Category Archives: Writing

For Me, the Year is Only Half Over

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I won’t be making New Year’s Resolutions on January 1. To be honest, I never have, but not because I’m against resolutions. It’s because for me a new year won’t begin on January 1. As long as I can remember, I’ve never marked new and old years by the Gregorian calendar. These twelve-month chunks don’t reflect my own endings and beginnings. Instead, I’ve always marked years by the academic calendar.

I count school years instead of Gregorian years because summers have always marked the major changes for me: every June I leave behind classes and teachers and prepare to meet new ones in August. Friends graduate and leave, relationships end, and the next school year offers new possibilities. The end of 2016 means nothing to me. It’s still winter, I’m still in grad school, I’m still 24. What will actually change tomorrow?

Now, while folks wallow in the regret of not fulfilling their 2016 resolutions, I still have six months left until I have to wallow in regret, and even then I have the whole summer to do my wallowing. I have plenty of time to not get in shape and not get published in The Paris Review.

I also have half a year left to finish my MA, improve my teaching, become a regular at a bar where everybody knows my name, and find inner peace. Piece of cake. Then, in summer, I can start the next year fresh and accomplished. I still don’t know where I’ll be next year, how many publications I’ll have, and whether or not I’ll have to cope with martial law, but that’s fine, because I still have half a year to figure it out.

For the rest of you folks celebrating 2017 like it somehow means something, I wish you a Happy New Year. For me, though, kindly hold your New Year’s wishes until summer. The weather will be nicer then, anyway.

Peace,

-jk

Coming Home for Christmas After the Boston Tea Party

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destruction-of-tea

The Destruction of Tea at Boston Harbor, by Nathaniel Currier, 1846, Hand-Colored Lithograph

On December 16, 1773, the Sons of Liberty checked their phones for messages about the plan. Some Tweeted about it as they crept on board the British ship; others posted Instagram pictures of the tea crates they dumped into the Boston Harbor, one after another. #coffeefromnowon. #revolution. #dumptea. Throughout the night, several Sons posted updates on the SoL Forum. Meanwhile, crate after crate of imported tea splashed into the salty, frigid water.

John Adams live-tweeted the affair with considerable criticism, but a new hashtag surfaced: #sitdownjohn. Frustrated, he stayed inside while the protest unfolded. Several Native American pages posted their own frustration that the Sons of Liberty were dressing up as Mohawks, pointing out the inaccuracies and retribution the British might take against them, but the protest continued unabated. Some tagged King George in their posts.

The next morning, King George deleted his Twitter account, then reopened it again to post “Not cool” several times. The Sons of Liberty felt like they had accomplished a good shaming.

A week later, Sons and Patriots returned home for Christmas. The media expressed a disorganized uproar about the protest, with Loyalist blogs calling the Sons of Liberty terrorists and the Sons of Liberty tagging everything #donttreadonme and #goteabagyourself. Some Sons returned to divided families: a Loyalist cousin here, a Quaker moderate in-law there.

It was particularly awkward at the Adams Christmas Party. Refusing to yield his position, John spent the entire time standing up, while his cousin Sam spent his time in a corner liking and retweeting every post of a tarred-and-feathered British tradesman. John called it grotesque of him to like so much shaming; Sam told him to stop shaming him for his views. Sam pointed out that John defended the Red Coats after the Boston Massacre three years earlier, calling him out for defending people who killed Americans; John called out Sam for passively defending a whiny group of protestors. Meanwhile, Abigail Adams drank whiskey in the billiard room and thought very seriously about tarring and feathering both John and Sam. She was, after all, ashamed of both of them. They liked the shock and awe of sharing listicles reinforcing their stances, like preaching to two different choirs. “Ten Horrible Things King George Has Done in Ireland,” “Nine Ways the Revolution Fails at Intersectionality,” “You Won’t Believe the Feathers on This Loyalist Cuck.”

Abigail had visited a Boston general hospital weeks earlier after a tax collector she had befriended was tarred and feathered at the docks. She remembered the way the hot tar stuck to his skin, the difficulty of pulling it off, the way it stuck to doctors who tried to remove it, making him untouchable, unapproachable. He refused to speak to Abigail for her husband’s politics, and instead stared at the ceiling while doctors treated his burn wounds.

Sam called John a feisty little tea drinker, and John called Sam a caffeinated warmonger. They were on the verge of tarring each other right there at the party, and if they did, Abigail knew that she would pull the dried tar from both morons while they lay side by side, listening to each other’s crying. Even that, she posted on Tumblr passive aggressively, wouldn’t get them to meet one another halfway.

-jk

Genre, Nostalgia, and The Love Witch

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I don’t normally do film reviews/analysis on this blog, but a recent viewing of The Love Witch with its “aggressive strangeness,” as a friend described it, warrants a a closer look.

witchAnna Biller’s 2016 The Love Witch begins as a parody of late 1960s/early ’70s sci-fi/fantasy sexploitation B movies such as Barbarella (1968) and A Touch of Satan (1971). Biller’s film establishes a concrete cinematic nostalgia that it then goes to great lengths to critique.

Spoilers and such: The main character, Elaine, is a witch utilizing her witchiness to seduce men in her supposedly endless search for love. After having killed her husband, Elaine quickly finds a new partner (Wayne) and uses her excessive witchitudes to convince him to take her to his getaway cabin. There, she gives him a “potion,” which causes him to “feel love” too intensely and die. (Audiences can recognize that taking beverages from strangers is also a possible way to die). Elaine attributes Wayne’s death to men being unable to cope with their emotions, and moves on from there, as we all should when someone feels emotions to death.

When Elaine finds  Griff, “the right one,” the film has veered from its established genre, becoming at different points a Hallmark romcom and a buddy cop drama. Disappointed that he fails to feel love for her (and also happens to be the cop who finds that she is guilty of “loving” people to death), Elaine stabs Griff in the chest. The film ends with a disturbingly quiet fantasy of Elaine marrying Griff in a Renaissance setting, interrupting the campy tone and ending with a serious meditation on the consequence’s of the film’s own logic.

The Love Witch exploits viewers’ nostalgia for a unique cultural moment that existed only after the emergence of birth control and before the HIV/AIDS epidemic, an era that felt like it was going places and might have were it not for the sudden death of hope that came with Reagan and the moral majority.

Elaine’s treatment of men is cynical and essentialist, and the film’s male characters buy into it just as much as she does. Audiences are meant to see her views as a product of her frustration with social expectations for happiness and monogamy, and she turns to witchliness to prevent further disappointment. Witchcraft here functions as a cult-like ideology: Elaine seeks improvement in relationships and cedes her agency to something beyond her (a program/product/cult), but as a result of that program/product/cult, she only ends up killing people (which, to no surprise, ends up hurting her relationships). Witchcraft is a stand-in for any commodified, pre-packaged self-help ideology, such as Sedona’s vortexes, Scientology, or the books of Rob Bell (all of which, I’m sure, have resulted in someone’s death).

Marriage appears most colorfully in a scene at a Renaissance fair, pulling back the curtain on Elaine’s personal investment in the program/product/cult. Elaine, like many Americans, is drawn to witchcraft simply for the nostalgia of a pre-globalized Europe, one without the intrusion of Christianity but all the aesthetics of a Pagan religion without the human sacrifice and patriarchy. All the fun without the historicity. Tolkien made even whiter and somehow less sexy. Halloween ruined by Medieval and Renaissance Studies majors. The list goes on. The film critiques the audience for participating in nostalgia for a style it portrays as commodified, pre-packaged, and self-consuming.

The Love Witch dissects the way many Americans imagine the sexual revolution, which existed between two periods of extreme repression, the 1950s and 1980s, and captures the strangeness of that moment of hope while simultaneously undermining it just as violently as it was subverted historically.

The film’s generic experimentation acts as a mechanism exploiting viewers’ nostalgia. The Love Witch tricks audiences the way time and politics often do, by taking its viewers on a trip they never signed up for but feel unable to step out of, forcing them to walk away with questions and pretentious blog post ideas about witch hunts and the 1970s or something.

-jk

Nobody Actually Has Time to Write a Novel (But We Do It Anyway)

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train-1November 1 kicked off the beginning of National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, the long-standing tradition in which writers and readers alike decide to write a novel (or 50,000 words at least) during the month of November. The idea isn’t to have a novel finished by December 1, but to have written enough of a first draft of a novel (or memoir or novella even) to build on during the next year, something to return to and tinker with at a more casual, realistic pace.

Writing at a bout 1600 words a day, writers might finish. Most don’t. I’ve only finished once, and I was a very sleepless college freshman, full of ideas and not much else. Now, I’m a graduate student in English. Now, I’m full of ideas and stress, and not much else. I have deadlines to meet, books to read, authors to research, research to catch up on, and workshop material to write. I have classes to teach and a full 13 credit hours of graduate coursework to focus on, as well as graduate applications and a brand new hip flask to make proper use of. Do I really want to add the pressure of a novel to that?

The answer, of course, is no. But I’m doing it anyway. I don’t expect to finish, even if I write during all of Thanksgiving break. Even when I inevitably don’t meet the standard 50,000 words, I’ll still have a novel draft to tinker with in 2017. Like many writers across the globe, I’m enjoying more ambition than I can justify having, and the companionship of fellow writers struggling near me.

So, to my fellow November-long novelists, I wish you luck and sudden bouts of free time. Say goodbye to your loved ones and the prospect of having clean dishes. It’s noveling season.

-jk

Useful Tips for Making Time to Write

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make-timeStephen King once suggested that aspiring writers carve out time to write every single day, which probably works for wealthy retired people like him. For the rest of us proles trying to be writers, carving out time to write can be a challenge. There are, however, numerous ways one can make time to write.

  1. Give up sleep. Talk to your doctor to let her know that you no longer require the recommended seven to eight hours of sleep; four or three or two should be sufficient. That’s what coffee is for, right? If your doctor protests, just let her know that she can have a free signed copy of your fantastic novel-in-progress, American Noun, once you finally get it written.
  2. If sleep is too difficult to give up, try giving up on friends. Thanks to social media, dropping off the face of the Earth has become quite easy. Delete your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Bumble, Thorax, PurpleDeth, and whatever other social media you have. No more notifications from you will quickly let your friends know that you are now and always have been an illusion. No more friends, no more distractions! Now get writing!
  3. If you somehow need friends and sleep, another way to make time is to quit your job. Many aspiring artists have done it. You can call it breaking out of the system, but we all know it’s to make time to write. After a month or so, you can consider more tenable versions of giving up on a well-paying job to pursue your dream, like getting an MFA in something or volunteering with the Green Party.
  4. If you’re the kind of loser who needs sleep, friends, and a job, another way to make time to write is to literally create time. For many writers, this is the most realistic option. Build a time machine (instructions are on Wikipedia) and spend a day writing, then go back twenty-four hours and respend that day working with friends and sleeping. You’ll have a novel in no time, but the problem is that, to the rest of us, you will age twice as fast.
  5. Making time to write is difficult, and you may have to give up a few things: regular TV, some social events, a few good meals. The important thing is to not give up on writing, if you really, really want to write. You can’t have it all, but the parties you get invited to after publication will make up for it.

-jk

Getting Over the Beats

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on-the-road

“We’re all golden sunflowers inside, bae.” -Allen Ginsberg, probably

In high school, I took a creative writing elective, and the teacher assigned numerous Beat Generation authors. We read sections of Dharma Bums and “Howl” and numerous Jack Kerouac poems. It turns out that the influence of the Beats on a youngboredsmallwhitemale is that he starts wearing black button-up shirts and fantasizing about expensive liquor. After reading On the Road the following summer, I spent a great deal of time fantasizing about drinking absinthe on road trips through the desert at night while listening to something called bop. I bought used jazz records that I listened to once, maybe twice.

I thought about rebelling, but I was convinced that the key to rebellion was originality, and just about everything had been done before. I learned the value of originality from the Beats, who were apparently the very first people to realize that dharma and karma fall under the category of “hip.” I learned more from various articles summarizing the Beat Generation that I found online to save time, and it was there that I discovered how powerful single  arbitrary out-of-context half-cited quotes can be, even with no subsequent explanation. I thought about growing out my hair, learning how to sculpt with metal, driving a motorcycle, making out with trees, but they had all been done before.

As time went on, I encountered other writers and poets who influenced me in more nuanced, healthier ways. Had I kept up with my Beat fixation, I might have grown up to the kind of person who uses Kerouac quotes to make myself feel better about spending fifteen dollars on one local IPA at a bar I frequent only because the regular server is an aspiring country saxophonist named Cynthia. Or I could have become the kind of teacher who wears skinny dungarees and Pink Floyd T-shirts with holes in the front and sits on the desk telling his students that Jesus and Steinbeck were both Zen masters who shared some sweet flashbacks to one another.

I still dig the Beats sometimes, but that scene has passed. I’m still not sure what kind of writer I am, but I can’t be a Beat, or any other writer from the past. It’s better to write for and from the present. I’ve almost entirely moved on, man.

-jk

Writing With the Season

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graveyard-walkI can’t tell you why I enjoy autumn as much as I do. Apart from the many holidays and the associated consumerism, I enjoy the aesthetic this time of year imposes on parts of the country. In my hometown of Flagstaff, AZ, the leaves on the aspen trees turn whole sides of Mount Elden a new, shocked shade of yellow. In my new home in Lincoln, NE, the season is just as magnificent, minus the mountain. It’s darker and windier every morning as I walk to campus. The nights are cool and toasty.

As a child, I once took a stapler to the woods and tried to “fix” the falling leaves. I was too young to understand the relationship between seasons and change. I liked the color green, and I was mortified that things could curl, turn red and yellow like infections, and fall to the ground. The pine needles, too, browned and plummeted. Before I could begin stapling the leaves back to the branches that I thought (wrongly) I’d be tall enough to reach, I wondered if maybe this change was good. If maybe it was supposed to happen. Maybe the leaves, like fingernails, would grow back to replace what has gone.

Now, I’ve come to prefer orange, red, yellow, and gold, but I still have trust issues with nature. I feel on edge watching it change, wanting it to be the same, but I can do nothing to stop the leaves from falling.

Autumn must be a good season for writers. I associate it with writing, at least. I associate these months with ghost stories and tall tales, and the existential crisis of trying to be static in a changing world. I associate the season with staying inside writing poems while eating pie or writing a novel every November. I want to celebrate the season, when I can, by writing, walking, and sharing. I enjoy the mystery, even the uncertainty. It’s a time to lean on the edge of our seats to see how the narrative will unfold.

Maybe autumn isn’t for everybody, but it suits me. I’m learning to enjoy the change.

-jk

 

Filling Office Hours

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officeYou sit down at your desk awaiting students with questions. Some have already sent you emails with one concern or another; they have questions and it’s your job to answer them in office hours. So you wait.

You check your email; nothing. In looking at your schedule, you see you have readings, papers, and writing to do. You begin one project casually, expecting students to pop in. You’ve done that countless times to other professors, after all.

You finish your first project and check your email; nothing. Good. More time to write. You write. You write some more. You look up, and there’s a student, but she’s looking for another professor and is lost. You feel smugly accomplished as an educator for helping a lost student find the answer to her question (room 345, third floor, past the weird-smelling book case).

You revise an essay, check your email, and find yourself interested in the political spam in your inbox. You sign some petitions, feeling less accomplished than when you saved that student’s career that one time half an hour ago. No, ten minutes. Has it really only been ten minutes since?

You begin a new writing project and look up, just in case. Yes, you are happy you have this time to get things done, but what if your students have questions? What if they didn’t understand the assignments? What if their email just isn’t working? You want to be a good instructor; you want to be accessible. It’s the first part of your teaching statement, and you want to be like those other professors you had who were so available, so accessible, to save your life with their marvelous answers.

This time you simultaneously check your email and your syllabus to see if you listed the correct office hours and room number. Yes. Students can access it. You keep writing.

No students come by. Soon your office hours are done and you have completed all your work for the next week, plus submitted an essay to a literary magazine. Before heading out for lunch, you check your email one more time to find you have a new email from a student inquiring about the first paper’s requirements. Finally, you think, relaxing back in your seat, the work can begin.

-jk

The Next Morning

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game 1UNL is empty as I walk through it early in the morning. The overcast sky dulls the stadium’s shadow. The sun is smothered and wind blows garbage around empty parking lots, sidewalks, concrete corners in the university maze. Red beer cups flounder down an overpass, and greasy napkins mingle with cardboard signs. Tongues of red licorice are flattened onto the sidewalk. A cap drowns in the mud.

Yesterday began with an earthquake in the morning, shaking me from my bed. Rain poured throughout the day over throngs of fans, and fireworks boomed like tanks around me. The streets were full. The streets were alive. Today, they are empty. I feel like I’ve walked onto the set of a zombie movie filmed in faded tones. There are no fans around the next morning. There is only the left-behind collage of plastic and paper and half-eaten food, and of course the alcohol.

Somewhere in the detriment is a cross, a necklace that fell from a fan. Or maybe it was torn, or fell from a pocket. It’s just another post-game testament to football’s force here. The stadium rises like a temple; didn’t some messiah once point to a football stadium and declare that not one brick will be left standing? Didn’t some messiah once bless a team to win the next game? The stadium looks unused, run-down after rain and the mass of fans. Nothing could keep them away.

I wonder where the heroes have all gone to. I grew up witnessing people ruin sports for me through doping scandals, gambling, dog-fighting, domestic violence. I learned the consequences of commodifying people, the exploitative measures taken to earn a profit, the cost of products sold. Who cleans up the mess? Who loses a parking lot in exchange for more playing space? Whose funding gets cut? There must have been heroes here and there, some legendary folks who made the sport an art and not a business. But for me, they departed a generation ago and live only in history, and it is just an empty stadium surrounded by trash right now. Trash, and one small piece of jewelry that I leave where I found it. It’s not mine to move. It’s not mine to rearrange. I leave it as it is.

-jk