Ghost Riding

First of all, tonight I’m leaving for Providence. I have a red-eye that leaves PDX at 10:50 pm. I take a stop in Atlanta and then take another plane to Boston. From Boston I take a Peter Pan bus to Providence. I get picked up at the Kennedy Bus Station and introduced to people over breakfast at 9:30 am. The awesome news is they won’t expect me to sing and dance the moment I get there. I have until Friday night, where I’ll be opening act for a play. That is, my reading will preclude an actual rehearsed performance.

On the plane, I’ll be reading The Evil B.B. Chow by Steve Almond and The Thing About Life is That One Day You’ll be Dead by David Shields. I also want to watch Be Kind and Rewind so I can talk Gondry. You can see what I’m reading regularly through GoodReads (which, if you don’t have one already, you should get: it’s a great way to keep track of everything you’ve ever read).

Second of all, for those of you who haven’t ever Ghost Ridden the Whip, maybe this internet video will provoke you to soon:

Non-Fiction Update

You’ll notice the Non-Fiction section has been replaced by a Hyphy section. This is temporary. If I write more (decent) non-fiction, there will be subsections for the different articles.

Until then, I highly advise you check it out. To sweeten the deal, I’m including this ghost riding compilation video.

Olivia plans Winter

I have a plan: I’m going to spend my winter in Berlin looking for my German half-brother, Christian, and plucking about for details about the person my father used to be. This plan has only recently become financially feasible due to saving up my moderate income this summer, but as anyone who knows me can tell you, I’ve been meaning to make such a trip for since I was 16.

I have never been to Europe. I have plans to spend most if not all of my winter break, that is Mid-December 2008 to Late January 2009, in Europe. I want to explore France, to meet some isolated family friends, and England, where some pen pals from my early adolescence live. From everything I’ve heard traveling within Europe is not as expensive as actually getting to Europe.

I need a passport, I need to mend my Canadian coat, I need a good hat and hopefully strong gloves, but other than that this looks like a very realistic travel plan. I have a goal.

I will probably apply for grants and other forms of sponsorship to make writing about my family more financially feasible, but at this point I feel like little to nothing could stop me. I absolutely cannot wait any longer. I’m going to Berlin.

Things I’m also in the process of doing currently:

• Getting my application together to become an intern at the Tin House Portland office.
• Writing about three different thesis proposals for my senior year at Reed College.
• Editing the Rest of Your Days, specifically Permanent Daylight (see Fiction).
• Packing for my trip to Providence on Wednesday night.
• Looking into applying for Teach for America.
• Writing letters to my future self, to my past self, and isolating “being 20″ while it lasts.

New writing forthcoming.

Berlin is a cold city in December.

This Never Happened

And now it's all over, and who am I to forget?

Now Tin House is over, and I’ve come back to my desk in the Hauser Library, Office #147. My hours are shot off a bit so I’m eating my breakfast just before everyone else eats lunch and staying awake about an hour or two after my flatmates have gone to bed. And when I try to sleep I keep thinking of Tin House and the free martinis and the more established writers having clothes that made me think New York! when I saw them. It’s only been two days since Tin House went away, but now when I think of it, it feels like it must have been someone else’s memory and not my own. My memories of the Student Union all buttered up with light, Frank Bidart squeezing my pathetic shoulder and saying, “You’re talented!” ; of Nick Flynn regarding my worn-out drawing and raising it to light, the inky eyes on the girl I drew looking back at him, and him saying, “I love this!” ; Steve Almond mashing my blue hair into my head and me always suffocating hiccups into my forearm from drinking water and coffee too fast in his class; Dorothy Allison and Abigail Thomas (with her fresh purple streak) talking to me about writing letters to yourself, and then Dorothy saying “Aw child!” in the only voice I’ve found I could trust with a Southern accent in my entire life. These people aren’t just teachers, they’re authors I’ve been reading for a few years now, some since I was a kid. They’re my heroes. I’ve read everything they’ve ever written, raked the internet, Powell’s, and the Cascadian library system looking for every last article, personal essay, short story, and interview. And I met them. And they took my drawings and laughed at my jokes and hung out at the place I live – surely someone slept in my old dorm room, on my old bed – and they ate the crappy food I’ve been eating for three years and they even knew my name.

I got to know so many other writers too, adults who just want to make it through their lives knowing they didn’t keep their novels in their closets after they became lawyers. Older women who age secretly and talk like they’re trapped in an episode of Sex in the City. Middle-aged men who show off pictures of their first-borns and miss their baby-mamas back home in Florida and Ann Arbor. Women who teach Creative Writing and Basic Composition to kids at state schools and community colleges. Men who are just about to break into the writing business, who can feel it. A few other kids like me, just a few, but most of them do other things than write, have other majors or at least other talents. Everybody went back home, and they all took taxis to the airport because they didn’t know the bus can take them there. Or maybe they just didn’t want to walk up the hill with their bags, but it’s not so hard once you’ve done it a few times.

And since Tin House has been over, I’ve tried to keep all the advice and feelings fresh, and I’ve been writing a lot, especially on the Rest of Your Days collection, coming back again and again to that on-the-road feeling from December and trying to listen to that kind of music, if that makes sense. The music I was listening to when I was writing from Virginia, and writing from Lancaster. Going into scene, almost writing the entire thing in scene, with Permanent Daylight, and having to use a lot of fantasizing to get Olivia to just get what she wants. What would my characters do if they ever got what they wanted? I don’t even know what I would do if I got what I wanted. In fact, I think that’s my situation right now. I got what I wanted, right? I went to Tin House, I lived it up, I met my favourite authours, and then? More writing, more time in #147. Good. I’m feeling ambitious.

So what I’ve been doing lately is singing songs to myself from December and recording my facial expressions to see if I can “see” Olivia’s character peeking out, or just feel what I was feeling when I originally wrote the piece. So far it’s been obscenely useful. Here’s one from today, “High and Dry,” by Radiohead.

As long as it keeps me writing, helps that ambition left over from Tin House linger into my real life as long as possible. I have no right to forget the whole thing. I am not an amnesiac. Will not be right now.

Tin House

Have you found me through Tin House?

Look at my shiny Reed.

Leave a comment with your website information or interesting Tin House stories, and I will link to you on my (soon to be here) links list.

I’m giving a free reading in the Reed College amphitheater at 5:20pm today – Monday, June 14th. Please come! I’ll only be reading for five minutes so if you’re late it doesn’t count.

If you’re famous and I accosted you, thanks for being a good sport. You’re probably one of my heroes and I’m very young and awkward. I’ll have a link just for writers I’ve been interested in within a few weeks (when I get around to it). Also, soon to come: a link to my goodreads site where I review books, maybe even yours.

I’m also counting down the days until I give my reading at Brown, and am still tremendously anxious about the flight. The East Coast is a strange place with old white people that remind me of the American Gothic painting (even though technically Grant Wood was referring to Iowa and not New England with this painting).

These White People would go to Brown maybe. They're from the East Coast.

Evidence

Here, on the internet, I was accosted and asked for a professional website. I told someone writing is all I do anymore, that I hack around day and night on computers and scribbling in notebooks, hoping to pluck some divine inspiration out of daily experiences. I told him I’m scared it won’t be allowed, that I’ll be forced to do something else that isn’t writing.

And this writer says to me, “You’re not a writer!”

And I say “Yes I am!”

So this person says, “Alright – well who’s your agent?”

But I guess I don’t have an agent, so I backed down, which is notoriously difficult to do when someone is wrong on the internet.

Which brings me here: I decided it was time for me to gather all my writing in one place so all the people who cared could come and look at it. I didn’t want a myspace because those things are trashy. I didn’t want a livejournal because those things are dramatic. Facebook certainly wasn’t going to take care of this for me. (I should add I have one of each of these and I’m not above my generation’s hyper-textual e-existence, I’m just slightly embarrassed of it).

So in a world where every single human being can tell a story, I have an insane hope I’ll be especially good at it. It shouldn’t be too hard though, considering every college-student I know is imitating Nabokov bombastically without any of the humour, or edging out worlds where vampires kill babies and set haunted houses on fire with no consideration for anything but (amazing) plot twists. But being kind-of good at writing won’t get you anywhere. I want to be an excellent writer. I want to throw away drafts and have strangers pull my crap out of wastebaskets because they accidentally caught the first sentence. I want boys who would otherwise not talk to me to be utterly won over by my buttery sentences. I want penury that’s bohemian in nature, like those people who collect type-writers even when they have expensive, skinny computers they can save their work on. I want to be mentioned in other people’s autobiographies. I want other people to note that they were mentioned in mine.

This is the place – the little internet lawn where I lay out my crap like a garage sale. Look at it, touch it, offer me advice. Don’t steal it, because just like most used junk people sell at garage sales, its value is sentimental and thus not as cool in your hands.

I’d also love if you dropped me a note or a comment here to let me know you’re reading and how you found me. Feedback is always good, especially on my stories. Go ahead and just leave a note here about anything, but if you’re stuck, write me about the stupidest thing that’s happened to you.