Writing Is My Drink and My 26-Minute Memoir

This summer I had a few precious weeks of more open-ended time that I could spend writing. It was quite terrifying and I felt the pressure to produce after long stretches of go-go-go work and home life. I knew I had to find a way to avoid the self-sabotage of frittering away that all-too-rare time.

In moments like these I cling to my collection of "writer's self-help" resources. One of my go-to books has been Writing Is My Drink by Theo Pauline Nestor. I was particularly inspired (once again) by her description of breaking through a terrible block writing her graduate thesis after reading Virginia Valian’s essay “Learning to Work” from Working It Out: 23 Women Writers, Artists, Scientists, and Scholars Talk About Their Lives and Work. I discovered this long out-of-print book in FIT's library while developing my Creative Imagination honors course over a decade ago. I am so happy that Theo has provided a PDF of Valian's piece on her site.

At the end of one of the chapters Theo gives a prompt for a "26-Minute Memoir" and directs readers to her website for more information. I did the exercise and decided to email Theo my piece, even though she hadn't published any new ones since 2015.

Lo and behold, a few weeks later, Theo wrote back and said she had been thinking of posting them again, and wanted to start with mine!

This morning, on the brink of the Fall 2017 semester, as I prepare to lead my department and teach my students (and support my son, who is now taking classes there), I got an email from Theo with a link to my piece on her website. I am even more terrified--of what it reveals about me as a person, and of what it means to me as a writer. Now I really have no excuse not to do the work. I am learning, thanks to Theo, Virginia, and many others who have done it before me, and to my students who will just be starting this adventure next week.

Ah, Summer! Taking the Virtual Blog Tour...

Summer is half over already (or something like that), and all of the "real work" I was gonna do has yet to be done. Instead, I have been teaching (2 online classes in June), parenting (more on that later), and plunging into a healthy new lifestyle of plant-based food and regular exercise. Oh, and recovering from one heck of an academic year, both for myself and my kids. As I have learned many times over the years, I really need a deadline, and a metaphorical cattle prod, to get words down on the page and out in the world.

So I was delighted to be invited by a dear and long-time friend, April Lindner, to participate in a "virtual blog tour," aimed at giving more exposure to blogs that readers may not have seen before. It's been quite awhile since I've posted (yikes!), so I figured this would be a perfect opportunity to get Saint Nobody up and running again--in hopes of revving up my own writing. This is the first in a series on various subjects I've saved up since my last post--time to put it out there.

First, meet April, the author of two poetry collections, This Bed Our Bodies Shaped from Able Muse Press and Skin from Texas Tech University Press.  She also has written three young adult novels—Jane, Catherine, and the forthcoming Love, Lucy, all published by Poppy. With R. S. Gwynn, she co-edited Contemporary American Poetry, in Longman’s Penguin Academics series.  A professor of English at Saint Joseph’s University, she lives in Havertown, Pennsylvania.

April and I were classmates in the PhD program in Creative Writing at the University of Cincinnati many moons ago. We read drafts of each others' poems in workshops, were roomies at my first-ever AWP Conference (Pittsburgh '95), and walked together for our doctoral hooding ceremony in 1998. It's been wonderful to see April from time to time at AWP and the West Chester Poetry Conference near her home in the Philly area. I've been a fan of her poetry for years, and have watched her career as a YA novelist with admiration ever since my niece, Mary, devoured the signed copy of Jane I gave her in 2012. I'll be posting a poem of April's, which I've used often in my classes, later in the week.

The next component of the blog tour meme is a quick "self-interview." Because this post is already fairly long, I will answer briefly here, and elaborate a bit in future posts.

1. What am I currently working on?

the way life should be

We are spending some time in Vacationland--the beach, the lakes, the mountains. More soon!

absence makes the...

blogger feel guilty. i am not going to even use capital letters in this posting because i feel very, very small as a blogger right now! it's been a full summer: three classes, four conferences, two rental cars, one new relationship (!), one new apartment (!!), one fantastic classic rock concert, a couple dozen books sold (i think), lots and lots of miles and not enough hours of sleep.

i am still surrounded by boxes, slowly settling in, just in time for things to start up at school again and take over my brain entirely!

some links to show what i was up to:

conferencing and communing:
west chester poetry conference
ocean state writers' conference
antioch writers' workshop
sewanee writers' conference

addictions, libations, birthday celebrations
brother bear's coffee cafe
young's jersey dairy
stirling's coffee house
lombardi's pizza
sugar sweet sunshine

romance, excitement, tlc
craftbar
new jersey transit
ferguson / commonhealth
look see chinese restaurant
bottle king
yes