current writing and reads, etc.

So, I know it's been a ridiculously long time since my last post. That's probably because I got real burnt out from the two writing conferences I went to (Indiana U and U of Mass-Amherst), and up until last week I couldn't think a bit about writing about writing. However, I got some good headway on some stories, specifically Strange English and The Naked Diner, and wrote a new story, Icarus, which needs a tiny bit of revision, and started another story that's probably kind-of sort-of a lesbian version of Breakfast at Tiffany's, and certainly more modern, and shorter. It's probably less interesting of a plot, but, that's not my focus considering that it's a short-short and Tiffany's is a novella. I really need to work on plot, though, so I'm thinking of purchasing a couple spy novels, hopefully something about a heist, a good mystery, and I got some Truman Capote from Amazon for only about $5 a book: Breakfast at Tiffany's, of course, and In Cold Blood. I probably won't be able to get to these new books for a while, though, because of my Honors Project.

I haven't been submitting anywhere recently but that's because I'm real busy from working on The Truce--I'm on about page 50--and I need 100 pages done by the end of the summer. (Technically, by December, but hell, I want to work on editing the first draft and on the critical essay in the fall semester). So, I'm doing about 5 pages a day this July, so I can unwind a tiny bit in August, and do some reading for the project before I delve into really working on the essay in September-November. I want to have something totally concrete by December, so I can put some finishing touches to everything. Of course, The Truce won't be a final draft, but it will be a good one. And that will be pretty cool. I should contact Prof. Faber sometime in late July, to let him know how everything's going. With all this planning, all of this seems to be going very well--especially since reading Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast really gave me a good kind of voice to come from. Benedetti's a very quintessential Uruguayan voice, so it only makes sense that I pick an essential American one. I'm so excited about this, and I need to stop being silly and just work!

As for reading, I decided that I really need to get back to Virginia Woolf, because Paul Lisicky, who read my manuscript at the UMass conference (I promise to talk about the conferences in the next post), told me I should read her because she'd be good for my work. (He said this in response to Strange English). So I'm reading Mrs. Dalloway right now, and it's absolutely wonderful. I'm sure I'll be finished with the book in a couple of days. I'm also reading Camus' L'étranger in the original French, and while I have to look up words every once in a while, it's ver readable. I should keep doing this, so that whenever I pick up French again (I certainly hope to do it at graduate school--many MFA programs require taking language classes), I can really know what I'm doing.

Just a note: Scrivener, the computer program, has done wonders for me. It's just great.

Dahl Prize, etcetera

Hey everyone!

So, good news, separate from creative writing, but certainly not from writing. I won the Dahl Prize, which is a prize for the best undergraduate essay submitted, and that's ridiculously exciting, yay! I'm winning $150 for that. If only I'd get this sort of reaction for my creative writing. (But, then again, this is far less competition.)

Among my own writings, I'm going to no matter what finish up the Los Ángeles story today, because I need to use it for the creative writing apps that I'm also finishing up today (which are due tomorrow by 5 p.m.). I'm really hoping to get into the fiction class, as Bernard Matambo and Dan Chaon are teaching it. I did a winter term with Dan Chaon, and it was absolutely, terrifically amazing. I wrote a bunch of stories and he went over them with me, and our tastes totally clicked. It probably helps that before I wrote the stories as I traveled for the month of January of 2008, I read an entire huge collection of Raymond Carver stories. Read, read, read. That's the only thing to keep us writers good and going.

So, I've decided that this summer, I'm going to read 3 books a month (at least): one in Spanish, one in French, and one in English. It's going to be a bit of a drag to not allow myself to read that much English, but it's just, totally necessary for my education in the other languages. Going abroad in Paris, and then taking a super-intense 400-level Spanish class this spring, just goes to show what reading in other languages can do for your writing. On top of the 3-books-a-month plan, I'm going to be reading a lot of theory, and working on my Honors project. Still keeping my fingers crossed for a job.

So, it's finals time at Oberlin. Crazy. That's the only word for it.

Love,
Me!

Oh Oh Oh Oberlin

So, I'm back at school, overwhelmed with such a winter and such a state. I feel less alone than I have in a very long time, and yet, I can tell I'm a different person from when I left. In a good way, though. But it's still a strange feeling. I feel like I'm doing things I could have never been capable of, even if I had been willing to do them in the past. I'm glad I'm living life in such a way that makes me become more like what I want to be, and even more, what I've always felt I'm supposed to become. Going to school at Oberlin has certainly been part of this.

Currently it's Winter Term, so the campus is bare--but that's part of the beauty of it. Not to mention, I'm not overwhelmed with billions of people around me. In Paris there were many people too, but as it's a city (and especially Paris) people keep to themselves there. I feel like I'd gotten so good at being alone that I need to learn a way to cultivate that skill, to be happy being alone, in a way. But I'm also happy to be meeting many people for lunch tomorrow, at Java Zone.

All this might seem irrelevant, but it's very relevant to my writing, so I guess that's why I'm posting it here. A book of places to publish to should be showing up in the mail soon, so some EXTRA EXTRAs will be popping up soon here. My writing projects have come to a halt, with the unexpected culture shock, as well as other reasons. My thoughts are preoccupied, but, not to worry friends, at least I am still reading (even if what I am reading is in French and I have once again halted reading Middlemarch).

The world is quite bizarre sometimes. I'm listening to Sufjan Stevens, and that helps. But I'm happy, be sure of that. I'm happy.

Spiral, etc

Spiral submissions coming up--due in like a week. I've agreed to edit Alyssa's submissions, in return for her editing mine, even though, I'll still do it if she doesn't have the time to look at mine. I'm hoping I'll be finish part I of the novella, but I have a back-up submission if I'm not able to finish it (but I really, really, really want to !).

Writing's not going as quickly as I wish, considering the little amount of work I have presently in comparison to what I was working on before. But I can't write when I'm exhausted, and since I got back from the States, I can only write so much per sitting. Hopefully, some time today at Starbucks will change that. (Yes, there are Starbucks in Paris!)

I'm cleaning my place currently. That helps me think.

New projects:
-Putting together a story for a friend. Inter-war era Paris, perhaps New York too. Very glamorous happenings, despite economic depression in the states.
-Want to put SOAP in the 50s. Totally. Screenplay it up.
-Considering asking Harris Lapiroff if I can put one of his poems to a comic strip. His poems have a very youthful feel to them, which can be good or bad sometimes, but I think that as he gets older this youthful feel will be more and more appropriate--perhaps due to its feeling of nostalgia, or something. Here's the poem he wrote up that I like:

How I Long to be Found in a Time Beyond Love

November when air is warm with climate change,
I pray for nuclear winter, another ice age,
a snow that falls soft and lovely and enduring.

You and I wandering the streets of Albany
and out to the beach, flakes of aftermath
dropping one by one by one onto our limbs
weighing down until we move no longer but only
sleep compressed under thousands of pounds of powder,
found millennia later by excavators
with tinted goggles and laser drills.

Our pictures on the news,
us kept below zero in a block of ice
preserving our perfect bodies.

An archeologist leading a tour points and says
see their strange clothes, the way they wear their hair
see the way their eyes light up at one another
and the way their fingers twine.

Something I could totally never put together myself, but that I nevertheless enjoy. Am also reading a totally shallow book called Cliente in French by Josiane Balasko. It's about an escort boy and this older lady. Figured if I'm going to be reading in French, especially before a superserious private reading in January, I should read something superly awesome. Therefore the purchase as well of some French slam-poetry and Persepolis (ohgodIlovethisbook). I've read everything by Marjane Satrapi, but only in translation. I'm so excited to read her in the original! Oh...and I bought something by the Marquis de Sade.

Elisa

Reading I've Done Recently...and other things...

So, I guess I should update y'all on what readings I've been doing lately...

So, I finished up Benedetti's La Tregua (whilst taking a break from Allende's Casa de las espiritus), and it was absolutely fab. I'm still waiting to hear about Honors...but I've decided to apply to a creative writing workshop if I don't get accepted for that...and then do some translation work over the summer.

I know I mentioned before that I was reading some other books; I finished Duras' The Lover (English translation), and I also finished Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse, which was challenge, but totally awesome. I'm currently working on Maryse Conde's Crossing the Mangrove (English translation) for class, Paris in the Fifties (for class!), and, finishing up Allende's Casa de los espiritus.

Other things:

I really want this program for MFAness....It looks so fab...: http://iub.edu/~mfawrite/about/
Of course it's amazing so who knows if I'll get in. But it's very international-like, and reputable. Two very good things.

I really miss philosophy classes. As usual. But I will be taking 2-3 this next semester, so...

I will be doing a reading in French literature for Winter Term...so I will be able to continue studying...yay!

--me.

Suddenly, everything around me is changing.

I'm becoming more competent at everything: reading, writing, organizing my time, dealing with writer's block and just writing, writing, writing, reading, reading. I think it's a couple things: (1) I'm really homesick, (2) I visited two museums this weekend and (3) getting more fluent in my other languages is having an astounding impact on my English.

It all started with the Centre Pompidou. As a result of said museum, I finally started on 'Sleeping with Scarlett,' a short story about beauty (and, yes, Scarlett Johansson) and just aesthetics in general (I would love to show it to a philosophy prof sometime who won't judge me for the popular icon use--or perhaps I will and change their mind). I also worked a little bit on 'The Disease,' which is a reaction to a kind-of-well-known short story a friend sent me a while ago--it involves a lesbian and an oxygen tank, and talks about love. And music. I also began work on a serial novella, that I would like to submit through my friend's Oberlin publication, Spiral (I may have spoken about this in my last post...). This novella involves a bunch of crazy stuff, like fate, incest, reputation, curses, love...anything you'd expect from a genre-type story that I write, especially when it's semi-magical realism, in French-thought, Spanish-thought, and English-thought (it takes place in Paris, Montevideo, and a small town in Connecticut).

Today I did some work on some poetry (tried at a sonnet--it's been a while!), reread some old stuff, and worked on some nonfiction that's really hard to get through--I ended up crying a little bit because that's what happens when I face my honest feelings about things. I also printed out the botany story, finally, so I can rewrite it, and the rewriting's going very well. My narrator has a more distinct voice now, and now that I know more what it ends like, I'm adding in little things to the beginning that show that he knows how it's going to end, too (because it's written like a confession). Best of all, this week I had been thinking, and today I finally picked up Benedetti's La Tregua. Finally. I think reading Allende has made more comfortable with my Spanish, and finally, I see the blaze of Benedetti's writing, its sharp beauty, its disturbing sorrow. I'm going to apply to translate that book--if not also others--for an Honors project. He's not translated in English. And I know, I know, oh God, I know that he will be so beautiful in this language.

My goal in all this: Be respectable. Grow up as a writer. Honor literature and language, but most of all...the so many billion ways that humanity can experience itself--in other words, honor life. If I do that, even if I'm not famous, etc, then I will find my life worthwhile. Not just as a writer, but as myself.

PS- I really, really miss philosophy classes.

Freelance Travel Writing

I'm considering doing some freelance travel writing for WT next year--probably in Uruguay (they're looking for South America). I don't have any writing samples yet, but I could write up a few when I visit Europe with the family, just for sampling. I could also offer to send some when I'm in Europe next month. I think it's good that I have a lot of future promise (with my education in French coming along) for travel writing, so I'll emphasize that too, I think. Right now I'm looking at LonelyPlanet, but let's see where else I could possibly apply. This is exciting. I'm seriously considering it.

Europe...Among Other Things

My plan: while on vacation in Europe with the family, I will write one short story every day, or a poem--although poems usually take much longer than a day for me, but we'll see what I can do. I'll edit everything on the planeride back, then I'll be back a day, and then off to France for study-abroad. (I don't understand the logic of traveling thusly, but my parents affirm it's the best thing to do.)

I've been meaning to write a poem lately, so let's see if that happens...perhaps I will just do the Benedetti translations instead, as I had been planning to do this weekend anyway...Translations always help my writing in general, though, so perhaps I'll work on a poem and some of the botany story after working on the translation. So, this weekend, I should start revising SOAP, and do somewhere from 1-10 Benedetti rough draft translations (this is of poems--not prose).

I'm basically halfway through The Unbearable Lightness of Being, so I can probably get that out of the way soon. Metro rides make a great thing for reading. It's a touching subject, but I think that's more on a personal level than with the actual level of the writing. Too bad it's a translation, I can sense so terribly how much is lost there. Perhaps I'll learn Czech after French? We'll see how quickly I learn French. I'm advanced in the language lab and in the homework thus far, so I'm doing some outside reading from books my brother has lent me (he took French in high school and has a bunch of books). I should have known that French would consume me this way. The same thing happened with the English language, and that's why I read so much; it took such great effort for me to learn it, and language has seemed so powerful since then.

I would like to add, this blog has made a huge difference in my writing: not just how much I write (which has expanded), but just, how I feel about writing, how much I read, and how confident I feel about the whole thing. I recommend it to anyone who takes writing seriously.

I'm putting in an excerpt from The Unbearable Lightness of Being, because I've been meaning to since I started reading it:

Cemeteries in Bohemia are like gardens. The graves are covered with grass and colorful flowers. Modest tombstones are lost in the greenery. When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles. It looks as though the dead are dancing at a children's ball. Yes, a children's ball, because the dead are as innocent as children. No matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery. Even in wartime, in Hitler's time, in Stalin's time, through all occupations. When she felt low, she would get into the car, leave Prague far behind, and walk through one or another of the country cemeteries she loved so well. Against a backdrop of blue hills, they were as beautiful as a lullaby.

For Franz a cemetery was an ugly dump of stones and bones.