Years ago, I was taking a road trip with my husband. We drove through Southern California, visiting his family and my family, old friends and old haunts. We were both working in different jobs then–I was cooking for a living, and I hadn’t written anything in several years. I’d practically given up on poetry altogether.

I had a book tucked in my bag throughout that trip: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. I’d picked it up on a whim, mainly because I’d enjoyed The Remains of The Day in high school. I read a page or two when I wasn’t on driving duty, but I always got sick while reading in the car, so the book stayed in my satchel (I had to dig around the book, in fact, to field a call back from an interview for my very first teaching job, my cell reception breaking up as we drove through the Sierra Nevada hills). Mostly, I saved the book for nights in hotels along the way.

It was an evening in a hotel in Fresno that I sat for a several-hour reading marathon, tearing through the pages well after my husband had fallen asleep. The novel didn’t just bring me to tears. It made me want to start writing again.

This summer, it’s roughly six years later, I’m dragging that dog-eared, beaten and brutalized copy of Never Let Me Go to another class session. I’m going to attempt to explain why Ishiguro is one of the finest novelists working in the English language. I’m going to point to passages that make me want to sing and dance and stand on the table Dead Poets Society-style. I know there will be some blank looks, though, because some students simply don’t care. I could stand on that table, and some would still rather curl up beneath it and take a nap. Read the rest of this entry »

This past week has made me feel that I work at the proverbial school of hard knocks. My students are, for the most part, a pleasure. But with a fellow teacher resigning in a bit of a bizarre incident (and my needing to train a new teacher to replace said coworker in approximately 10 minutes), new students being dropped in my class with neither warning nor enough textbooks to go around, working 12+ hour days each day, and juggling a handful of life issues, I’ve been struggling to handle everything without breaking a sweat (literal or figurative).

Finding time in the daily swarm of grading and lecturing and reading to actually work on my book(s) has been a challenge–a challenge that I’m not handling well by quantitative means, as I’ve only gotten a half a chapter written this month. I’m not entirely sure how I’m going to cope with reading LAR submissions when we open in two weeks. Either neither book will be worked on whatsoever, or I will not cook, see friends and family, or sleep until late September. I’m leaning toward the latter.

But there’s a funny thing that happens when you’re working this hard and investing so much in each class, each publication, each manuscript: you really quit caring about strangers’ critiques of you. As I was checking my LAR email as I consumed my vat of coffee before work today, I was greeted with a nice, early-morning hate email. From time to time, people decide to email me snide things about LAR, about our guidelines, about myself personally or editorially, or, in this case, about our mission statement. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother me a bit to be confronted by complete strangers behaving badly (what would their mothers say!?), but I’m noticing that there’s such a thing as a critical mass of hard knocks. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m back to the world of the living, or of the living dead, perhaps? (this world is also known as the world of Those Who Teach All Summer Long.) I’m finally getting my feet beneath me during this summer quarter, and am inuring my relatively introverted self to lecturing for 5 consecutive hours each day, though, luckily, I can retreat into the comfort of the red pen on college-rule paper for the final three-plus hours of the day. Tough as it is to go from my weeks split between writing, editing LAR, and teaching to days of teaching only, I’m pleased to say that all my students this summer are smart, engaged teenagers, and that I’m happy to talk with (at?) them every day.

We’ve been reading some fantastic, non-Sparknotsable books thus far, and while I’m pleased to say that those books are turning some reluctant readers into enthusiastic readers, I have been finding that keeping up with my classes’ books has left me with little time to spend with books that I myself want to read.

And so it was with great guilt that, last weekend, I purchased my first ebook. Let me repeat: great guilt. I’m old-school when it comes to books. I believe that a book comes with covers, that delicious smell of paper, and with foldable edges. It doesn’t come on a digital device I’m terrified that I may drop. But just as I’ve asked my students to withhold judgement on the books I’m asking them to read, I decided that I, too, could withhold judgement of the ebook at large, or, at least, finally experience that which I’ve held in negative view for so long.

In buying my first ebook, I had some ethical considerations: Read the rest of this entry »

The Huffington Post isn’t known for publishing the most well-considered commentary, at least in terms of literature. One Anis Shivani, for example, had quite a mouthful to say about the Best American Poetry Series, calling it “incestuous,” and suggesting that only a closed cadre of writers ever appear in BAP (my friend Caleb Barber, a phenomenal, blue-collar poet who works in a machine shop by day, would find it news that he is counted among “the quaint artifacts and robust machinations of the Old Masters” because he appeared in BAP).

Shivani seems very unaware of how the series is actually put together (he appears to believe that David Lehman personally edits every year’s collection–a quick check of the cover would show the guest editor changes yearly), and goes so far as to say that poets like WS Merwin have contributed “little unwanted turds” to the collection. When my mentor, David Wagoner, was the guest editor of the series, I was the beneficiary not only of many a literary magazine he’d culled through in search of his picks for the anthology, but also of his thoughts on the purpose and methodology of compiling such a group of work (in short, he told me he thought it ought to be called “some of the good poems published this year,” rather than “Best American Poetry.”) When he showed me some of the poems he’d selected–I think I may have known some of his picks before the poets did–on several occasions, he’d hand me a poem, then say with great pleasure, “I don’t know anything about this poet. But isn’t this a remarkable poem?” (Not my idea of an incestuous coterie.)

To me, Shivani has always seemed like an angry, bitter sort of guy who couldn’t be bothered to investigate his topic before writing about it–just a poorly vetted one-off of a columnist for whom I’d have to forgive HuffPo.

But The Huffington Post went even farther afield in their recent piece about this year’s Orange Prize winner, Tea Obreht, for her novel The Tiger’s Wife. Ruth Fowler, whose biographical information describes her as an “author, screenwriter, and journalist,” appears to have been on call for HuffPo when Obreht was named the winner. Read the rest of this entry »

It has been a great few weeks for uniformed statements about the book world. On June 1, The London Evening Standard reported that VS Naipaul declared all women writers unequal to him. He called women writers sentimental, claiming they have a narrow view of the world–a natural result, he says, of the fact that women are not the complete masters of their homes. This, of course, after having called post-colonial nations half-made societies. In many respects, I felt Naipual’s statements were beneath comment; they’re self-serving, self-aggrandizing baloney. How could anyone take such sweeping statements about all literature by women seriously?

But this week, I read another story that’s been sending ripples throughout the literary world: Meghan Cox Gurdon’s piece on Young Adult fiction, printed in the Wall Street Journal. With the garment-rending rhetoric I’d associate more with a temperance campaigner than with a book reviewer, Gurdon slams contemporary young adult fiction, scolds librarians for stocking shelves with books that deal with subjects like sexual abuse and self-harm, holds up to pillory an author who “makes free with language that can’t be reprinted a newspaper,” and, in some of the most overwrought language I think I’ve ever seen in a serious publication like The Wall Street Journal, claims that publishers attempt to “bulldoze coarseness or misery into children’s lives.” Read the rest of this entry »

Since last time, when I shared a 20-minute, time-saving recipe here on my blog, I’ve been thinking about the other ways we writers can make more time for the business of writing. Sometimes, when the rest of our lives are pared to the bone, it seems as though the only way to make more time would be to cut back hours on anything that does not constitute paid work: no more sleeping, no more eating, no more conversing with fellow humans. But that, friends, would be no way to live.

Those who know me well are familiar with my love/hate relationship with exercise. I love no longer being shaped like a Peeps Easter candy, and I love the sparkly and well-appointed gym I get to attend thanks to my husband’s work benefits (ah, that smell of chlorine in the air!), but I really hate taking time out of the day to go lurch around on various kinds of equipment. That’s time I could be writing, after all. In his On Writing, Stephen King commands writers to spend their workouts multi-tasking with a good book (really, he’s very serious about it), but I find that I become as motion-sick reading on the treadmill as I did when I was a small child riding in the back of my mom’s station wagon. (Sorry, Mr. King.) So I’ve been in the habit of cranking up the ipod to some inane dance music to distract me as the minutes tick away, all the while feeling guilty about the waste of my 60 minutes.

But recently, I came across a fantastic writing podcast, Writing Excuses, that has made me kinda-sort-partway eager to hit the gym. I hop on the elliptical machine, pull up a new issue of the podcast (or dig up an old issue from the very extensive archives), and suddenly, I’m multi-tasking. My pen may not be on paper, but my  mind is with my work. Writing Excuses may not have the world’s slickest-looking website, and the banter of the podcast’s hosts may even be a little corny from time to time. But Writing Excuses has become a major source of inspiration for me over the past few months, and has given me some fiction-writing tools I didn’t have before. Read the rest of this entry »

As I mentioned a while back, the folks at 32 Poems had a brilliant idea: writers sharing their healthy, 20-minute recipes as a way to share time-saving tips that make time for writing. Today, I’m sharing my contribution to the recipe pool with one of my favorite quick meals, Chili-Glazed Vegetable Tofu over Rice.

Okay. You’ve seen the word “tofu” here. A word about tofu: anyone who says he or she doesn’t like tofu hasn’t had the real deal. The weird, anemic looking block of whiteness that comes swimming in a plastic container full of water? Skip it. A trip to your local Asian market is more than worth it for the real thing, fresh from the producer. Fresh tofu should be firm to the touch, closer to eggshell than white in color, and should come wrapped simply in a piece of plastic–no strange tub of water needed. Here in the Seattle area, we’re lucky to have the famous Uwajimaya market, where the brand Chuminh tofu, which locally produced, is readily available all year.

This dish is a mainstay at the Davio house, because it’s not only quick to make and packed with nutrition, but it’s also delicious–our idea of comfort food. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s May. The month when many of my teacher friends are winding down their Spring semesters and turning in final grades, looking forward to well-earned vacation time. But because of the nature of my work (teaching English as a Second Language to teenagers), the times of year that are off-seasons for many are full-throttle seasons for me; my students (or their parents, in some cases) want to spend their summers, their Christmas breaks, their Spring breaks, their evenings, and just about any free time at all working on their language skills as they look ahead to college. So as others are wrapping up and embarking on new projects, trips, or even just a period of rest, I’m spreading out the books, updating syllabi, and prepping for what’s sure to be an intense summer (though I look forward, this year, to having my very first teaching assistant–ah, not to have to photocopy ever again!)

Tied to the fact that I’ll be teaching a heavy-duty schedule every day is what I consider the sad part of summer: this is the season during which I inevitably stop writing until September. I promise to make time around grading essays, prepping lessons, and writing daily progress reports. Around the inevitable strange germs I catch at least twice per summer. Around the combat fatigue of trying to explain that, yes, reading a book is important, and using online notes just isn’t going to cut it in my class.

But every summer, my resources in terms of time and energy seem depleted enough that I can’t dive into my manuscript for four or five hours at a shot with any kind of positive results. And I end up feeling guilty that I haven’t accomplished much, and feeling like a failure at my own management of my resources. But this year, I’m going to try to take a different approach: to remind myself that, to be a writer, I have to be a person, not merely a workhorse. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m taking a little break from my rather relentless posting about publishing and editing this week, because, well, a change is good now and then, right? Also, I’ve been dreaming a great deal.

All my life, I’ve dreamed as other people. Not of other people, but as them. Not myself in other circumstances, or even myself in different bodies, but as other people entirely. A four-year-old boy cleaning up after the animals on the family farm, a middle-aged trophy wife healing from plastic surgery, a young man going to work in a brightly lit office. And though it doesn’t happen every night, and it doesn’t happen in every dream, when I dream as other people, my thoughts, my moral coding, my own desires and beliefs are gone; I’m someone else entirely.

I didn’t realize this was strange until just a few years ago. In fact, I assumed that everyone had dreams like this at some time or another until I brought it up in conversation. As I was sitting around a lunch table with fellow students and a fiction teacher in my MFA program, chatting about using dream scenarios for fiction fodder, I mentioned dreaming as other people. My comments were met with perplexed stares and at least one “Wait, what are you talking about?” When I explained myself, the strange looks on everyone’s faces got even stranger. When I suggested that everyone must do this every once in a while, my teacher maintained that my experience was pretty darned unusual. (I didn’t then go into the fact that I have also died in my dreams–a scenario that I’ve often been told is impossible.) Read the rest of this entry »

The folks at 32 Poems have come up with a wonderful idea. In recognition of the fact that poets have to find ways to make time for their writing, but often have families that, well, need to be fed, 32 Poems is inviting poets to post their favorite 20-minute, healthy recipes on their blogs on May 20, 2011.  32 Poems will host a master list of all the participating blogs here.

As you may know, I’m a self-proclaimed foodie, and I may have trouble limiting myself to one recipe. I can’t wait to see what other writers have up their culinary sleeves as well, so I hope you’ll join me in participating!