Glad To Be Back!

Hello, there! Does anyone read any blogs anymore? I don’t imagine they do. But I’ve been re-reading my old journals and blog entries lately, and I’ve realized a few things:

1) As I have discovered in other ways (particulary, by doing NaNoWriMo and MoPoWriMo), a regular casual writing goal/routine (by which I mean “not with the intent to publish formally or to work into anything that will be published, but just for the joy and habit of writing”) leads to more creativity and generativity in my formal writing. When I am writing more, I get more ideas. Writing generates writing.

2) At the risk of cutting against or contradicting the spirit of #1 above, many of the things I worked through in blog posts ended up as poems or essays later. I didn’t consciously draw from by blog posts when it was time to sit down and generate formally, but something about having thought through and written about those ideas years before made some of them stick with me so that I was able to bring them up in my mind later.

3) I continue to suspect (as did/do some of my poetry professors) that I am an essayist in a poet’s body. My essays, of which I’ve actually finished and polished very few for publication, have done much better in the world than my poetry, in terms of critical acceptance. I have published maybe 4 or 5 actual finished essays. One of them was nominated for a Pushcart. One of them was mentioned as Notable in a Best American anthology. Two of them won or placed highly in contests. Would that my poetry had those kind of percentages! So I’m curious what would happen if I dedicated some time to actual study of the genre, both in reading and writing it. I wish, even, that I could go back and get another MFA in CNF, just so I could have the experience of making it a real, formal study.

In light of these realizations, I’d like to return to blogging as a present to myself. For now, I’m going to set a goal of posting here once a week at a minimum. As I look around here, I see that I had some great interactions with the readers of my blog. What a cool community it was! I miss that. I’m not sure that I could get this back, since no one reads blogs anymore and I’m not even sure anyone would ever notice that I was blogging still. But maybe I could gather some readers if I linked through facebook and twitter and instagram. I’ll think about this after I’ve generated a few posts here.

In the meantime, here’s a report of what my life looks like these days in terms of the themes that my blog USED to focus on:

1) My Kids are Old.
During the golden days of this blog, I was in the midst of the storm of child-raising. I was, thankfully, past the hardest stage (toddlers and babies), and finally getting my head above water a little. But my life centered around my children’s adventures, triumphs and struggles in a more moment-intensive way than it does now. I wouldn’t say for a second that my children’s triumphs and struggles are any less heavy in my life. I’ve got three young adults (two returned missionaries, one current missionary) and a teenager (senior in high school), and, as you know if you’re there yet, the problems just get bigger along with the kids. But that’s not to say that I feel more burdened. In fact, this has been a phase of great enjoyment for me. I’m interested in exploring some of that here.

2) I Am Old.

So, if my kids are old, that makes me . . . older. Yes, I am very much in Middle Age. More specifically, I just turned 50. There’s no more even pretending that I am on the young side of anything.

I don’t think I’ve hidden the fact here or anywhere in my life that I have always feared dying young. My mother died at 43 and her mother died at 34, so I don’t think that my fear is all that unreasonable. And so I’m a little surprised to be here at 50. But I think that maybe most people find it surprising to discover that they are grown-ups, and then middle-aged, and then elderly. It’s just hard to imagine in general.

I have to say, though, that reaching 50 has been a completely positive thing for me. First of all, consider the alternative: not making it to 50 isn’t something to rejoice about. Second, I absolutely claim all that I have learned and enjoyed about my 50 years on earth. Third, when I was at my sickest, I made a plea to God to allow me to live long enough to raise my children. I feel that I’ve made it to that point. Peter is almost on his mission, and the others are proving that they can handle adulthood. They really don’t need me anymore. That’s not to say that I don’t look forward to much more time with them (and, hopefully, grandkids!). But I really do deeply feel like anything from here on out is cream. I’ve had my fair turn on this earth and done all I really worried about not being able to do.

And being 50 is freeing. No one is going to be fooled anymore that I am young. I’m feeling braver and braver, then, about giving up the effort to hide my age. In fact, I had always planned to let myself go gray once my last child was home from his mission, but this COVID quarantine stuff has led me to consider going gray now. Here’s the progress so far.

I’m reserving the option to dye again once I have to head back to school in the fall, but hoping I won’t. I love the idea of being free of the bondage of the bottle. More than that, I love the idea of helping show the world that women shouldn’t be afraid to look their age. I dream of world in which women are valued for much more than how they look. I should put my money where my mouth is.

3) My Health.

There’s been a new, major development, which I’ll get to in a minute. Outside of that, I’ve been doing generally pretty well overall. I still struggle with fatigue and may for the rest of my life. I sometimes have harder times—I suspect I just get recurring mono, among other issues. But I have reached a point of acceptance and peace about my health burdens. I am remarkably blessed in that I can do all I need to do and most of what I want to do.

I am excited to report that I was able to lose 20 pounds last winter using Noom, and now weigh my lowest since before I had kids. So that feels good.

The big development is that I finally had surgery to repair my heart! I have been trying to get this surgery for years. You can read about the original discovery that I had a hole in my heart here. Since all that, something really exciting happened: a doctor in Europe invented a new way of repairing PFO that does not involve a device. Instead, a stitch is used to close the hole. This is much better than a device for many reasons, but the biggest reason in my mind is that I have nickel sensitivity, and the device has a little bit of nickel in it—enough that some people have had reactions and subsequently have required removal of the device via open-heart surgery. So I have spent a few years trying to get insurance companies to recognize that PFO repair is a good thing and that this new way of doing it is the best way. After lots of effort, things finally came together and I had the repair with the stitch just last week. I am still in recovery and so can’t tell if there’s a difference, but I look forward to finding out. (And, in the meantime, I have reduced my risk of stroke, so that’s a good thing.)

Here I am with the surgeon, Dr. Jim Thompson, who practices in Virginia:

4) My Writing
I see that a lot of my blog entries from the good ol’ days were about my concerns as a writer. Was I a writer? Should I invest in myself as a writer? How? And in what genre?

It was my dream to return to school for an MFA and, eventually, I did! I wrote about my first attempt here, and then about my experience in the program here and here. But here are some post-program thoughts:

a) It was absolutely the right thing for me to do. One of the biggest reasons is that it gave me an MFA so that I could teach on the college level, something I’ve been doing ever since and which I am passionate about. I love teaching even more than I love writing, and I am good at it. Another big reason is that it did help me improve—or, at least, it taught me the path by which I could improve. I learned how to push myself. I learned what and how to read. I learned about individual aesthetics and a little of the big philosphical questions behind poetic craft and aesthetics.

b) Although I am supremely grateful that the professors admitted me to the program, I see, in retrospect, the benefits of professors ONLY admitting students whose work they are interested in. For most of my time in the program, I was convinced that no professors were interested in my work—that they had admitted me sort of grudgingly. I won’t get into the reasons that I believed this here, but this belief handicapped my progress. It wasn’t until after I was done and I went to a retreat where I found people who were truly interested in my work that I began to grow. Once I felt that interest—and it was interest in the work I’d done that I felt was closest to my heart—I decided to return to the things that truly interested me, and when I did, my work blossomed. I wrote tons more LDS stuff, but not all of it was LDS, and because I was writing so much more and with more joy, even the non-LDS stuff was a lot better than it had been before. I wonder, then, what would have happened if I had felt this excitement during the first few months of my program. I think I would have grown a lot more and a lot faster. Again, though, I am so glad they accepted me ANYWAY, because that MFA is so precious to me and has truly helped me.

As a result of that blossoming, I was able to produce enough work that I could put together a manuscript, and my book, Homespun and Angel Feathers, was published by BCC Press last spring. I am so grateful to BCC for their interest in my work (in fact, Steve Evans at BCC contacted me about the manuscript when he saw my facebook announcement that I was working on it). I am pleased with the book and its reception. And this spring the book won the AML award for poetry. If you know me at all, you know what that award meant to me. You can read the award citation here.

I was thrilled to be able to read from my book at BYU’s English Reading Series earlier this year. I also got to go to the meeting of the Mormon Arts Foundation in Dallas to present about poetry and faith along with Susan Elizabeth Howe. Here we are:

I’ve got almost enough work to make a second collection already, and I’ll finish that up in the next few months, but I think I’d like to take some time on essaying in the near future as well.

5) Crazy Sauce

OK, so that’s the report on my life. The other big things I might mention you’ve been experiencing, too: Trump. A pandemic. Protests about racial injustice. I don’t really want to get political here—at least not today, and not at the end of a long post. But let me just say that in addition to all the stresses of this time, my time with my children at home as we’ve been socially distancing has been very sweet. I love home church. I haven’t been missing the auxiliary church activities and all of the other things that usually take my boys and husband away from home. I realize, though, that this is not healthy for long-term. We need a church community—we need to see, and serve, each other regulalry. My boys need a chance to date and mix socially so that they can move on to the next stage of their lives. And, of course, many people have been devastated by this, physically or economically or both. So of course I have been praying that this burden can be lifted from the earth. But I am grateful for the sweet memories I will have of this time.