Popularity

It appears I’ve become the 8th fastest growing Blog-of-the-Day on WordPress. I want to respond with: yes, I’m very excited, but also, I’d like to share my writing here.  Here, here we go: something from this summer, something that ISN’T about Heartbreak or Let Downs (at least explicitly).

Tonight was my first night sitting for Aiden the 3-year-old.  Excellently behaved child, very clever.  No fusses at all.  Took him to the playground where he immediately noticed, out loud, “Little Girls!”, delectably.  Chose the blond one, little Payton, started playing tag and came back to ask me what I thought of her.

He pointed across the play structure and said, “The curly one with the poodles on her shoes.”

“What about her?”  I said.

He lowered his voice, “She still wears diapers.”  I couldn’t tell if he was pleased or disdainful, but he turned around and ran back to his beloved Payton.

Payton’s mother, Julie, came and sat down next to me. She said, “Our kids are really hitting it off.”

I couldn’t resist it, I took credit it for him without even thinking.  “Yeah, he’s a real lady-killer,” I hammed it up. “But little Payton’s got him on a string.”

I should add I look nothing like Aiden, that he’s a potato-blonde with dark green eyes and a
sweeping button nose.  My skin’s dark as rotten pears and my hair, which shows at the roots of my blue, is black as God-blinking, same as my eyes.  My face is all wide and Mayan-plate looking, too.

Julie smiled at our children benevolently, “He’s got your mouth.”

Both children ran away, Payton chasing Aiden.

I laughed, and pointed at them behind a tree.  “They’re rolling in the grass!”  And surely enough, little Payton had pinned down Aiden and they were kissing, one kiss at a time, next to an ant hill.

Julie suggested we wait it out, so we discussed Junot Díaz and library sciences for a few minutes (Julie is a librarian).  We turned to look at them a few minutes later and Payton was still going at it, so Julie went over to pick her little Carmencita off the dutifully submissive Aiden.  “I think she needs a nap,” Julie said.

“I don’t need a nap!” Payton protested loudly, “I need a gummi bear!  What happened to all our gummi bears?”  Payton said all this while being thrown over her mother’s shoulder.

“Aiden! Help!” She pleaded, quite sincerely.

“Bye Payton!” Aiden waved and jerked his whole arm around to do so, “Take your nap!”

Such was the end of their amourous adventure, and Aiden and I went home to eat dinner. Aiden ate his pesto pasta heartily and asked for a gummi-bear vitamin.  I asked him if he remembered Payton.

“Oh yeah,” he said.  “I loved her.”  He swallowed his vitamin and asked for a cup of orange juice.  I obliged.

Later I set Aiden to bed in the midst of a thunderstorm, which made him shiver and hide at my skirt.  I had to peel him off and remind him to pee before going to bed. We sang Radiohead songs in the bathroom and he stomped on some stray ants that had gotten inside the house.  We read stories but he clung to me and wouldn’t let me leave, so I told him he was a good boy and he’d sleep just fine.  Eventually he fell off and I sneaked out, but as I closed the door, he called out to me:

“Don’t eat the last cupcake,” he said, “it’s my cupcake.”

Two hours of reading later, I realized I can very happy with this job.  For some reason I feel the need to record all of it, mostly because there’s something I’m touched by in this ex-Reedie single-parent’s house.  It might be all the space or it might be that the kid is a total hipster, or some other combination of things.  Something about it, though, worries me deeply, as if I would actually want to be a mother, as if I could have a house and keep things in it very alive.

Done with my book, I watched the television set downstairs and doled my attention to the rain coming down the windows occasionally.  The Daily Show was on.  It was sometime after eleven.   I stretched out on the couch, ran my fingers through my hair, and fantasized about a mid-May snow drift, so I wouldn’t have to go back to my apartment, so I could eat the food in the fridge up, so that I could be trapped.

Esperado

Entonces olvida me. No te lo resentaría. Solo déjame soñar siempre en ti, escribir memorias como pájaros de cada ala, simples pero diversos. Memorias que no existen en ningún pasado. Sonorilla, pues.  Te estoy recreando. – Opening of Everything That Never Happened To Me, my thesis (translation forthcoming).

I really want you to subscribe to Forgets so you can get pieces of my novella, news about the epic search for my brother in Berlin, and translated statements from my thesis.  Also, so I don’t have to continually link here from my other internet presences. Invest your time in me.  You will be richly rewarded.

Do it.

My New Thesis Desk

Soon to be applying for the Reed College Initiative Grant and Opportunity Grant, in regards to Berlin.

My thesis meeting today: I got a free peach.  Improve the melancholy humours, those peaches!

Berlinette

One of Six!

Thesis Proposal

I present you with my creative thesis proposal.  I have been working for a while on this, and I finally finished a completely reworked version of Archangel — Prodigal.  Prodigal, like Archangel, contains previously used characters, but stands on its own much better.  It’s severely enough edited that I almost want to call it a new story, but I keep remembering the first few pages are virtually identical.  I am linking it separately in my fiction section, away from The Rest of Your Days collection. 

Prodigal is my first writing sample, and my second is Even Your Absence.

And the long awaited proposal is here:

Everything That Never Happened To Me//Fiction of Exile

I would like to write five short stories that focus on the experiences of foreigners in this country.  Specifically, I’m interested in the Latin-American experience and elements of magical realism within contemporary American literature.  Latinos are the fastest-growing minority group in the United States, and I’m concerned primarily with presenting different angles of the experience through my writing.

Writing creatively has been my only habitual craft for the past three years, and my most beloved academic interest.  My experience as a writer, primarily at Reed, has evolved into an experience as an editor.  My greatest strength as a writing student has been the second-draft (sometimes the third, fourth, or eleventh).  I have taken classes with Maxine Scates, Jean Thompson, Charles D’Ambrosio, and Peter Rock.  I attended the Tin House Summer Workshop this summer and studied under Steve Almond.  This summer, I was invited to give a reading at Brown University through a program called Project Eye-to-Eye.  At Reed, I’ve been published in the Creative Review and sat on the board every year.  I am founder and signator of the Writers’ Alliance, a workshopping group for student writers that meets once a week.  I have written recommendations for other students applying for grants and internships.

 Junot Díaz won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.   After reading his novel and his short-story collection, Drown, I wanted to find a way to allow my own writing voice to take unnaturally somber situations of transience and translate them to feelings of arrival.  I want to capture the anxiety over a new home and a new language.  My experience as a foreigner in this country, and of having a separate language for my private thoughts, resonates whenever I read Díaz’ writing.  I want to present my own collection of stories in the context of other Chicano and Latino literature.  My reading list might include more canonical texts, like Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Parámo, and more contemporary texts, like Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya, but I’d hope to come up with a challenging reading list with suggestions from professors.  I have consulted with Rebecca Gordon about putting together such a reading list.

The stories would have the common theme of abandonment and disembodiment within American culture, both of which are forms of exile.  Barriers such as language, skin color, and class will figure heavily. My writing, though realistic, is heavily affected by magical realism, as is it an important element of Latin American culture.

 

I will wake up early this morning and turn this in.  If you’re interested in marching through Vollum to the box with me feel free to convey such interest (soon, as in before 9:30 AM today).