My Writing Process Blog Tour

Thanks to Alison Barker for tagging me!

1. What are you working on?
Long answer: article edits, syllabi, comprehensive exam prep, a memoir, a novel, some journal articles

This week: comps prep essays, notes, and reading

2. How does your work differ from others’ work in the same genre?

I guess it depends which genre you're talking about. Academic writing is an interesting one, because I straddled the gap between college and my MA at NYU obsessed with theory and its jargon. I think I thought that I could only be a successful academic writer if I wrote like that, and I also thought that I needed to pretend I understood it. In my Ph.D years, where I am now, my writing is much clearer, I think, and I'm less attached to slippery, polysyllabic words. Ultimately, I guess, I'm much more interested in how to make my writing elegant and clear than how to make it sound fancy.

Where memoir is concerned, I'm working on a grief memoir about my mom. What I don't want it to be is just that - I want to include as much or more of her happy, healthy, amazing life as I do of her illness, her death, and my experience soldiering forward without her. 

3. Why do you write what you do? 

Most boringly, I write because it's expected of me, but I wouldn't have chosen a career path so centered on it (academia) if I didn't love it. It frustrates me routinely, but then, so does love.

More profoundly, I write to honor my mother, who died unfairly, painfully, and too soon, and who gave me a voice and a desire to use it. She was one of the most poetic and clear writers I have had the pleasure to read. (Her personality was like that, too.)

I write because I feel most like myself when writing is part of my day.

I write because I can't stop - I have written on the walls of my bathroom and I write when I run (I pause and I take notes on my phone). 

4. How does your writing process work?

I could write a dissertation about that. I try to write at least 750 words a day, my favorite motivating tool for which is 750words.com. (It's free! It's fabulous! You should use it.) I don't always get that many down, but I like having a no-frills platform that I can access on any browser. I write on my iPad a lot, since I'm often in transit between home and campus and/or yoga studio or what have you.  

Lately I have been rediscovering my own handwriting. I carry a small notebook now to jot in, rather than my usual habit of using the app on my phone. (I do both, actually.) It's very nice, and I'm rediscovering the ways in which my thinking is facilitated differently by different technologies. DragonDictation fits into this nicely (also free! You should also try!).

My dear friend Valerie Wetlaufer, an amazing poet, did this awesome process tour as well: check her out!

Fragment: Tatouage

I can't stop thinking about tattoos. I can still smell the ink, even though my newest one is a few months old. My industrial-size jar of Aquaphor sits in the bathroom and leers at me. My favorite artists' business cards live on my fridge, and wink every time I go out the door. Any kind of buzzing noise evokes a tattoo shop for me. (There are electric saws and lawnmowers outside my window as I write that both pull out the feeling. The quickening pulse, the impending sensation, the scent of ink.)

Healing Sources

From my horoscope email: "What are the sources that heal and nourish you? Where do you go to renew yourself? Who are the people and animals that treat you the best and are most likely to boost your energy? I suggest that in the coming week you give special attention to these founts of love and beauty. Treat them with the respect and reverence they deserve. Express your gratitude and bestow blessings on them." 

 I am nourished by strenuous movement, most of the time, but also, sometimes, by being still. Touch heals me, and laughter. Really good words put in a wonderful order. Really good notes and sounds and voices. 

What are your healing sources?

Scarlett O'Hara, Grief Counselor

I wrote this before going to my mom's to tackle the house. Now that we're in the during/after phase, I've got more thoughts, but I wanted to share this.

*

Now that I am staring down the packing up of my dead mother's things and the selling of her house, a task that's petrified me since the beginning of her illness, The house tasks glom together into what feels like an insurmountable mass, and that mass sometimes shines, mirage-like and as falsely, as worse than her death.

It's not.

Nothing in my life has been worse than her death, except the fact of the wall it put her behind, and the fact that I can't break it down.

But it's a hard task. It'll be like cleaning out her office times who knows what. I don't really want to think about it. So I'm not. Like the formerly unseen grief counselor Scarlett O'Hara, I'll think about it tomorrow. Another day.

Dwelling on it won't really help me handle it better, I don't think. I'm sure I dwelled the last time we went there, and that time, I utterly fell apart. I fell apart in a way I didn't in the days after her death. It felt like the house itself was suffocating me. Being there without her was worse than being haunted - it was utterly empty, except when it wasn't, and those two feelings alternated with me between them like a buffeted sapling.

There's no sense in being buffered more than you already are if you can avoid it.

Not thinking about things was a tactic I used when she was sick, too, though sometimes I'm not sure I realized it. Looking back at it now, I didn't spend a ton of time worrying about what would happen (or at least not putting the fear into thoughts or words). I focused on hoping, and when I wasn't focused on hoping, I was focused on doing. Taking buses to be with her. Living in yoga pants in her room in the ICU. Being forced by well-meaning nurses and family and sometimes Mom herself to go outside.

I thought about everything else another day. Today, and tomorrow.

Beauty Wellness Wisdom (Out of the Mouths of Babes)

Last week I was honored to represent a teacher of mine at a really interesting event that's gotten my thoughts churning and creativity flowing. Twice a year, ABC Carpet and Home does a Beauty, Wellness, and Wisdom event that "celebrate[s] holistic beauty, health, wellbeing, wisdom, and wonder — always relevant topics, but particularly apropos in the context of the season of renewal." I offered a writing workshop centered on the concept of felt sense. Felt sense, rooted in the work of psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin, is complex and fascinating way of accessing the deeper parts of creativity. My professor and mentor, Sondra Perl, developed a series of writing guidelines out of Gendlin's work, and I'm currently adapting it for a creativity and movement context.

The most powerful moment of the afternoon came right at the end. I had also been asked, in my capacity as a yoga teacher, to lead a yogic meditation to close out the day. I knew the space would be filled with chairs, so I had a series of open standing poses planned, and some dharma talk at the ready. Just as I was taking the stage, a small boy appeared at my elbow, and the producer said, "This is F. Is it okay if he comes with you? He'd like to demonstrate the poses." The only possible answer was yes - I love kids, and I was excited to see how his energy would affect the energy in the room. I wasn't prepared for how much.

F stood next to me and carefully mimicked my movements, holding his mic just as I held mine. We moved the group through a gentle series of asana, from half moon to forward fold and back up again to take it to the other side. Dharma talking is one of my favorite parts of teaching yoga, and I started mine with the intention to close out the session on the notes the whole day had been tapping: beauty, wisdom, wellness, wholeness, love, integrity.

Then F looked up at me and asked, "Can I say something?" He asked everyone to hold out their arms like wings, and led them through one of the more powerful guided meditations I've had the pleasure to hear. It was affecting and beautiful, and I am very proud of myself for not sobbing in front of everyone.

Thank you, F.

(More From A) Real Brooklynite on Girls: Whitewashing and Books

You may have seen my thoughts on "Girls" before. I have many more thoughts that I am trying to tie together into some sort of narrative coherent enough for at least an article. I suspect that Hannah's impending move will provide lots more thought fodder next season. (What details will the show get wrong, one wonders?)

"Girls" is set in an otherworldly Brooklyn. The borough has been fictionalized out of its multi-cultural, socioeconomically diverse reality, (seemingly) solely populated by white, trust funded hipsters. Much has been written on these dynamics and their validity, and, indeed, they underpin the organizing principle of this volume. I started watching the show really angry about the lack of diversity until I realized what story Dunham is trying to tell: tales of a very inward-focused tribe. The main Girls aren't afraid of people of color. They don't know any. They aren't really interested in other white people, either - they're the navel-gazingest characters I've seen on TV since, I don't know, Seinfeld. In connection with this, what interests me is how these and other identity-focused questions impact the curious literary sensibility of the show, one that molds itself out of odd social dynamics, tribal modes of discourse, and an almost bookless world.

Midway through the third season, in a trajectory marked by increasing vapidity and hostility among the Brooklyn trust fund hipsters, Hannah and Shoshanna evoke literature and literary thinking in the middle of a drag-out fight. In response to being called "unstimulating" by Hannah, Shoshanna snorts, "What is this, a Jane Austen novel?" (She goes on to snort, "I'm so fucking sick of all of you.") The context of the argument is (fictional) years of resentment (played out in actual seasons), and it comes out in the fight in different versions of what each character says another "always does." Writing becomes a device on the show - the characters love hearing themselves put words together in a formalized speech.

I am interested in considering representations of literature and thinking on the show. How does the trope of the high culture novel (and maybe other literary tropes) pushes back against the "lower culture" aspects of the girls' lives? How does the show's depiction of life impact its art and art appreciation? How do the girls work out their own anxieties relating to thought and education and reading? How does the trope of the Jane Austen novel both articulate and press back against the world Dunham and her actors are creating? (Preliminary answers: through class/privilege, and through race.)

The Economy of Adaptation (Scattered Thoughts in Death in Venice)

One could write a whole paper on the economics of adaptations, but I'm interested in the other meaning of the word - how do adaptations get transferred from original text to adapted text and in that, how is the original "meaning" (a concept I'll problematize later) transferred?

I think that novellas, in their economy of style, could seem to require more of their content to be included in an adaptation. Part of that is due to how we read: it's easier to hold onto descriptive phrases and small details in a book that has fewer of them (or even fewer words). Sparer prose is easier to remember but harder to film, in part, I'd like to suggest, because each word's role is deeper (not more important) than those in a longer work. By deeper, I mean that the overall sheen of a short work is more impacted by a given word than in a longer work.

Let's take some phrases from Mann's Death in Venice (trans. Michael Henry Heim). His lengthy description of Aschenbach at the beginning of the book is easily cast: just find (or adapt, through makeup and camera angles) an actor who looks the part and can also play it. However, take a detail like one about the hotel manager: "a short, quiet, obsequiously courteous man"(42). Short is easily cast. Obsequiously courteous may not be so easily directed, especially for such a small role. (I can imagine it being overdone, but it's harder to imagine it being as subtly struck as Mann's description.) Maybe I'd have an easier time of this if I were a better actor myself?) Even more complex is this description of the gondolier: " A "lightweight" outfit (52) is more easily portrayed than a "washable" one (ibid.).

This is a text of introspection more than action. There isn't even any dialogue until a third of the way through. In that vein and in contrast to what I've been arguing, the beach scene on 54-55 is written like a painting. It's easily reproduced, almost as through Mann were himself a set dresser, until Aschenbach starts musing on the sea and the "deep-seated reasons" that he loves it (55). I'm not sure that a voiceover would do any of the musings justice, although that's the easy solution to the problem I'm setting up.

One other complication that Mann's book throws in is that of translation. Michael Cunningham's introduction to the Heim translated edition (Ecco, 2004) foregrounds the issue of translation right away. He says that fiction in particular in "an ongoing process of translation" (vii) -- and his point that Aschenbach changes in the new Heim translation.

Mann himself offers something of an answer to my conundrum. In describing Tadzio and Aschenbach's preoccupation with watching him, Mann has Aschenbach say, "What discipline, what precision of thought was conveyed by that tall, youthfully perfect physique!" (81) and "he longed to work in Tadzio's presence, to model his writing on the boy's physique" (85).

A Tattoo Meditation

I got my fourth tattoo this weekend. It was my largest (size of a face), longest (two hours), most complexly designed (lots of little lines running over differently sized curves), and most intense (on ribs and touching hips).

Getting a tattoo is so meditative, despite its intensity (and I don't call the feeling pain - it doesn't operate on me the way that pain does). I kept very still, didn't clench my toes or fists, and barely had any muscle spasms (something that did happen with my first hip tattoo). I breathed into any discomfort, and tried to still my thoughts. I imagined my body moving up to the needle instead of it moving down into me - when I mentioned it, my artist concurred that that really works. I turned on my yoga teaching mindset and thought about which bandhas I was engaging. I traced the sensations like a map across my hip and rips, trying to determine where it felt better (I think my back ribs felt best, with hip and front ribs coming in as more intense). I also noticed the times when I was wrong about where the needle actually was. I bathed in the buzz and the smell of the ink.

I didn't think twice about wandering through the shop with my shirt hiked up (which, to be fair, I don't think twice about in kickboxing, either). I walked barefoot (same). What I said, when the artist and my friend asked about how I felt, was that I was okay. And I was. When it got tough, that moment ended, often replaced by a good moment. Sometimes just letting my gaze unravel its focus was helpful. Sometimes I curled one set of toes. I though about my mom, my ex-boyfriends, my friends, my cat, my homework. I got Writing Ideas. I thought about all the things the tat and I would experience together. I took in as much of the experience as I could, and when I left, I felt a high like the one I got after my first (fifteen minute) tat.

First Book. Next Installment.

I read the following section of my memoir at the 2014 Winter Follies at Spoke the Hub. (Please never spell my name this non-way.) See if you can find one of the title contenders.

Dedicated, as always, to my amazing mom.

The year my mom died - 2013, last year - wasn't light. It sat on my shoulders and pressed me deeper to the earth, the earth they say receives us when we die. I saw the worst ravages of cancer claim her formerly healthy body. It only took nine months. She fought her physical demons and I fought my emotional ones, both of us staring down the prospect of our little unit of two being torn apart. It was unthinkable. I spent most of my childhood thinking it was unthinkable. Now it's my reality.

In another sense, though, the year was suffused with glow. It was the year I learned to take myself upside down in the advanced yoga classes I used to shy away from. It was the year I learned to lighten my own load of grief, discovering a fierce kickboxing warrior inside my runner's frame. It was a year with a lot of self-discovery and love along with grief and loneliness. It was the year in which I had to find a middle way - between that of my life with my mother and my life without her. It would take a book to tell you our story, a book that I'm writing, a book that will have this in it. It only takes a few minutes to tell you that she lived, she was so important, and I miss her with every fiber of the being that she made.

In The Long Goodbye, her memoir of her mother's illness and death, Meghan O’Rourke talks about mourners thinking that their lost loved one is somewhere else and will appear. I empathize. For me, it's like my mother is just around the corner, or behind an invisible wall that I can't beat down, no matter how hard I learn to punch. I wonder if some part of me thinks that writing this will bring my mother back. My words will somehow alchemize a turning back in time, or a sea change in biochemistry, a putting-together of rended matter. It sounds plausible to my little girl brain. The four year-old who lives in me doesn’t believe in the finality of death or what it does to the earthly body. The yoga teacher that I am now is starting not to either. It's more comforting that way, and there are holy traditions behind it.

I try to do things my mom did, to carry on her many, many small good works, working up to the bigger ones. I pledge to my local NPR affiliate in part because she always did. I compost like she did. I say, "Hey kids" the way that she did, and "I'm well, 'n you?". I wear her earrings and, when at home sometimes, her robe. I kept it folded next to my pillow for some months after her death. When I was tiny and she would leave me with a babysitter for a few hours, I would wear the same robe, and wouldn't go to sleep without it. I'm in grad school pursuing my Ph.D, and I'll be the second Dr. Ashton in our family, after my mother. I always knew it was something I wanted to do, but now I realize that it's in my blood.

Here's some of what I've learned in the year without her. Live your life as fully as you can. Don't save anything for a special occasion - use it now. Use it when it calls to you. Say the word love until you can live inside it. Make room for serendipity, and room within time. Breathe more deeply. Know that some things return. Some experiences repeat. This is the life you're living. Live fully within it. Nobody's keeping score but you, and guess what? You don't have to either. More people admire you than you even can imagine. And so many people love you. 

Yoga Is

I've been thinking about the general pressure in the fitness world to make yoga "for" something. I read a lot of fitness mags and get headlines emailed to me, and they often scream, "Yoga Poses for a Better Butt!" "Tone and Tighten with Yoga!" "Yoga Your Way to a Sexy You!" (I made that last one completely up. It seems plausible.)

Look, I'm a yoga teacher, and I've been practicing for years. I know that yoga tightens and tones. But what bugs me about headlines like these, particularly at a time of year that is all-too often focused on "improvement" and "resolutions" and "doing better" (phrases that I am all too susceptible to believing, just like you may be) - well, hell, let's keep some practices sacred. Let's let yoga be. It is what it is and it does what it does, but it shouldn't be saddled with reasons. We have enough pressure out there. Let's keep our spiritual practices empty and see what comes to fill them.

Teaching Out in the Open

All of my teachers this semester hold their tricks and challenges out in the open. Some have shared personal stories in the service of the topic at hand. All have discussed their scholarly practices. It's a level of academic engagement in the highs and lows of the profession that I haven't seen since the conversations I used to have with my mother, a professor of psychology. The communication lines were different in my master's program. Though many of my professors there shared their honest experiences, there's a level of professionalization in the doctoral context that I think institutionalizes their honesty a bit. We're being treated, to some degree, as future colleagues, which is such a meaningful move. My yoga teachers make similar moves that chip away against the divide between teacher and student. They talk about the poses that challenge them, problems they overcame, things that bother them. They do it with love, underlining the yogic belief that we are all works in progress. 

This aspect of my academic and professional training makes me think differently about what kind of teacher I want to be. There's less performative drama and less hierarchy, but more listening. I try to be this kind of yoga teacher, and next year I hope to be this kind of college teacher as well. The wall between teacher and student breaks down when these qualities come in, and it will be my challenge to keep that wall down, or at least low, in lecture settings and in situations when I need to discipline. A version of the latter scenario can come up in yoga - when a student attempts a pose for which the class hasn't warmed up, for example - and in those situations, I've found it's pretty easy to shift from warm to stern and back again. The balance of that in my college teaching experiences will be interesting to compare.