For My Writer Friends

Imagine with me, writers: It’s 1856 and you are traveling by wagon train across the Great Plains en route to California with dreams of starting an apiary in the Sierra. In the back of your wagon are four unruly, ever-buzzing swarms of honeybees in their hives. Each afternoon, you release them to the fields to forage on wildflowers: scurf peas and clover, milkweed, evening primrose. One by one, the bees spit out of the hive and buzz off, dissolving to specks in the distance. You are very far from home and hungry all the time. The afternoon hours (when you let the mules wade to their knees in the creek and drink long and hard) are empty hours. Contemplative. Watching them go, you have no guarantee that a single bee will return. But you send them out, and early each evening they return, their hairy legs dusted with pollen, their crops full of nectar. They return as though siphoned home by the dusk to waggle and dance their maps of the flowers. They regurgitate the day’s haul of nectar. They enact with precision and diligence—and maybe even love—the great mystery at the heart of Apis mellifera. Do they sometimes sting you? Yes. Every day, in fact. Your hands. Your neck. You’ve grown used to it and hardly flinch. You feel as though it brings you closer to them. And as it is with bees—so too with words. On your journey across the blank page, you travel hard all morning with no thought of the family you left behind or your final destination. You train your sights on only the wildest pastures. When the time is right, go ahead: open the swarming hive of your heart and stand back to glory in the spectacle. The words have their own distances to travel, and desires, and they know better than you. Once they have gone, trust that they will return with insight, nuance, meaning. Tomorrow: send them out again.

Write in the Wild!

In 2001, I won a writing contest that afforded me seven months of unadulterated solitude and wilderness along the Rogue River in southern Oregon. Now it's your turn. The Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency is taking applications until the 1st of March.

The following description of the residency comes from John Daniel's website, where you can click for more details about the application process:

The Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency is a unique opportunity for a writer or pair of writers seeking a lengthy spell of unparalleled solitude for work and personal refreshment. In exchange for an hour a day of routine caretaking, the resident receives use of a remote, small but comfortable house in the Rogue River backcountry of southwestern Oregon and the support of a $5,000 stipend. The residency runs from the beginning of April through the end of October, entrance and exit dates varying with weather conditions. With proper planning, the resident may extend the residency through the winter if he or she chooses. The program is administered by PEN Northwest, the Northwest branch of PEN American Center, in cooperation with Frank and Bradley Boyden, program founders and owners of the property. The residency is named after their mother. 

The house stands on 92 acres of meadow and forest, known as Dutch Henry Homestead, in the canyon the Rogue River has formed for itself through the steep, forested terrain of the Klamath Mountains. The homestead is surrounded by public land managed as wilderness by the Bureau of Land Management. There are no neighbors. Wildlife—deer, black bears, wild turkeys, bobcats, the occasional cougar—abounds, as does silence. The Rogue, a fishable and federally-protected wild and scenic river, is 25 minutes away by trail. A large fenced garden area with grape vines and fruit trees is available for the resident's use. The climate is mild and wet in the spring, hot and dry in the summer, just right in the fall. 

The house has a combined kitchen/living room, two small bedrooms, a standard bathroom with tub and shower, a sleeping loft, an enclosed porch area, and a covered deck. It is completely plumbed and has reliable hot water from a solar panel and coils in the wood stove used for heating the house. (Firewood is provided; the resident replaces what he/she uses.) Other appliances include a wood-fired cook stove, a propane cook stove with oven, a propane refrigerator with small freezer, and propane wall lamps. The house is fully equipped with cooking and eating ware, simple furniture including a queen-size bed, and a radio telephone. The house is wired with electrical outlets but there is no continuous source of electricity. A gasoline generator is available for occasional use—running a printer, for instance. A small solar electrical panel is capable of charging batteries to power a computer. 

The Boydens have their own house on the property, a quarter-mile away and out of sight of the resident's house. They do not live on the homestead and scrupulously respect the resident's privacy on their infrequent visits. 

The resident's hour-a-day caretaking responsibilities include road and trail maintenance, mowing, pruning and weeding, maintenance of a half-acre (swimmable) pond, upkeep of the houses, and light repairs to homestead water systems. Duties are specified in a manual and will be fully explained and demonstrated at the beginning of the residency. No special expertise is required; a willingness to learn is. All tools and equipment are provided. The Boydens pay for all maintenance materials and all gasoline used in power equipment. The resident pays for telephone use and propane as well as for food and personal supplies. 

Pets are welcome if housebroken. 

Dutch Henry Homestead is two dusty or muddy hours, over teeth-jarring roads, from medical services and all cultural amenities save one—radio reception, including public radio, is pretty good. All writers considering this residency should honestly assess their appetite and tolerance for authentic backcountry solitude. You must be handy with a chainsaw or willing to learn; if a tree falls across the homestead drive, it will be up to you to deal with it if you want to get to town. You will need a reliable high-clearance vehicle, preferably but not necessarily four-wheel-drive. You must be ready to coexist with black bears. Above all, you must be self-reliant. The selected writer or writers will be required to visit the homestead a year ahead of the residency, in the company of the Boydens and PEN Northwest, for a firsthand look. After this visit and before beginning the residency, the selected writer(s) will be expected to sign a release by which he, she, or they assume the risks inherent to living and working in a remote wilderness location. 

The residency is open to poets and writers of all kinds, advanced in their careers or just setting out. Publication credits are not mandatory. Applicants may be individuals, couples (with or without children), or partnerships of two willing to live together in close quarters. The 2013 and 2014 residents will be selected in the same application round by PEN Northwest. Applicants will be judged on the quality and/or promise of their writing and their suitability to this unique situation. 

Good Times

Crushed by the grading wave these last few weeks, this is the first chance I've had to express my gratitude to Penina Roth of the Franklin Park Reading Series and the good folks at Electric Literature, who had me down to Brooklyn back in November for a reading with Matt Sumell, Ben Greenman, Colson Whitehead and Jim Shepard. You can read Julia Jackson's story about the reading here. Suffice it to say, I was thrilled to take part in the festivities. Doesn't get much better for a Monday night.

One of the evening's highlights for me was the debut of the single-sentence animation (by Edwin Rostron) for my short story, "Daily Bread," which appeared in EL No. 6. I really loved the concept Edwin came up with! And you can check out the rest of the single-sentence animations for Electric Literature here. They're such a great fusion of literature and the digital arts.

The main highlight of the evening, of course, was the chance to hear Shepard and Whitehead read. Sumell and Greenman, too. Good times, all around.

Walden Pond

The birthplace of modern environmentalism . . . an inspiration to one of America's greatest writers and thinkers . . . a living piece of history. So said the park ranger to a group of us standing around Thoreau's cabin site last weekend. October sunlight shining bright and fine through the trees, I listened to the ranger and considered his words and thought for a moment about how quiet this place must have been during Thoreau's two-year experiment. And indeed I felt chastened: by Thoreau's words and deeds--and by his life. And I felt chastened, too, by the thought of what Thoreau would make of the tourist-attraction quality that Walden Pond now gives off with its sandy beaches and wire fences and marked trails. And its out-of-town visitors like me. 

But on the pond's far side with my son later, casting rocks into the water and appreciating the splash, I almost forgot about Thoreau altogether. It was easy, in fact. A chilly wind blowing, sunlight glimmering on the water, my boy holding each new rock in his tiny clutched fist as though it were a world unto itself: this was all the transcendentalism I needed. Books and ideas seemed very small right then, and time seemed very large, spreading out before us like the surface of a great pond. 

Raspberry Picking at Summer's End

View of Quabbin Reservoir from Hamilton Farms

Our little family picked up and moved across the country over the summer--from our beloved Nebraska to my wife's home state of Massachusetts, where I was lucky enough to find a teaching job. The drive? Long and monotonous, as to be expected. The heatwave crushing the country didn't help much, and neither did our summer colds, but, miraculously, our little guy (who turned two on the trip) managed to endure it all with a surfeit of grace.

We've been in our new place three weeks now. I've started teaching and life is again settling into a rhythm. Last weekend we even managed to sneak off and do some raspberry picking in New Salem at Hamilton Orchards. It was quite a treat to watch our little guy meander down the long rows of raspberry canes, picking and eating, and making a glorious mess of himself.

I'm looking forward to more days like this.

I'm also looking forward--now that the move is behind us--to returning to my writing life with all the energy I can muster. I've had two or three publication successes over the summer, a brief column in the Sept/Oct Orion Magazine excerpted from my new project, and a short story in Electric Literature No. 6, ("Daily Bread") which comes out in a few days. I also somehow won a short-short story contest over at Silk Road Review  and have continued to get nice notes on Breaking into the Backcountry. So I'm feeling primed and ready to keep after it, and really grateful to have good work (the teaching and writing and family) to give shape to my days. Wish you the best, fellow travelers.

A Simple Pleasure

I just took our neighbor a slice of rhubarb upside-down cake my wife baked this afternoon. It tasted every bit as good as it looks in this picture, and you can find the recipe here. But I mean to talk briefly about the act itself--the giving--and how nice it felt.

First, some background. When my wife and I arrived in Lincoln, six years ago, this neighbor greeted us right away with a knock on the front door and a big slice of chocolate cake. Since then we've been trading goodies across our driveways, everything from pulled pork and lemon bars to hot cinnamon popcorn balls on Valentine's Day. It's one of the forms of neighborliness that hasn't been stamped out of contemporary life in Nebraska: people here want to share their good fortune.

And there's something about giving like this, something essential, that transcends both the divine flavor of the cake and the sense of community that engendered the sharing. We aren't rich people by any means, not my wife and I, and not our neighbor. In fact, I'd say we're squarely lower-middle class, and this is a lower-middle class neighborhood. People here work for a living. Dorothy on the corner, who turned 93 last week, spent thirty years on the concrete at Weaver's potato chip factory.

But when we share something like a piece of rhubarb upside-down cake--such a simple pleasure, after all--how truly rich we become.

 

Spring Reflection

image source

Last night my wife and I took our little boy for a walk at a nearby park, and everywhere on display were the hallmarks of spring: blossoming trees and trees about to blossom, lush green grass, full rain clouds slashed here and there by bright swords of sunlight. The beauty of it all. The beauty of it all felt almost like a kind of violence, an assault on the senses--something you have to finally turn away from or else turn to salt. To think that this life goes on in winter, under scabs of snow and ice; that these blossoms are locked up in the trees' slow blood, a promise, a possibility, beyond our ability to touch; and that it all happens so suddenly, creeping up like a cloud, this phenomenon--spring--that so dwarfs our lives. And indeed how small I felt chasing my boy in the grass last night, listening to his giggles and the honking geese, and back behind it all, the wind in the pines: how small I felt, and how good.