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Today is the first day of my summer break, and as far as breaks go, it’s the purest I’ve had since high school. I’m teaching one class (online, for ten weeks), and I’ve got a new class to prep for fall, and I’ve got some freelance work, and I have some pretty intense writing goals, and I’ve got a book review due, and I’m helping out with the social media at the Lit Pub, but really, I’ve got nothing to do.

Someone asked me the other day how I do it all. I said I don’t feel as if I do. I stopped reading for Hayden’s Ferry Review because I couldn’t keep up, though I still suspect someone else could have. The main thing, though, is that I just do. There’s something to be done, and no one else will do my work for me. So I do it.

I have a lot of goals. They’re goals I’d never considered before the last few years—and there are some goals that I did have that I no longer feel drawn to. I thought I’d be married now, probably with a child, but I don’t mourn that loss. Instead, I wonder how I would make time for me with those things on my plate. I want to dedicate myself to my writing, to being published. I love teaching. I’m working on building myself a network, and I still take time for myself. I’ve stopped feeling selfish about this, for there’s no one I’m taking from, and I’ve spent too many years trying to make other people happy without realizing that the people I should be worrying about are the same ones who simply want me to be happy, my own way.

I’ve had a hard time adjusting to my new apartment (I’ve been here twenty-nine nights now), but while I miss my parents, and my sister, and the three dogs, and while I haven’t slept a whole night in almost a month, I’ve come to realize that I’m happy. Not because of the move, but despite it. These past few months have been perhaps the best of my life—and it’s because of me, of what I’ve worked to achieve, and what I have become. I see people post online about how wonderful their god has been to them, and I wonder why they don’t see that happiness and success and achievement can be tied to ourselves. I am lucky—I would never say otherwise in this world—but that hasn’t been enough for me. I want more, more, more more more. Not things—I don’t want a yacht or a five-bedroom house or a fancy sports car. No, I want to make a difference. I want to write things that touch people, and I want to teach in ways that my students remember. I want to help others make a difference. And I believe I am doing these things.

My grandmother died back in February, and I’ve had friends become acquaintances, become memories, often with little warning. I’ve lost things I never took time to appreciate until it was too late. I’ve made mistakes, and, even when I haven’t, some things have been pulled away. But that’s life, and unlike myself of eight, ten years ago, I accept this. I’m spouting off cliches here, but their overuse doesn’t stop them from being true sometimes. Like now.

Things are good.

Team Katniss, all the way.

Let’s just get this out of the way: I loved this movie. I’ve seen it three times already. I’d go see it again in a heartbeat. I just love it. Okay. On with the review.

Also. Yes. There are spoilers here.

First, Jennifer Lawrence nailed Katniss. I was never really concerned about this casting choice (or about any casting choice, really), but she absolutely exceeded my expectations. What I was concerned with was the transition from first person point of view to film, since so much of what happens in the book happens in Katniss’ head. In the book, we are told how Katniss feels betrayed by Peeta when he teams up with the careers, but in the movie we see it. Same with her relationship with her mother. She hits all the nuances of this character, everything from fear (in the tube) to physical pain (the tracker jackers) to anger (the berries) to emotional pain (Rue). In the scene with her and the game makers, she transitions effortlessly from nervousness, to disbelief (at herself), to determination, to pride, to disbelief (at the game makers), to anger. Even had everything else about this movie been weak, Jennifer Lawrence alone would have made it worth watching. Read more…

I’m finally back and (mostly) decompressed from AWP, which means I’m ready to start harnessing the energy and motivation I acquired while at the conference. Most of that energy comes from guilt, and from seeing so many successful people (and wanting to be like them). I figure it’s still good though, no matter where it comes from.

But I realized something at this year’s conference, something that I think I’ve slowly been figuring out over the last year or so: I’m good at writing.

It feels odd to say that considering that the reason I started this whole MFA-business in the first place was because I knew I was good at writing. Before graduate school, I’d never once done substantial revisions on any piece of writing, be it creative or academic. My idea of revision was rereading my work, deleting extraneous commas, and changing a few of the more awkward wordings. There was only one time in all of my pre-graduate school years that I got below a B on a paper, and I was so offended by my grade that I dropped the class rather than have to figure out what I’d done wrong. But even considering that one time, I never had to pay the price for not improving my work. I got 4.0s on papers I wrote, start to finish, two hours before they were due. Even my graduate school writing sample was a rough draft.

That began to change in graduate school, of course, but in a lot of ways, it was too late. Rather than learning the value of hard work, I’d learned over many years that the good thing to do was to give only 50-80% of my effort to any given project. That way, in the event that I did fail (and for me, failing has usually meant anything that is less than perfect; seriously, ask me about the time I got grounded for getting a B+ in math), I had the ready-made excuse of having not given everything I had. That way my problem could always be defined as lack of effort rather than lack of talent.

But writing is turning out to be different. You see, I am good at it, and I’m good without trying too hard. But good isn’t enough. Good doesn’t get you to the level I want to be at. Good won’t get you a book published, won’t win you any prizes or contests. Luck might, but not being good. You have to be great. And to be great, you have to work.

People ask me sometimes how it feels to do something I love. I tell them I don’t love writing but that I love having written, that I love the power of a good story, that I love creating a good story, or a good character. These people are usually shocked to hear this attitude, but I don’t see why they should be. When writing is such a huge part of your life, when it’s another job—one that never ends—it’s hard as hell. And at least so far, it hasn’t gotten easier. Oh, I get better at it, but it’s still not any easier. It’s hard work.

And I’m finally ready to work. I’m ready to stop making excuses about why I haven’t written in two days, ten days, three weeks. I’m ready to take a chance for once in my life, to risk giving everything I have and still not being enough. But I want more than I have, and I’ll never get it sitting here talking about someday. This starts now. Wish me luck.

The AWP conference started yesterday, and the last twenty-four hours have been a whirlwind. For those who don’t know, AWP is an annual writing conference, with panels and a huge bookfair (think hundreds of tables to visit). This year there are (I believe) seven thousand writers in town for the three days of the conference.

So far it’s been good. I’ve bought more books than I probably should have (and will most likely acquire a few more before the conference ends on Saturday), and I’ve met and reconnected with some truly awesome people.

It’s also been stressful. I’ve done one previous AWP conference (2010 in Denver), and in the two years since, I apparently forgot how crazy, busy, and overwhelming it is. More than all the people and booths, however, what exhausts me is the constant need to push my introverted qualities away and pretend like I have more extroverted ones than I do. It’s a performance for me, and when that needs to go on all day, it becomes more than a bit wearing.

The problem (or, perhaps, just one of them) is that I don’t find myself very interesting, and while I genuinely like many (most? all?) of the people I meet, I can’t get rid of this lingering self-doubt that tells me they find me horribly boring. I don’t worry that people actively dislike me, but rather that, once I walk away, they don’t think of me again.

I don’t know what to say in groups. I don’t follow group dynamics. I alternate between not knowing what to say and so saying nothing and not knowing what to say and so saying the first thing that comes to mind until I’m babbling. I smile a lot, and nod when I don’t necessarily understand. I ask questions, but often struggle with articulating them. I do this even with people I know fairly well.

Usually, I prefer sitting at home to going out. I prefer solitude to groups, even when I’m feeling lonely. The one real exception is my immediate family, and they don’t understand why I’m not as comfortable with others as I am with them.

Yesterday, I found myself in conversation with someone I’d been really looking forward to seeing, but it was a group conversation, and I mostly just stood there mute. The girls on either side of me talked freely, jumped into the conversation in a way that felt natural, unplanned. Close to interruption, but in an intimate rather than rude way. I walked away from this group feeling dejected. There wasn’t any reason I should have been given a one-on-one conversational moment, but I still felt cheated for not receiving one (because, you know, I didn’t ask for one).

In my hotel room hours later, I lay staring at the dark ceiling, and realized my disappointment stemmed from wanting to feel special, important, and from the fact that I have a hard time feeling special or important of my own right. Usually those feelings only come from external forces. I think this is why I often miss school so much—I received these types of confidence boosts without having to seek them out: a good workshop, a good grade on a paper, a verbal compliment during a thesis meeting. Now, I’m floundering. Except at twenty-seven, it’s not supposed to be like that, and so I perform—or try to.

Like in my writing, I excel when given a specific task. I do perfectly well sitting behind a booth talking about a literary journal, or in front of a classroom when following a lesson plan. I feel comfortable when someone points out the flaw in my writing that I should fix, but I still struggle with finding the flaw myself. I still struggle with knowing what to do in non-scripted encounters. On the whole, the issues with my writing are improving faster than those with my personality. I suppose I should consider that a good thing.

Reads parts I and II.

August

August was a bit of a whirlwind for me. I went through two weeks of training at MSU and spent my time at the State trying to finish up a massive copyright project, as well as learning how to use the new item bank system (which, in my opinion, will help quantity of test questions rather than quality, but I digress). Missy moved out this month, and I helped with that. My mom was just getting worse with her back, so at the end of the month it was pretty much just me and my dad handling anything involving lifting or pulling. As a final aside-type note, I think it was right at the beginning of this month when I saw Harry Potter in the theaters for the last time, when my sister and I went back for our final repeat showing.

Mistborn: The Hero of Ages, by Brandon Sanderson
This was another reread for me, and while I remembered some very big general things about how the series ended, it was exciting to watch it all unfold again. I was shocked by how little time the two main characters (Vin and Elend, to me) spent together in this book, and this made me rather sad. Still, this books deviates from so many archetypes in the fantasy genre, and it was great to re-experience that.

The Sea of Monsters, by Rick Riordan
Considering that I’m someone who tends to enjoy retellings and reimaginings (and I love work that incorporates myth), I wasn’t sure I’d enjoy this series, but I was excited to start this second book in the Percy Jackson series. I especially liked how the book worked more with Annabeth’s character.

A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan
I really enjoyed this book, but I wouldn’t quite go so far as to say I loved it. I struggled with the large cast of characters at times, because I felt that the limited page space each got wasn’t enough to fully develop them in my mind. That said, this was still a very good book, and I would recommend it, especially if you’re interested in ways books break (or attempt to break) out of the traditional bonds holding them. Read more…

For fun, and because I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about all the places I’ve been these last few years.

1. “Into the Airwaves,” by Jack’s Mannequin. Makes me think of sitting on the floor in my first apartment watching someone try to fix my computer. I’ve always been drawn to the evocative quality of his first album. One song on it has inspired two (totally different) short stories, though at least for the moment, this one brings back the strongest memory—though I’m not entirely convinced the memory is real the same way it is in my head.

2. “All These Things that I’ve Done,” by The Killers. I love this song, and this song brings back lots of small happy moments (more impressions really), but it also brings back one very sad one. My second party while I was in Spokane, I helped pick a song, then turned down an invitation, and had one hell of a bad night.

3. Wicked, by Gregory Maguire. I’ve read this book a few times, and I loved it. In graduate school, however, in front of the professor I most respected and wanted to impress, I named this as the best book in the past twenty years—not because I thought it was a great answer, but because it was the only work of literary quality I’d read from the past twenty years. Since then, I’ve made a real effort to keep up with modern literature. I’m rereading this book now, and I’m hoping that it’s sparkle doesn’t dim for me, but so far it’s only good, not great.

4. Cold days, when the heating vents turn on in the morning. Our dog Jack used to love when the vents came on, and he’d run over and curl up over top of the vent. That in turn always reminded me of when I was a little girl and would do the same thing while my dad got my breakfast (Cheerios with brown sugar) ready for me.

5. Morrill Hall. I once spent a fall afternoon wandering around campus with a camera and a friend, and he took some cool pictures of me on the steps of Morrill Hall. Art, beauty, friendship—and now I hear they’re going to tear the building down.

6. Girls to the Rescue, by Bruce Lansky. I’m not even sure I still own a copy of this book of fairy tales (all of which have the females as heroines rather than damsels in distress), but I still think of it from time to time—and whenever I hear the word persnickety. I took this book to an MSU football game once, and it poured, and I tucked myself completely under my poncho and ate a bag on M&Ms while I read this book.

7. My senior year varsity soccer sweatshirt. And it’s not for the reasons you might think. I left this sweatshirt at the home of this guy I liked (though to this day I can’t tell you what I saw in him beyond someone else to help keep me as down on myself as possible), and after I finally broke away from his abusive attitude, I gave up on ever getting it back. And then one day it was left at my work for me. Then, a few months later, a friend of mine mentioned this guy in the context of having seen my ex-boyfriend, and I flipped out. I still can’t look at the sweatshirt, and I swear it still smells a bit like that house, but I’ve hidden it away against the day that it brings the good memories of soccer success again.

8. Long stretches of highway vanishing into the horizon. While I was in Spokane, feeling so very alone, I used to think that if I only had the guts, I could take the highway all the way home.

Read part I here.

April

April was not a good month, but I’ll start with the good things. I started my new position with the State, and I took a trip to Florida to visit my cousin, Erin. We spent a few days at Disney World, and we went to the beach and the zoo. But my last full day there, I got a phone call from my parents telling me that my dog, Jack, had died. My parents found him dead in his bed in the morning. Then, at the end of the month, my dad needed surgery for cancer that had been diagnosed earlier in the year. The bright light at the end of the tunnel, however, was that we brought home a new dog, Molly. My dad wasn’t ready for a new dog, but we asked him while he was…um…slightly out of it in the hospital. So that’s how we got Molly.

Suicide, by Edouard Levé
I read a review copy of this book, and you can find my review online here, so I’ll be succinct. Loved the book. Also, this was another book I read in translation this year (from the original French).

Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy, by Ally Carter
This is the second book in the Gallagher Girls series, and I brought it with me to Florida as my fun read. This book did suffer from a bit of the sophomore book syndrome (did I just coin a new phrase?), but it was still fun and exciting, and I liked getting to know Cammie and her friends even better.

My Happy Life, by Lydia Millet
I’d read one of Millet’s short story collections in 2010 and really enjoyed it, and so this was the second book I picked up by her. We’d run an interview with her in Willow Springs, and I was really intrigued by the premise behind this book: that of a character who is happy despite all the bad (horrible) things that have happened to her. It’s a quick read, but very captivating, even when you’re unsure whether you really should be enjoying it, because some really awful things happen to the narrator. I’m probably not making a good sell here, but this was yet another fantastic book I read this year. Read more…

For 2011—a year without school for the first time in twenty-one years—I bumped my goal back up to 52 books and 20,000 pages. I hit the first goal (57 books), but I missed my page goal by quite a bit, for the first time in years (only hit 18,932). This will probably take a series of posts, but I’ll go month by month and then finish up with a general overview of the year. So. Here we go.

January

January found me still working at the State of Michigan, though I mostly kept to myself, especially after they forgot to invite me to the Christmas party (then I got scolded for not making an appearance) and then left me out of the secret santa exchange. This is also the month that I really started reaffirming my commitment to writing. I took some time off after grad school (my advisor wasn’t wrong about there being burnout after twenty-one years of school), but the new year felt like a good time to get back into it, and so I started 100 Days of Writing—a project where I tried to write 100 out of 110 days. The month was good for writing, but even better for reading. I got through nine books.

Cathedral, by Raymond Carver
Carver is hit or miss with me, but this book was mostly miss. The only story I remember from it now, a year later, is the title story, and I’d read that one before. There’s something really beautiful about this idea of these two men sitting there and drawing, but the execution falls flat for me. And now, I suppose the hate mail begins for me.

The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
This was a reread and, to be honest, I only waited a few hours after the ball dropped to restart it. Reading the book in a new year meant I could count it again, and even though I’d only first read it three months before, I couldn’t wait to get back to it. And just like the first time I read it, I loved it. I’ll be reading the book again this year, too, though not until right before the movie comes out in March. Read more…

I’ve got less than eleven months left on my Day Zero project, and I’m only a bit over halfway done. So now I ask you, dear reader, to help me out. Here are some goals I still see as possible, with some help.

• go to NYC (who can I visit?)
• learn a new song on guitar (what’s an easy song?)
• go ice skating (who wants to go with me?)
• take a yoga class (who wants to take one with me?)
• go horseback riding (who has a horse?)
• play kickball (who wants to help me start a team for this summer’s league?)
• go sledding (who has a sled?)
• host a wine and cheese party (who wants to come?)
• visit three museums (suggestions?)
• go to a Detroit sporting event (who wants to come? I’m thinking Tigers.)
• go swimming in a lake (who wants to come?)
• play poker at a casino (who wants to come with me?)

So. Any takers?

I sit here on New Year’s Eve, listening to music from ten years ago and debating whether or not I should wear my nice black shoes to my family’s Christmas today. We usually have the Hemond Christmas between Christmas and New Years, but this feels so late. I’ve already moved past the holidays, preparing myself for a new year. There are only a few things I have left to do before the clock strikes midnight tonight, and I’m ready to put this year to bed.

It’s been a year of extremes. We had cancer, back surgery, and Bell’s Palsy just in my immediate family this year. Our dog died. I spent half the year with insomnia so extreme it wasn’t uncommon for me to miss an entire night’s sleep. But I also got a new job at the university, published my second piece of writing, and rejoined the halls of literary journal editing. I started coaching a soccer team of eleven-year-old girls. My sister graduated.

But there are holes, too, in my experience, as there always are: friends who went unseen yet again, plans that fell apart or that never fully formed, possibilities left behind, choices made that so fully exclude others. Things left undone, and there aren’t enough hours left now.

I’m not big on making resolutions; I’ve never understood why the turn of the calendar should be the prompt, but here I am today, using the same coming occurrence to look back, to plan forward.

2012 will be many things. I will complete my first year with Michigan State University. I will turn twenty-eight. I will attend my ten-year high school reunion. And there are other things that I hope for: to become published (fiction this time), to finally move into my own apartment, to be kept on at MSU with a full teaching load, to travel back to France and learn to speak the language well enough to not need English while I’m there.

And now I’m listening to What Sarah Said, and it all feels so appropriate.

Perhaps it’s the weather, or the holidays, or genetics, or one of a thousand other things, but I always get a bit melancholy at this time of year. Reflection can do that I think, and for me, planning can, too. If I did set a resolution this year it might be to become a better planner. Not better at making plans, but better at letting them go, at making new ones, at thinking on my feet when things take a turn.

It’s hard being back in my hometown now, feeling as if I’ve changed so much and yet so much around me is the same. I’d have never guessed, five or ten years ago, that I would be someone uncomfortable with comfort. I remember sitting in the car with a boyfriend once, maybe nine years ago, talking about that awful John Mayer song and debating comfort. But even then I said I wanted something more. It’s funny how even in change, some things stay the same, simply maturing, blossoming.

Now I leave, to go spend a few more hours inside this year. I will try to finish some of those things I’ve left undone: I will deliver my final Christmas gift, I will try to finish reading another book (Rivethead), I will read more story submissions. I will think on all the things I haven’t done: phone calls I haven’t made, things I haven’t said, stories I haven’t finished writing. So much, so much unfinished. Some, I will do in 2012, some I will try to push into the back corner of my closet and forget about, to be packed in boxes and taken with me wherever I go, until I finally forget, or find the courage to do.

May 2012 be a year of many blessings for you. May the stumbling blocks be ones you can climb over, teaching you important lessons as you do so. May there be smiles and laughter. And may we all find the strength to do those difficult things, or to let them go. Happy New Year, everyone.