a love letter.

It’s a Wednesday afternoon and I’m sitting on my front porch; it’s hot today, around 90 degrees, and humid, a little uncomfortable, but I don’t mind.  The heat is making me drowsy and I was having trouble concentrating on the papers I was grading, so I put them away for a bit, and now I’m just relaxing, feet up, iced tea beside my rocking chair.  It’s so quintessentially Southern it almost makes me want to vomit, but really, it’s pretty wonderful.

Hold up, I just have to brag for a moment: The front porch on this house is as big as some apartments I’ve lived in. (And the porch swing is nice, but I’ve found I can’t do work on it, because it gives me motion sickness, so I’ll stick to the rocking chair. Hey, I never claimed to be cool.)

Being able to sneak these mid-week quiet moments is a guilty pleasure.  Summer is barreling towards me and I think of everything I have to do in the next month or so, and after that, and after that.  Teaching, writing, editing, workshopping, writing events, social events.  Each day fills up quickly and sometimes it’s hard to catch my breath in between.

Not that I’m complaining, mind you.  Career-wise, my life is turning into exactly what I’ve always wanted, and I’m thankful every day for the people I get to work with in all aspects of what I do.

I hated North Carolina my first year here.  I moved from Boston to Raleigh for graduate school; I missed the big city, my neighborhood, my skyscrapers, and my friends; I knew no one in the area and I was lonely.  Adjusting to a smaller city was more of a culture shock than I anticipated and I was dealing with the stress of being back in school after a couple of years off.  I was intensely miserable my first semester, and it barely got better the second.

Then things suddenly settled.  I met people and made friends.  I realized that I was pretty good at the whole grad school thing, and I found myself in the midst of an amazing group of writers who were my colleagues and mentors.  I got to know the area better and realized that there are, in fact, plenty of good bars and restaurants and museums, they just are a little more hidden away than in big cities.

Throughout that first awful year, I kept thinking, “The second I graduate, I’m off.  To somewhere.  Anywhere.  Europe or California or Alaska or maybe back to Boston.  Just not here.”  The closer I got to graduation, I started to think, “Well, having to stay here wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world; maybe I’ll apply to some jobs in the area, just, you know, as back-up.”  By the time I was actually staring the end of my graduate career in the face, I realized that, to my utter surprise, I loved it in North Carolina and didn’t want to leave.

So I moved to Durham.  Fell in love with Durham.  I live close to downtown and Ninth Street, and can get to any number of bars, restaurants, coffee shops, independent stores, art galleries, and music venues in minutes.  I work in Saxapahaw, a small town in rural NC, west of Carrboro, that was recently in The New York Times for being an up-and-coming hip spot.  I still spend a fair amount of time in Raleigh, and go to Chapel Hill and Carrboro on occasion.

This area shatters every bad stereotype of the South.  The people retain all the friendliness, but it’s astoundingly progressive and diverse.  With NC State University, UNC-Chapel Hill, and Duke, as well as dozens of smaller schools, it ties with Boston as the number four area in the country with the highest concentrations of college degrees.  There is a definite dedication to education at all levels, with NC having the most charter schools of any state (which are public and therefore tuition-free, by the way) as well as many public arts schools (I live a couple of blocks away from the biggest one in Durham).  We have food trucks and CSAs, locally owned businesses with fierce customer loyalty, and masses of people in their twenties and thirties from all areas of the world.  It’s a great place to be vegetarian or vegan and there are anti-Amendment One signs in every single yard in my neighborhood.

Some of them are even handmade. (Quite a few, actually, but the other pictures aren’t working, so this is the only one you get.  Also, be sure to get out and vote no on the amendment by either voting early or showing up on May 8th.)

I no longer feel like I’m missing out by not living in a big city.  The culture is thriving and there is a strong feeling of community.  We’re proud of where we live, and for good reason.

And there are writers.  Oh god, there are writers.

Writers giving readings!
(Smriti Ravindra, a classmate of mine, reading from her book at the Raleigh Review loft.)

One of my main incentives to stay is that I didn’t want to lose the writing community I’ve found here.  Writing requires time, commitment, and community.  I still struggle with the first aspect, but being surrounded by other writers who truly understand what you do is key, and I have that here.

Writers in bars!
(Some of the women of fiction, spanning four years of the MFA program)

I still meet with friends from the MFA program once or twice a month to workshop manuscripts for publication.  We’re all serious, are working on first or second book manuscripts.  We support each other through the writer’s blocks and rejections from journals and publishers.  I’ve been lucky enough to work with award-winning writers as colleagues, professors, advisors.  There is always someone I can talk to when I have questions about the publishing process or professional protocol.

Writers in amazing outfits!
(Dr. John Kessel, author of four novels and three short story collections, channels 1977 and reads us a story he wrote when he was in grad school himself)

 They’ve introduced me to other award-winning writers, and meeting them has shown me that yes, it is possible to make a career out of this.  As young writers, we’re given a kind of personalized attention that would be much harder to find in a bigger city.  

Writers who let me name-drop in my blog!
(With Kij Johnson, classmate and winner of several Nebula/Hugo/World Fantasty/etc awards)

But more than anything, this community Gets It, what I’m trying to do with my life, and is supportive.  (They also happen to be fantastically laid-back and hilarious, but really, that’s just a bonus.)

I’m an official convert.  You win, North Carolina.  You win.

Review: Matters of Record

Megan Roberts is a young, prolific North Carolina writer who has that one quality that all writers covet: she is able to genre-hop between fiction and poetry effortlessly.  While her MFA is in fiction writing, her poems have appeared in several literary journals and won awards.  She has a novel in the works and most recently published a chapbook, Matters of Record, which contains poems about women murderers who were executed for their crimes.

The chapbook will officially be released in July but Megan was nice enough to let me read an advanced copy, since I had heard her talk about the project and couldn’t wait to get my hands on it.  I was intrigued by the subject matter.  Women murderers?  Executed?  There are so many different ways a writer could approach such a topic; each way would influence the stories being told, and I wondered how Megan would handle it.  Would she judge the murderers, have sympathy for them, give them voices, give their victims voices, or merely report the facts?

It turns out she did all of the above.  The women in the poems range from those executed within the last decade all the way back to Mary Surrat, who was executed as a co-conspirator in the Lincoln assassination.  There are times when she gets inside the women’s heads and tells the stories in their voices; other times, the poems are from the perspective of complete strangers who are only tangentially involved with the crimes or executions; other times there is a completely omniscient, detached narrator.  Some of the poems concentrate on the crimes themselves, the motivations (or mental illness) behind them or the aftereffects, such as in “Wishing Well,” where a community pitches in to buy a– you guessed it– wishing well, and one of Betty Lou Beet’s (executed in 2000 in Texas) husbands ends up under it, or in the first-person poem “The Divorce,” which describes how Mary Mabel Rogers (executed in 1905 in Vermont) took her husband into the woods to poison him.  Other poems, like the first one in the chapbook, “Peach,” about Karla Faye Tucker’s (executed in 1998 in Texas) last meal, draw further away from the crimes.  The last stanza of that poem is squirm-inducing:

Later, as the hollow needle
was pulled from her arm,
a cockroach entered Karla’s old cell.
Engorged itself
within that leftover peach
head stuck inside,
legs running on air,
body struggling to go deeper.

Probably the one that haunted me the most, however, was “Margie and Me,” a poem about Velma Marge Barfield (executed in North Carolina, 1984, for killing a boyfriend, her husband, and her mother), and I think because it’s the only poem where the author explicitly allows herself to become part of the story.  This is the first stanza:

I.
At ten, Margie stole coins from her father–
a poor girl and at school
Margie wanted to buy lunch.
That heavy thud against her thigh,
silver jingle in her little pocket.

My father left his dresser drawer full
of change like scattered temptations
along with a single heavy gun.
Satisfying thud as I slammed
the old drawer shut, thunk
inside my birdcage breast.

The fact that the author was making connections between herself and a killer made me stop and think; I didn’t for one second think that Megan approved of Velma’s actions or was trying to excuse them, but it did let me see the story in another light, one that was uncomfortable at first and then became more human as I considered it.  That’s what these poems do: they make you uncomfortable and squirmy, stop and consider, ask yourself questions about these women.  Each poem stayed with me long after I finished reading it.

After finishing the book, I assaulted Megan with a bunch of questions about the project and the process– I think the poems made me even more curious than I was before I read the book:

How did you decide to write a book of poetry about women sentenced to death for murder?  What started the project?

I can tell you that this is not the type of topic I usually write about. I normally focus on Southern families and places, small town tensions. So this topic was a big leap for me. It really started small, with a conversation with Luke Whisnant, a professor at ECU. He told me a little about Velma Marge Barfield’s story,  and then I was off and running. One woman led to another. I wrote about Velma early on, and I also wrote the title poem “Matters of Record” fairly early in the process when I began to explore racism and women in connection to the death penalty.

What kind of research did you do for the poems, and how much is fact and how much is fiction?

The basics of their crimes are true, but I’ve taken full creative license with the details. I’ve also used experimental points of view and small moments to allow room for fiction. Through adding my own “facts,” I began to find a deeper understanding in their stories.
I used websites, newspaper articles, and books for my research, but I am far from an expert on these women and their crimes. I researched enough to find something to be inspired by and then I put the books down. If I went too far into the research, I found that I couldn’t write a poem. My mind was overwhelmed and closed off to creativity.

The stories in these poems are told from varying, and extremely diverse, viewpoints, ranging from a bystander in a parking lot to the murderers themselves to an anonymous woman on an online message board.  How did you decide which viewpoints to use in the poems?

At first, I was only writing in first person as the women (persona) or third person with the women as subjects. After several poems, this began to weigh on me. I switched to unexpected view points out of necessity. I was bored, and the book was going to be much too dark if every poem took you inside a jail cell or to the electric chair. I began to ask questions like, What does a jury really think about? What about their children? What about witnesses? I soon realized the new viewpoints told a fuller story.
The online message board poem came from reading so much about these women online. There are a lot of other people who are obsessed with these stories, and they usually become obsessed with one woman in particular. I was always questioning why I was interested and why others, strangers to these women, were interested as well. I think it comes down to the connection we feel with them. Even if we find their crimes heinous and grotesque, there is something in all of these women that we can relate to. I think people dissect these women’s lives, childhoods, motives, because they are trying to understand humans and themselves. Most of these stories boil down to issues of power and powerlessness. What woman can’t relate to that?

Emotionally, how did you handle spending so much time and energy on the lives of murderers?  Did you become attached to the women?  Judgment is almost totally left out of your poems; personally, were you able to maintain that distance?

This collection was a side project. I couldn’t focus totally on it for any length of time. While writing fiction during my MFA, I would only spend a day, here or there, on these poems. If I spent much longer than a day or two at a time, my creative brain would shut down and my thinker brain would try to take over. I couldn’t let that happen because I really wanted this to be a creative project, not a political or judgmental one.  For example, Judy Buenoano, the Black Widow, is a woman I researched and studied;  she still haunts me, but I couldn’t write anything worth putting in a collection because I had begun to judge her. I hated her, and the writing was awful because of that.
I tried to keep my distance in the poems, but I probably show some sympathy or at least a connection to Velma Barfield and Helen Fowler. Especially in the poem about Helen Fowler, you can hear me lamenting her death. I slowly decided to bring the reader a little closer to my emotions throughout the course of writing. My main goal was to bring their stories to life; readers should draw their own conclusions.

I have no idea how chapbooks come into being– can you tell us a little about the process?

Me either! I became obsessed with a certain topic and just wouldn’t stop. At some point, fairly late in the process, I realized I might have a collection. I think it took a mentor or professor saying, Hey, you’re working on a book here. Then I began what was a really fun part of the process: what poems to include, exclude, and which poems to put side-by-side. I think that process was very organic for me. They seemed to fall into place within the book, but I really liked thinking about the poems “talking” to each other in relation to where they were placed within the chapbook. Then I found Finishing Line Press and they seemed like a good match for my subject matter.
I don’t know if I could write an entire collection (40-50 poems) on this subject because it is so draining on me. Although I am still obsessed by their stories, so they may begin to appear in my short stories now.

If you love poetry, find the subject matter interesting, or just want to support young writers and the local writing community, you can buy  Matters of Record for $12 (and I strongly, strongly recommend you do– the writing is fantastic, seriously).  To pre-order a copy from Finishing Line Press, click here.

To read a blog post by Megan about how she first became interested in Velma Marge Barfield and how it started the project, click here.

numbers, letters, learn to spell; nouns and books and show and tell

I have failed horribly at writing in here once a week.

About a month and a half ago– the day after my last post– I started a new job teaching 10th and 11th grade English at a charter school.  It’s kept me busy.  I had taught before but only at the university level, and I realized pretty quickly that teaching high school is an entirely different ballgame.  Not in a bad way– in fact, I will say that working with teenagers might actually be more rewarding than working with college students– but I’m definitely having to think on my feet a lot and deal with things as they come up, and create lesson plans from scratch based on what I learn from my students as we go.  (Another unusual circumstance: I’m taking over for another teacher halfway through the school year, so a lot of times I don’t really know what the students have already worked on and what they haven’t.)

Teaching college is pretty straightforward.  Since the students went through the admissions process to get into the school, it’s assumed that they’re all performing at a certain level, and it’s just your job to teach them the material for your class.  You expect them to be able to keep up, and if they can’t– well, it’s not really your problem.  I wasn’t a harsh grader by any means– I never failed anyone who came to class and did their work– but a lot more of the responsibility rested with the students.  It was their responsibility to come to class and do the work.  It was their responsibility to email you with questions or come to your office hours if they were struggling.  All you had to do was teach them the class material.  Simple.

In my interview for this job, the principal asked me for a sample lesson plan for American literature.  I was caught completely off guard and fumbled out some BS answer, because my previous approach to lesson planning could be summed up as: Teach the effing material. Assign reading.  Talk about reading via some amalgamation of lecture and discussion.  Write things on the board occasionally.  Throw a few jokes in there to make sure they’re not asleep.  Show examples of what you’re talking about.  Boom.  Done.

Not to say that I never switched things up.  I did in-class writing assignments and class-wide activities.  One class period, my students and I spent a solid ten minutes looking at pictures of Tobias Wolff’s righteous ‘stache on google images via the doc cam.  (I was really burnt out on lecturing that day.)  But overall, yeah, I just lectured and led discussions and workshops.  I never got too crazy or went too far out of the box with my lesson planning.

One of the things I learned right away is that lesson planning is much more important– and complex– with high school students.  You have to switch things up fairly often just to keep their attention.  I’m having to learn to teach to a much broader range of skill levels and learning styles, so I have to make sure that the activities we do in class are diverse enough that each student is able to get at least something out of it.  This means approaching the readings from different angles.  Some students respond well to lectures and discussions, but some respond better to small group work, or art projects (side note: art projects are awesome and totally relevant, since it means they have to be really familiar with the material to depict something), or turning the material into some sort of performance.  It turns out that there are countless ways to get students to think about and analyze the material.  Also, high school students are still very much in the “process” part of the learning process, and if someone is struggling with something– such as, say, being able to write a thesis statement– it is my definite responsibility to work and work on it with them until they get it.  I can’t say, “Oh well, it’s your GPA, I can’t make you learn this” and move on.  It’s very much a learning process for me as well.  I know a lot of teachers and have been jumping all over them for advice and suggestions, and luckily they’ve all been very helpful and accommodating, because truth told– I don’t really know what I’m doing.

This job is forcing me to be more creative, active, and quick-thinking than I’ve ever been.  My students surprise me every day, usually in good ways.  On the days when all my classes are right in a row for long periods, my voice is starting to go hoarse by the end of it.  I’m usually exhausted and heading for bed sometime around 10pm (if I’m lucky).  I have a long commute, which gives me plenty of time to think about the day’s lesson plans on my way into work.

And I love it.  This job has the most basic requirements that I look for in employment– namely, I get to wear jeans and talk about books all day– but I love how rewarding it is, when those “Ah-ha!” moments happen and suddenly a student just gets it, that– as cliche as it sounds– I learn almost as much from them as they do from me.  (A little known fact: Teenagers are hilarious.)  I love when they get excited about the material (even if it’s vehemently telling me why they disliked the reading– totally acceptable, as long as they can back up their opinions with at least three concrete examples from the text).  I like that it changes every day.  I spent a couple of years after college working a low-level desk job, and I was bored out of my ever-loving mind every freaking day to the point that I would start eyeing the industrial-sized stapler on my desk and think, “You know, if I just jammed that into my forehead, it would give me an excuse to leave for the day…”  With teaching, there are definitely days when my head wants to explode (OHMYGODWHYCAN’TYOUJUSTSHUTUPANDQUIETLYDOYOURWORK), but at least I don’t feel like my brain is atrophying in my skull from disuse.

But that’s what I’ve been up to.  Forgive any typos in this post; I don’t have time to proofread.  And now, back to class.

vacation reads.

I took the month of August off to bounce around the East Coast and do fun things.  (I know, I know– I’m totally spoiled and you have a right to be jealous.  You, too, can live such a glamorous life by going to grad school.  You’ll put in seventy hour work weeks during the semester for very little money, but the trade off is the great academic breaks.  Worth it.)  I went to a music festival in the mountains, spent some time at the beach, visited the family in Virginia, then spent several days on Cape Cod with some friends, several more days in Boston and Montreal each on my own, and then got caught in Boston for a couple of days again on my way home when Hurricane Irene messed up my travel plans.

During all this, I was reading.  I spent a lot of time hitching rides with people and on trains and subways and Greyhound buses (budget travel, y’know).  And when I travel to cities, especially by myself (which is often my preferred way to travel– if you’ve never done it, you should seriously try, it’s great and way more fun than you’d think), I really don’t do much other than wander around, people watch, read, and eavesdrop.  Oh god, do I eavesdrop.  I’m not one of those writers that puts people I know into my fiction, but half of my ideas come from surreptitiously honing in on other people’s lives, and people who I’ve met briefly or never officially met at all make their way into my stories all the time.  Woman I met in a flower shop in 2007 in Orange, Virginia?  You’re in a story.  Man sitting on a bench next to me in Vieux Montreal talking on your phone to your young daughter, switching back and forth between English and French?  You’re in a story.  Guy who got your face kicked in while trying to crowd surf in a mosh pit at a Dellinger Escape Plan show in Richmond in 2002, and middle-aged German couple in the hostel room with thin walls next to mine in Venice, and large businessman from Cincinnati who sat beside me on a flight from Seattle to Chicago three years ago?  You’re all in stories too.  The vast majority of my minor characters, and sometimes not-so-minor characters, are people I’ve just tangentially happened upon in the world.

I digress.  Back to reading.  I read a lot in that month.  I only had my backpack with me and fitting the books in with my clothes was like playing tetris.  I left some of my books at libraries when I bought new ones, picked up free books from my hostel in Boston and left them in my hostel in Montreal when I was finished with them, then repeated the process when I went back and got stuck.  I went out in Boston just as the hurricane was moving in to find a bookstore– and surprisingly, found one that was open– to buy the last Harry Potter book and spent the next day reading in the common room while waiting out the storm.  I can’t remember everything I read, but I know I re-read Harry Potters 4-7 (great travel reading, quick and engrossing), Junot Diaz’s Drown, Vonnegut’s Welcome to the Monkey House, Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Hollis Hampton-Jones’ Vicious Spring, Calvino’s If on a winter night a traveler and Invisible Cities, and Charles Bukowski’s The Most Beautiful Woman in Town.

The Harry Potters and If on a winter night a traveler are old favorites that I revisited.  Invisible Cities was a new Calvino I tried and I was disappointed, couldn’t get into it, and didn’t finish.  Drown deserves its own blog post at some point, and The Left Hand of Darkness probably does too, although I will say (spoiler alert!) that I was extremely disappointed that the sexual tension in that novel never paid off.  You can’t put two main characters in a tent in an icy, isolated tundra and have them slowly fall in love and then never get naked!  Vicious Spring was pretty awful and one-dimensional and not worth reading (if I want a story about how quitting high school to become a stripper and becoming addicted to coke is a bad life decision, I’ll just watch the after-school special or sit in on a fifth-grade DARE meeting), and although I love Vonnegut dearly as a thinker and writer, I will say that I find his short stories less engaging than his novels, and his novels less engaging than his nonfiction.  Granted, I’ve only read two of his novels and should give the others a try, but A Man Without a Country, a book of his essays/memoirs, is one of the best things I’ve ever read in my life.

But The Most Beautiful Woman in Town.  Damn.  That was the first story collection of Bukowski’s I had read– before that, I’d only ever read his poetry.  And I really like his poetry, which is saying something, since poetry isn’t my thing; I like it well enough but it just doesn’t hit me the way that fiction does for the most part.  But Bukowski has a blunt and poignant way with words that comes across strongly in his poetry, and it translates beautifully in his fiction.  I spent two days burning through this book.

While I liked the first story in the collection, the title story the collection’s named after, it didn’t blow me away, but the more I read, the more I loved the book.  I love his aforementioned blunt writing style, lots of declarative sentences and descriptions that punch you in the face, like: “A refrigerator which shined like a mad and enlarged tooth that had been scrubbed until it cried.”  As I read, I kept thinking, “You know, this sounds a lot like Hemingway, if Hemingway were less careful about his writing and way dirtier.”  Then he mentioned Hemingway in a story.  And then mentioned him several more times throughout the book.  Ah, I see what you did there.

I’d like to point out that although the title of this post is “vacation reads,” that’s not synonymous with “beach read.”  If you’re looking for a nice, fluffy book to kick back on the sand with, this probably isn’t it.  Bukowski is harsh and blunt and vulgar, oh so vulgar.  That picture up there?  It’s an actual sign from the Harvard bookstore.  (Sidenote: The Harvard bookstore is in Harvard Square, next to the college, but isn’t actually connected to the college and is a delightful independent bookstore, one of my favorites.  If you’re ever in Boston, you should go there!  Also, Schoenhof’s, a fantastic foreign-language bookstore with one of the widest selections I’ve ever seen in the US, two blocks over on Mount Auburn Street.)  Bukowski is not for the weak of stomach, or the strongly moral.  One of his stories actually made me uncomfortable to read… and that’s pretty hard to do.  But overall, his stories say things about the human condition that are poignant, even if they’re not necessarily something you want to think about.  Not all of them.  There were some I was unimpressed by.  But enough of them to make me keep thinking about it after I finished the book.  And a lot of the ones that didn’t convey anything poignant were still entertaining.  And beyond all that, there’s still his writing style, and writing style does a lot for me.  No matter how great a plot is, if the way it’s written annoys me, I will not finish the book.  Bukowski’s style sucks you in.

The second story in the collection is “Kid Stardust on the Porter House,” about a washed-up boxer working a day job in– you guessed it– a slaughterhouse.  This is where I started to get hooked.  ”Out of the shame of defeat taught me in American schoolyards as a boy I knew that I must not drop the steer to the ground because this would show that I was a coward and not a man and that I didn’t therefore deserve much, just sneers and laughs and beatings, you had to be a winner in America, there wasn’t any way out, and you had to learn to fight for nothing, don’t question, and besides it will get dirty.  I don’t want it to get dirty, or rather– they don’t want it to get dirty.  I walked it into the truck.”  (SEE?  Less-carefully-constructed Hemingway!)  These are themes that run throughout– what you have to do versus what you want to do, what they want you to do and what you really couldn’t give less of a crap about.  This shows up strongly in my favorite story of the collection, “The Gut-Wringing Machine,” which manages to be allegorical in a way that’s, well, gut-wringing rather than preachy.

I’m almost hesitant to recommend this book to people, since, like I said, it is not for the faint-hearted or the strongly moral.  It’s vulgar and offensive, consistently.  You can pick it up and flip to the table of contents and if the titles offend you– and they might– it’s probably not a good choice for you.  Yet there’s still something about it that has me going back to re-read passages six months later, and to me, that says something about a writer.

write this.

What do you do with a BA in English, an MFA in fiction writing, and a flexible working schedule?  Start a literary blog, of course.

I feel like this has been a long time coming.  I like words.  A lot.  More than any one person should.  I like using words, I like reading the words that other people use.  I ruined my eyesight as a kid by reading via nightlight (after lying to my parents and telling them I was scared of the dark for much longer than I was) after bedtime, and have since turned into one of those nerdy teachers who spends a lot of time pushing their glasses up the bridge of their nose.  One semester my students pointed out that when I’m not wearing my glasses, I still do the motion out of habit and just poke myself between the eyes a lot.  Yeah, I love words that much.

I’ve been wondering for years when I could start calling myself a writer with any confidence.  I remember writing and illustrating stories as soon as I learned how to form letters and put words together– skeletons and vampires were a favorite subject in elementary school– and when I was in sixth grade, I wrote my first “chapter book” about a group of hikers that get stuck on a mountain during an avalanche and turn to cannabalism, a la the Donner party, although I didn’t know about the Donner party at the time.  (That’s the kind of thing all 11 year olds write about, right?)  I’ve been writing for a long time.  In college I was briefly distracted by my second love (Italian literature) and was looking into grad programs in that when I took a fiction writing class my last semester and thought, “Oh yeah, that’s right, I love this,” and immediately abandoned ship and started thinking about MFA programs instead.  It took me a couple of years after undergrad to do all the research and start a program, but I made it, and suddenly I got to do what I love full time.

But calling yourself a writer is a tricky thing.  After college, two of my friends and I moved from Virginia to Boston, into an apartment on the second floor of a triple-decker Victorian in Dorchester.  A couple with two kids lived on the third floor. The husband was a book editor and the wife was a history professor at Harvard.  I was talking to the wife on the porch one day and I don’t remember how it came up, but she mentioned that she was at some kind of academic social function and met someone who told her he was a writer, and she was surprised when she recognized one of his books.  (It was Matthew Pearl, author of The Dante Club, a NYT bestseller.)  I specifically remember her saying that when he told her he was a writer, she thought, “So you mean you’re a trust fund kid… and then I realized I actually knew who he was.”  You’d think a professor with a book editor husband wouldn’t be so condescending to the arts, but those kinds of attitudes and questions happen all the time.  Oh, you’re a writer?  Yes.  Would I recognize anything you’ve written?  Probably not.  Do you support yourself with your writing?  Kind of.  Barely.  Sometimes.  Spare any change?

(And for the record, hardly any of us have trust funds.  If you would like to set one up for a young writer trying to make it, email me and I’ll work out the details with my bank.)

So when does the switch happen?  When can you start to call yourself a writer?  After you’ve been doing it for a certain number of years, have put in a certain number of ass-to-chair hours, even as a hobby?  After your first publication?  Second?  Third?  Even though none of those pay?  After you’ve been paid to write something for the first time?  After your books appear on the shelf at Barnes and Noble, your name in the New York Times, and you have a vacation home in Costa Rica, complete with tennis courts and helicopter pad?  I’m hoping not the last one, because somehow I doubt that will ever happen for me.  (And that’s okay.  I’ve never ridden in a helicopter and I think it would just result in me vomiting everywhere anyway.)

I’ve been tentatively calling myself a writer for a few years now, all the while just waiting for someone to stand up, point a finger at me, and call bullshit.  It hasn’t happened yet and I finally feel comfortable with that self-label.  I’m a writer, and yes my job is more fun than yours.

So here’s the deal.  I write a lot, I read a lot.  I hang out with a bunch of crazy writers.  (Crazy in the fun way, not the ODing-on-heroin way.  Usually.)  I’m going to blog about it.  I’ll do book reviews and talk about writing and words and favorite authors and writing events and writer events.  (The difference between writing events and writer events: At writing events, we at least wait until after the reading or panel or whatever is done before cracking open the booze.  At writer events, we hold no such pretense.)  I promise to not try to dispense a bunch of writing advice, because I don’t really have any to give.  In my next post, I’ll talk about where my blog name comes from.  (Kid Stardust– sounds innocuous, right?  Bahaha.)

Stay tuned, kids.