Searching For A Home

It’s been one year exactly, and I’m at it again: apartment-hunting.  It was only a year ago I accepted a job in Madison and began looking for a place to live.  Now I’m at it again, only this time in Nashville, TN, where in August I’ll begin my Masters of Fine Arts in fiction.  The process causes a great deal of anxiety for me–what if I can’t find a place? Where will I live? How’s the neighborhood? Who will I know there? How will I learn the layout of the streets? It always gets me thinking about the idea of home as a place, but I’m starting to think it’s more a feeling: it’s familiarity.  It’s safety.  It’s someplace where you know the noises and the smells, the weak places in the floorboards, the schedule for garbage pickup and the times the landlord comes by to mow the lawn.

In this in-between time, as I get ready to leave one apartment and struggle to find another in a strange city that may as well be a different planet than Wisconsin, I can’t help feeling unmoored. All those familiar things will soon be gone, and I don’t even have an address to which I can attach my new life.  As a result, I’m moody.  I grind my teeth a lot.  I check craigslist every two hours instead of writing, or reading the pile of books we’ll have due in workshop this semester.  I float between emotions–anxiety, excitement, terror, sadness exhaustion– and never stay long in one.  I’m so preoccupied, in fact, that I can’t even start to miss Madison, something I know will hit me hard when it does.  For years, Madison was a place to come back to, a familiar place that was always willing to give me another shot at my life, no matter how often I screwed up and left.  I know the roads; I know the people; I know its values and what its people will do for them.  Madison has been my home, the way my little one-bedroom on the east side has been my home.  I belong to these places.  I hope I can belong to somewhere new.

As I prepare to leave, I hope to write more about Madison, WI: city to which I return.

The Next Move

It’s been a while.  Actually, it’s been a long while of sending out graduate school applications and not really expecting any of them to come back accepted.  I’d settled in to Madison.  I figured I was going to spend a long time here, broke but holding it together.  Writing sporadically.  Staring at lakes.  Then, the world decided to give me choices.

Columbus, OH

West Lafayette, IN

Gainesville, FL

Missoula, MT

Ames, IA

Tempe, AZ

Nashville, TN

Of the 17 programs I applied to, I got the green light from 7, and waitlists at 3 more–Minnesota, Oregon, and Bowling Green State.  I was moving, and soon–but where? The decision making process was long and arduous, and I had to compare each program for faculty, teaching load, financial situation, and other factors.  Finally, it came down to Vanderbilt.

I am moving to Nashville, TN.

Naturally, this is both exciting and terrifying.  I am heartbroken to leave Madison, where I know the one way streets and the best places to view the lakes.  I am worried about the Nashville heat and the honkey-tonk and the new accent to adjust to.  But this move finally means I am serious about my writing, and I’m going to do something about it.  This move means time to write, and a community of people with whom to share that writing.  It means the chance to get better.

It also means a big change for this blog.  Because “here” has been the Midwest for a long, long time.  Soon it will be the South.  And soon I will be struggling to learn a whole new place, with a whole new language.  I may behave strangely.  I may long for winter.  I may miss the campus traffic.  As I learn a new place I will discover a thousand ways to miss the old place.  That’s just how it goes.

I want to give a big shout out to Nickolas Butler, for believing through all of this I would end up somewhere.

Vanderbilt campus

Strange Spring

It’s been a strange spring here in Madison.  You may have seen it on the news: the hordes of protesters, the surly governor, the renegade Senators, the fictional palm trees.  It’s been weeks of anger here; anger, and the belief that the individual voice is worth something in our society.  Both are strange concepts to me, so while I’ve been out with my signs a few of the countless days this very polite mob has occupied the Capitol, my voice is not hoarse.  Besides, I can’t spend all my time being angry.  For while the public world goes up in smoke, my private world–and those of my friends–is starting to come through this winter.  The ice on the pond across the road is melting.  Ducks and geese are returning to the park.  The future, once monotonous and frozen, suddenly has a shape.  It’s hard to reconcile all that with the political rumblings at the other end of East Washington.

Earlier this year, I applied to seventeen MFA programs.  I did not expect to get into any of them–I was playing a lottery.  But it turns out I won.  Of those seventeen, 6 have offered me admission to their program, all with funding, all in very competitive pools.  The idea of being a writer–which was my private, unlikely little idea for most of my life–is now a full-bodied reality, and that idea takes getting used to.  And as though to reinforce this vertigo, a story of mine has been accepted for publication at the Southeast Review.

I have friends, too, for whom there are big new beginnings coming–things I won’t list here because I want them to “go public” in their own time.  But while the future of the state, of our jobs and our rights, is looking so dire, this other part of life is looking pretty good.  It’s split all my days between emotional highs and lows: depression and anger at the news, and unbelieving joy at the rest.  My brain would like a nice single vote, please, a unanimous opinion on how to feel and what to do.  But life, I guess, like politics, is not that simple.

protests in Madison

Spring Tease

Today was that first warm day in February when you start to think you might actually survive into spring.  I went for my first outdoor run of the year, splashing through the puddles of snowmelt like a kid after a rainstorm.  It felt good to breathe without hurt.  By the lake the wind ached in my ears and the cold competed with my quick-moving blood.  I have missed this feeling.  It is something no treadmill can simulate.

It’s been a long winter, short bouts of sunlight and too many hours spent enduring the listless nowhere of my life, the long numbing stretches of the unemployed.  I’ve been frozen.  It’s been hard to think, hard to write, hard to talk with friends of the word “future,” for which I’ve felt ill-equipped and debt-laden and panicked.  This winter has been stasis; pure endurance.  Keeping the apartment clean and the dishes washed and the pets fed and happy.  Checking off hours with a kind of pride at their ending.

But there’s always a kind of hope that comes with the first thaw.  In past years it has been actual shock at winter’s end, at the prospect that I would live to see April, May, June.  This year, the thaw includes a prospect for an actual future: I have been accepted for graduate study at the MFA Program at Ohio State University.  Suddenly the next few months mean not only warming weather but a new city, apartment hunting, new people, new expectations, new stories, new conversations.  I have so missed that world where narrative matters, where the feeling of surviving a long winter might struggle to find words that can contain it, and that struggle is considered important.

Today, running through this city I love and have come to know as home, it first occurred to me that I would soon be leaving it.  This thought made me sad.  But I’ve endured several long winters on this isthmus, I’ve struggled through a degree program and then sat in hibernation through a job market that renders that degree useless.  This chance–whatever it brings–is finally some sort of thaw.  It is as unexpected and miraculous as 45 degrees in February, but I’ll take it.

To Cold

Snowy street, Madison (CNN)

It’s eight below in Madison tonight.  Only a few hockey die-hards circle on the ice rink across the street.  In my old building the heat runs constantly, tapping softly against the pipes.  Everything is still.

Long winters are a fact of life in the Upper Midwest, and the dark and the cold are common complaints.  I do my share of despairing, of fearing that winter will never end.  But there’s something vital about cold this deep, cold that hits you so instantly and completely that you are aware of the most minute creaking of your bones.  You can see your breath and feel it, too, and though it hurts, you’re aware of each pull and exhale.  I walk out in a cold like this and awareness is no longer a struggle.  The mind quiets and the body takes over, conscious, maybe, of its limited survival time in such air.

Some nights, late, I go for walks around my neighborhood, past the old packed-together houses and the dried up gardens and the piles of old snow.  It’s the best way to clear my head; the change in temperature is like diving into icy water.  In the winter, sounds are sharper: I can hear a train whistle miles off.  I notice the squeal and crunch of my boots against snow.  For once, I don’t think; I just listen, and look.  Snowed-in cars, bare branches, yellow light from an old porch bulb, blue light from a T.V.  In one house someone is playing the piano.  Down the street, in the coffee shop, people lean over tables and address each other eagerly.  They don’t see me go by.  I am alone and aimless in a city where everyone is constantly making plans.  But out here, there’s quiet.  In this cold, I can practice just existing.

This is not to say, of course, that I would not welcome summer.

Words, bullets.

This is not a typical post, because it is not concerned only with the place I currently am.  It’s about this computer chair, yes, and the stale air in this apartment, but it’s also about a Safeway in Tucson, AZ, and all the airwaves and cyberspace of this country in between.

Earlier today, a 22-year-old man named Jared Loughner shot and killed 6 people and injured several more outside a Safeway in Tucson.  Among those hit was Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

Now, Giffords is (yes, she is still alive, media) a Democrat and was a supporter of last year’s health reform legislation.  She’d endured threats, vandalism, and her district had been literally “targeted”–with a crosshairs graphic–by Sarah Palin’s political action committee, SarahPAC.

Because of these factors, many commentators in the media, as well as many of my friends, were quick to blame Palin for the shootings, to label the shooter as an agent of a right-wing agenda.  They saw this as political and part of a much bigger picture.  And in some ways, they’re right.

But as we learn more about Jared Laughner, the man behind these shootings, I can’t convince myself he’s a pawn or a revolutionary or a meticulous assassin.  He seems more like a confused, unstable young man whose logic somehow stumbled toward violence.  And the logic isn’t easy.  According to posts he left on YouTube, he has a fascinating obsession with grammar and what he calls “literacy”

“[My] hope — is for you to be literate!” the text in the video said. “If you’re literate in English grammar, then you comprehend English grammar. The majority of people, who reside in District-8, are illiterate — hilarious. I don’t control your English grammar structure, but you control your English grammar structure.”  (L.A. Times 1/8/2011)

His other posts include disorganized thinking peppered with certain political topics (like a return to the gold standard) and concepts from his favorite dystopian novels (brain washing, being watched by the government).  He says his favorite activity is “conscience dreaming” and that he studies English grammar.  The posts have an eerie obsession with grammatic clarity to them, as though he desperately wants to be understood.  In fact, in his farewell message on MySpace, he mentions “The literacy rate is below 5%.  I haven’t talked to one person who is literate.”  He says, “I’m saddened with the current currency and job employment.”  This strikes me: first, his not having spoken to “one person who is literate” to me screams alienation.  Second, the way “currency” and “job employment” are plopped in there, almost MadLibs-style, makes me wonder how much those matter as legitimate reasons.  Former acquaintances of Loughner actually described him as “left-wing” politically, and I have to wonder if his intrigue with language stems to all rhetoric–left, right, fictional, real.  I have to wonder if he was not just a lonely, confused time bomb, regardless of message.

I wouldn’t post his language here if I didn’t have a point, and it’s about language.  A lot of people are upset with Sarah Palin tonight, and you can see why: her language is over-the-top, violent, and often devoid of factual foundation.  She has contributed to political dialogue becoming personal attack, and she’s supplied the crosshairs or gunsights to send the point home.  But is Palin, or the Tea Party, or any other political group responsible for what Loughner did? If his farewell message had been more focused on his favorite books, 1984 and Brave New World, would we be as quick to condemn George Orwell and Aldous Huxley? It’s hard to say.  I do know that we can’t go around putting language in the world without understanding its consequences, and without being careful about its intent.  It is one thing to write a dystopian novel and have its message misinterpreted.  It’s one thing to speak about violence and oppression to make a point about violence and oppression.  But when we speak violence for a gimmick, for a gain in the polls; when journalism pushes fear to gain ratings without regard for fact; when we, as bloggers, facebookers, skypers, etc. spin theories and repost fear-driven hype, insisting it’s fact, not willing to wait ten more minutes for the truth; when our everyday language becomes so hysterical and angry that one confused young man takes it literally, and acts–then we have a problem.

And me, here in cyberspace, here in frozen Wisconsin, here in America–I am sad, and I am afraid.  At least I know what those words mean.

My Escape Fantasy

We all have them: those places we hold in the back of our minds, the places we tell our friends about over beers or in moments of despair.  ”I’ll tell you, if things ever get too tough, I’m headed to–”

Sometimes it’s the next town over.  Sometimes it’s the other side of the world.  We think a change in landscape will change us, even save us.  To hell with reason or the rest of the world.

For me, that place is called Montana.

I can’t tell you how many elaborate plans I’ve made to get there, how often I’ve mapped out the route, calculated the gas, taken inventory of the bank account.  I will go where there are mountains, I think, and where the sky is so huge nobody knows who you are.  I will swim through water so cold it will stop your heart and live in a place dark enough to see stars.

Like most escape fantasies, this one has childhood to blame.

I went to Montana with my family when I was ten years old, to Glacier National Park, near the Canadian border.  I had seen mountains before, in Colorado, but that trip was mostly confined to the car and what I saw were a few peaks out the very tip of the backseat windows.  Here there was hiking.  There was a road leading up into the park that rimmed a valley so steep we feared for our lives on each of the turns.  There was a grizzly bear rifling through the garbage at the hotel; there was a meteor shower over a Mexican restaurant that made us forget our food.  One day, we took a hike along a river, up toward a place called Avalanche Lake.  It was an easy hike, probably no more than two miles, but for a Midwest kid who had only ever used two speeds on her bike (slope and not-slope), it was practically Everest.  We wound through trees for what felt like hours, guzzled water, wiped sweat from our brows, but then the path turned and the trees cleared and we came upon a scene I still return to sometimes, in the moments before sleep:

A lake, still as glass, and clearer.  It was lined with a thousand smooth, tiny stones.  Further out, sunken logs were piled under depths of green.  And way out, so far that we could not even begin to hear them, a half-dozen waterfalls fell from spectacular cliffs in snakes of white foam.  I have never seen anything like it since.  We shucked our shoes and socks and waded into the water, and it was so cold it made your teeth squeal, made bright lots go popping behind your eyes.  This place is outside of reality, I thought, and also: this is the only real place I have been.

Since then, I’ve often thought of getting back to Montana.  At a retreat in Texas I met a girl from Kalispell who offered a place to stay should I ever make the move, and some long nights I will think, I know a girl in Kalispell, like a bad country song.  I was tempted to take her up on her offer, as I was tempted to take a job with another woman’s ambulance company in the Northern Yukon.  (“You could write all day,” she told me.  ”I’d pay your training and your housing.”)  In the end, though, I went back to Illinois, and began the slow practice of learning to be okay with wherever I am.  If there’s one thing I know, it’s that changing where you are cannot change who you are, and I had work to do on the latter before I could begin to approach the former.

Still, there are nights when sleep is elusive and the television shows nothing but the world splitting at the seams that I go back there, to Avalanche Lake, to water so cold and clear I’m convinced it changed something in my DNA.  But that’s what’s great about fantasies: they let us come back.  They retreat in the morning and they let us go to work again, only now there’s a secret refrain in our heads.

I know a girl in Kalispell.

Avalanche Lake, Glacier National Park (National Park Service)