mutability

September 13

Well, if fair Karen is going to dedicate an entry to me (and, presumably, my prolificity), the least I can do is put some new words here...

But I was going to write an entry anyway. Lots of stuff to write about-- like seeing Ellen Bass read last night. But let me get to that in a roundabout fashion...

So about my prolificity. One of my strengths as a writer has always been that I write fast-- I revise slowly, yes, but I get that draft down awfully quick, and usually all the really important parts are there-- my stories are occasionally born without toes or even arms, but almost always they have a heart and two eyes and even a goodish brain. But lately that hasn’t been the case. I’m not blocked-- not even remotely-- not suffering a crisis of drive or talent or enthusiasm or anything. I’m just writing my fiction more slowly. In the past month I’ve written (I just looked this up-- I don’t go around reviewing these stats in my head or anything) about 11,000 words of fiction, give or take a few hundred. Once complete story called “Spider Rolls” and the ongoing cowgirl story-- which isn’t stalled, or at a sticking place, or bogged down, or anything. In fact, the next several scenes are monumentally kick-ass, and I’m really going to enjoy writing them.

I’m just probably going to write them really slowly. A few hundred words one night, a couple nights not doing any fiction, a few hundred more words. It’ll get done-- and it’ll be good, one of the best stories I’ve ever written, unless it falls apart in the last third.

I’ve been bothered by this slowness! Not the skipping a few nights, hell, that’s my classic M.O., but I usually come back and write several thousand words in a sitting after I get done playing hookey. I make up for it. I haven’t been doing that lately. What’s wrong with me?

So last night I go to see Ellen Bass, and of course I don’t write anything yesterday... in the two hours I had between work and the reading I drank some coffee and caught up my other journal, the one where I write all the stuff I can’t even tell good friends like y’all... then I went to see Ellen.

The short form is, I have long adored Ellen Bass’s work. For the long form, go here.

Where to begin? She was wonderful. She’s a Santa Cruz resident, which I didn’t know. I knew Adrienne Rich lives (or lived) around these parts, but I didn’t realize Ellen did. She just sold a new book, her first in some time, and she was so excited! She’s a very warm person, with a brilliant smile. She read new poems, things that will be in the book, and they’re just as great as the poems from the 70’s and 80’s that I’ve loved so much for so long. I memorized lines as she spoke them so that I could write them down later, guessing at the line breaks, because the book isn’t coming out until 2001 and I couldn’t wait that long to have that language back... she read poems about her son, about her partner Janet, about tigers and sex and suicide phone calls...

And I actually talked to her when we took a break-- pretty brave for me. I mean, I’ve been privileged to talk to and spend time with lots of writers that I admire, but my admiration for Ellen Bass is beyond the usual. She was very, very nice. She teaches workshops (boys are even allowed to take them, sometimes, though sometimes not), and I’m going to try to get into one. To have Ellen Bass read my stuff, and respond! Wow! And after the reading she signed my copy of Of Separateness and Merging, which is an old one but wonderful... I left the Bookshop quite excited about writing and life and everything nice...

(Brief insertion: Ellen read with a fabulous poet/activist/editor named Bret Axel. He was awesome. Look for his stuff, especially Will Work For Peace, and anthology of activist poems he edited that’s full of good stuff by the greats and by burgeoning unknowns)

So as I was walking home, I got to thinking about poetry... and realized I had been writing, after all. I’ve lately had this mental vision of myself as a lazy slug who eats ice cream, drinks gin and tonic, watches old Clive Barker flicks, and occasionally rouses himself to plink a few keys of the old word-processor-piano. And it’s true, my fiction output hasn’t been quite up to snuff... but I’ve been writing lots of poetry.

I tend to not count poetry as writing, somehow, anymore than I count writing here in Tropism or in my other journal. You know? I spend half an hour, I get maybe 30 lines, sixty if it’s a long one, and that’s a poem, but I’m not going to rush over to the “I Wrote Today” topic at the Rumor Mill and crow about that. I’ll spend more hours over the next months revising, polishing, trying different elements of formal structure, and thinking hard about every little word and line break... but I still think, “Oh, it’s just a poem, I didn’t crank 8K of fiction tonight, so I didn’t do anything.”

Hell. That just ain’t true.

Looking back through my poetry notebook.... in the past few months I’ve written around a dozen poems that are quite good or are going to be quite good when I get finished with all the polishing (I work hard at poetry, folks, and while I’m not so enamored of revising fiction, I love revising poetry). Sure, it’s probably no more than a couple thousand words, all together, but with poetry it’s different, you have to count differently, a word in a poem does the work of ten or twenty words in a piece of fiction.

So I am writing, and not too slowly (you count that differently with poems, too, in my experience). Maybe I’m a cyclical writer, with periods of prose, periods of poetry. That wouldn’t be so bad, would it?

Thanks again, Ellen.

In other news, my poem “Daughter and Moon” is finally going to appear in Weird Tales! Whee! I’m not sure which issue yet, but all the difficulties seem to have been surmounted, and I sent back the contracts, and I have reason to believe it’ll be out soon. So keep your eyes open.

And Meg’s visiting for longer! She was going to come in October for fall break, just a brief visit of four days, but now she’s coming early and staying for ten days! Whee!

Next week I’m going to the National Trails Symposium, up in Redding, by beautiful Mt. Shasta and that big wilderness area thereabouts (which I’m told is the size of Ohio). My boss asked me yesterday if I wanted to come along, work in the booth, and it sounds fun, so I said sure. I’m going to be gone from Sept. 18th to the 26th... so now I have an excuse for not posting an entry for a few days!

Next entry: Observers, Theorists, Poets, big ol’ telescopes, and faraway terrestrial planets. Is it science fiction? No, my friends, it is not. Just science, and those like me who wander on the fringe thereof.