One line in one minute

Today as part of a survey I was asked, What do you enjoy doing in your free time? And I easily answered, Oh, yoga and reading and walking and writing, and realized that I haven't been doing any of those things lately unless school-related (downward-facing dog grading papers?), and must remedy this immediately, like right now, hence this line.

This is not an AWP recap

Maybe you know this already: AWP is the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, and last week/weekend was its annual conference in Chicago. I could spend some time telling you about the panels and readings I went to, but chances are you were one of the 10,000 people there, too. And besides, I still need some time to process. To digest.

Which brings me to: while packing, I removed a sweater from my suitcase so as to make room for a big thing of Cheez-Its. I travel in style. I also devoured Giordano's pizza, a lovely basil/mozz/tomato flatbread sandwich from Cosi (the one chain that has yet to settle in Indy, apparently), and taro, spring rolls, and pad thai at Tamarind. Oh! Also had a pretty great cheeseburger with enormous pickle on the side at Buddy Guy's Legends, where my dearheart friend Sarah was performing, along with other writers who are musicians. Sarah is a co-founder of Octave Magazine. If you are musical, and a writer, then you should send them something.

There were many celebrities at AWP, too many to count. Writing celebrities, that is, which means the gathered throngs of writers were swooning, while US Weekly would have been checking its iPhone or looking over your shoulder while talking to you for more interesting faces. (Actually, writers do that, too.) I did not see movie stars Megan Fox or Shia LaBeouf at AWP, but handily, you can find them in my latest headline poem at Punchnel's: "What Shia LaBeouf Won't Do with Megan Fox."

Is it a continuation of my delusions that I hope somebody manages to get this to MF and SL for their reading pleasure? Have their people call my people. My people are 17 months old and are the boss of me and the rest of the universe. My people will answer the phone if given the chance, yell "HI!", and then hang up/press buttons for as long as allowed. Speaking of, the boss is napping, it's fake spring break (one school's off, one school's on), and I've got to get back to revising. It's going well, I think. It's happening in bits and pieces, fits and starts, dribs and drabs. Name your cliche for piecemeal. It's early March and I've got candy corn and that is excellent revision fuel. Sweet dreams, little lambs.

Dear Diary

Oh, Dear Diary, so much has happened lately that I don't know where to begin!

I shook dreamy Jimmy Fallon's hand at a taping of his show in Indy. He was here for the Super Bowl, along with a gazillion other people. I saw Patriots coach Bill Belichick riding on a bus. I saw Shaquille O'Neal in pink bikini bottoms, and Fitz and the Tantrums in nice blazers. I saw lots of other people on screens, even though they were a few miles away. Sometimes I like to keep my distance.

Diary, I have been lecturing to nearly 200 undergrads on Candide and grading up a storm. We talk about poetry next, then Kafka. Beetles! Allegory! Kafkaesque! I am, if you cannot tell, a little excited. The Hunger Games is also on the syllabus. Yes.

My sweet little toddler has been sick, diary, and boy have we had a hard winter. But he's healthy and cheerful now, and demanding a COOKIE after we let him have one at a Super Bowl party, where he kept saying MMM, COOKIE, MMM, and signing "more." He had never had a cookie before, nor had he ever said the word cookie. It was oatmeal chocolate chip. He ate three. Including half of one he ripped from my hand. Also he had his first chips. And a huge bowl of rigatoni. My boy did the Super Bowl up RIGHT. He may never eat a vegetable again, but hey.

Diary, I wrote another headline poem. This one's called "Astronauts answer YouTube questions from space," and it appears in Sweet. I think you will like it.

While we're on the subject of headline poems, lately I am meditating on Ezra Pound's assertion that poetry is news that stays news. The sentiment kind of blows my mind. Journalistic-literary-something-something worlds colliding.

I am, diary, a little tired.

But life is good. I am revising a certain thing to send back to a certain place. Did I just jinx it? NO. I am only telling you, diary, because I know I can trust you. But not with the specifics. Sorry, friend.

And I forgot to tell you, this is oldish news but hopefully news that stays news, but my short story "Resuscitation" came out in Blackbird a little while ago. This character, Shel, is one I kind of wonder about, still. What's she doing now? Maybe I need to find out.

Hugs and kisses,

Pre-united and it feels so good

Please join my obsession with the Bourne franchise of films as I pitch prequel ideas at Punchnel's. It is my irrational expectation that one of you, via six degrees of separation, will get this to Matt Damon.

Don't make Bourne come after you.

Spreadsheet No More! A tale of liberation.

In 2008-2009-2010, I have read 61 books, 70 books, and 40 books, respectively. I tallied my reading habits on nerdalicious spreadsheets, sharing and comparing with my readerly friends. We had some great conversations over those lists, didn't we, friends? Didn't we?

Lookit. I wimped out this year.

No spreadsheet. No list. Occasionally I updated the column on the right side of this page, the "Now Reading," though I declined to include the books I was reading to my son, now almost 15 months old. There would be quite a few repeats on that list, including a book we have unofficially titled "Sad Animals."

Huge point of pride that this little guy loves books. He'll clamber into your lap with a book in hand, and point out certain pictures and read along. His favorite books often involve the word "no," which he delights in saying.

Did I distract you yet from the lack of spreadsheet? It is partially due to caring for baby that I neglected to care about logging my book list. To be honest, I used him as an excuse: I knew I'd be busy and never started a list in the first place. It was freeing to read indiscriminately and not think about how the books stacked up, or how many books I'd have to read to reach the previous year's total, or whether I seemed to be reading more nonfiction versus fiction or men versus women. All of that tracking I did was interesting for a time, and helpful in making conscious choices about reading material. But the unconscious can be a powerful ally, I think, in picking books that you not only want to read, but might even need to read.

A few of the ones I read and loved (or am still reading, and ones that I can, at this moment and without a spreadsheet as a reminder, remember): Kate Atkinson's Started Early, Took My Dog; Jo Ann Beard's In Zanesville; Bob Hicok's Words for Empty, Words for Full; Teju Cole's Open City; David Foster Wallace's The Pale King; Marilynne Robinson's Gilead (again); Patricia Henley's Other Heartbreaks; Michael Martone's Four For a Quarter; Mark Neely's Four of a Kind; Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad; Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story; Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games trilogy; and Leah Stewart's Husband and Wife.

My awesome sister and brother-in-law got me a Kindle for Christmas, which has been fantastic. The first book I downloaded was Thoreau's Walden. A compromise of sorts: taking baby steps into the technology, dearhearts. (Also: free book.) Can't imagine ever giving up paper books, but I'm excited by the prospect that having more options will equate to more reading next year.

Happy almost-2012. And please send me your recommended reads.

11 lines in 11 minutes

1. When I was in college, we called an automated line to find out our grades in advance of receiving paper copies; you had to listen to a maddeningly slow voice spell out the course and section number and then likely you would hear, "GRADE. NOT YET. SUBMITTED."

2. The message I'd like to send at present: GRADE. NOT YET. SUBMITTED.

3. During the Victoria's Secret Runway Show tonight, with musical guest Kanye West, he spoke of his own departed angel, his mother; he dedicated a song to her as 19-yr-old women dressed in angel wings strutted past.

4. His mother died of complications from plastic surgery.

5. I am living the American dream, said one corseted model.

6. This was about six minutes worth of the show, and then we watched LOUIE, in which the title character, a much younger male comedian, came on to the much older Joan Rivers.

7. Today I read a YA blog that called this generation of young people the most literate and text-savvy of all time.

8. Eggs, it seems, taste different lately, almost as if they've changed the recipe, like the chickens got together and cracked open (ha) a cookbook and said, Well, how about this?

9. If I were a different sort, I would WebMD the symptom: WHAT DOES IT MEAN WHEN EGGS TASTE DIFFERENT?

10. Better not to know.

11. Ah, there's twelve minutes, and I've missed my designated window, and we haven't even gotten to the tabloid narratives observed at the grocery store, which can be a topic for a later date. (Teaser: ANGELINA RUINS THANKSGIVING. And it hadn't even happened yet.)

It's here. Welcome, book.

Sudden Flash Youth, a new collection of young adult flash fiction from Persea Books, is out now. It includes my short piece, "For Good," about Juan and Cece at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. You'll find work from Steve Almond, Richard Bausch, Stuart Dybeck, Dave Eggers, Pia Z. Erhardt, Meg Kearney, Paul Lisicky, Naomi Shihab Nye, Pamela Painter, Robert Shapard, Alice Walker, and many, many others. The book is edited by Christine Perkins-Hazuka, Tom Hazuka, and Mark Budman.

This piece of art gets special mention in my story (The artist is Do-Ho Suh):

And so does this one, by artist Robert Indiana:

A funny thing happened on the way to the dinner

So there I am, at the gorgeous Central Library as part of the Indiana Author's Award event. I have two back-to-back sessions during the day, and before the first one starts, I have a minute to duck into the Author's Fair and say hello to Bich Minh Nguyen, one of the finalists for the Emerging Author award (the other finalists were Micah Ling and Aaron Michael Morales.) Bich was kind enough to invite me to join her for the awards dinner at Purdue's table -- she teaches at Purdue, which is where I earned my MFA.

I also see Dick Wolfsie sitting at one of the tables in front of a stack of books. I say hello, and tell him that I had the pleasure of watching a taping of his show with my class more than 20 years ago at Union Station.

"Great!" he says, nice as can be. "Are you still a teacher?"

This is where I had to explain that yes, I am now a teacher, but back then, well, I was in the sixth grade.

Poor Dick Wolfsie was mortified. He clapped his hands over his mouth and apologized. "Wait until my wife hears about this." (Note to Dick Wolfsie's wife: It was totally fine. Funny, in fact.)

My sessions were titled "Get Started," a course I'd taught before for the Writers' Center of Indiana. My first group kicked off with participants asking a number of questions, which helped focus the discussion. We wrote a little, talked a little more, and people discussed the stages of their various writing projects (for some, they had yet to begin, so "Get Started" made perfect sense.) It was a great, participatory group. Afterwards, I watched two attendees introduce themselves, then exchange contact information along with meaningful hugs. Not exactly typical of a short writing session, but hey: I'm thrilled that connections were made.

Have I mentioned that I did not eat lunch, not officially, on this day? It had been a busy morning. My husband had rented an aerator for the lawn, and drove across town to do my parents' lawn, too. When he got home, he looked peaked. "I feel horrible," he said, and collapsed into bed.

Really? I was thinking. I haven't showered, and the baby needs to eat, and he's taking a nap? I looked closer. He was more than peaked, he was green. And he'd have to take care of the baby -- who'd had a bug two days before, which my husband must've caught -- when I left to teach. "Rest," I said, "then call my mom if you need her." Grammy's always on call. Three cheers for Grammy!

So I wheeled the high chair over to the bathroom door and took a quick shower while the baby ate. He whined at first, then kicked his feet and laughed each time I peek-a-booed around the shower curtain. I quickly got ready and grabbed a banana to go. Got through the first session, then realized I'd need a little more sustenance. I bought a granola bar at the library cafe and ducked into the now-empty author's fair room to eat.

A man walks in. "Are you an author?" he asks. "Are you famous?"

"Um, yes?" I say. "And no."

We chatted a bit about his writing, his identity crisis, his career change. I gulped down the granola bar. I only had a few minutes before the next session, and I raced off. I do a lot of racing around these days, which is funny considering my high school volleyball teammates used to call me Eeyore. Because I was slow. Also: grumpy.

The second session went a little differently. People came in and out, sort of trying out the class before deciding it wasn't for them. Or maybe they wanted to hit more than one session before heading home. There was a distracted vibe. I talked about getting messy, creatively, rather than trying to shoehorn ideas into a prearranged format. "But I'm halfway done!" one person argued. "I've got it all mapped out on a spreadsheet, and now you're telling me to start over?"

Was I? I didn't think so. I had been talking about getting started. As the title of the session would suggest. Even so, I began to sweat. Was this nerves? Students offer challenges all the time, and usually it doesn't faze me. I like trying to think on my feet and explain something in a new way. But I was definitely sweating. Maybe I shouldn't have worn a wool sweater.

I was in the middle of a sentence, answering a question about the merits of MFA programs, when I knew that it wasn't nerves. I felt sick.

"I need to excuse myself," I said. "If I'm not back in five minutes, we'll have to cancel."

Deep breathing got me to the bathroom, where I proceeded to retch my meager lunch into the toilet. "Sorry," I said weakly to the person in the next stall, who was nice enough to ask if I was OK.

Actually, now I felt great. "I'm fine," I said emphatically, popped a Breathsaver, and returned to the room to finish the session. A concerned trio of library staff waited for me there, and I reassured them I could finish the remaining ten minutes. And I did. I can still make the dinner, I told myself. That was a one-time thing.

It wasn't. I had to pull over once on the way home, and couldn't even make it to the passenger side to get sick on busy College Ave. Someone, I thought, is going to drive into my open car door, and also my head, and this will be a humiliating way to die. While vomiting on the roadside.

"I can still make the dinner," I said when I got home. My husband eyed me from the couch; my mom shook her head doubtfully. I laid down on the floor. My sweet baby scooted over and flopped his body over mine as if giving me a hug.

"Just a sec," I said, and ran to the bathroom.

Old Faithful, my husband called me, once I was well enough to joke about such things. I stayed in bed until late afternoon Sunday. The bug my son had and my husband nearly had was no joke.

So, I missed the dinner, which, judging by all of your photos on Facebook, was really nice. Congratulations go out to poet Micah Ling, who won the Emerging Author award, and I wished I'd had the chance to talk to her, and to catch up with Bich, and to meet Aaron, another Purdue MFA grad.

Jell-O and soup and saltines and a really great husband (and mom, who came back on Monday to take care of me AND the baby) fixed me up right. Baby's feeling great now, too. Here's hoping I'll keep my clean bill of health for the Gathering of Writers this Saturday. I'll continue my strict regimen of granola bar avoidance, and everything should be just fine.

In which I want a crepe but do not get one

Indianapolis Monthly has just made me swoon, via "The Dish," with mention of banana and Nutella crepes. It is too late to get some, hour-wise. Must distract self. And perhaps you!

Me, in words:
A headline poem, "Monkeys Ponder What Could Have Been," in Gargoyle 57

An interview with PANK Magazine, at their blog

Short fiction, "Arrested Development," in Midwestern Gothic

Me, in events:
I'm teaching two "Get Started" sessions at the Indianapolis Central Library on Saturday, from 1-2:30 p.m., and also from 3-4:30 p.m. This is part of the Indiana Authors Award event. Very excited to attend the dinner. Business attire is recommended! I do not know exactly what this means, which is part of the excitement.

And, I'm teaching a session on the essay at the Gathering of Writers, a fantastic annual event put on by the Writers' Center of Indiana.

(I still want those crepes. Man.)

Uh-oh

Today's horoscope: "Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): The answers you need may be lost in the mail or floating in cyberspace. You and your can-do attitude will prevail."

That's a nice little uplift at the end. Still. THE ANSWERS I NEED MAY BE FLOATING IN CYBERSPACE? Super. I'll just get started tracking them down. Because cyberspace is small, easily managed, and it shouldn't take me, oh, more than an hour.

Also I have tons of spare time! So there's that.

USPS, I still love you. Whitney Houston-style: I will always love you. Do not be confused, though: I am not saying you are Kevin Costner in The Bodyguard. Which is playing simultaneously in living rooms across the nation, on three different channels, at any given point on any given day.

Except Sunday.