As I’ve struggled through my dissertation, the writing, and the research I looked forward to the conclusion. I imagined writing the acknowledgments because I often needed reminding of how many people have been in my corner and how many people have actively stepped in to help me through the process. As I work on the conclusion, however, I find myself at a loss. It is not that I do not know what my conclusions are; I had no trouble writing those sections. But for some reason, I feel stalled when it comes to the more personal reflections I wanted to include. And I do not know why. I’m even having trouble remembering some of the “future research” stuff I wanted to include.

In my away message on my IM client I wrote: It’s not so easy to conclude a graduate career’s worth of work. And I guess it does feel like more than just the conclusion to a research study, more than just a conclusion to my dissertation; it feels like the end of a very long process. I have no idea what to say about it. Finishing this work has been the focus of my life for so long, I don’t quite know what to do now that the end is literally at my fingertips.

Can I just say: “it’s been real.” ?

It’s been over a week since my last post which is incredibly unlike me. It is not because I don’t have anything to say. I’m still working on the Books That Changed My Life: Adolescence post, which I will try and post soon. I recently finished reading Julie Jung’s book on Revisionary Rhetoric where she talks about the possibilities silence and how to explore silence as part of revision (or at least I think that’s part of what she’s saying about listening to the silence.) That being said you can read my silence here as me hard at work on finishing my dissertation.

I haven’t had the time to blog, to think, really about much else. And there is just so much I cannot articulate about this process, no matter how I try. And I think that’s part of the silence Julie is talking about.

I’v reverted to my old blog design until I can figure out why my comments are not showing up when you guys write them. I’m hoping that the theme template is the problem and something more in the database. I am sorry that you’re comments aren’t showing up but I am getting them in my email so I do see them.

If you want to help me test comments leave a comment on this post and I’ll see what else I can figure out.

I recently discovered Lizzie Skurmick’s weekly reviews of the books she read in girlhood. She re-reads the books and posts her thoughts on Fine Lines. I’ve read some of the books she mentions but some I’ve never heard of, probably due to both an age difference and the local library’s holdings. Nevertheless, it’s fascinating to process my own recollections with Skurmick’s experiences of re-reading. Her posts have inspired a book to published next year by Harper Collins. I love books about books.

Also this week,Kevin Kelly, technologist, author and Wired editor lists the books that have changed his life. These are not books you love or think you should have read but as Kelly puts it, “books that altered your behavior, changed your mind, redirected the course of your life. Books as levers.” What a great way to think about writing: as a lever.

So, inspired by Kelly and Skurmick, I’ve been thinking about books that changed me throughout different periods in my life.

As a girl, I always had a book in my hand. I loved Nancy Drew and Encyclopedia Brown. I also couldn’t get enough of those Choose Your Own Adventure books. But there are a few novels that change my perspective on the world and myself and the small corner of the world where I lived and played.

The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams
Along with the A.A. Milne Winnie the Pooh Books, The Velveteen Rabbit was my favorite book as a child. I don’t know if it was the illustrations, the story or the idea of toys being real that was so compelling to me. I thought that my toys were real, too and that when I left the room they moved and talked and had feelings. This book made me question reality and faith. If I didn’t see something could I still believe in it, believe it was real. Was something real only based on my experience of it? Though I obviously couldn’t have articulated those exact feelings as a girl, the story made me curious about how things worked and whether all living and non-living things had a purpose. I remember asking my father a lot of questions about why God made stuffed animals if they only talked to one another and other strange and curious questions about existence. I probably have the same questions today.

Aesop’s Fables by Aesop and The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales
One of the first collections of stories I remember reading and having read to me was Aesops Fables. Stories like The Boy Who Cried Wolf, The Lion and the Mouse, The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing and The Fox and the Crow influenced my interests in storytelling and in folklore. The stories with morals always intrigued me. The Grimm stories were always full of creatures and locations I could only imagine and yet the people seemed both real and fantastical. My grandmother had The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales and my brother and I would gasp and laugh with the stories. We always found ourselves a bit scared but loving every second of it, which is probably why I love scary movies, stories and urban legends now. I remember my grandmothers telling stories in similar ways. Even ghost stories had some kind of moral in the South. What I learned from these, I suppose, was that the words on the page are only part of the story; the rest is how one reads it aloud. How the story is told, understood and interpreted. These collections began an interest in the oral tradition of storytelling that would carry me all the way to the digital age.

Sounder by William H. Armstrong
This book had a great impact on me. It was one of the first books I read where I realized that morality is a very gray area. When the boy’s father stole food for his family because otherwise they would be unable to eat, I did not think that was wrong. Though if you would have asked me at 9 if stealing was wrong I would have said yes. This book complicated issues of right and wrong for me. It also coincided with a time in my life where I was realizing that people were/are treated differently because of what they look like or the beliefs they have or the clothes that they wear and that people had completely different and difficult lives from me. The story was about hardship and survival, a message I was only beginning to understand might apply to me, albeit in very middle-class ways.

Sounder was also the first book I read aloud (that wasn’t a picture book or story I read to my brother). I was selected to read the text to a third grade class each week when I was in fourth grade. Reading the book aloud was significant. It changed how I understood the power of spoken language. With a change in my inflection, the tone of what I was reading could change. It was the first time I understood in a very real way the power of my voice. Also, I learned that depot is pronounced dee po and not deh put.

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
I cannot even tell you of my adoration for this book. It was the first book I read about pirates, which seemed both thrilling and terrifying. It was, I knew, a “boy’s book” because when my mother saw me gripping it in the library. She said, “Are you sure you want that one? It’s a boy’s book.” I nodded vehemently and tightened my grip; I was 11 or 12. I liked the adventure of the story, sure. It’s a quick read and the action moves easily from one chapter to the next but I also appreciated the message of courage in the face of danger. When I didn’t understand something or if I needed to know how to pronounce certain words, I asked my father. He loved that I was interested in Literature. As I read, he asked me what I thought about the book, and its themes. It was the first book that connected me to my father in this way and the first book I worked to understand. In my discussions with my father we talked about morals and responsibility and entitlement and greed. I learned to read thoughtfully by reading and talking about reading with my father. I’d never really talked about a book before, not in the way my father encouraged me to. It was a pre-cursor to me as an English major.

Though these books are not the only ones that influenced my girlhood, they are ones which enriched my thinking about myself, the world and people in it. They are the beginnings of my academic and personal interests in reading, in studying culture and stories. Each text mentioned above contributed to who I am and how I see relationships, reading and writing. The next books will be ones from adolescence which will be very different from those listed above because I was experiencing growing up too quickly. I always tried reading books above my understanding and it is interesting when I re-read them now and think about the teenager I was reading Tender is the Night at 14.
These and other stories to come in the second installment of books that changed my life.

When I was younger, probably fourth grade, I had a black and white TV in my room. It only got a few channels because though it was hooked up to cable, the dial only went up to 9. Still, one of the channels, I have no idea which one used to run The Twilight Zone re-runs late at night. I caught an episode one night after falling asleep to the TV. When I woke up in the middle of the night, it was the middle of an episode, one about a creepy hitchhiker. I missed the first part of the episode and picked it up where the girl is talking to herself after running out of gas. The episode stuck with me. I remembered it a few years later when I devoted my English project in seventh grade to poems about Death. I wasn’t fascinated by Death but rather the metaphors which represented it, the way it had been personified, described, explained. Of course, I had no language to describe these thoughts and my parents were a bit concerned. My father, who had been taking me to hospitals and funeral homes because he had to work and take care of me and my brother, was less surprised by my interest than my fragile mother. What I couldn’t explain just seemed weird to my mother; that I would think about Death in a literary way didn’t occur to anyone.

No one close to me died when I was young. My great-grandmother Oswald was the first family member’s funeral I can remember attending. I was a teenager. Even then it seemed surreal to me. It was, I think, the first dead body I’d seen. Though I’d accompanied my father to funerals before, I purposefully waited outside or in the funeral director’s office, safely away from the “realities” of death. And all I remember about my Granny’s funeral is that her fingernails were painted and I couldn’t stop laughing about it. There is an incredibly absurd element to funerals. When Candace died, someone I loved and who died who was not a member of my family, I was overwhelmed with guilt, loss, fear. It was as if I had to face something, a truth about Death I was unprepared for. And still, I am intrigued by how I’ve explained the ending of life, how I have experienced loss and watch my closest friends experience it. We understand or come to terms with Death in various ways. What I think is interesting about the Twilight Zone and similar shows and stories, particularly in Science Fiction, is that they are often about surviving. I think that’s why I love Supernatural so much. There are a lot of storylines that take an idea from the Twilight Zone and push it a step further. But ultimately it’s about relationships and sacrifices and survival.

As I write about this now, after discovering Twilight Zone clips on YouTube (I love the Internets!), my obsession with forensic shows and mysteries makes a bit more sense. I could probably try to explain my love of most horror movies as originating from my psychology as a child who stayed up late and watched Twilight Zone episodes though most of my watching came in high school when the episodes aired on one of the local channels or maybe on Nick-at-Nite. When I was in my Master’s program they aired some new episodes with Forest Whitaker as the host. And though some of the episodes don’t have the same bit as Serling’s original series, I loved them. When I saw the episode “Night Route,” I was so reminded of that episode “The Hitchhiker” I’d seen at 10 only this time Life is personified and the woman seems much more aware of what might be happening to her as if she grew up watching Twilight Zone episodes. I prefer the black and white episodes and some of the storylines are better, and better acted.

Other favorites of mine are Mirror Image, Number 12 Looks Just Like You (if you’ve read Scott Westerfield’s Uglies you’ll recognize the theme), The Eye of the Beholder, which is also really interesting in terms of what we find beautiful and is an episode referenced frequently by other TV shows;The Bewitchin’ Pool, Nightmare as a Child and of course, The Monsters are Due on Maple Street (I haven’t seen the updated version of this yet).

If you have nothing to do for a few hours you should check them out. Or at least watch “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street”:

Part Two:

Part Three:

I knew, in the way one knows things vaguely and intangibly, early in my undergraduate writing career and certainly as a Master’s student that writing is an act of consequence. My understanding of what that means, however, has grown the more I’ve written and the more honest I’ve tried to be with myself, and about myself in my writing. There’s a kind of understanding that writers are liars. We tell stories; we stretch the truth; we remember how we want to remember. Maybe that’s true but I’m a pretty bad liar and a pretty good writer. Perhaps fiction and lies aren’t the same thing in my mind. In fact, I know they aren’t. I can create fictions as I did in childhood, whole mythologies about my life: the southern romantic nostalgia I so love to spin. I know, however, the importance of dismantling nostalgia and coming to terms with my girlhood. I make a conscious effort to remember that I hate the humidity, the cloying smell of honeysuckle and sweat. That there is a heaviness to my relationship to the Gulf Coast, to home. But I can’t help but long for it all in its rich complexities in ways I will never understand.

I recently got back from Daytona where I scored AP exams. The week was long, tiring but fulfilling. I walked on the beach at night, stared into the ocean and thought about how the process of the Ph.D. program and of dissertating has drained me. But also about what I’m learning about who I am as a teacher, scholar and writer.

During a conversation (as we waited in the airport for our plane) with one of my committee members, I talked about how personal this project has become. I did not realize when I began writing it that it was about me, about my struggle, my identities. It is, like my thesis, about me as a writer only instead of me exploring myself through poetry, I examine social media and academic discourse. Still, it’s startling at the end of this to see realize that I’ve been headed here all along. My thesis was titled Mosaic: The Shaping of a Poet, Woman, Daughter because those were the identities my work dealt with at the time. I was struggling with each identity, trying to make the pieces fit. The Ph.D., for me, has been about making other pieces fit. I’ve complicated the puzzle by adding new pieces: teacher, professional, scholar but at the core of it all: I’m still a Southern girl trying to sort herself out.

What I am discovering as I rework my pedagogy chapter, that I was drawn to blogs because of the revelations bloggers seemed to discover through their writing. Having such writing read by an audience seemed incredible, and added a layer of complexity to the form because readers could write back. They could have their own revelations and tell the blogger about them, extending the text and making it, somehow, their own. What I see now is that all writing is revelation. All writing is revealing; it’s about giving yourself away. For non-fiction writers and memoirists these pieces may be larger than others, sure but whether you write an academic essay or a blog post, there’s some small sliver of you left on screen or on the page. So, if writing is consequential and revealing then as a writing teacher, I have to be willing to offer my students something in return. And when I look back on my teaching Internship where I tried using blogs in the classroom, I realized I never gave myself away. Instead, I maintained a teacher identity, causing students to perform as students not individuals. Blogs did not fail me. I failed. I failed because I was unable to reveal myself to my students in any way. And what’s really great about this epiphany is that I think it makes my pedagogy really say something. I’m hoping so anyway. It makes sense to me but I might have overdosed on sweet tea from McAlister’s.

I saw Krista had created a Wordle from one of her diss chapters and since this chapter is consuming much of my thinking these days I thought I’d do the same.

I wrote a post and it got eaten by the machine so for now I’ll give you the wedding pictures. Notice, if you will the shot of the groomsmen and the father of the bride that they’re wearing boots instead of the shiny patent rental shoes. I have a lot of stories from the weekend but it will take some time to decompress and I have to pack for the AP reading in Daytona because I leave tomorrow.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

I have always loved this poem since I first stumbled upon in my senior poetry seminar as an undergraduate. As I get older, it means something different each time I read it. I’m struggling with my pedagogy chapter right now, trying to revise what I’ve written, to articulate more clearly how I do what I do in the classroom and why. But I always struggle with the why. I am a doer, one who acts. Have a problem, I will troubleshoot it for you. Ask me why that’s how I would approach a situation and I falter. I see a big picture but explaining why it is important to look at something that way, leaves me in self-doubt. Maybe that’s why I like this poem. It’s about doing, looking for yourself for the thing, not the story or the myth but the thing itself. It describes how I approach research because at the end of the day aren’t I always only looking for myself, trying to make my presence known? To say: world, I am here and I have something to say and I am saying it. It’s why I loved poetry so much; it gave me a voice, a way to say something important to me, to share it with others. I loved the feeling on stage, screaming into a microphone things like: revolution is revolution is revolution but the revolution is dead and I am dying slowly without anything to fuel my fire…. I loved the looks on the faces of the girls in the front row who hung on my every word when I spoke about laurel, candace, the girls who smelled like strawberries and tasted like peaches. I loved the shock of my raspy voice in a crowded bar when I began to say, “the boys I fuck…” and the “girls I love…” It was heady stuff and it got to me. I’d gone to poetry to find myself and ended up buying the myth. The one that says you can capture it again, that beatnik spirit, and you can live on vodka and gas station sandwiches and run your checking account down to eleven cents because the world is large and something will come along tomorrow to rescue you like a 300 dollar paycheck you forgot about, which means you can go to Florida with the cash and spend every last cent chasing some version of yourself that is actually less than your potential. I fell easily those days, easily in love with the idea of myself as that girl, the rock star girl who throws up in her hands and in the bar and outside and tries to make out with a girl she likes later in the night only to have her say, “You’re too dark and intense for me.” I wore that statement like a badge, like a definition and I warned the piano players and the doe eyed bartenders and waitresses who wanted to feel, for a moment, the way that my poems felt: all passion and fire, sparking like firecrackers only to fade more quickly than imagined. Because when it was over and I was off stage, sitting in the dark drinking cold vodka, I was simply another drunk poet who found nothing at the end of the bottle. And no matter who was in my bed that night, I was alone. I dove into the wreck and found the wreck and it was me.

Diving into the Wreck
by Adrienne Rich

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.

I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.

The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.

We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.

I go down.

My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.

I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed
the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun

the evidence of damage
worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.

And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.

I am she: I am he
whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

I have done a lot of stupid things in my life. I’ve made not so great decisions, gotten involved in relationships and friendships with people who were not good for me. I know that these decisions, these circumstances have shaped me somehow. I have learned from each less than advantageous move and tried to learn so that next time I don’t make the same kind of mistake. In a life full of mistakes, some of my actions have led to dire consequences. I submit the following:

Yes, that is my Ford Taurus or what’s left of it after driving through some high water that I didn’t realize was so deep. As of now, we think the car is dead though some of our more expert friends will be looking at it in the next few days to let us know more definitively.

My mother has graciously decided to loan me her car until we figure something else out. She’ll share with my dad. I’ll pick up the car at Matt’s wedding, which means we’ll be driving two cars back but there’s no real way around it. We’re hoping that M’s brother can be a passenger and help break up some of the drive for M who hates driving and is now faced with a 11 hour drive, potentially alone. But we are grateful and so we do what we have to do.

Perhaps one day, this incident will be a stupid thing where I look back and laugh or at least can talk about without stomach pangs. At the height of my dissertation panic, I have a way of complicating my life and bring M along for the ride. I’m hoping that one day, my life will feel more settled and that I won’t always feel how I feel right now.

Also, it is boiling hot in our apartment and I can’t convince M to turn on the air. I’m thinking about starting a petition about it, but wonder if she’d be convinced. Maybe I should do a PowerPoint instead.