Content Resolution: Learning

I think I need an angle for this blog, like some combination of the above topics that play into and off my experience. Metawriting isn't cutting it anymore.

Content Crisis

Okay, so I want to blog more. I really do,. However, I'm not sure WHAT to blog about. I am fascinated by these things:

poetry,
politics,
trans and queer issues,
music,
creative nonfiction,
journalism,
the media,
science,
the natural world,
food,
family,
economics,
education,
atheism,
spirituality.

That's a lot to fit into a single blog. But they're all related (somehow, I am sure), so I think that's still almost okay.

I want to blog about these things. I also want to stop wasting my time posting about them on Facebook, since I only get a handful of likes (and one of them is me!) and rarely comments whenever I post anything that has to do with this stuff. So maybe I can have better conversations on this thing.

I'm also going to start a second blog for innocuous little creative things. Stay tuned.

Blogging.

Z

New Stuff Coming up the Pipe

Heyo,

It's been almost half a year since I posted anything here. Not dead, not silent. Many things have happened. I'll spare you the mundane details, but in a quick list:

stopped writing poetry,
was accepted into the MFA program at Oregon State University for creative nonfiction,
graduated grad school round 1 and nabbed my MA in English,
discovered Fleetwood Mac
hostessed a party dressed congruently with my identified gender,
got a letter from my therapist recommending me for hormone replacement therapy (!)
moved to Oregon,
changed labels from transsexual to transgender to bigender to trans to transfeminine (blog post coming about this soon),
got a job in the Writing Center,
started writing poetry again.

Between hormones letter and moved to Oregon, my Dad died. I'm not in shock anymore. I'm not angry anymore. I'm not in denial anymore either. I'm in the place where you remember the person for who they were, warts and all, good times and bad, and learn a lot about them by talking to relatives. I'm at the point where his death inspires me to do and not do things. The point where you let go of a lot of garbage you didn't know you were carrying around until you knew you could throw it out. The place where you both weep as the ashes disappear in the wind, and search for a good place to keep the cardboard box that holds them: in the closet? In the basement? Maybe bury them at some yet to be found scenic locale?

That place. I start school again in a month. I know I can't hurry this up. I'm sure he'll make it into my thesis more than I'd like. I hope I can treat him fairly when the time comes.

That's a lot of life happening up there. Probably pretty boring to read in list form, honestly. But too much to cover in a blog post. These things are supposed to be entertaining on some level, yes? Balance the self-obsession with some quirky stylistic or formal play? Zap the mundane with the extraordinary or collide the extravagant with the dull? Explode? Implode? Just plode? I've ploded enough for a while.

The major point I'd like to convey right now is this:

I owe Rebecca a breakdown/explanation/investigation into my understanding of my gender identity from like a year ago. I'll be posting about that soon. 

Working name: Zia. I want to expand it. More syllables, before or after.

~Z

Facebook vs Blog vs Applications vs 1965 Miles Davis

If you want a soundtrack, here's some moody jazz. I think it sounds like what's been happening between my ears since February 22nd, when the conference turned to shit, then the magazine arrived damaged, then the big conference disappointed, then the rejections came rolling in. Result of MFA/PhD application season: three MFA waitlists. There are both better and worse results than this. Somehow this result refuses to elate.

Not much to celebrate these days.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zpn2JdkTv78

How to Write What You Came Here to Write: An Attempt at Writing AT the Definition of "Writing At"

In order to write something close to what you really want to write, you must push. You must write something that sounds like something you would write. Then You must write more--you must get bored with the way you write, and try something else. Abandon complete sentences. Delay the settling of syntax. Delay the completion of the thought. Allow the gaze to focus, then dilate and take in unexpected things, and allow those unexpected things in, onto the word-receptacle. Allow yourself to abandon your original purpose. Let the newness arrive in its bloody mess.

30 in 30 Challenge: Approach

Once a season, local poets in Flagstaff, AZ, challenge each other to write 30 poems in 30 days. In the spirit of starting the new year off in a new way by making new stuff, yep, I'm in. Time for this. 

The 30 in 30 Mindset is not necessarily to write 30 perfectly beautiful poems in a row. The goal is to get back into the habit of writing often in order to free up the pen some--write even when you don't think you have anything to say, force yourself through rough spots where you would usually stop writing, try new things that pressureless you would avoid.

With 30 poems looming ahead, the pressure to be awesome kind of disappears, and I tend to write my best stuff with just that amount of pressure: write something, and let it be awful if it wants to be. The value is in the practice, the scrimmage, the skirmishing of forces--not necessarily the product. 

In a word: experimentation. In a phrase: invite the new, no matter how it arrives. In an exclamation: Hooray! A poem has been made! This in itself has value--the appearance of one poem usually signals the presence of others.

If this last year can function as any kind of lesson, the piece of advice Matt Larrimore offered me in July holds true: sometimes you gotta write through the yuck before the gold starts to appear.

Side note: I love writing prompts like these, wherein I am commanded to write, but not what about, and the quality does not matter. I suppose its more an exercise than a process then. And I could use the exercise. I haven't written a new poem since November.

Hopefully, this 30 in 30 will provide a double-writing-whammy. I'll get to write more poems, and I'll also be providing myself with writer-stuff to blog about. Process, instances, brief discussions with the muse, things I love in other poems, the experiments failed, the experiments succeeded, the way there and the there too. 

So I'll be updating more soon. 

-Hope (not bad)

Revision

I think we can revise ourselves. I think we do this every day we interact with anynone, or make a different decision than usual. In the spirit of new year, new thoughts, new ways, etc, I'd like to briefly revise yesterday's unfocused post about rumors, to revise myself a bit.