,

and she remembers belting the soul-jarring line

“You’ll be on my mind forever”

WR didn’t plan on getting trapped in a lyric
but the song showed up tonight anyway

You know how it is
Some songs have long shadows

I suppose I ought to invest in some ear plugs

Word Raccoon’s not planning on stopping singing any time soon;

Someone once told her she should keep singing

This is definitely not a poem

And you’re so vain (but what’s so wrong with that?)

And you already know this song is about you.

Wait, that’s a different song, isn’t it?

by Word Raccoon

Now Playing: “More Than Words,” Extreme

Psst… persona prose poem ahead. No need to panic. No need to @ me. It’s just Word Raccoon, cruising in metaphor. A revised version may appear elsewhere in the future.

Once upon a Sopranos-soaked decade ago,
Word Raccoon had a very specific dream:
a Cadillac Escalade.
Gold wheels.
A statement.
Obnoxious.
Tacky.
Ironic.
A middle finger dipped in rhinestones.

She was in a mood (and probably wearing a shrug) and rightfully so.

She pictured herself Tonka-trucking over whoever looked at her funny.
Or at the very least, feeling extremely safe in a snowstorm.

Sometimes she didn’t want to feel safe. Opposite, really. 

She wanted to fishtail down gravel roads and 

break down without cell service,

have to walk home 

in shoes with a broken heel.

hitchhiking into the past

and picking herself up 

in a semi

and taking herself 

an alternate route. 

Or just make it to the DQ before they closed at ten. 

But.

The universe blinked slowly at this dream/nightmare vehicle.
So did her bank account.
So did her husband.

So she compromised.
A little.

She set aside the fantasy
not entirely, let’s not be dramatic
and started noticing what could be beautiful and soft without requiring financing.

She took long drives in her succession of cars, the total value of which was probably still less than her beloved Escalade, but rarely on country roads.
Admired light on cornfields like it was a runway.
Turned old roadmaps into love letters she shredded, unread, by moonlight.
Built stories with pen and paper instead of purchasing horsepower.

As of today, she drives a Cadillac crossover: smaller, silver, sensible, with no regrets. She LOVES it and can scarcely contain her desire to drive all night. 

No gold wheels, but she still wears her sunglasses like armor,
still dares anyone to underestimate her at a four-way stop.

And yet, she’ll be the first to wave you on through. 

Because the dream wasn’t about the car.
It was about running over the things that wouldn’t get out of her way, metaphorically.

It was about being higher than everyone else

not out of snobbery,

but so she could finally see

where the hell she was.

Where she was going.

Where she’d been.

Her bearings. Herself.

A perspective she suspected

most people never even thought to ask for.

Maybe never knew existed.

She wanted to show up like she meant it.

And baby, she always means it.

Cars come and go. 

Art is forever. 

She can live without many things, has and will, if she must. 

But not without her art. 

Say it again for those in the cheap seats.

Oh, wait. Art has no cheap seats. 

👓 Author’s Note:

Word Raccoon would like to clarify that she still thinks Escalades are a vibe, and would like to sit in one just once and recline dramatically with a smoothie and yell at Tony while wearing sunglasses and maybe a (fake) fur coat. But she’s also just pretty jazzed to have found these VERY COOL wheels with husband, who says it can be her baby. She’s not arguing. 

And yes, she will be writing poems in the new car. Parked just slightly askew, because that’s how she rolls and because she can’t park for shit.

And now, with 90s ballads in the speakers and a pen in the console,

Word Raccoon is revved up in every sense.

Beware the poem she writes in the coffeehouse parking lot.

It might be about you. 

You should be so lucky, love. 

Carmela just had her nails done. 

She’s deciding if you’re worth messing them up for.

This is all to say that hey, Word Raccoon and I have wheels again! No harm, no foul, eh? 

Update: Had I looked closer at the forecast, I could’ve saved myself this whole spiral. I’m not walking through thunderstorms to get to a café today. The sun porch at home it is. At least until any lightning. Word Raccoon does not like that. (Then again, the weather app just updated and no thunderstorms? I’m so confused. As ever.)

I’m posting this anyway because we have this discussion all the time, Word Raccoon and I.

Here are the options for today:

Option A: Stay home.

• Clean house (ugh).
• Probably not write, because “I’ll just clean first” turns into “I forgot I even wanted to write.”
• Fight with the clutter and lose.
• Possibly eat something sad like string cheese and write a poem about how sad it is.
• Maybe catch a glimpse of something distracting out the window. Because we are easily distracted.

Option B: Go to the café

with a sub-decision needed: indoors or porch

• Walk through misting rain with no umbrella, unless I find it (unlikely; I think it’s in DH’s van).
• Risk being chilly inside, because the café believes all customers should be popsicles.
• Be surrounded by students and men discussing conspiracy theories. Or no one. Not sure which is worse. Depends on the day.
• Might write. Might revise. Might finally track down those missing poems I swore I uploaded and now cannot find. Might listen to music that makes me want my blankie.
• Try not to be nosy and glance out the window every ten minutes.
• Fail.
• Sit outdoors and see if it rains, if the rain blows in, if the wind is too much, if it’s too chilly.
• Order usual breakfast and ask why, because it’s yummy but cold.

Which makes me lean toward:

Option C: Sun porch at home.

• Pajamas.
• Writing in a blanket cocoon with lukewarm tea.
• Wind might ruin it. Rain might slant in. But keeping the windows closed could prevent that. So why am I even thinking on it??
• Wildlife sightings are probable (squirrels, cardinals).
• Good odds WR will start writing something we don’t finish.

Option D: Abandon all plans.

Become a person who reads novels in bed until noon when it rains.

• Sadly, not sustainable.
• Tempting anyway. Very.

Creative Decisions Also on the Table:

• Poetry: Write new? Revise old? Submit something?
• Novel: Are we ever going to open that file again?
• Richard Hugo Essay: He wouldn’t pick this topic, he’d say, but maybe he should’ve stood on a porch in the rain with nothing but a Sharpie and a rock.
• Reading: Can I read a poem without rewriting it in my head? No. But I’ll try.
• Blogging: Is this it? Am I already blogging instead of deciding?
• Breakfast: WR already ate a disgusting protein bar and wonders why they’re all one ingredient away from clay. She claims she’s swearing off them. They’re just… handy.

I’d rather be writing this than cleaning the kitchen.

WR says she’s proud of me.
I don’t trust her judgment.

But she just slipped on the new earrings.
So maybe we’re going. (We’re not.)
Or maybe we’re about to fall asleep and overthink it in a dream. (Very possibly our next move.)

Word Raccoon is awake too early, yearning for the words,
but trying to figure out what words.

I did my best not to write the past few days. Well, maybe not entirely my best, but a decent approximation. Okay, fine. I paused on the writing front for a minute or two.

Then on Saturday morning I received the kindest rejection letter EVER.

The editor told me to let him know when my poem, “To Power the Human Heart,” was published, because he knew it would find a home. He said he’d promote it on social media when it did. He said it was in his top ten for poem of the year out of over 500 entries, invited me to submit again in the future, and suggested I check out the journal’s fellowship opportunity.

Wow. That’s an amazing rejection.

(Today I received another heartfelt, personalized rejection about the same poem. Men in particular seem to be connecting to it.) 

That stoked the coals, so I sent a thank you and prepared to promptly send “Power” back out to find that home.

Only then, of course, I remembered that most places accept packets of multiple poems. So why send just one poem when you can send five? You never know what someone might connect with.

So there I was, assembling a submission, trying to match tone, theme, vibe, etc. for each journal. I remembered another poem that would go well with a particular packet. That poem probably definitely needed tweaking.

(Time to pause and say that as much as I appreciate praise, sometimes it makes me want to hide just as much as rejection. I feel all “you don’t mean that,” and yet why would someone bother to send such a beautiful email otherwise, am I right? And now I’m embarrassed to have written this, but duckies, we have to share if we are to help each other.)

And suddenly it was lunchtime. But I don’t regret my Saturday porch time at all. It’s such a great space and the view… ah. Soothing to the poem-weary eyes.

Lunch, right. I thought, Give me ten minutes and I’ll finish this submission. Cover letter. Which bio to use? (Ooh! Update the bio because I’ve got new work forthcoming!) Double-check the formatting.

(Word Raccoon whispered: Submit NOW. Then feed me lunch or I’m going to eat your poems. Then she pulled out a lip gloss labeled “poetic frenzy” and added a thick layer.)

She did not bother reminding me that I was supposed to be packing for the dunes, too.

I had a list. I’ve done this trip at least a dozen times. And yet? This time I forgot several essentials. Barely packed any snacks. But I did bring a bag full of books, a journal, pens, highlighters. You know, standard Word Raccoon fare.

WR made sure the van was loaded with Coke Zero. Could she not have added some shampoo?

Anywho, that bag of books is how I ended up arguing with poet and writing teacher Richard Hugo on the beach. The man’s been dead since 1982, but that didn’t stop me. He brought the theory (and the criticism of it). I brought the sunscreen.

Not arguing, exactly. More like creative sparring at first.

Naturally, he ended up in three of my poems I “wasn’t” going to write. One poem was me trying to process something we witnessed on the beach that I am not ready to talk about. Which tells you it wasn’t good, Nan. I grabbed a poetic maxim of Hugo’s and rode it to emotional safety.

The second Hugo poem was just my usual process: wrestling with someone else’s view on poetry until I can see what, if anything, of theirs works for me. (Does that sound like I am a poetry scrapyard ghost? Maybe so.)

I will say that a writing strength I have developed (I think) is knowing when someone’s advice is going to strengthen my writing and when it won’t. I can tell you what each of my writing mentors has contributed to my process. (Perhaps they contributed other things, but with them all, I know at least one specific thing they gave me that has made my writing better.)

Even the worst writing mentor (a professor) I had in the 1990s taught me about sentence patterns and length and how I ought to vary them. He was right. (See what I did there?)

It is currently almost two a.m., but instead of stepping in that hole in the yard again, I will tell you what other poems I “didn’t” write this weekend. 

I wrote:

• a poem about cheese being made in our town (that disturbs me, though I don’t think it should)

• one about my mother (she visited me in a dream on the beach, wearing her mint green sun hat I hadn’t thought of since childhood)

Yes, I napped on the beach almost as soon as we got there. Hubs says I said “Do not disturb” and promptly fell asleep in my chair.

  • one about my anxiety over leaving my glasses in the car (not because I needed them, but because I was suddenly convinced they’d focus sunlight just so and start a fire. Welcome to my stupid mind where anything bad, no matter how improbable, is still a possibility. Which is why it’s exhausting being me.)

  • one called Aqueduct that I’m only now second-guessing the title of (typical). The main character rides a horse for no good reason. It’s overly sentimental schlock, I fear.

    • one featuring Natasha Lyonne (embarrassed by the title, not the content—so I’ll let that one marinate until I forget to be mortified or find a better title). It’s about The Thing falling in love. Go see Fantastic Four and you’ll get it. LOL. BTW, Natasha is fabulous in everything she acts in.

    • and that difficult-to-write Hugo poem, title redacted because it’s too soon to talk about.

Meanwhile, Word Raccoon had fully staged her own side quest. She sat beside me under our cabana, halfway through a frozen chocolate-covered banana that I noticed she did not offer me a bite of, even though she knew I was awake by then. 

While I was deep in Hugo-land, she dumped the contents of her tote across her towel like a glitterbomb.

Contents of said beach bag (as of this morning):
• One Sylvia Plath coloring book (half-shaded, with commentary in the margins)
• A zine titled Poetry Snacks for Restless Geniuses (“Issue #1: What If the Poem Is the Snack?”)
• A glitter pen that doesn’t work, thank God
• Highlighters in four shades: Overwhelm, Intrigue, Oh No She Mitten’t, and Spite

We still have another day at the dunes ahead. The sun feels like it’s trying to burn my life from me. I’ve been craving this place for weeks, and now that I’m here, it’s…more intense than I expected.

It had rained, and was going to rain more, yesterday, so though we made it to the beach, breakfast in hand, we did not stay after we ate.

You will ask if we checked the weather ahead. We did, friend. But as I keep yelling this summer, the weather apps are wrong, like, all the time. Just this summer.

Then again, the whole spring/summer kinda feels like a fever dream. Some pleasant spots, to be sure. But this heat! 

It eventually led us to go see the latest Superman movie in air conditioning (the movie was sweet though not flawless, and please don’t think I’m a geeky superhero fan; I’m just easily lured by popcorn). 

Before the movie, I finished The Triggering Town and found a sentence that made me exclaim “NO SIR, I cannot let you by with this!”

It started as a niggle and grew louder: he had so many of the same faults he was warning writers against. And then came that sentence. Just… no. Absolutely not. That’s not getting a free pass. More on that in a separate post. 

And don’t worry, I will be fair. He says many things to be admired in the book, and I won’t forget those even as I discuss the thing that troubles me most. 

Like I said, I wrote a third and final poem featuring my beef with him.

I also wrote a rat king of childhood Sears poems that need untangling.

I slept between 2:30 and 6:30 a.m., which it now is. If my weather app is correct, it’s getting hot already. I had hoped to raid the shoreline for some flat rocks to write poetry on before we leave Dunesland. I even brought a Sharpie, ready to freestyle and leave words in the wild.

But the hotter it gets, the less sure I am that we won’t just pack it in and head home. Only the currently sleeping driver knows for sure.

There’s a restaurant along the way we’ve been to a couple of times. Word Raccoon is craving chicken fried steak for breakfast. If they don’t have that, I’ll eat my… well, whatever I eat, it won’t be chicken fried steak.

P.S. Reader, it was indeed too hot, so we came on home after breakfast. They didn’t have chicken fried steak; they did have country fried steak. Same difference. Word Raccoon is very content and happy to be home, even though she didn’t get to go to the beach today. She wishes it were cooler here, too.

The porch calls. She’s going to try to answer.