George Carlin has some interesting material on the nature of public grief, in fact, if there’s anything you wouldn’t think about bringing up at Christmas dinner, the odds are pretty good that Carlin has a routine for it somewhere. This particular bit came from his show It’s Bad For Ya from 2008, in which he makes reference to things we are prone to say when someone dies;

“This conversation is bound to turn up. Two guys in a street meet each other, and one of them says, “Hey, did you hear? Phil Davis died.” “Phil Davis? I just saw him yesterday.” “Yeah? … Didn’t help. He died anyway. Apparently, the simple act of you seeing him did not slow his cancer down. In fact, it may have made it more aggressive.”

What Carlin doesn’t get into (because this is where it stops being funny) is that this reaction is not so irrational as it sounds. “I just saw him yesterday” doesn’t in fact mean, gee, I could have saved him, so much as it is the person’s reaction to the proximity of death. They are musing on, and in part disbelieving, the inevitability of death, becoming aware again that it exists, and that they by proximity somehow brushed with it. Because the dirty secret here is that grief is not about the person who died. When we talk about death, we are talking about those still living. And if you ask me, that’s completely correct. There’s a Grey’s Anatomy episode in which the main character spends an entire episode dwelling on the fact that one of the near-death patients came in wearing the same pair of shoes. In the episode, the shoes act as a tether between her and the patient, making it difficult for her to distance herself. This woman’s impending death becomes more significant to her because of their coincidental similarities, allowing her to have an encounter with her own fragile mortality.

I had a death in the family a month ago that essentially made one of my parents an orphan. Not shockingly, this made me sad for my parent, but the most awkward and troubling emotion I had to deal with was that is made me think about what it might be like to have no parents left in the world. That thought became the all-consuming drive of the remainder of my month, during which time I discovered and became obsessed with the television show Pushing Daisies. I would turn it on in the morning and watch it constantly until I went to bed at night. Pushing Daisies is a show in which the main character has the inborn ability to literally wake the dead, but only for one minute, at which point the universe balances out the cosmological scales and takes another life, at random. In concept, it sounds like a spooky scifi show, but what stands out about this program is that it is in fact a very successful comedy. Death, to the deceased, becomes a mere event, equal to any other, and at worst is just slightly inconvenient. On this show, death never makes the deceased better people, causes them extended grief, frightens or overwhelms them, though often the briefness of their reaction is necessitated by the fact that they have a mere 60 seconds of dialogue before they are dead again. All things considered, Pushing Daisies has an unprecedented sunny outlook in death.

I suppose if you don’t think about grief critically at all, all that really occurs to you is that you are sad, and I think for some people, being sad and not knowing exactly why really is enough. But those of us who have an obsession with emotion, who study the minute details of each new emotional experience, have to go deeper into the hows and whys, and I think sometimes that makes those of us who consider death often seem cold or insensitive. I’ve found this is a very large risk when it comes to fictional characters in any medium. If grief doesn’t present in an easily interpretable way, often an audience can turn on a character. The depth of emotion that character had for the deceased, or their depth of emotion in general, comes into question. It’s easy to let a character get villainised by a tear not shed in the right moment. I’m always especially impressed when a writer risks an a-typical reaction and it pays off. Prime examples that come to mind are Vada’s reaction to the death of Thomas J. in My Girl, and pretty much all the reactions in the critically acclaimed Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “The Body,” in which Emma Caulfield delivers the performance of a lifetime as Anya, a newly human character, coming to grips, child-like, with the concept of human death.

“But I don’t understand! I don’t understand how this all happens. How we go through this. I knew her, and then she’s—there’s just a body, and I don’t understand why she just can’t get back in it and not be dead… anymore! It’s stupid! It’s mortal and stupid! And…and Xander’s crying and not talking, and…and I was having fruit punch, and I thought, well, Joyce will never have any more fruit punch, ever, and she’ll never have eggs, or yawn, or brush her hair, not ever, and no one will explain to me why!”

What’s most honest about this particular portrayal to me is how unacceptable Anya’s lack of knowledge about “how we do this” is to the other characters. Because she is operating outside the acceptable social norms when it comes to her grief, she is made an outsider while the other characters cluster together and perform the more social aspects of grieving.

But Anya’s reaction is a very natural one, because the limited capacity we have for seeing outside ourselves makes it all the more challenging to imagine an end to our existence, especially when that end is placed in the context of our isolated culture. The individualism that permeates American culture is addressed as a problem or at least a hurdle in much of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, in which life and death are not only intertwined, they become synonyms. Whitman makes pushing our boundaries between each other a part of pushing our boundaries when it comes to death.

“The smallest sprouts show there is really no death,

And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait

at the end to arrest it,

And ceased the moment life appeared.

All goes onward and outward. . . .and nothing collapses,

And to die is different from what any one supposed, and

luckier.”

What Whitman seems to be suggesting is that if we are all a part of each other, and all a part of the earth, if we’re all the same matter, then we cannot truly die, at least not in the traditional definition. I think it would have been even more profitable to take this to another extreme and refute the connotations of the word itself. Whitman suggests to us that our own culture of isolation is what keeps us from coming to grips with topics like sexuality and death.

We cannot definitively say that the dead are any worse off for being dead, in fact there are a number of schools of thought that consider that if the dead no longer have a human existence that they are beyond caring about whether or not they continue to exist or hold sway on the living. The entirety of the series Angel is about an immortal character seeking to fulfill an ancient prophecy that says his reward will be to “Shanshu,” interpreted as death, and then mortality, because the language in which the prophecy was written made no distinctions between life and death. To Shanshu in the Angel universe means to live until you die, interpreted as a more than adequate reward for the main character’s good deeds done. The Cylons of Battlestar Galactica are another set of death-seeking individuals, going as far as to theorize that to be human is to die, or be mortal.

It seems very likely that the ideas of grieving for the sake of the deceased, or that the deceased might be particularly concerned with how we grieve, are all designed around our own self-importance or to offer a strange sense of comfort, but isn’t it infinitely more comforting to give ourselves permission to admit that this is something we the bereaved are going through, that it is after all, about us? We experience our loss of the person, our grip with mortality, our need for the comfort or support that person provided not being met, and to be very honest about there not being a single thing wrong with feeling that way. A number of arts forms are taking up the topic of death, even art that would be considered mainstream like television, music, and movies are opening up the topic and challenging the given perspectives on how the see the end of life and the beginning of the unknown. I hope that we continue to expand our perceptions and refuse to close the conversation on what makes this event something we don’t talk about.

I recently read some internet-press about Jennifer Love Hewitt and her inconsistent statements about dieting and body image.  I’m not going to link to that particular article, because to even take a shot at Ms. Hewitt is tired and cheap these days and this site shouldn’t be getting more traffic from it.  Female body image is a topic that is very very important to me, I think it is a lynch-pin of feminism in our current social climate, but I also believe that crucifying a person for having complex feelings about it the way the majority of women do these days is completely reprehensible, if not part of the original problem.  She is a woman who has been seriously brain fucked by all the crazy tabloid headlines because she had the unfortunate experience of growing up in this business. If she’s got body-image issues, they’ve definitely been constructed by the swarming media, who have been obsessed with the shape of her butt for years now. All I see is a woman trying to get a handle on her life. She’s expected to be honest about her body-image problems AND be a good role-model, and her uneven statements are a reflection of that RIDICULOUS expectation.

I’ve been thinking a lot about those safety nets the last two days. My dad’s dad died yesterday, and while his father and I weren’t personally very close, the first thing I thought was that that makes him an orphan. And while I think that perhaps my father might have considered himself at least emotionally orphaned a long time ago, the stark reality is that he doesn’t have that net. Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t go back to those people, that one safe place. I try not to think about my parents dying, but it’s hard not to when you witness them going through something like this, when it’s so easy to see yourself in them.

It’s not the first time I’ve thought about quitting and moving back home, especially not while I was in Fresno. I think if I hadn’t got into Antioch, I would have packed up my truck and moved to Mankato in 30 seconds. All this just makes me wonder if time apart from them is time wasted, and I have the feeling it’s going to make it a very lonely week. My mother and my aunt were supposed to fly in tonight to stay here for four days, and while I know my mom did the right thing by staying with my dad through this, their absence during this time makes things worse. I cleared my schedule to try and get my head right today, but tomorrow I think I’m going to try and venture out to the West Hollywood Book Fair for a good solid distraction.

But I think also that Los Angeles doesn’t suffer from the oppressive xenophobia that prevents “outsiders” from getting even menial work. To be completely fair, this is just one of the factors that contributed to my unemployable status while living in Fresno, I was also dependent on an unreliable transit system, and the unemployment rate there was quite possibly the highest in the country, but I do think it was a contributing factor because besides having little experience in the field I would have preferred to work, I am a really good candidate. I have excellent references from my last couple jobs, before I started moving I worked for the same company for three years with nothing but glowing things to say about them and I’m sure they return the favor, I’m adaptable, reliable, easy to get along with, and I really honestly dig working in customer service. Maybe only being able to work the limited hours allowed by the bus system tipped the scale away from my favor, but I can’t imagine that was the case EVERY time. The local Lane Bryant manager strung me along for a month after an interview and never called me back. (I worked for Lane Bryant for 2 years and I’m bra-fit certified)

It’s possible that blaming this on Fresno is a bad call. I recently had an interview that went extremely well with a small tutoring agency that repeated this exact behavior, made me feel like I’d landed the job, had me email in samples of my creative work, and then dropped me without so much as a let-down email. I had to call them twice to get a direct no. (then of course I didn’t have the nerve to ask why) So what is it? I’m not sure. I searched the internet pretty thoroughly for this topic, I figured there must be someone out there that had noted some sort of cultural or professional differences in the job market between the Midwest and the East Coast, but my search came up completely empty. So far the only difference I’ve been able to confirm is the need for Spanish in the food service industry. How can it be there are no facts on this at all? Is the West Coast hiding some dirty little secret about their hiring practices?

I’ve had a few people tell me that interviewers in California expect you to be phony. I can’t imagine this is a wise interview tactic. Is the West Coast not looking for honest, trustworthy, hard working employees? If that’s the case, I’m afraid I’m out of luck.

Most surprising of all, the very first real job offer I’ve had here (after only a month of searching, so LA beat Fresno by a mile) was in the nonprofit sector. It’s contingent on my ability to memorize a short script, and the hours are not ideal, but it seems to be the first place to appreciate my candor. What do you think? Californians, what do you expect going into a job interview or writing your cover letter? What do you think they want to hear? And anyone else, do you think the job search and hiring process has changed on a social level in the last 5 years? Why don’t we have the literature and research to fill this need?

The program at Antioch University, Los Angeles is completely unique.  I arrived in Culver City to immediately attend the most intense orientation I’ve ever been to.  They laid out the whole two years in 4 semesters (or project periods) and 5 residencies.  The program requires a field study, an academic paper, a 50 minute lecture, and a final project in the form of a manuscript.  Needless to say, thinking about accomplishing all that on the first night was really daunting, and I came away from the meeting craving a stiff drink.  At the same time, I’d come to this program craving a challenge and challenged is definitely what I felt.

The differences from my experience were numerous, but the most important difference I noticed over the course of my first 10 day residency was the respect given to my own version of my work.  I think this attitude on behalf of the faculty, and passed on into the students, is the key to keeping students from pumping out what so many programs have been accused of producing- uninspired, unoriginal, uniform work.  Antioch sees a wide variety of work and in my four days of workshop I got to see just how wide the variation is.  In my experience, working with  individuals who’s strengths are different than mine is always the best way to grow.  I went into the workshops and lectures feeling that my fellow students had plenty of things to teach me.

I’m now one month into my first self-designed project period, for which I send in an 8-10 page packet of work to my assigned mentor.  My personal objectives are:

• To become more well read in the sort of work I can relate to in order to help understand the literary landscape and better understand my place in it.

• To get back to a place where I feel more free to follow my poetic instincts, less cerebral and more fearless.

• To figure out what it means to be a feminist and a poet, queer and a poet, to understand how I can reconcile those things in my work.

• To expand my own personal definition of “literary” to include the things I love, for example, vampires, superheroes, and pop culture.

• To get out of the habit of procrastinating and putting off writing in favor of things that matter less.

What I’ve noticed about designing my own learning is that I’m not dragging myself to the work anymore.  I delight in the creation process, the reading, and the critical thinking I’m doing and it’s all what I’ve asked of myself.  I haven’t been so excited about learning since the first semester of creative writing at SMSU.  All those side projects I would have normally tried to accomplish while completing other coursework are now my primary objectives each month.  I’m really optimistic about getting more than 20 poems a semester finished because the things I’m reading are landing squarely within my realm of interest.

The most important thing is that I’m getting out of a graduate program exactly what I wanted, which is time to spend entirely on developing my work.  I believe in this program’s ability to turn out working writers with good habits.

My first workshop in the MFA program at my first (or rather former) program was a stressful experience. I wanted very badly to impress, to show everyone in the room my poetic muscle, and to place myself with a group of my peers that I could learn from and mutually help grow. We had a very experienced and accomplished workshop leader, and let me preface all this by saying that I believe she is the sole reason that these shenanigans didn’t ever get out of hand, like they did at another workshop in the same program that I only heard about. In this workshop, and in this program, there existed a literary elite. That is to say there was one impenetrable clique of students that had already decided on their aesthetic and decided theirs was superior to every other in the classroom. This group would habitually flock together and tear to pieces any poem that crossed the desk that was outside their narrow definition of art. Partway through the semester I even wondered now and then if they weren’t intentionally sabotaging the works of certain other students. It sounds paranoid, but there was a sort of general toxic energy around this small group of students that was really undeniable. What was most frightening to me about this wasn’t the toxic energy itself, but that the workshop tended to follow what seemed to me a very immature and narrow-minded approach to the work of others. In this respect, I completely understand Bell’s criticism of the workshop, now that I have experienced this kind of mob-mentality, I can picture it happening in the best of programs.

I do think however, that all of this can be reigned in and controlled by the tone of the workshop leader. I think it’s essential to contextualize this experience for any students, let them know how they are expected to read as well as what they are expected to read. Working in the writing center on campus and with the book Sharing and Responding by Peter Elbow and Patricia Belanoff helped me to understand how I might approach leading my own workshops in the future. The book helps above all to keep egos in check; the response techniques you learn remind you that approaching any book you are simply a reader, and remind you to respect the author.   I’ve not seen it done with creative work yet, but I think it could go a long way to keep the nastiness and cultish behavior out of the academic workshop.

I have wondered though, if the problem with a number of MFA programs (I’m sure there are exceptions, I wish I could find them somehow) doesn’t lie in the perceived hierarchy of educational or professional achievement. This first occurred to me while having a conversation before class. We were being asked to write weekly two page responses to the reading material, and a group of us were advising each other on how exactly we went about generating the content, whether we explicated poems, whether we responded to the text and the poetry, ect. I interjected that I often hoped to disagree with the professor’s perspective on a poet because I felt like that gave me more to write about, and a male student responded simply, “you know he has a PhD, right?” I was so confused about what that might have to do with what I said that I just nodded and let the conversation continue.

I was reflecting on it later and realized this student had more or less demonstrated to me what I had often felt but never realized was awry about the system under which I was learning. I concluded that it was very possible that the real basic problem with the program was the vision of the grad student as a beginner or intermediate in her field. Everyone I was working with had a four-year degree in the subject and at least one publication under their belt, and yet felt unqualified to disagree with the professor on a subject that a high school student could speak on. Achieving a PhD somehow put the professor in the position of lofty expert instead of colleague. Given four more years of experience and education, it is likely that a professor might have a more well-formed opinion that a graduate student might, but assuming that this is a certainty completely kills the academic conversation before it can even start. I wondered if my classmates simply didn’t participate in class discussion because they felt that had nothing worthwhile to contribute. I should hope after four years of studying literature, they might have something to say.

It seems to me that this is equally damaging on the level of creative work, perhaps especially destructive when it comes to creativity because succeeding in this business takes such self-confidence and occasionally a hardy ego. The dynamic causes the ambitious student (me) endless frustration in practicing her opinion (if she’s so lucky as to have them) and causes the under-confident poet (a number of my classmates) to have no ability to build her own protective ego. Thus, her originality of craft is ground out of her by way of always deferring to her mentors as authority figures instead of guides. It thereby stops the creative process cold. It occurs to me that this perhaps another issue that is causing MFA programs to produce such uninspired uniform work on the whole.

If I could go back and do my initial applications one more time, I would use the whole preceding year searching for the program that is the exception to the rule. Perhaps there is no exception to the rule. Maybe it’s my responsibility as a student and an artist to resist the pressures of these programs and come through the experience unscathed. I do know that my disillusionment with the entire process is part of my choice to apply to a number of low-residency schools. I suppose my hope in that arena is that if the program becomes too crushing a force on my own creativity, I have my own life to retreat back into for strength. It continually amazes me how much of life is about resistance.

When I updated the people I planned to update, I wanted to have good news, but I haven’t had that good news yet. I need to own up to the fact that I’m still waiting for a cosmic rescue, because once I share the fear that that rescue isn’t coming, maybe it will dissolve like most irrational ideas do once they’re released from the confines of my own head.

The program I currently attend admits a very wide range of talent to the MFA, and while some of the people I have met here are complete geniuses, there are a larger number that are not ready for an advanced workshop at the undergraduate level. I have doubts that some of them will even end up serious about their writing in the long run, and while I think they could catch up to the level I’m at at some point, I’m here to learn, not to teach. It’s also been a catastrophic ego blow to have these particular writer’s work equated with mine by way of being admitted to the same program.

So I have to decide, how much am I worth? Am I going to let a couple rejections from my schools of choice determine the potential of my writing, or do I continue to push the limit? It seems like a pretty dumb question when I write it out like that. This year’s choice for grad school applications;

1. University of California, Irvine
2. Antioch University, Los Angeles
3. Naropa University in Colorado
4. Vermont School of Fine Arts

I have choices. I can get up everyday in the morning or not, I can just want what I have or have what I want. I really believe that the moment in which most people get stuck in an unhappy position is the moment in which they forget that they are in charge. We’re living in a pretty frightening and depressing time, and it’s a different place than it was when I was sixteen, but that doesn’t mean that I’m a different person, and I’m a person who goes after what she wants. I won’t be happy until I stop fighting that.

Anyway, my return may have something to do with the glimmer of hope on the horizon of my future that makes me feel better about the state of things in general. (I just finished applying to a bunch of new graduate programs) OR, much more likely, it could be that I have quit WoW and to avoid getting addicted to YouTube again, I will be taking a shot at participating in the internet in general. I have only so much patience for hearing my own thoughts, so unlike YouTube, it is an entertainment with an eventual end and I can eventually get fed up enough to go read a book or do my homework, which will also include a large amount of writing. Blogging is good.

Also, I have plenty of topics stored up for this! I become a more well educated Sci-fi nerd every day and I’ve been meaning to drop a massive blog entry about the role of women and gender in science fiction for a very long time. I have a lot more fuel for the fire now, assuming I can get some sort of time line straight in my head. Did Babylon 5 come before BSG and did they both come before or after Farscape and where exactly do the X-files fit into this whole equation? Boring out of context. Anyway, just a promise to myself and anyone that might be reading this to stick around and write down more thoughts, hopefully it’s not a very empty one and you’ll be hearing from me soon, internet.

What I’m wondering about, really, is what sort of environment allows you to be the best version of yourself? It’s easy to achieve that in separate isolated moments, but on a day-to-day basis, it’s a struggle to be the best version of you. Everyone around you has a different idea of what that best version of you looks like, too. My boss considers my best version of myself a good salesperson who pushes sales, my co-workers consider my best version of myself a sarcastic wise-cracker who keeps things just a little bit risque, and still yet, my customers/clients consider my best version of myself a helpful customer service slave who never thinks of anything but how best to make their day easier. There is a marked difference between the best version of yourself and the perception of your best self reflected from others.

I guess the point I reach is questioning; in what environment am I most rewarded for being my personal best version of myself? Human beings rarely commit repetitive behaviors without any sort of physical or psychological reward- that’s the whole idea behind the human reproductive system. It’s psych 101; Pavlov’s dog. We continue positive behaviors or negative behaviors for a variety of complex reasons, but generally because of reward or punishment. I should be putting myself in situations that reward me for those behaviors which make me a better person. I think that personally I am extremely fortunate in having accessible knowledge of what I think my best self should look like. Which is why I’m taking advantage of that self-knowledge and moving to a place I hope will reward me for being my very best self.

I’ve experienced a lot of resistance to this decision, and it’s troubling to me. It’s hard not to see the caution of others as proverbial rain on your parade when you’re pursuing a dream. Most Minnesotans don’t want you to leave Minnesota. They see the rest of the country, maybe the rest of the world, as a threatening space outside the safe bubble of Minnesota-nice and a culture of Norwegian hospitality and kindness. I know this because it’s the way that I feel from time to time. It sneaks up on me in quiet moments and I’m overcome with anxious fear of these “other people,” these non-Minnesotans. It’s that exact fear though, that presses me outward as well. Not for a sense of adventure or danger, but in hopes of knowing and understanding these “other people.” I feel as though I’m justifying or defending now. It’s so much more simple than that. I am a person that needs to grow, always, constantly. I’m bumping my head on the ceiling in the mid-west, so I’m headed for the coast, to find rewards for being the best version of myself.