Let’s be real, here: grief sucks.  It sucks so, so bad.  On the list of Emotions That Are Hard To Deal With, grief is at the top, florescent and harsh and without a hint of remorse.

When you’re drowning in grief, it’s like the world stops, the air goes out, and all you can see and hear is the echoing of your own pain.  Running from it is impossible, and it clings to you for much, much longer than it should.  It grabs your neck and punches your heart and laughs while you shrink down onto the floor or collapse onto the bed; grief doesn’t give a shit.

Which is why it’s so hard to write when you’re not directly feeling it. Read more »

I do my best to stay calm.

In between barely making enough money and working on my art (and occasionally watching True Blood), I force myself to meditate, breathe with intention and stay mindful.  I’ve bought into all that stuff, because I want a balanced, fulfilled life.

But then something happens — something that knocks me over and causes my heart to drop or break or just generally stop — and I doubt all of the work I’ve ever done.

You’re just not built for peace.

At least that’s what I think when I’m crumpled in a heap on the floor, feeling sadness and pain in places like my knee caps and right shoulder.  …Because that isn’t how normal people act.  Normal people aren’t wrecked for years after a break-up, writing songs and plays and short stories while filling journals to the brink with stuff that would make even Sylvia Plath blush. Normal people don’t stay in on a Saturday night so they can exorcise demons with a keyboard.  I have normal friends.  They agree with me on this one.

And so that’s why I wonder: can true artists ever live a “balanced” life? Read more »

I clearly remember the time I read through my first literary sex scene.

I was probably around 10, or 11 years old, and I was probably reading some adult book I had pilfered from my mom’s bedside table or that someone else had pilfered from their own mom’s bedside table.  Where the book came from, or even it’s title, isn’t important, what is important is that Anne Rice was behind it — and spared no details.

Obviously, I wasn’t old enough to understand what was going on in the pages I skimmed through during one long summer afternoon, but even as a very young writer, one who had just barely begun to record life with big, loopy letters, I was concerned with how Rice actually got the courage to write such lurid details.  And they were lurid.  At least to a 10-year-old.

These days, I have that same concern.

Yes, I’m older.  Yes, I understand sex and see it as a natural part of life (I somehow missed the whole Shame and Guilt dance Roman Catholicism can often force its young followers to do…and left the church before they could tell me it was even worse to do It before marriage), but I’m still much preoccupied with putting it into my own writing.

I mean, we all like to watch sex scenes.  And we all like to read them, too.  They’re fun.  They break up the monotony.  They give us ideas. Etc. But.  How does one create a sex scene that doesn’t (ahem…) suck? Read more »

I have a friend who’s read almost every classic piece of literature there is, on her own.  A few of them we had to read in school, but all those others…yeah, she read them on her own time.  For enjoyment.

I hear a lot of people do this sort of thing; pick up an old, thick book that’s been embedded in the literary canon for centuries and read it in a hammock or by the fire, soaking up the famous words for their own benefit.  It sounds impressive.  Especially to me – because almost every classic novel I’ve read has bored me into a coma.

It occurred to me that this was going to be an issue among my peers as soon as I hit high school.  While all my other writing / book nerd buddies found Jane Austin to be a delightful romp, I had to virtually skim the chapters because it annoyed me too much to read slowly.  And while they were all recieving A’s on their essays about The Awakening, I was busy getting the lowest essay grade of my life, because all I could stand to write about was how much I hated the protagonist and good lord why was she so selfish?!  My teacher told me I missed the point of the story.  Maybe I did.  But whatever.  That book pissed me off.  Big time. Read more »

I consider myself a well learned, words-loving person.  I even spent an infinite number of dollars to get a graduate degree in the field of words, so obviously, I’m a fan of writing and reading the writing of others.  When I was a kid, I used to read so voraciously that I could speed my way through half a book a night, and would routinely stay up much later than was advisable just to get in that one last chapter. So yes, I love words.  I love to read.

I just hate the bookstore.

For some reason, buying a book at a store (be it a cute used Mom and Pop thing or a huge Barns’N'EveryBookEverWritten) is an immensely stressful process for me.  Maybe all the choice just freaks me out.  I don’t know.  Whatever the reason, I’ve developed my own way of picking out a new literary escape, a way that the New York Times Book Review may frown on, but that nevertheless keeps my blood pressure where it should be. Read more »

I’m a pretty easy-going person.  It takes a lot to bother me and even more to piss me off completely.  But there is one issue that gets me every time.  Every. Single. Time.  What’s that issue?  Excitement.  No, not the actual emotion.  The over, and downright wrong, use of the word.

How many times, during a 24-hour period, do you hear people say “yeah, I’m excited about this” or “yeah, I’m excited about that”?  Probably a lot of times, right?  But here’s the thing, are these people really excited to do whatever they’re going to do?  Or are they just looking forward to it?

Webster’s defines excitement as exhilaration: the feeling of lively and cheerful joy and the state of being emotionally aroused and worked up.  When you or someone you know says you’re “excited to talk to so-and-so tonight,” are you in a state of lively and cheerful joy?  Most likely: no.  We all feel exhilarated once in a while, but anyone who’s emotionally aroused and worked up on a daily basis needs to check their prescriptions.

So yes, it really, truly bothers me when someone says they’re “excited,” when what they really mean is that they’re “looking forward to it.”  Why are my feathers all ruffled?  Mostly, it’s because the word excited has become so common, we don’t even think about what we’re saying when we say it.  And speaking without real thought – well, that irks me. Read more »

Writing about heartbreak is supposed to be the writer’s forte.  It’s something most people just expect.  Writers have the unique ability to turn a heart-smashing, psyche-damaging event into something beautiful and moving.  Right?

Well, maybe.  But we’re also human, so we have to go through that heart-smashing, psyche-damaging event just as much as the next person.  We have to get through the days where we can’t get out of bed, where we can’t listen to the radio because a specific song might remind us of someone or something…basically, a writer’s time frame of emotional healing is not superhuman.  Perhaps we notice tiny details and jot them down so we can remember them later, but writing about the heartbreak while it’s still fresh is probably not something even the greatest Writers can manage.

Because, imagine it.  Imagine trying to take something that feels so one-sided, so close to you, and putting it down on paper objectively.  It wouldn’t be possible.  The small injustices would still be crawling underneath your skin, blinding you to how things really went down.

The question then becomes, when is it okay to write about heartbreak?  When is it okay to turn our deepest tragedy (or even a minor one) into our greatest work? Read more »

In case you haven’t heard about TED, let me break it down for you: what started out as a “small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading” has turned into a highly Googled, highly popular website that features tons of speakers taking art and ideas to new levels. Elizabeth Gilbert, of Eat, Pray, Love fame, recently took over the internet with her words about nurturing creativity, and I must have gotten at least 8 emails gushing about how awesome it was and how I had to check out it RIGHT NOW. An excerpt: Read more »

In news that isn’t really news, today’s artists are having a hard time making a living. And when they do make a living, they probably aren’t working on their art.

For the majority of us who majored in something that made our parents shift uncomfortably in their seats – or worse yet, acquired a graduate degree in that field, the reality of every day life is indeed a heavy one. Most of us won’t be discovered at an early age and catapulted to fame before we can mentally or emotionally handle it. Hell, most of us won’t even see the first letter in the word fame. But what we will see: bills, long hours at sucky jobs, and more reports about how today’s artists are having a hard time making a living.

I know plenty of talented writers who have settled into lives of little consequence (teaching, working 40 hours a week as editors and proofreaders, transcribing Japanese manuals into English…) because they got too damn tired of walking the poverty line. They fought the good fight as long as they could, but time eventually claimed its victory. They no longer cared if their masterpiece was ever published or garnered lavish acclaim, they just wanted to buy groceries without coupons and own a DVR. Read more »

As the decade draws to a close and my reading habits slow down to a trickle of Us Magazine and the occasional novel bought in a fit of fear that my brain is going soft from all the reality television I watch instead of reading, I’ve decided it’s time to memorialize the weirdest, craziest book I’ve read in the last ten years. Mostly to prove to myself that I once read actual literature, but also to let the rest of you know about perhaps the most messed up, most beautiful book written in the last decade.

And that book is Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis.

I’ve been a fan of Ellis ever since I read American Psycho over the course of two weeks (when I say ‘read’ I mean mostly read with occasional skimming because a girl can only take so many detailed descriptions of mutilated prostitutes). I liked his style, how he didn’t seem to care about what people were going to think about the blatant narcissism and the way women were treated (or disemboweled) in his words. Read more »