How I Spent My Summer: Discovering that human vertebrae can break titanium steel rods

Today, Atlas & Alice is publishing my essay "Meditating Underwater," about my mother's back surgery three years ago. You can find it here.

Image by Shawn Hoke via Flickr, CC.

I wrote this piece in its entirety in the ten hours of my mother’s surgery, and spent the next two years revising it. (Thanks to Jennifer Bowen Hicks, Jericho Parms, Catherine Buni, and Kristopher Jansma for your words and time in this.)

In what I can only file under Extremely Unfortunate Ironies, the week after editor Ben Woodard let me know they would publish the essay I learned while visiting my mother in Kansas that two of the titanium rods the surgeon had implanted in her spinal column had broken.

I’d known something was horribly wrong the minute we arrived in Kansas for a visit, as she now walks bent over at a 45-70 degree angle from the waist, she couldn’t sleep in anything but one particular easy chair, and I quickly discovered she was again taking the narcotic pain medicine she’d become addicted to after the last surgery and finally kicked just last October.

I’ve had intimations of her condition for the past few months, and knew that her primary care physician, a family practice guy, had thrown up his hands and said he didn’t know what was wrong and couldn’t help her. With help from my stepmom, a nurse, I found an internist group that my mom had made her primary care group at the start of the summer. They did x-rays on her back the day I arrived in Kansas, and gave my mom the news about the broken rods on the last day. This was the least sunny part of my summer.

My mother has her corrective surgery this week, which will be as invasive as the first surgery. I’m feeling sad, angry, and hopeless as I leave for Kansas to assist in whatever small ways I can. And I’m sorry that I can’t offer a happy ending - or an ending of any kind – to the story that began with “Meditating Underwater.”

Out with my wife last night, I told her (as I’m getting better at doing) about this black hole I feel growing inside me every time I think about my mother. I’m generally not a person who cries, but I just sobbed silently in my seat on the Metro North for most of my trip to my first day of classes this morning.

Have a great day!

How I Spent My Summer: Writing for a week at an estate in the mountains of Ohio

After spending a month or so hanging out with my family and Zack Hample, I spent a week writing the bulk of my essay on him in the quiet seclusion of a writing residency run by my friend Tatiana Ryckman in Amish Country, Ohio. The area was, in fact, so Amish that the local Wal-Mart parking lot had stalls for horse carriages. 

The Young's Estate

I shared the residency, at a place I shall only call "The Young's Estate" (residency by invitation only) with three other writers and artists, thinking about the book manuscript I’m developing, about beginnings and endings, about losing and loss, and periodically about my family going about their business without me while I thought about these things.

The estate itself is composed of three main buildings: central quarters, rooming quarters, and the plantation house. The first thing I noticed upon entering my space in the rooming quarters was that it smelled like the Seventies. Feeling the soft, plush carpeting and the mahogany paneling of my room, I thought of the many basements of friends and cousins where I ogled my cousins’ Star Wars action figure collections, played Mousetrap, and tried in vain not to spill Tang all over the always-damp carpet.

"As you can probably guess, everything about the estate was built to spec for the Young family," Tatiana told me. I would have guessed this. I could feel the eccentric personality of the family in every room, but especially mine:

My small space in the Young's Estate

On the third or fourth night, Tatiana sat down with me and Kate Senecal and recorded a conversation about the experience for Ian Bodkin's wonderful podcast Written in Small Spaces, which you can find here:

Written in Small Spaces: A Grand Movement of the Mind (the interview is in the second half of the podcast)

How I Spent My Summer: Hanging out with Zack Hample

At Zack's Place

On June 19, two days before the end of the summer, Alex Rodriguez got his 3,000th hit, a home run at that. I wouldn't really care about this enough to be writing about now, if it weren't caught in the stands by Zack Hample, the A-Rod of snagging baseballs in the stands.

The night it happened I became fascinated by both the instant and intense hatred of many Yankee faithful for Hample (Bald Vinny of the Bleacher Creatures famously said that night, "nobody worse could've gotten that home run ball than that fucking guy") and the fact that he'd already caught over 8,000 baseballs at major league games before catching the A-Rod ball, so I decided to try to get ahold of him via email. Thus began a series of dates with Zack Hample - brunch, hanging out in his apartment, going to a game with him, meditating on the baseball as metaphor, and generally keeping up with him as he negotiated a deal with the Yankees to give them the A-Rod ball in exchange for a $150,000 donation to his favorite charity, Pitch in for Baseball.

Hample is an interesting, likable guy who also has written three books, holds the all-time scoring record for Arkanoid, and is a competitive Scrabbler. I began writing about him, which developed into the first essay I wrote for my collection on misfits and outsiders. It'll be published on The Weeklings, where I published my Royals essay earlier this year, hopefully within the next month.

How I Spent My Summer: Reading some great books

I was going to spend this week blogging about how I spent the past two months, but then things got a little testy, at least in this place. (And that place.) (And this place again.) I can't promise those things won't come up again, but for now let's talk about fun stuff.

Like reading! I did lots of that this summer. One thing I read was on the suggestion of Steven Church, who asked me if I'd like to review Andrew Malan Milward's short story collection I Was a Revolutionary for The Normal School. It's a really great read, and we had some great conversation about it, now up on TNS's website. And the book is out this week!

I've also been reading a lot of work for a set of essays I started this summer that I'll be working on for the next few months, all of which are in some way about misfits, outcasts, and people who just missed greatness or happen to be great at things that nobody attaches much value to. I've been researching and writing the first essay for the past few weeks, but more on that with the next post...

Just to follow up on the AWP no-decision...

I don't know whether to be gratified or deflated that my blog has gotten more hits in the past two days than it has all summer. (Granted, I've only posted to it five times this summer. Hey, I've been busy writing writing.) And I hope I don't sound fakey when I say I didn't mean to cause a stink with my post on Monday - I wrote it because I had to. I didn't tag anyone, and I figured it would disappear into the internether after I wrote it, or at the most get me some condolences from my friends on social media. (Which it did - thanks, friends.)

But it turns out, as the first comment to my post said, "You're saying what lots of people are thinking." This doesn't happen often, which is something I usually pride myself on. But in this case I'm glad I hopefully put into words what most of us who entered this year's AWP Prize in Nonfiction thought when we read the letter stating that judge Lia Purpura had decided not to award a winner this year. Lots of people - most of whom I've never met - expressed similar thoughts, many of them more lucidly than I did. And then, this morning Brevity Magazine's blog published a reply/retort to the mounting criticism of both the AWP and Purpura:

I read a blog post written by someone who had entered the contest and I appreciate his passion and disappointment. I would imagine others feel same as he does.

But I do disagree with a statement he made: “The choice to say that no nonfiction book submitted is worthy of her (or, by proxy, the AWP’s) selection is an outright dismissal of a hell of a lot of artistic, intensely wrought, truth-telling work, and make no mistake: it will be seen as a wholesale value judgment of an entire year’s crop.” I’m sure there was artistic work in the bunch. I’m sure it was intense, and I’m sure the writers told the truth in literary ways. But I would ask this of the entrants: Did you submit your absolute finest work? Are you sure you submitted something near perfection? I wrote seven drafts of my memoir before it was published. It is quite tempting to submit a manuscript before it’s ready. And you know what? I did that. A lot. I think I even submitted it to the AWP contest. But now I realize anything before that seventh draft was not ready. I suspect the judge, Lia Purpura, saw a lot of great work but judged that the writing was still rough.

There's a lot to take issue with here, which to me boils down to this: No book is perfect upon submission. I've been working on my essay collection, and I know it's not perfect, even though (or perhaps because) I've been writing and publishing the essays for the past five years. In fact, I would argue the search for "perfection" can lead many a writer to go over and over old material until one finds oneself running so obsessively on the editing treadmill that one loses the joy in creating new material and experiencing the world with fresh eyes, something I think is perhaps the most important quality of a nonfiction writer. And then of course there is the advice almost all of my writing mentors have given me: Don't get too attached to your manuscript, because any decent editor is going to have her/his own ideas to impose on it. How can that relationship happen if f one considers one's manuscript perfect, or even nearly perfect?

So perhaps I have an issue with contests as a whole, especially book contests. And in a way I empathize with Purpura - as an editor at Hunger Mountain I read plenty of shorter submissions, and I personally can't imagine reading ten full manuscripts over the course of one summer. AWP Executive Director David Fenza in his letter said that the award series is not "like a sweepstakes or a lottery," but all literary contests are structured precisely like a lottery - everyone gives a little pittance so that one person wins. If no one won the lottery, no one would play.

Like I've said before, I'm new to this game. I spent two years with the completed essays that comprise my manuscript, sinking into a depression many of my fellow writers can probably understand - not knowing when it was ready, when it was done. Finally, my wife and my closest writing friends told me how crazy I was making myself and them, and I decided I had until spring of this year to start sending it out and get back to, you know, writing. I'm still a bit tentative about putting my essays - my babies - into book form, but this whole AWP thing has led me to believe that literary contests are not where I want to send my babies.

Hopefully this is the last I'll be writing about this, though I'd love to hear other people's lingering thoughts. Tomorrow I'll get back to finishing an essay, preparing syllabi for classes next week, organizing for Hunger Mountain's online presence, and writing updates on my blog that will get, at best, probably 10% of the hits I've gotten for the past two days. I'm cool with that.

PS: Many people had more insightful things to say than I do in the comment section of the Brevity post and Brevity's Facebook page.

And the 2015 AWP Prize for Creative Nonfiction goes to...nobody.

I'm about to do something I've told myself many, times since deciding to make writing my profession I would never do, something I frequently judge other writers when they do it, something I'll probably regret tomorrow, or next week, or even a couple of hours from now: I'm writing out of bitter, despairing anger.

I just received notification from AWP that Lia Purpura, the judge of this year's nonfiction book contest, to which I submitted my manuscript, has decided that no nonfiction book manuscript submissions merit the award.

Honestly, I didn't expect to win, or even place, in this year's competition. The contest was my first submission of my first book ms, and I have no idea how far along it got in the (non-)selection process. If it had been awarded anything I'd have been the luckiest writer in the world. I did, however, look forward to seeing who the winner was, knowing that the award could be that writer's entrance into the fairly insular world of academic publishing. Purpura herself saw her first publication when Judith Kitchen selected her collection, Increase, for the prize in 1999.

By choosing not to give the award (or the prize money), Purpura and the AWP have perpetuated the feeling, which seems to grow at a roughly equal rate that the AWP has for the past 20 years, that the whole institution is rigged. Every year since I started paying AWP dues in 2011, my social media circles explode with people who come back from the conference feeling disconcerted and alone, like they just went to a big dance club where they weren't on the list, and every year I've patted the pavement at the book fair, talked to publishers, communed with other writers, and most importantly continued writing, writing, writing - all the while staving off the sinking feeling that every square centimeter of the independent publishing fishbowl had already been called.

I think it's important to state that I'm not attacking Purpura personally or professionally. I really, really love her nonfiction work - her essay collection On Looking is one of my favorites - which is perhaps why I'm taking her dismissal of every manuscript she saw (which, in her defense, had already been whittled down from thousands to ten by who-knows-who) so personally. The choice to say that no nonfiction book submitted is worthy of her (or, by proxy, the AWP's) selection is an outright dismissal of a hell of a lot of artistic, intensely wrought, truth-telling work, and make no mistake: it will be seen as a wholesale value judgment of an entire year's crop. I'm trying my hardest to imagine a way of taking the decision not to award one of the literary nonfiction community's most respected annual awards as anything but this. 

I'm going to stop here for now, and post a copy of the letter from AWP Executive Director David Fenza. And who knows, I may delete this post in a couple of hours, or tomorrow, or next week, once I think better of it.

New post on A Child Grows: What Is a Father? Part III: Other Voices, Other Rooms

"So far I’ve been talking mainly about prototypes that are fairly accepted and traditional in American culture. But what about men for whom the traditional family has for generations been seen as asynchronous with their innermost selves?...Perhaps the sea change we’re undergoing is leading us toward more acceptance and understanding, and away from prejudice and willful ignorance. I don’t know, but I hope so. But this fluidity of understanding will not come without consequence for own senses of self, individually and communally. Knowing there is no one right way of doing things necessitates a willingness to embrace the areas of ourselves and others that haven’t yet been mapped."

Read the rest here!

New post on A Child Grows: What Is a Father? Part II

"Among the many narratives of the late 20th Century, one I find especially relevant here is that of fragmentation: of global culture, of the family, of the individual. This isn’t something I lament, nor is it something I celebrate. It just is, and its most relevant result here is that we are collectively, as responsible and cognizant parents, in a position to pick and choose through the fragments of our culture, finding the most useful and fitting ones and discarding or storing away the rest."

Read the rest here!

New post on A Child Grows: What Is a Father? Part I

"I’m of the suspicion—and it gets stronger every year—that we are at a historical transition where our accepted notions of parenthood are less stable, more fluid than ever. I think a number of factors contribute to this—the decline of the nuclear family as the norm, more questioning of gender-normative patterns of behavior, perhaps even a wide-scale movement away from social groups in the physical space with the rise of digital media. But every year, as my relationships with my children become less about fulfilling basic physical needs and more about forging strong emotional bonds with them and teaching them life lessons that will carry into their own adulthoods, I wonder if I’m doing this right, or if there is even a right way of doing this."

Read the rest here!

Three-part series on Father's Day coming up this weekend!

So I've been spending a large chunk of my non-parenting time this week (which isn't that large actually, considering I'm on fulltime duty while my wife is on a well-deserved vacay) thinking about and compiling other people's thoughts on what it means to be a father, which will see fruition tomorrow, Saturday, and Sunday in a 3-part symposium for A Child Grows in Brooklyn!

I'll of course post links to the segments each day, but just, you know, a heads up.

My Pathos-Laden Running Playlist: Suzanne Vega addresses Game of Thrones

I heard you say you look out for the feet of clay/That someone will be falling next without the chance for last respects/You feel the disappointment when heroes go down.

We all find consolation in our own ways.

Like many others, I finished the Season 5 finale of Game of Thrones deciding not to let myself be abused by it again. Like most of the same people I'll be over it by next year, when it subjects us all to its relentless destruction of everything and everyone we love.

But then, while loading up my iPod late Sunday night, I ran across Suzanne Vega's 99.9 F°, which I hadn't listened to in probably 15 years but I still consider her most underrated album. I couldn't help listening to the whole thing again, then again. On the second time around, as I was singing along to "When Heroes Go Down," I realized that almost all the lyrics seem to be addressing Game of Thrones:

When heroes go down, they go down fast/So don't expect any time to equivocate the past.

When heroes go down, they land in flame/So don't expect any slow and careful settling of blame.

It turns out I'm not the first to wonder about her connection to GoT - she doesn't watch it, but her husband does - but I might be the first to cite this song (someone else made a nice montage of scenes with Daenerys from Seasons 1-4 set to her "The Queen and the Soldier"). It's in heavy rotation during my runs this week, as I mourn the death of [too many characters to single just one out this season].

Some ephemeral housecleaning...

As I finish up grading and shift into summer, I'm doing some tidying and catching up. A few things:

A cupcake toast to my Convergent Media seminar!

• The Convergent Media, Divergent Voices seminar I teach at Manhattanville College was particularly awesome this semester. One student who's fluent in HTML gave the class blog an upgrade as part of her semester project - check it out here!
• Speaking of teaching, I added a memorial to one of my greatest teaching mentors, Charles Braver, to the Ephemera section.
• I also added a interview I gave last year for Lori A. May's The Write Crowd to the Ephemera section.
• And as long as I was there, I added the recent Satellite Collective Telephone Project to Ephemera as well. It feels good to be ephemeral.

New post on A Child Grows: A Viewer's Guide to Watching Sports with Kids

After taking a 3-month hiatus to complete my book manuscript, I'm back on A Child Grows! Strangely, after refraining from writing directly about sports (at least in published form) for pretty much my entire life, this is my second straight piece this month on the subject.

"Strangely, having two girls has made my renewed sports-watching feel somehow new and different. I still refuse to spend more than a couple of hours on any day watching any given game, but I do enjoy using sports-watching, particularly games involving teams I’m emotionally invested in, as another window into their child-lives...This is all to say that I’m learning more about my children, about the sports I love, and about the joys of watching sports in general with every game I share with them. Here are some of the things I’ve learned."

Read the rest here! Strangely.

Satellite Collective's Telephone Project: Now live!

I'm happy to announce that the Satellite Collective's Telephone Project is now live, and the New York Times wrote a piece on it this weekend! (Oh, and I have a microfiction on the map.) Tonight's release party at the Bowery Poetry Club will be livestreamed on HipChat, if you're into that sort of thing. I'll be there in the flesh.

Here's a bit on it from the website:

TELEPHONE works just like the children’s game of the same name. Also called Operator, Grapevine, Phonebook, Ear-To-Ear, TELEPHONE is simple. One person comes up with a message and whispers it to another person. That person whispers to the next person. As the whispered message travels through it the sequence of players, the message changes, it evolves, it surprises.

In our game of TELEPHONE, we whispered the message from art form to art form. So the message could become poetry, then a painting, then music, then film, and so on. Each artist was only aware of the work of art that directly preceded her or his own. Each artist received a work and was told to translate the message into the language of his or her own art form.

This interactive, online exhibition presents 315 original and interconnected works in 18 different art forms, created specifically for this experiment by artists from 159 cities in 42 countries. And it all originated with a single message.

My "Royal Blue: Return of the Repressed" now up on The Weeklings!

All hail the Royals! (The baseball team.)

On this Opening Day for every team but the Cubs and Cards (they played yesterday), I give to you an essay I wrote about my long-suffering Kansas City Royals during and immediately after their hopefully-not-once-in-a-lifetime postseason run last October. It's longish, but goodish. (But not Frank Donald Goodish.)

Enjoy!

My Pathos-Laden Running Playlist: Galuppi Baldassare by Kris Delmhorst

I am not a religious person, but I used to be. I mention this only because the closest I still come to religious experience is when I'm running. John Russell, the greatest runner on my junior college cross country and track team, once said in reply to my question of what he believed in, "Running is my religion." I think at the time he equated religion with obsession, but his reply has stuck with me decades after said it, informing my own private mythology.

Running is the time I commune with my dead. Something about the repetition and the pain and my own obsession with time and human limitation puts me into a mindspace that welcomes and is vulnerable to the ghosts and spirits and voices that I don't allow in otherwise: people I've known, writers who've spoken to me, troubadours who've sung me their songs.

This is why I love this song so much. It opens Delmhorst's album Strange Conversation, in which she uses and reacts to the words of poets and composers who have long left us. The song's opening line is a reference to Robert Browning's poetic ode "A Toccata of Galuppi's":

Oh, Galuppi Baldassare, though I never knew your name, thanks to Mr. Browning you are with us just the same...

The rest of the song quotes Browning's ode, with lines like this:

Oh but you you ghostly cricket, singing where the house has burned,...’but what’s left behind I wonder, when the kissing has adjourned? ‘Dust and ashes,’ so you tell me, and I cannot say you’re wrong, still those dear dead dancing ladies with their hair so soft and long stir a little in their slumber, every time we play your song.

Oh, and the music itself is rollicking and gay. I imagine Galuppi and Browning would approve. In fact they whispered as much in my ear on my last run.

My Pathos-Laden Running Playlist: Trouble Every Day by Frank Zappa

This may be the most important song Frank Zappa ever recorded, and that's saying something. For one, it's lyrically his most mature, which is interesting considering it's from his first-ever album, the Mothers of Invention's Freak Out! (he was still developing the juvenile potty-mouth persona that would deliver such gems as "Catholic Girls" and "Don't Eat the Yellow Snow"). For another, it's remarkably prescient for a song released in 1966 - ostensibly about the Watts riots, sadly it transcribes easily into discussions of the Ferguson protests and modern police brutality.

Finally, the song itself is both a cry in the dark and a genuine work of art. Every single element, from the free-flowing rhymes and the muscular guitar riffs that somehow come off both menacing and ironic, to the strange studio effects and the driving percussive beat that shifts into another place entirely with 30 seconds left, comes together to make for six minutes to live within, get angry about, and move forward to.

My Pathos-Laden Running Playlist: Don't Stop Believin' by Petra Haden

Ah, threw you there, didn't I? Nothing against Journey but I much prefer the Petra (no, not that Petra) version, though I'll admit this is probably a familiarity-breeds-contempt inclination. Plus, she does this thing a cappella in a manner similar to Todd Rundgren's A Cappella, overdubbing her voice in all the instrumental parts (except, I think, for the drum track). I don't watch Glee but I hear they stole this version note-for-note, as they've been known to do to other artists. If you're into it, Haden also does the entire The Who Sell Out using the same aesthetic.

The song itself has a deceptive loneliness that belies, or at least balances, its singalong refrain. Granted, it's a brand of loneliness and despair that's peculiarly American, nursed by Geoffrey Hopper paintings and anchor chain/plane motor/train whistle escape mythology. These two things, solitude and leaving, are probably the two tropes running most represents and nurses in me.

But you don't have to subscribe to my obsessions to get this song. Just ask the millions of people who have sung it karaoke, usually in large groups (writer/editor Ross McMeekin led probably 200 people in a rousing rendition one summer at Vermont College of Fine Arts that still haunts me). Honestly, when I'm running I don't hear any of the verses, just that refrain, those ascending chords, that scorching guitar (er, vocal) solo. I haven't stopped believing yet.

I just got in the most pleasant car accident.

I was on my way to my Saturday morning Mermaid's Garden shift, stopped for a red light at the intersection of Sterling and Flatbush drinking a coffee, when all of a sudden my coffee was all over me and the steering wheel. I looked in my rearview mirror, and a youngish woman in a leopard-print jacket was already getting out of her Jeep Liberty. As I got out, another woman rushed over from the sidewalk, over the dirty glaciers of two months of hardened plowed snow.

"She didn't mean to do it!" the woman yelled from the sidewalk. "She just slid right down that ice on the incline."

Almost on cue, I slipped on the ice as I got out of my car and fell.

The woman who rear-ended me apologized profusely, and we pulled over to the side of the road in front of a hydrant and called the precinct. As I was talking to dispatch, a van rear-ended a service car in the exact same spot. Both drivers got out, inspected their respective bumpers, and made a handshake deal to go their respective ways when they found no significant damage.

Then another car rear-ended another, in the exact same spot. They pulled off to the other side of the road, and we told them the police were on their way.

Then another car slid into a parked car. We looked at the driver, who refused to make eye contact. He pulled backward then skidded away.

At this point, the parking meter attendant came walking by. She was about to give us a ticket for parking in front of a meter, but once she saw the situation she said she'd stick around with us until the cops arrived. Sensing that wasn't going to happen for awhile and seeing more of the same accidents looming, we got out our shovels from our respective trunks and started pounding on the ice while taking shifts telling cars to slow coming down the incline. This was my view:

While waiting, the group of us spent a little less than an hour preventing another accident and trying in vain to pick away the worst of the problem ice (to be honest, though, our shovels were like pea shooters in a hurricane). After the attending cops arrived, took all of our information, and filed a report, we hesitantly went on our way. I think we all wanted to stay, knowing there would be more accidents here. But then the line of sunshine that covered the north sidewalk inched its way into the street, and I think we all felt a certain relief knowing it's supposed to reach 40 degrees today and for the next few sunny days. Spring is almost here, you nasty New York City streets.

My Pathos-Laden Running Playlist: Nothing by the Fugs

After listening to some recent segments of On the Media, one of my Convergent Media students has recently decided to do her semester research on the commodification of nihilism in media advertising. She's currently poring over my copy of Tom Frank's Conquest of Cool, beginning content analysis of various advertisements, and generally dealing with that college-age rush of discovering a philosophical system based on rejecting everything that's come before it, and the ensuing Ecclesiastical shock of finding that said philosophical system has long been defeated simply by putting a price tag on it.

This led me back to the Fugs, perhaps the most cynical "band" to come out of the Sixties folk revival. This song, from their appropriately titled First Album, is either a Buddhist chant or a nihilist tract set to music (or both), with shout-outs to folk musicology, Marxists (and Marx!), Times Square, Church, sex, etc, all punctuated with an emphatic "Nothing, nothing, nothing." On the album they revel in both channeling and lambasting Allen Ginsberg, put William Blake poems to music, and have a song titled "In the Middle of the Recording Session The Fugs Sign the Worst Recording Contract Since Leadbelly's." Inside Llewyn Davis could be a movie adaptation of this song.

Ironically, I find the sarcastic drone of the song soothing, especially on a longer run. The Nothing's reach a certain crescendo toward the end that is really something.