Enough with the sad, sad, sad endings, already

I hereby admit that I am not good at the bleak, desolate endings. Even in books. Even in fiction.

I can appreciate complexity, a mix of trauma or tragedy in layers and textures. But throw me a little hope. Give me a sliver I can hang onto.

To the Novelist, I give you my time and, if you write well, my full attention for hundreds of pages. I enter your world, trusting you to take me through it and leave me with something, besides despair.

This morning, I finished a beautifully written book that was, in the end, so completely depressing and sad that I wondered if I should really be reading novels. Maybe I can't handle it. I have a hard time pulling a way from that world, removing myself from the reality I've agreed to follow. I feel robbed. Yes, I'm whining (sorry) and probably pathetic.)

I feel like a wimp. I feel naive. I feel like I may not have the heart or the stomach, the intestinal fortitude, to appreciate literature or the Apocalypse. Living can be scary enough.

Should everything be sugar-coated, all the loose ends tied up? Certainly not. But must it all end badly? Does art require that much suffering? (Or, could I possibly not obsess this much?)

Insert story here

I saw this in the grocery story. I didn't even have time to look for the label to find out what it was. (Can you imagine? It was that kind of a day.)

But it looked like something my middle kid would love. He might even launch into a whole story about what it looked like, what it might be, what it might taste like. So I snapped this picture for him.

Now I'm back to trying to revise the poems in my manuscript again... and again... and again...

Left, left

"I left my wife
and 49 kids
on the verge of starvation
without any gingerbread left
left, left, right left."

Remember that one?

Thanks to my recurring reluctance to repeat a word in a poem, unless it's really intentional in a them kind of way, I am today trying to find another word for "left" (in the wife and gingerbread sense).

Preferably also monosyllabic. "Abandoned" feels a little too long and too strong.

I have several hours left.

The work of writing

Last night, our poetry group met. I took a couple of poems, and one of them fell flat—completely flat. It was a really good opportunity to take a close, detached look and try to see why.

The feedback from my fellow poets centered on the last two stanzas, but I think that the problem starts much earlier. The poem is recapping a story, and there are undertones of personal experience, but they aren't revealed at all, and so the emotional investment on the page is low.

Does every poem have to be emotional? Would that make them all the same?

I don't know, but I do now believe that every poem has to risk something. That belief was reinforced at last weekend's LitFuse workshop.

At the workshop, I also realized that revision isn't just editing or tweaking or even moving things around. A couple of people referred to it as Re-Vision, which sounded perfectly sane and also daunting to me. Then I realized that revision is really just writing. It's the work of writing, just as much as free writing or the euphoria of scrawling out that first inspired draft. It's iterative, a constant starting over, an act of discovery and an act of letting go.

I admit that I'm lazy, or eager to be done, to have something finished. I don't like to start over. But I think that if I can approach it as more writing—approach that first draft as a bundle of notes and clues—I'll be able to go further in my poems.

How do you approach revision? Do you have a checklist? Do you have a set of rules or steps? Do you start over every time, or do you prefer to treat the first draft as a scaffold on which you build? Do you dread or revel in it?

It's official

The season of rain has arrived here.

I wanted to take a picture of the fallen leaves in the rain-dappled puddles.

But there wasn't enough light.

A sigh of relief

A whoop of joy.

A need to roll up sleeves.

So much work to be done.

Remembering the dead

After a weekend of poetry and Day of the Dead remembrances, I returned to town and found out that a kid from my daughter's school was shot and killed on Halloween.

This is a kid who rode my daughter's school bus last year. This is a kid who was good friends with a boy my son used to play soccer with. This isn't just in the neighborhood. This is close to home.

The media isn't releasing much information. Maybe that's the family's wish, or maybe that's a prevailing attitude. The paper even says that this kid, and the other young man who was shot, were not associated with the high school.

But my daughter tells me this is a guy who was funny and liked—well liked. Students wore mourning black to school today. Counselors were on hand for students who had lost their friend.

The media's message is, I guess, that if you're associated with a gang, your life—and who you are—does not count. And if you cancel out all the young men who are in gangs right now, that forgetting, that dismissal, is another kind of genocide.

I don't think that being in a gang is a good thing. I don't think that smoking a blunt or flashing cash is a good move for a young man. But I don't think that it should cancel out his death or his life. Here was a boy, and he's gone, and his family and friends mourn him and miss him.

Here's a video remembrance that was posted on YouTube.



The day of the dead is every day. And we must keep remembering.