Done With Donne

I've tried to stick it out. I've tried to be one of those stodgy old scholarly types, absorbing the greats of the 17th and 18th centuries and conveniently ignoring the fact that I'm only studying Old Dead White Men.

Oh, I realize that these old dead white men are the basis for many more greats in literature (who still turn out to be... old, dead, white, and male). I realize that one needs these foundations in order to better understand contemporary work. For Whom the Bell Tolls? Straight out of Donne's Devotions, man.

But I have to say this. I am tired of learning about John Donne. I feel that Donne, Hobbes, Herbert, Jonson, and even Shakespeare have been unnecessarily drilled into my head for years and years. No, stodgy old academics, I do not feel my literature education has been rounded out enough! I do not feel that I have improved for taking a class that is as fresh as a month-old box of saltines!

I don't like the fact that I am missing out on literature written by women, by minorities, by those who were not afforded the luxury of these poor old dead white men.

I am done with Donne. Let it be known.

ETA: I realize the ridiculousness of making these statements after submitting a short story for peer review that's titled "Be Not Proud." Minor quibble.

Be Not Proud

I tried to write my original NaNoWriMo idea into a short piece for my fiction writing class. Protip: Don't try it. There are some things which just can't fit into that tiny space, and a sweeping story of finding your identity amidst demon possession is one of those things.

What did happen, though, was a story I'd started to let gestate during the summer. I was steeped in Sandman and small-town sensibility, and out of this was born the incarnation of Death visiting an old woman in an old house in an old town.

Sadly, the best part of the whole freaking thing is in the last scene, at the big reveal. This would be great, if it hadn't taken eight pages or so of set-up.

Betty looked at the clock. The hands were frozen now, the little one on the three and the long one on the six. She closed her eyes and tried to sleep and take that tall redhead out of her mind.

A soft click startled her awake. Betty’s eyes snapped open and she saw Thandy standing there to the right, leaning against the window.

Betty’s voice was barely a gurgle from her throat. “What do you want?”

Thandy smiled and pulled off one of her driving gloves. “I love this town, Betty Norris, and I love your house. I wanted to see it. I wanted to feel it.” She pulled off the other glove and sat the pair, lightly, on the windowpane. “It’s your house. Why don’t you want it?”

Betty couldn’t explain why she felt so calm, even with a stranger standing in her bedroom at three-thirty in the morning. She suddenly just felt old. She sat up a little more and tried to stretch the age out of her bones.

“There’s too much here in this house,” she said softly. “I was born here, I lived here, I had my children here. I was afraid of dying here.”

Thandy was still smiling. “Are you still so afraid of death?”

And Betty looked up, and she understood.

“I can’t be afraid of death so much anymore, I suppose. Just don’t have anything else I can live for.” Her eyes dropped down and the lines on her face eased. “I miss the living. I can’t sit on that windowsill anymore and look at the sky, since Vann died and I couldn’t get out there to keep the trees clear anymore.”

Thandy extended her right hand. “Here. Hold on to just this hand for a minute.”

Betty extended hers, tentatively, and took the young woman’s right hand with her own. A jolt shot through up her arm and she felt warm in spite of the chilly March night that had seeped through her cotton nightgown. She closed her eyes and smiled.

Behind her eyelids was the house, that room, that big windowsill and her husband sitting on it with their oldest. She smelled that strange odor of growth and rot living on the same patch of ground outside the door, with the new shoots growing up from the mulched leaves. She opened her eyes again to see Thandy outlined by the soft fuzz of faded moon. “I suppose you aren’t actually going to buy the house after all?”

Thandy smiled, showing teeth for the first time since Betty had seen her. They were as bright as her skin, cold and white and almost glowing from the inside. “No, Betty English, I’m not buying it. I don’t guess I do this too often, but I just had to see it before I came tonight.”

Betty could still feel warmth pulsing where her hand met Thandy’s. The pulse didn’t come from Thandy herself but at the same time existed in that space between their palms. Betty had missed the pulse between two hands. She kept staring at the glowing white fingers around hers and tried to put her mind around what she knew would come next.

“Just take my other hand, Betty.” Thandy reached out her left hand this time, still firmly grasping Betty’s right.

And she did take it.

---"Be Not Proud," (c) Caitlin Cauley 2010

My ego knows no bounds

I don't know if anyone who might be reading this has had the exquisite pleasure of taking an undergraduate creative writing course, but I am here to tell you that the jump from the beginning class to the intermediate class is colossal. It's like trying to motocross over the Grand Canyon colossal.

First of all, Beginning Fiction Writing is normally taught by a grad student. Grad students, as we know, are very luck of the draw when it comes to teaching styles. If you're like me, you got someone who can write well enough himself but was not the most engaging instructor. I am positive this is a common phenomenon when you get grad students to teach things, because my freshman year I had a grad student for calculus II (the first time, anyway) and he suffered from a MASSIVE case of Not Giving A Shit. At the very least I can say that the student teaching my introductory writing course Gave A Shit.

In stark contrast to the instructor caring is the fact that more than half of the students will not. This is another issue with beginning creative writing classes - most people take it because it satisfies a humanities GER and they think it'll be easier than taking something in the rhetoric field. And yeah, it is gonna be easier, because undergrad 200-level creative writing is full of pansies. Not only did people not care, they seemed to have an aversion to giving useful criticism.

At least, until I gave constructive critique, and then everyone was all over my ass for no real reason. I don't think my stories were perfect, but "I'm Going To Write Crappy Dragon Stories" kid found the dumbest things to attack me for. Oh God, later on that kid. He deserves his own paragraph, if not his own blog entry.

The point here is that if you can make it through your 200-level creative writing course without attempting to use your manuscript to slice through your jugular, you shall find that the next level is much better.

In fact, it's almost too much better.

What you get is a room full of people who take themselves very seriously and are VERY SERIOUS WRITERS. Most haven't gotten out of undergrad yet, and the rest are grown-ass adults of lifelong education people who fancy themselves late bloomers in this great rate race of fiction writing.

Maybe I'm the only person in there who has no illusions about the likelihood of my fiction even getting read by someone higher up, much less published. I'm taking the class because I'm not entirely sane and want to get into a workshop setting for good critique. I'd add that I want to do this without paying extravagant amounts, but my tuition was in the range of $2000 for twelve credit hours, so I really am paying extravagant amounts for this education which will probably amount to less than a hill of beans when I'm done.

I'm remarkably disillusioned. Do I simply want to go to grad school to delay real life?

Things I've Learned

It's time for another edition of Caffeinated Creativity. I told myself that I was going to blog all my nonsense, so I probably ought to follow through on this promise to myself. And who knows, maybe someone out there is reading.

You know how there's common sense things that you've always known but somehow, you have to actually put it into practice and find out for yourself? After three and a half years of college I've learned some things that you think I would have known before:

1. Taking your laptop to class is a recipe for distraction.
2. Finishing homework before you go to sleep is actually a good thing.
3. Moving yourself to a different location to do work means you might get it done.

These are the things you think I'd have known but it took a while to actually put into practice. Before you know it I'm going to be taking Chuck Wendig's advice and outlining before I start writing. The horrors! I might actually be an adult now.

I'm Only Halfway Through My Coffee

I wonder if writing about writing is at all productive to what I'm trying to accomplish here. I keep trying to think of something else to write about but all that comes out are things about my personal life that the rest of the world could do without knowing.

But when it comes down to it, isn't that a large portion of why and what I write? I mean, it pretty much is all about me. I realized this last night when I was replying to a forward my mother sent me that was one of those Myspace-esque surveys (God bless her) and there was a question about how I handle anger and my answer is that I write it out. And I do. Whether it's in an IM conversation to someone or something like this blog (or my locked Livejournal) or my idea book, I just write everything out. It's just what I do. I guess I never viewed it as something particularly special because I've just always done that. It's easier for me to communicate in the written word than spoken or sung.

I hate blogging sometimes because I feel like I ought to be cohesive and each entry should have a beginning, middle, and end like a terrible five-paragraph essay.

The story I want to write the most has the hardest time coming out because of what associations it has and the situations it was born from.

I Can't Finish Anything

Not only did I fail at finishing NaNoWriMo, I'm also in the process of failing at finishing three - count 'em, three - short stories.

All three of these stories have been thunking around in my head like sneakers in the washing machine since the summer and suddenly they all have beginnings. Not brilliant beginnings, but beginnings all the same. The middles and ends have yet to be formed, though. I wonder if anyone else has this process? I have bits and pieces littering my brain and journal pages and papers all over the place and it takes forever for them to form into complete entities.

The piece I submitted to Windhover (which you can see here) was an idea I had in January, wrote bits of in February, and finally made myself complete (partly because it was for an assignment) in April. I guess deadline is what I need, but even self-imposed deadlines have been a pain in the ass.

A lot of what I write about in my personal/idea journal is how I have a hard time writing. This really doesn't make much sense, since I'm writing about not writing, but when it's all you put on the page it's not much of anything is it? I'm sure reams of paper have been lost to such laments. I just really, really want to not be one of those people. Maybe it's inevitable though.

I'm having a hard time focusing my brain today. I ought to plan out posts like I ought to plan out stories, and be interesting and informative. Guess that'll have to come with the stories.

Goals

I've ranked grad schools. Next semester I might as well take the GRE and start working on a portfolio I can be proud of.

1. University of Montana
2. University of Maine
3. University of Minnesota - Duluth