I must share my total gratitude to Dr. Haugen. Last fall, I had what I adoringly call, “a breakdown”; although a mini-breakdown, a breakdown none the less. I had been under too much pressure from all areas of life last fall, and ended up not finishing the quarter with resolve to not finish my degree. I had convinced myself, as being someone who is medically retired from a publishing company, that not only did I not have to finish school, but I didn’t have to go to school at all. All I needed to do was watch TV and die. Sure, I had obligations to my wife and daughter, but I figured that those obligations would come and go as well. I just was over my head in school, and in life. I was deeply depressed and stressed by my classes and my personal life. As you may guess, I have serious health issues, mostly with my pancreas, diabetes, and depression. But there is a list of other ailments that have to do with my kidneys, blood, liver, heart, throat, cholesterol, nutrient absorption, chronic fatigue, fibro-myalgia, atrophy, amputations, chronic pain, ruptured disc, and more. Life IS pain. And when pain is all there is, life becomes subject to a loss of proper perspective on determining whether or not you want to add the stress of school, family, church, and whatever else. I tend to take on the weight of the world. For some reason, I feel as though the wellbeing of everybody within my social sphere is my responsibility. I don’t know why. I feel as though I am here to teach people, but yet to care for their needs as well. I desire for no person to suffer any ailment at all. I know that I need to be careful not to cheat anybody of that opportunity to grow and mature as a human by overcoming difficulty and suffering. But I cannot stand the thought of anybody that I love being subjugated to suffering of any kind. Pretty much, except for an occasional exception, I pretty much fall in love with almost everybody I meet. Of course I assume you are more mature than to think I mean romantically, but I generally love people. I weep for their sorrows. I hurt when they hurt, I mourn when they mourn, and I laugh when they laugh. I yearn for all people to be well. Even recently, in the news, when I saw the young people in downtown Manhattan jumping for joy like little monkeys upon the news that Osama Bin Laden had been killed, I had a torn feeling of NOT rejoicing upon anybody’s death, but yet feeling fired up for the people who in their whole memorable lives have lived under the “terror” lifestyle. They didn’t get to live in the times where we thought our Country could do no wrong, and there wasn’t a global scene, just a national scene. The world of Terror and the world of the World Wide Web have almost gone on simultaneously. As our world gets smaller, so increases our knowledge of how this country of ours has been treating other countries for years. There was little disillusion in their minds because for the most part it’s all they’ve known. Moreover, with all of my loves for the people of this world, I am also hypercritical, short tempered, and lack patience. I don’t appreciate hypocrisy, greed, materialism, profanity, and selfishness. That basically means that, not only am I extremely judgmental, I am full of self-loathing.
But as I overcome these issues, and as I sat at home watching television, not going to school or thinking I would ever return, I started to notice that I wasn’t producing. I mean, writing, artwork, photography, poetry, even brainstorming…it was all producing nothing. My creative output was almost nil. I realized that in order to decompress, I had to mentally accept the possibility that I wouldn’t go back to school, in order to go back to school. You can get as Freudian as you want with that. I’m not sure why that was, but it was just the way it had to be. I had to know in my heart of hearts that I didn’t HAVE to go to school. With my retirement, all I have to do is go to doctor’s appointments, take my kid to school in the morning, and kiss my wife good night. That was it.
Then it happened. I wasn’t having hardly any creative output, nor structure, nor ANY social interaction, and I had to run to campus for a favor for my ex-art professor (I’m only an English minor, not major, sorry), and ran into Dr. Haugen. She asked me when I was coming back to school. It was at that instant, after seeing campus and feeling nostalgic for the good old days when I had purpose and fun, I said, “This Spring”…and here I am. I came back with a fervor that I haven’t had in years. I love that I’m back into school. With my health issues, I am always feeling at the end of my rope, and just making it, at all times, but it is better than watching “Days” and “Price is Right” on a daily basis with no hope of tomorrow being a better day. Now, tomorrow is a better day.
Okay, so now I’m back in school, trying to finish the classes I need to get my AA, and move on to my BA. I decided to take Dr. Haugen’s three hundred level English class, and was graciously asked if I could fill in an abandoned spot in the trip to the Athens Lit Fest. I was one of the few that got to go last year, so I knew what to expect. I knew what to hope to see and be a part of. Last year was amazing. Last year was so inspiring that I am still ironing out poems from inspiration from then. So, heck YES, I will go. And here we are. Last night was great. Rita Dove was inspirational and I enjoyed that very much. Then Rosellen Brown did a reading of some of her work. Although it was filthy, there was still great value in the way and power in which her characters interacted with each other. A dying husband picking out his surviving wife’s next lover, and on his death bed, as he lay dying, he demands to watch his wife make love to this other man. She gets graphic, not only with that story, but also the next about a half Jewish half African American woman getting laid and having a follow-up conversation with this guy and resenting the whole ordeal. I didn’t find her work inspiring and now know to not buy her work. As much as I might possibly find great worth in her characterization and plot twist, I profoundly hate in propriety and profanity; both of which she offers in great volume.
However today, as Tobias Wolff was sharing, and giving his discussion, I was delighted for several reasons. One was the free book table. There were hundreds of literary and poetry journals for free today. It was spectacular. I ended up with a hand full of journals that are filled with inspiration waiting to be found with hopes of notoriety and desire to discovered. I have written for journals before, and I understand that desire to be published. Many of these journals I have seen in Poet & Writer’s Magazine in the submissions section, so I was eager to read some. It was ironic that these Journals are so hard to get your work into, but yet they were sitting in front of me, costing me nothing but the gas money to get home; also the shelf space at my writing office, of which there is very little. So they had no value other than a free almost unlikely to be read journal, which I wasn’t good enough to get into, was now at my will to do as I please. I could not take it home with me, and that somehow was going to dismiss the power they had in my life. I could take it and cast it in the trash, and teach those ignorant editor’s a thing or two, or I could do the right thing and go home and read them, enjoy them, and find value in, not just the human value, but value in the writing itself. I could learn to be grateful that I wasn’t in some of these journals also.
The Second reason I was thrilled with earlier than today, was the lecture Tobias Wolff gave. I had heard of him, of course, but hadn’t read him. I may have read one of his short stories in one of my lit. classes. My previous professors have excellent taste in reading, and I think Tobias may have been the writer of the many short stories I have read over the past four years. Wolff spoke of writing to a writer needs to be like a priest at the altar. It not only needed to be something that we put great work into, but something ordained and sacred. He also spoke of one of our greatest teachers, other than constantly writing and instruction and so forth, is reading. Reading needs to be a great teacher in our lives. He spoke of how he started becoming a reader at a young age. Back in the seventies, when I was a lad, we held the library to be a sacred place. But we loved it there. I had gotten into the habit of reading the books called, “The Big Little Books”. And mostly they were biographies. I read biographies of many of our founding fathers and more famous people of the great American history. Also, I read the stories of Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, John Henry, Casey Jones, Danielle Boone, Davey Crocket, Johnny Appleseed and others. I loved the old American Folk stories. I ate this stuff up. Well, I remembered fondly of all of this during Wolff’s talk. In fact, I lost track of what he was saying several times because of the paths that he was leading me onto. I do however remember the Tolstoy that I had read when he talked about this one story that I had read also. But then he said something that I wrote down. I specifically wanted to quote him on this. He said that good writing can be, “….beat into existence, dragged down the trail, or let it be allowed to lead you.” This is an excellent quote. I think that this is so universal to all of us writers that we completely understand that. He also said that, “…when I write fiction, I have no loyalty to memory, none…in no sense do I owe anything to memory.” I admire that attitude, because I don’t know if I am there at all. I use so much of my memory of life in my fiction. In fact, most of my fiction is usually a retelling of something that happened in my life. I hope however that the more I write, I will write that desire to share my life away. That desire should leave me at some point, I assume. I think otherwise I’d get tired of hearing my own voice. I should tire of the sound of my prose, as it were. I would like to move beyond this. With short stories, like Pretend Park, there is not anything about that story that is inside of me. But Wolff continued that his non-fiction is just the opposite. This is all in a statement he made about his caution to all of us to be careful with the term, “Creative Non-Fiction”. He commented how “Creative” and “Non-Fiction” really shouldn’t go together. He spoke of how when it is proven to be false, it devalues true Non-Fiction. His examples were stories of how the Jewish Holocaust impacted their childhoods, when in fact, it hadn’t. This puts fuel to the flame that says that the Holocaust isn’t anything other than a series of stories—point taken.
Over all, and this point, I am having a blast. The pace for me this year is much different. It is still quite stressful on my body, but there is a minimal amount of walking. That is due to the chronic tendonitis in both ankles and on my heal, plus the amputation, the open sore on the bottom of my left foot, and yada yada yada…
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