Process

Bad at keeping pace with the world we have today, I'm a ways behind at keeping up this blog. Perhaps because I've been working, mostly, on longer and hopefully publishable expressions. Perhaps because writing blog posts can feel a little like whispering into the void, hoping someone will somehow hear and stop and listen, and lately I have preferred to do my best to save my words. But really, there is no good reason, and really no excuse except travel to Boston and back and now to Brooklyn. I just finished my second cross-country flight, a red-eye on a Friday night-- I am standing (perhaps better described as swaying)-- at the side-counter of Brooklyn Coffee Roasters waiting for my friend Justin to wake and be conscious, listening to the grind and swish of the machine filling bags and the hiss and clank of the espresso machine and the murmur of conversation in a high-ceilinged room. And so, what better time than delirious limbo to 'catch up.' As if, truly, I had something to say.

Except. Well, there is the strange sense I have had lately, of things happening. Of movement, whatever my own static tendencies. I woke in the middle of the flight in the dark with the leg of a middle-aged man jabbing me in the calf and the reason I woke not the uncomfortable contact but the fact that, asleep, the lines of the section of my recently completed memoir were playing in my head and I had just heard, whole, a vignette that needed to be added that would complete the section, give it roundness and wholeness and a bit more humor. And so I got out the paper I'm going to read off of tomorrow night at the Sunday Salon and wrote down what I'd heard, which was the voice of a child speaking, and then I tried to settle again into something like sleep, and failed. Because now the words were playing again, and all I could do was hear them. I know, reading your own work to yourself by heart in your sleep in the dark of a plane bound across the country to read your work-- this is circularity and obsession. But it is also an aggregate effect, I think-- I have inhabited this work these last six months as much as I can bear, sleeping and waking, and as I wait now on word from agents who hold the work, and only yesterday approved proofs of one chapter bound for Creative Nonfiction magazine and recently approved proofs for Gulf Coast and feel now the opposite ends of this long rope that for so long I thought to weave and knot instead of loop, well-- things come together. There is an imminence to the work, now. You so often hear of people talk of writing using blue-collar language-- I write every morning, it is hours of butt to seat, it is all sweat and discipline, the long lonely labor, the development and realization of craft-- and I would like to validate the ideal of persistence and how writing is not easy, how it requires a great deal of time. A decade, for me and this work, in fact. But even as I admit that I have worked long and hard, I find too that for me there is a falseness to many of those ways of speaking about this writing. What I have done, finally, is finally found something true for a long and a-linear seeking whose process has finally been, well, at its best when natural and at its worst when I let others notions intrude. That was profoundly difficult, but it was not-- well, it was not a punching in or even a showing up. It was sometimes a stumbling and sometimes a sprint. And now my stride is good and my speed is good and though I don't know where I'm headed, it feels like the right direction.

Teaching

Yesterday, I stood yet again in front of a room full of a black brown yellow cream gold charcoal caramel coffee every shade of in-between low-income, first-generation college students, listening to a local Hawaiian girl read Lois-Ann Yamanaka's "Boss of the Food," in perfect pidgin and later explain how her teachers made her stop speaking pidgin, stop saying 'mines' for 'mine', and then listened to a Latino student explain that 'hispanic' is a white-created term he doesn't use as he rejected Richard Rodriguez's rejection of the Chicano movement and spoke of an experience like that of Blas Manuel de Luna's in his poem "Bent to the Earth," where he speaks of what it meant to be stopped by immigration when he was five, to witness what a stick of polished wood could do to a man's face and see friends taken who would never return and then go back to work, and then got a Native American student from the Rez to talk about how he felt Sherman Alexie's essay "Superman and Me," was speaking directly to him, how he too was that Indian boy reading and reading, trying to save his own life, and then taught the class the concept of phenotype and heard all the students chime in about what it means to look like the background you want to claim or to be mistaken for something else, heard the weight of stereotype and assumption and expectation in the story of the latino student with a pierced ear and baggy pants who writes better than you'd believe and who gets followed at the Duckstore, and the experience of the Mexican student who's light-skinned but first-generation and low-income and who nobody ever thinks is Mexican, and the tale of the latina girl who people always assume is Philipino or Hawaiian who's hurt when people find out she's Mexican and say 'Oh, that's too bad,' and then the story of the black student from North Portland who's squarely built and who regularly gets assumed to be a football player by his professors, TAs, and fellow students, and so is simultaneously talked down to or treated deferentially, and then to listen finally to the Philipino and Native American girl who said she's been mistaken every day of her life for a Mexican immigrant, to the point where she used to want to learn Spanish and embrace whatever there was redeeming and positive in that position, since she had to endure all the negative assumptions and discrimination. I stood at the front of the room and walked to the back of the room, spoke to individual groups and individual students and to the whole group, read from the text, wrote on the board, told my own stories about Oregon and Mississippi and even being mistaken for a local in Southern Spain, trying to draw it all out and weave it into a salient lesson, to get the students to begin to locate themselves and define themselves, to have something coherent and significant to say about their own identities, where they come from and where they want to go. And you know, it is a privilege, to teach these kids. So I did it the first time (though not for the first time, since this is my seventh year in diversity-retention, my 65th comp class with this demographic of students), in my 11 am class, and prepared to go do it again, and then again once more, bearing witness to America in all its contradictions and possibilities.

Southern Sin is In

Just found out my essay, "Harm," a chapter from my memoir "Gone," was selected as a winner from more than 600 entries in Creative Nonfiction's "Southern Sin" contest! $, Publication, and evidently an imminent Southern Sin Anthology as a book on its way. I badly needed some good news; this is pretty good stuff!

New Year's Day

I wake early on New Years, on a few hours sleep, and not from light through the drapes—it is a blue dark still behind folds of clouds, and below the red and green and yellow lights of the city are barely visible, muted by a gauze of fog that hugs the streets but is punctured here and there by the steeple of a church and the sharp fingers of Doug Fir along the distant hills. Cars cannot be seen except for the flicker of headlights and the thrum and rumble of motors gunned and idled, and day does not seem imminent—it is less dawn now than the melancholy of evening, the diminishing of hush, child, it is time to rest. I was too old for riot, though I rang in the New Year by a fire in a house on a hill with a well-chosen song and a half-dozen old friends, and now there is this new clarity: hello, world. You are here, I am here. Let us make peace with that uncertain arrangement, for distantly a train-whistle lows and I hear the click of wheels headed somewhere, declaring promises: come, be carried, be bound.


And now the day comes and there are breaks in the clouds where there is a ghost of blue and this light of this first day is white and erasing, unrelenting, and the fog is only a thin mist on distant hills and the squared blocks are there and the streets are there and now the cars are plain in their bustle and crawl, make sharp turns motor up and rev and screech brakes, and somewhere out of sight someone even honks, as if to say, I can make noise here in this wide open world, bare and plain and full of demands. I must rise and shower and get in my car and drive to a cabin where my parents and brother's family eat my mother's New Years soup, Japanese Azone brought over from the old country, deep broth of boiled chicken carcass and kombu and shitakes and shoyu, ladled out in great bowls stacked with mochi and clams and lotus root and purple potato, my favorite meal, well worth rising for even into such unforgiving light, but if it is a blessing to have places to go then it is perhaps an equal blessing to do so on a morning we are supposed to forget last years sorrows and burdens, to abandon regret, and think of where we are going, what bounty awaits. I wish you all, friends, a year as good as the Azone that awaits me by a wood-burning stove in a cabin on a river beneath a grove of Douglas Fir where the voices of my nephews fill the rooms.

Even the Rain in the New Year

Here, I had pasted in Agha Shahid Ali’s “Even the Rain,” thinking to borrow inspiration from the lines, from the mood of melancholy and the resonance of the repetition. How he begins, What will suffice for a true love-knot/Even the rain? But he has bought grief’s lottery, bought even the rain." And then I erased it all, and rewrote the first line from memory, and see I cannot steal from Shahid what he has already said, to repurpose or reify, just as I see that when even the rain is not here even the rain is here. Oh, Shahid, man who mourned the world adequately. Out the window is only the rain, as it always is here in Winter, and I don’t have anything to say about grief or silence or the desire for hope. The coffee is bitter and the long afternoon is a well in the bottom of which I cannot see from and the music is tinny and thin from the speakers of the café, and the baristas don’t bustle because no-one waits on anything and what I want is to create or say or do or make or find. No, I want a beginning to the sun, or an enchantment of the tongue instead of this dull, stuttered musing. I want not to write the words ‘I want’.

But tomorrow is New Year’s Eve, and we are supposed to be filled with resolution and resolve: this year I will be different, I will diet and exercise until I bulge with muscle, I will leave off whiskey and cigarettes and poor choices in my love life, I will lust for less sweets, go vegan or pescatarian or organic or cream my coffee only with clarified Chinese soymilk, I will take up hot yoga, find Jesus or Buddha or become nonviolent like Gandhi, I will finish my book sell my book begin to write my book or say just one true thing appreciate beauty and the blessings I have, become better, better, better. Too much less, and too much more. Too little, and not enough.

Tomorrow will not dawn clear or bright, and the day after we will not be different, though we might be renewed for thinking we can be. Today my best old friend rolls back into town to ring in the New Year, and tomorrow night it will be more wine, whiskey, and country songs, trying to find some heat and light in ringing it all in, bringing it all down, in a house high on a hill with the long rows of grapes swinging away, or toward, under the rain falling in the dark, or rising, since all the rain that falls was once river or ocean or lake or puddle or pond and has already fallen before and risen again, made new (or not), and so it will be for all of us, soon or not so soon, later or never too late: we will live, and we will love what we can, even the rain, and we will want, and we will not, and we will be, and we will not, and that must suffice.

On the Eve of the Apocalypse

for Jake Adam York


Dusk arrives early in these last couple days before the shortest day of the year, not yet five in the evening and the sky a darkening bruise and the streetlight is less coming on than spluttering out. It has been a week of grief, first Newtown and the long mourning to follow, yesterday the poet Jake Adam York of unexpected stroke at forty, Jake one of the first editors to champion my work, and surely one of the finest poets in the country. Warm inside the bright, clean, bustling café, the alt-rock seems garishly shallow and every piece of small talk and every cursory conversation seems put-on, veiling grief or truer auguries of imminent sorrow, and I suppose we should all heed the prophecies of apocalypse and drop our smiles and beat our chests with grief.

But it was Jake himself who said in his poem “Elegy,” that in Greek, elegy means mourning song, a poem for what’s been lost, and the Greeks always cut something from their lines, a syllable or two, to create a silence or a place to hear it, maybe breaking meter…stepping quick then stopping, so the pain can arrive, and so the elegy, the mourning song, reaches for what’s missing or left behind.
So, I search for a silence or a space to hear what needs to be said, search the bare beams of the ceiling and the faint rattle of the airducts overhead just audible beneath the rhythm guitar and I see what everyone else makes of mourning. On Facebook the poet David Daniels keeps searching for his last memory of being with Jake Adam York—‘was it here, no, no, it was there, at the reading, over cocktails, just in passing on the street, in words of congratulation said in passing, no, no, wait, now I remember, yes, I do, it was there, it was there,’ as if by remembering when or where he might unearth why, how, what to do with loss. One friend says that she will make mashed potatoes and pretend the world is ok, and another friend posts pictures of the ingredients for Dominican Chicken, and here someone who doesn’t know Jake Adam York at all has put up photos of the tiny house she has made herself, decorated miniature but bright and shiny for the holidays, and so it is after great pain: people go on, they persist. Yesterday I ran into an old lover I hadn’t seen in years who was in an obliviated place when I knew her; now, she says she’s found a grace in being in the world, and when we had to go, as she was dressed in a tinsel-laden Christmas-sweater costume and so couldn’t hug me goodbye she cupped my cheeks between her warm hands, a benediction meaning only, we will both be alright. Out the window the sky holds only the last, waning light, but the streetlight has steadied its beacon, and I suppose I trust the sky behind the sky, the mystery best signaled by lit candle or unlit candle, that is in absence imminent, that is in elegy present, that is the words to all the poems that Jake Adam York will no longer write or that he already wrote. Nearby a young girl with gold pigtails laughs at her own joke, a sound innocent with joy that makes me sure the morning of the coming apocalypse will dawn silver and clear and bright, and we will all still be here save those of us now gone from what we know of the earth.

Second Year Preparation

Over the summer back in Oregon, I set out to learn how to teach fourth grade. I immersed myself in literary theory and methods of differentiation, consumed everything from “Mosaic of Thought,” to “The Four Blocks,” system of Patricia Cunningham, and created a scaffolded curriculum synthesizing different approaches. I set up an installation in my father’s medical practice with pictures of children and an essay about teaching in the Delta and solicited donations of books, which poured in by the boxful. Then I read books geared toward best practices in creating positive classroom culture and effective classroom management, and began to create systems and make signs and displays with posterboard and Kinko-prints. I convinced my mother, an architect skilled in interior design, to drive back to the Delta with me a week before school started and do a makeover of my classroom, to make it into a colorful and inviting and functional space, and she generously agreed.

We drove the country with the Subaru packed to the ceiling and then unpacked what we had brought in the classroom, mostly boxes of books, and my mother clucked her tongue at the barren and sloppy plainness of my room and unfurled her tape measure and sketch pad and found a vision and a plan while I swept and mopped and wiped away the dust and then began to order and mark the books according to grade level. The next day we drove to Rosewood to the nearest Lowe’s for supplies, and we bought the giant blue scraps of rug and great pieces of showerboard and the interlocking series of folding shelves and paint trays for students to get new work and turn in old work and a hammer and nails, and then at the fabric store we purchased bright fabric and twisty-ties and wire and adhesive tape, and then at Wal-mart we bought pillows and beanbags and dry-erase markers and magazine holders and notebooks in bulk and the biggest electric pencil sharpener available, and then we went back to the classroom and began to work, me the grunt labor and my mother orchestrating it all, as we nailed the great pieces of shower-board over the fading slate of the chalkboard to form a huge white-board, and threw out the nubs of chalk and filled the ledges with dry-erase markers. We laid the thick blue rug and shaped the shelves and my mother measured and bound the fabric into a series of blue and pink and yellow arcs to form drapes to frame each window. I ordered the books on the shelves, blue and yellow and white and black and green stickers to cover the distance between second and sixth grade level, and then I set up the line of work pick-up and return trays for each student and then set in each one a magazine holder with a notebook within for taking notes on the book each child was reading and then sharpened a pencil and tucked in in the wire of each notebook.

We propped the pillows about the edges of the reading rug and put the beanbags in the corners and my mother’s considerable work was done and so I drove her to Memphis for an evening flight and drove back to return to work. I taped the giant, colorful letters for the word wall all the way around the classroom and in the front above the board I secured the signs and displays I’d created concerning reading strategies good readers apply and decoding strategies for compound words and models for Listening Learning position and the list of three rules, the first being, “Raise Your Hand Before You Speak,” and the sheet bearing the class pledge I’d written right beside the American flag and the plaque put up in every classroom after 9/11, “In God We Trust,”, and then I put up the colored card system for personal behavior, with black being ‘Superstar,’ and the list of consequences for being less than super, and mounted the special white-board/meter for whole class recess time and put up the Morning math board on another piece of showerboard on the wall beside my desk put up and the new board for Awesome Work and the great space of wall blank with expectation and finally taped up the great glittery sign for the door that said “Welcome to Success!” The room was clean and bright and colorful, rich with comfort and color, brimming with the insistence that here, one couldn't possibly fail.

Finding Home at the China-King Buffet

One refuge I found was a Chinese restaurant off the highway called “China-King Buffet.” The unlit, hand-painted sign was all that distinguished the plain square white building from the industrial uses of the identical row of buildings beside it; the windows out front were covered, and the first time I went I was a little scared of what I’d find inside. The space was vast, high-ceilinged and unpartitioned, so that the modest buffet which steamed constant clouds from the egg-flower soup tank looked comically small, and the old formica tables and cheap folding chairs seemed unreasonably distant from one another, each table its own solitary island even on nights when the tables were full, which usually they were not. There was a sense that it was a small operation striving to fill an overlarge space, an impression heightened by the attempt to fill the long walls with pictures of properly large scale: the entire rear wall was a twenty-foot by hundred foot color picture of the great wall of China receding into blue sky, splitting the restaurant in two down the middle, while on each adjoining wall hand-painted gold koi of monstrous proportions undulated across the otherwise empty space. One of the oddest features of the place was how on weekend nights the place often divided by race, with blacks on the left, on one side of the great wall, and whites on the other side; fittingly, I often ended up in the middle, directly beneath the great wall. In the furthest corner from the entrance was a desk and cash register and a single open door which was bright with the lights of the kitchen behind, and every time I entered a short, slight Chinese boy of fifteen or sixteen was perched on a stool beside the desk with a Chinese-language magazine or book in hand, and he would startle at the clang of the bells on the door and thrust the magazine under the desk and leap forward with a stack of menus, speaking broken, heavily accented English: “Welcome. Help to the buffet if y’all like, please!”

The first time I went in, I looked over the buffet and knew it was for a Delta pallet—everything was fried and thoroughly inauthentic for the Szechuan cuisine the menu claimed, shrimp and chicken and noodles and battered vegetables. When I called the boy over and asked to order off the menu, he brightened and nodded and said, “Oh yes, you are Asian!” When the steamed dumplings and buns came the platter was brought out by a small, kind-faced woman in an apron who I took to be the boy’s mother, and when she saw me her face lit up and she slid the steaming food in front of me and put her hand to my shoulder and motioned for the boy to come translate; through his translation, she indicated welcome for ‘Another Asian person!’ and tried to hide her disappointment at my questionably Japanese origins, and said several times just how welcome I was; finally, she retreated to the kitchen and let me eat and I was delighted to find the food good, fresh and flavorful and not fried. When I finished, the boy brought with the check a giant plate of dessert from the buffet, lime jello with whipped cream and white-cake and pudding, which he indicated was on the house and which I tried to move around on the plate so as to appear to have enjoyed. And so the pattern became set—whether I came with a group of other TFA teachers or alone, there was always a complimentary plate of desert, and always a warm reception, the only place in the town where I was not the only slant-eyed, brown-skinned fellow.

Over time, in conversations with the boy, Hao, on quiet days, I found out a little more: the family had come over not long ago to a family restaurant in New Jersey, and when relatives who’d run this restaurant decided to leave they’d agreed to come take over with no idea about what being Chinese immigrants might mean in the deep rural South. Hao went to the public schools, to the high school; he told me, in his broken English with his over-pronounced syllables and troubled ls and rs, that he had no friends, that he wanted to return to Jersey or to China, that America was not as he’d thought it would be. I couldn’t imagine how difficult it was for him at the high school—I knew from my experience of the streets the pointed fingers and the laughter, the taunts of China-man, China-man, show us some Kung Fu!

One day when I came on a quiet afternoon the Hao’s face lit up when I entered. He called out “Hey! I got something for you!” and gestured for me to find a seat, then he hurried back to the kitchen; moments later, the music, which had been new country, went silent, and then there was a crackle and first quiet and then at ear-splitting volume, the first notes of flute, and for a moment I didn’t recognize it and then I did: a vintage recording of “Sakura,” the cherry blossom song, that most common Japanese folk song so often used when teaching about Japan. I nearly burst into laughter, then restrained myself. Who knew where Hao had found the cd here, in a town without a record store—it certainly must have taken some effort.

Hao walked out of the back with a proud grin, the flute notes echoing loud from wall to wall, and called over the clamor, “I got this for you. Do you like it?”

I did the only thing I could: I told him I loved it, that it was everything I missed, and he nodded and nodded, beaming, imagining he’d returned home to me in a way that he himself must have longed for so acutely—a reminder of who he was, where he’d come from, that made him feel for a moment he belonged in the world.