Do I Like Grad School?

This is a question I have been stumbling over lately. How I am enjoying grad school.... Last week, one of my profs said "Look around you, these are the friends that you will have around you for the rest of your life." I glanced to my right and left, and frantically tried to work some saliva in to my suddenly very dry mouth. Am I making friends? I am not totally sure that I am. I have too many opinions, the leash I hold on my temper slips too often, and frankly I am just not a "joiner." It takes ages for me to make friends, and only 8 months have passed. Possibly, I am too full of self-loathing to even notice myself making friends, but more likely I scare people off.

Lately I have been angry about something one of my profs did/is doing, and I have no power to stop him or change his mind, I can't protect myself or my classmates. It really sucks. (for the record I am talking about poor teaching pedagogy, not lechery or worse) I hate that feeling. Powerlessness. The worst part of planning my wedding was the continuous confrontation with vendors and specialists who believe that they have an advantage over you, because they have what you want/need in order to plan the "perfect wedding" and they take advantage of you, squeeze as much money out of you as they can, renege on agreements, and generally treat you very poorly. This is why I ended up doing so much of the work myself or hiring friends who are not in the wedding business to do the things I could not. Ultimately, my wedding was not perfect; it was beautiful, charming, and utterly imperfect. My point, is that doing things for myself stopped that feeling of powerlessness. I think that if professor dinkwad knew what a horrible feeling this is he would rethink his instructional practises. Maybe.

I am presently writing a book review on an awesome illustrated book, The Wild Swans. Thomas Aquinas Maguire rendered Hans Christian Andersen's classic fairy tale in the most gorgeous pencil and tea-stain sketches. It's not bound in traditional book fashion, instead each panel is connected to the next, and it comes folded neatly in a "book" but stretches out over 60 feet in length. The panels often blur into each other, creating such gorgeous and weird landscapes... it is truly my favourite book right now. Of course, it helps that it is also my favourite fairytale. Juliet Marillier wrote a similarly powerful version of this story, in her book Daughter of the Forest. People are generally aware that that is my all-time favourite book. However, I haven't got a clue how to write a professional review essay, so I am just kind of avoiding it/gathering my thoughts elsewhere...

I said last semester that I was going to do some writing, and I did only the tiniest amount. This is fine. Grad school is busy, the assignments are generally not difficult, but time consuming. Oddly, what I consider time-consuming is evidently only a fraction as time-consuming as my classmates find them to be. I keep hearing these nightmare stories of "Oh, man! I was up all night finishing that!" And I, who put stuff off to go see movies, watch Netflix and read novels for fun during the semester, generally feel no stress, and I have never yet been up later than one am to finish an assignment. It is almost as if my classmates are having a contest to see who can get more worked up, more stressed out. The atmosphere is almost toxic at times. I was listening to a newstalk radio story about second-hand stress, apparently that's a thing. People who express their feelings of stress out loud to their neighbours are capable or infecting others with those feelings. Something to keep in mind. A few careless words can send another person into a tail-spin, evidently.

I suppose I shouldn't avoid my paper any longer. Still lots of work to be done.

Oh, but wait! I am trying to decide which story to focus on for my summer novel project.
There are several I could work on:

1. time travel rescue, save the earth, avoid discovery, underwater ferris wheel, living ghosts, middle grade science fiction.
2. tales of settlement/invasion, herb lore, rescuer/conqueror, xenophobia, romance, adventure, folk tales, young adult fantasy.
3. teenage ghost story, grief, denial, high school, intervention, spiral, acceptance, saying goodbye, young adult fiction.
4. dreamscape, flight, reincarnation, alzheimers, dark-souls/hungry ghosts, birgitte and gaidal cain, dual reality, lost love, adult fiction.

Working at the EPL this summer should still leave me with lots of time to write. Just need to pick one and get to it! I dream of these stories... I need to do something about that.

So This is Grad School?

Two years later....
I find myself in a Masters program! (MLIS) And most days, I feel a little bewildered by how I got here. I was teaching, and putting off writing my novels, dating my boyfriend, living in Regina, tweeting about the assinine things students do... and now I'm married, and working a menial job, and living in Edmonton, and I'm a student. And I always have my phone out in class, I skip doing my readings in favour of ... other stuff... and now I don't have time to write my novel. And.... I am desperately afraid I will lose the pieces of it that are waiting to be put together.  And its NaNoWriMo and I have nine reasons why I won't be participating. And they are all due this month. Bugger. So, I am going to be selfish. I am going to write for myself, a little bit. A blog here and there, and a few hundred words of my story. I don't have time to put my wedding pictures in an album, and I'm barely scraping together the time to write my thank you cards... but I am going to find time for this. Because I think I am a writer. And the defining characteristic of a writer is that she.... writes. So this is it. This is me making a committment. To write. I really miss my writing group. And by that I specifically mean Natasha Morrow, and Devon Pacholik, Kelli Kellington (who I actually see now and then), and a few other people from my writing classes. How will I know how I am doing if no one is there to read my stuff?
I wish I had a time machine. I would spend a lot of time back in Medrie's class.
Sigh.
Don't expect scholarly writing here. I'm just rambling.

Waiting for the Right Moment

There are links on my page to websites and blogs that tell me how to get published and advise me to go! try now! send it away now! You never know, they might publish it!
...but that is just not how I operate. I have legitimate excuses, people, for why I cannot send away my writing yet.
I am really busy. Two jobs, two cats, two classes, two families, two weddings, too many friends, four siblings, two of whom still need care and feeding because they are teenagers and if you don't spend time with them they will go down the wrong path because they feel unloved and need guidance.
My boyfriend doesn't require attention most of the time, but he misses me eventually.
My mother needs almost as much care and feeding as my younger siblings it seems sometimes...
Did you know I haven't gotten more than six hours of sleep in two years? Never. I never ever sleep. I don't sleep and these links are telling me to write write write and send send send! Sure, I guess I will just do that then. But not yet. when I have time to breathe and sleep all the way from elevan pm to 7 am, and take a deep breath and look at my clean apartment without feeling guilty about all the deadlines that are rushing up to meet me, then, I will pull out some writing and click on some links and I will see about publishing my writing.
That is why I have those links there on both sides of my blog homepage. That is why I follow six publishing houses on my twitter account, and countless literary agents and authors, despite the fact that I rarely read their tweets. It's for later. It will be there when I have time and I'm ready to focus on publishing. Alexander Mcleod wrote that you can't be a writer and a runner. Not, if you want to excel at something. Right now, it seems I am a runner, but I won't be forever.

Of course I realize that everyone in the flippin world is busy... and no I am not under the impression that people who publish their writiing have an excess of spare time. I am only talking about my life, and my feeling that I am under too much pressure right now to pursue it. But the information is there so that I can do it when I am ready, and that is a comforting knowledge. Indeed.

The Art of Creating

I guess there were expectations for my blog that I didn't exactly meet. I meant to, like for instance, I went on that walk, and took those pictures. I just never put them up. But there's a reason...

I never walk around my neighbourhood, I don't even do my runs in my neighbourhood. The only thing that happens in my neighbourhood is my car gets frequently vandalised there. So, I will put those pictures up tonight, but I feel you should know that they don't represent the space where I create. I am bound to this space because it is rare to find an apartment building that accepts pets, and its conveniently close to one of my jobs and there's a grocery store and a tim hortons all within a stones throw of my front door. So lets just say this is the foregrounding of my photos.

The walk I took is the only walk I do take in my neighbourhood. Because, you see, there is one more convience about the space I live in. It is through a playground and around the corner from my Grandparents house. So I walk there as frequently as I can, which is never frequently enough, and I learn things like how to bake bread and make soup, and sew patches and quilt useful items like a laptop sleeve, or I teach my grandmother how to surf the interweb and download patterns and recipes, or stream videos like simple exercises for seniors. It's the only walk worth taking in my neighbourhood.

It seems like I should mention here where I am when I actually do my creating.  I create at the most inconvenient times. When I have an armload of books at Chapters I will suddenly become possessed by an idea that won't let me go until I swipe some till tape and write it down. When I am running around the lake and there isn't a pen in sight, I suddenly know exactly how to say that thing I have been trying to say. When I am driving in my car and my music is up and I have 57 kilometers between me and a pen and paper. These are the moments when I create.

Isn't life funny...

The End?

It is weird to think that the creative writing class that brought this blog into existence has come to an end. What will become of us now? Of course I plan to keep writing, and although I have two other blogs and a twitter account (mostly unused) I like to think  I will keep this one going as well. I rarely write anything on my other blogs, and 140 characters isn't really enough space to ponder through anything meaningful (I think) so I like to believe I will continue to use this blog to catalogue my writing trials and tribulations, and hopefully keep in contact with my classmates whose writing I have enjoyed an awful lot. It was a stressful semester and i don't think I will miss it. But I will miss the push to write. I will have to find a new way to push myself.

Some of us talked about the idea of sharing our 'other stories,' like the ones that we didn't get to workshop, or even other writing from outside class, I would be interested to know if anyone would like to do such a thing now that the semester is over. I guess leave me a message or send me an email  at j.janemorris@gmail.com if you do.
So, here goes, another ending, another new beginning.

Talk to you soon.

Jessie

More To Say

I didn't get a chance to say a couple things at the end of my presentation on Thursday, nothing too, too important, but things I would have said if there had been time.

One thing is that I talked about how literature has changed, but I didn't get a chance to say that I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing. Nor do I think it's a particularly good thing. The lessons to be gained from a lot of popular literature today involve lessons about friendship, following your "heart" (read: id) and encouragement to use one's imagination, all are important values to internalize. More important than lessons about honestly, equality and self sacrifice? Nope. But they certainly do deserve a place on my book shelf. Balance is important, here, as in so many places.

The other thing I didn't get to talk about is the question "why has the situation reversed itself?" This question seems to have an answer based largely in capitalism. Happy Endings sell. Why read a copy of Little Red Riding Hood that ends starkly with Red's death? That's not a happy feeling at all. (but it does give you something to think about!) Why not bring Red back to life by killing the wolf, having her pop out of his belly uninjured, and completely overshadow the warning of the story? Don't mind if I do! Happy endings don't make most of us think the same way a stark ending does.

I can't be the only one who has noticed that more and more people seem to want to live in a consequence-free society. I mean, that's why we buy insurance for our cars right? To dodge the consequences of our mistakes? (yes, I do believe in insurance) That's also why we tell lies, why we convinced our parents to call us in sick to school when we had a test we didn't study for, and a miriad of other ways we dodge consequences. If we can't face consequences in the literature we read, how are we supposed to do it in our own lives?
On the other hand, although literature with dark or serious messages does exist in bookstores, it has lately come under fire by a concerned citizen writing for the Wall Street Journal.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303657404576357622592697038.html?mod=wsj_share_twitter

 After reading her "article" I was left with the impression that as a child, this woman comforted her fears by throwing a blanket over her head and pretending the bad things couldn't find her, and somehow I doubt she ever stopped. My point is that avoiding acknowledging that bad things happen doesn't prevent them from happening, and likewise, acknowledging them isn't the same as inviting them to happen. Reading about tough subjects, experiencing loss, or hurt, or fear through literature can help a person to cope in the event that something similar ever comes their way.

A quote by YA author Chris Crutcher summarizes my view (and his) on the subject quite nicely,

 "I think people who believe we can protect our children by keeping them ignorant of hard times and the language those times are told in, don't realize that by showing our fear of issues and language that are "everyday" to our children, we take ourselves off that short list of people to turn to in a real crisis."
No, I don't think it would be healthy to fill our minds with only the darkest, most didactic images available, stories about hope and friendship and silliness are absolutely necessary to uplift us and offer us some distraction from what can be a daunting world. But you cannot fully appreciate the light if you never experience the dark.

I Guess I'm a Writer...