Happy New Year! 

Let me get some business out of the way: the inaugural Nob Hill 6-week session of The Lab starts TONIGHT (1/24), and there may still be one seat left. Email me ASAP if you'd like to sign up. 

And big Thank Yous to everyone who helped spread the word! 

(Now for the obligatory...) Keep up with The Lab :: Writing Classes with Matthew Clark Davison on Facebook; on Twitter. 

Now for a long overdue update: 

***

I hear the mail carrier below my window in the entryway of my building while I'm listening to and simultaneously re-reading "A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor. By today's standards, it's a poor-quality, but none-the-less riveting recording of her actual voice at Vanderbilt University in 1959. I'm delighted by how funny Ms. O'Connor was on that day, how rapt the audience seemed by their bursts of laughter, especially given how serious Ms. O'Connor comes across in her essays on writing, and how grim the subject matter of much of her fiction, even when humorous.

I book mark it, pause the recording, and run downstairs to my building's entryway to give the carrier a DVD mailer I've needed to return for a month. She takes it and hands me my stack of mail. In it, there's a card my mother told me to expect. I open it on the way back to my office, knowing she recently visited her sisters and mom in Wisconsin. Inside, there's a photograph with me in it from 1976. The photo is of a road trip--and while I'm grateful that ours did not end up like the one in the O'Connor story--it's not entirely unlike it either: family sets out on a vacation. A woman in slacks. A grandmother and young boy in tow. Detour onto an unpaved road. 

I stare at the photo for a while and then return to reading/listening to the story. My head is full of the imagery from the parts of the south I've never been, and memories of my childhood. Both the memory and the story act as filters and re-contextualize the other.

It's this process that makes me feel very happy to be alive. 

It's the end of the first month of The New Year, so back to school and to the start of a new session of The Lab. It's been a great break, but I can hardly wait to get back into the mix. Why? Because of this: how listening to someone else's story can help you tell your own.

I reach the part where The Misfit says, "My daddy said I was a different breed of dog from my brothers and sisters. 'You know,' Daddy said, 'it's some that can live their whole life without asking about it and it's others has to know why it is, and this boy is one of the latters. He's going to be into everything!'"

Most of the writers and artists I know, in a moment if being "into everything," were told a version of what The Misfit's father said. Given what you can glean from The Misfit's life circumstances, most of us who share his propensity for having "to know why" are fortunate to have found our creative outlets.

I am not implying that without art we would have become serial killers...but given the personality of a couple of the writers (and aspiring writers) I've met...well...I not ruling it out either.

In the photo, I was six: two years younger than O'Connor's character John Wesley. We'd parked on a dead-end road in Broomsfield, Colorado. I'm holding onto my Grandpa Clark's hand. Grandma Clark is holding onto Grampa's arm with one hand, and her sister Dorothy's with the other. A chain of four of us stand on a narrow and gravely road with a sedan parked a couple hundred yards in the distance at the base of a stone cliff.

Why was I the only kid in the picture? Where were my brothers? My parents? Who took the photograph? Why was there a car at the dead end? What am I holding in my left hand? Wasn't Dorothy one of my aunts who died of alcoholism? She looks so healthy and capable in her pleated white slacks and open-necked, white-and-red striped blouse. Why didn't she get help? 

Now I'm thinking of the new novel I'm writing. How little I know about Thomas' childhood, and how important it is to the story (in ways I don't know why, but nonetheless know); specifically his childhood relationship to his brothers. And suddenly, I have an idea to interject a memory of his childhood, the only kid with a bunch of adults on this road trip. Thomas will remember it in a scene where, shortly after a tragedy happens in both their lives, he is about to see and have dinner with his father.  

My memory of my Grandpa Clark, who died shortly after my newly acquired photograph was taken, is of a very quiet man. I liked him and felt he liked me. I don't get to see Grandma Clark very often, but she, too, has always been my ally. I specifically remember her keeping an eye on me during the years my parents could describe as my being "into everything," before I left home for good, when my against-the-grain personality started to emerge.

Grandma Clark and I once ditched the rest of the folks in a lake house at a family reunion, got into a rowboat and made our way far from shore. Surrounded by water, she told me stories about growing up on a farm, what it was like to be married to Grandpa, what my mom had been like as a little girl. If her stories took her to a place that triggered it, like the childhood death of her oldest son, or the day my mom left home, Grandma cried freely, just like I always had, and just like my mother did and still does. That day, Grandma kept talking through her tears and snot and constricted throat until the stories shifted into scenes that made her laugh. 

Why? Neither of my grandmothers was anything like the grandmother in the story. So, did I think of myself like her? A racist, petulant, selfish, manipulative liar who seemed to require a gun in her face after witnessing each member of her family's murders before she could access her own decency? 

No, I didn't. But perhaps more importantly: Yes, I did.

It bugs me when people reduce art and the people who make it. "It's an Asian-American book." "It's a Black play." "It's Cuban art." The other night I made the mistake of confronting a dear friend for calling a movie that focuses on two guys in love "a gay movie."

My friend was merely using economical language. It didn't warrant a confrontation. Still, I couldn't help asking her if she'd refer to any of the thousands of movies focusing on a lover relationship between a man and a woman as "straight" or "heterosexual." No, I said. You wouldn't. You'd refer to the themes and the actors and the writing and the script and the cinematography. It halted--or at very least, derailed--what could have been an interesting conversation. 

Petulance?  

As a teacher, I reduce art and the people who make it all the time. If my experience allows me to assume, Flannery O'Connor's virtuosity with the short story probably has nothing to do with the fact that she was Southern, a woman, or Catholic. There are plenty of people who fit those categories and others who have lost their father to a disease they'd later suffer from, too. I sometimes talk to students as if it's BECAUSE OF these things that O'Connor was able to write these stories--rather than the fact that she was able to write amazing stories IN SPITE OF certain challenges. 

I use broad strokes of her biography in attempt to manipulate students. I want them to find her stories as moving as I find them. It's an attempt to validate my own tastes and what resonates for me. I exploit these facts outside of the story itself to further my theories about what I think O'Connor sought to achieve. 

Hypocricy? 

O'Connor, in almost all her stories, reminds me of what can happen when there's no outlet for a person's energy. The danger of being trapped. Whether it's trapped in a body that doesn't work--or trapped in a time or town or job that limits the person's options and forces the person to downsize his or her dreams and desires. 

Last semester at SFSU, I taught a graduate-level process class called Characterization. In it, ten smart aspiring writers showed up every week. In addition to a bunch of short stories, we discussed the novels Sula, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and The Yacoubian Building. On the surface, these three books have nearly nothing in common. The subject matter and style in which each author chose to depict her or his characters allowed us to freely experiment with the limitless choices in how we depict our own. Even though the focus was on character, a common theme emerged in the works: what happens when the opportunities available for expression do not match the person's capacity to create and give them form? 

2011 was an especially challenging year. I didn't get a couple of things that I worked hard for and really wanted. I came close, which was, on one level, encouraging; but on another level even more painful. As embarrassing as it is to admit, I metaphorically felt like there was someone there with a gun to shoot me every minute. Career stuff was hard. Family health scares were hard. Other changes, too. Hard, but not impossible. Not even close. And I owe so much to the freedom I have, that Sula and Oscar and Taha el Shazli and John Wesly's grandmother did not. 

In thinking about what to say in this newsletter/update, I was tempted to do a repeat of last year. Of singing the praises of former students who've gained admission to MFA programs across the country; publish books; win awards. Instead, I decided to write this, as a shout of gratitude for the freedom to create. 

Looking at the picture of me as a little boy, and rereading a story I discovered before I knew I could be a writer, I see that I've come a long way, and I also see how much further I have to go. I'm reminded of how easy it is to become bitter. To expect more than I give. To allow the ambition to be recognized for what I've already done eclipse my desire to dig deeper, get better, try something new. Art and conversations about it are, for me, the gun pointed in my face, the thing that brings me back to the middle of the lake where nothing else mattered except listening to another person's story. 

Thanks, all. Hope your 2012 is off to an amazing start. 

. 

*Next Session of The Lab will start 9/2011

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UPDATE: 

I’m at Charles de Gaul airport waiting to board a flight to New York. This after spending over an hour in line for the only airline left on earth that does first-come/first-serve live-in-person-not-online check-in. This after sitting on a train that took over an hour to get to the penultimate stop, and then a half hour to get from that stop to the airport. It was 95 degrees and two dehydrated and grouchy families surrounded me in my drenched tank top. By the time I got in line at the airport, I looked like I’d just taken my turn at a wet-tee-shirt-contest. And no one on earth could possibly love his life more than I do mine right now. 

The tiny tiny apartment in Paris my friend Ebi rented was a half-block from a bakery that almost always had a line of Parisians out the door. This morning, on the way back from my workout at a neighborhood park, I bought enough quiche and bread to feed a family of five. She and I had our final Parisian lunch in the shade of the trees on the lawn at the place of my first Parisian outing: outside the architecture museum at Trocadero facing The Eiffel Tower.

We packed melon and cheese and quiche: one with tuna and black olives; the other with salmon and spinach. Also a baguette with pistachios, walnuts, golden and dark raisins. Spread out on Ebi’s sarong, we talked about how extreme the weather was(we both froze and boiled on the trip), the heft of our accomplished itinerary, and we congratulated ourselves for staying within what may’ve been the tightest budget Paris has ever allowed. 

While others were drinking their coffees and eating their nicoise salads in sidewalk cafés, Ebi and I had our bags full of goodies: sandwiches with French ham and French cheese on French bread…all bought from the grocery store…so we could eat on the steps of Notre Dame or in the Pompidou’s sculpture garden high above the city or on the left bank’s walkway hugging The Seine.

Afterward, we drank coffee standing at the bar. We returned at 9 for a homemade dinner and showers and change of clothes before heading out to the Marais to walk among the Parisians until 1 or 2.

Museums, shops, churches, views…we wanted it all; and we got it. The only thing we didn’t get was sleep.
 

A relatively long time has passed since I’ve sent out a monthly check-in from my life as a writer and teacher as it relates to The Douglass Street Lab; and it hasn’t been for lack of inspiration. 

This year has been a trip in more ways that one. I taught 6 classes last year at State, did three sessions of The Lab, and interned four or five new artists at Performing Arts Workshop. I also subbed a bunch of 3rd grade poetry classes, started a new novel, redrafted the finished manuscript, all while looking for a new agent.

I was lucky enough to spend Christmas in Pittsburgh with my older brother, Jon, his wife and three daughters, before and after flying back and forth to Colorado Springs. There, I stayed with my mom, sister-and-law, niece, and brother Paul as he prepared for and then underwent chemo therapy and radiation for neck cancer. More than ever, I committed to teaching, art, and exercise (I lost 20 pounds without noticing) as vital outlets for the full gamut of human emotion as it vibrated through me.

Professional envy, impatience and frustration with the agent search mixed with the joys of my own creative breakthroughs and the successes of students. I experienced spotty and breathtaking inspiration as the kids (and the teachers) at The Workshop struggled to fit all their huge humanity into their creative movement, theater, world dance and creative writing classes.Session after session of The Lab saw its participants take risks, engage in critical thinking, and use the arts to practice seeing how seemingly distinct forms have more in common than it may seem on the surface. If that wasn’t enough, I rode waves of appetite-robbing fear that I’d lose my brother. The fear would wane and a strange peaceful acceptance of the absurdities of life and my complete inability to control almost anything would wax..

I applied to Yaddo (got wait-listed…wish me luck), a MacArthur (form letter rejection.

In the middle of my trip to Paris (my first) I was able to go to Italy and visit my friend Daniela who I met 20 years ago soon after my best friend Richard died of AIDS.

Daniela was the person who made me feel young again. I was young. In my early twenties, but at the time, I was so old. Two close friends’ deaths a year apart the two years of relentless illness leading up to their deaths preceded our meeting. She and I were inseparable. We worked at the same restaurant, had slumber parties, and went dancing three, four, five nights a week. Now she’s a married mother of two and I’m the godfather of her oldest son.

The years I lived in Italy were nothing like what my former-teacher Francis Mayes described in UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN. The last few months in Italy vie for first place in the category of most challenging times of my life.

In was during this time that my friends Eddy and Lore and Ebi, perhaps without knowing it, came to my rescue. All three were people I’d befriended after starting as an English teacher. I don’t like to ponder, not even for a second, what that episode in my life would’ve been like without them.

Through Daniela and Eddy and Lore and Ebi—I learned something new about my own family. To others, we may seem an odd bunch—and while we’re all living lives quite different from one another—the older I get the more I realize how wrong I may’ve been at times.

What I interpreted as the crimes my parents committed against my freedom (which added to the reasons I had for running away at 15), I now understand the emotional filters through which I was interpreting their behavior. 

All of it makes sense. Their interpretations through the years. Mine. But the reuniting that started after my oldest niece was born continues to sustain me emotionally.

The strange bonds of my family fascinate and move me much in the way great fiction does.

Susan Sontag says, “A great writer of fiction both creates—through acts of imagination, through language that feels inevitable, through new forms—a new world, a world that responds to a world, the world a writer shares with other people but is unknown or misknown by still more people, confined in their worlds: call that history, society, what you will.”  

When I travel, I take a resistance band, some pushup handles and a DVD of P90X my brother Paul copied for me. On my last day in Italy, my hosts Lore and Eddy left me at their home to slowly enjoy breakfast in their garden, to exercise, and to pack for my return to Paris.

As they own their own business and work close to home, I was invited to join them as soon as I’d had all the time I needed to prepare. Without adequate time to do and dry additional laundry, and with luggage weight-restrictions that prohibited traveling with damp clothes, I decided to do a session of P90X wearing only a hand-washable pair of underwear. 

In the middle of a kick-punch combo, Lore’s 80-year-old mother, walked in to pick up their recycling, leave lettuce from her garden, and “check-up” on “things.” No call. No doorbell. Just a key in the door and then a greeting while I dripped sweat and tried to cover my very exposed body.

She seemed completely un-phased.

I like the fact that my family calls before they visit. I’m pleased that most of them prefer to stay in a hotel rather than try and squeeze into my 400 square-foot apartment. I appreciate that there are locks on the bathroom doors of my own and every bathroom in the members of my family’s individual dwellings. (Daniela’s and Eddy’s do not, and when Daniela’s kids wanted to know where Uncle Matthew disappeared to, they came looking).

Naked? No big deal. Mid-business? No big deal. The two years I lived in Italy also encouraged me to ponder the context in which I grew up. It was the time of the talk-show obsession with “The Dysfunctional Family.” It told me my family should not have been the way it was, it may’ve skewed my objectivity, and worse: it interfered with the joy that can come from accepting people for who they are.

This is an adult’s perspective, and I was a teenager at the time I left home—and the context of The Dysfunctional Family was only one of several complicated dynamics in my life at the time. I’m not implying that a person should stay connected to his or her family under any circumstance. Those choices are personal, and I’m happy that I left home at fifteen.

I might as well be. It’s what happened.

Like in a good play, no one in my family, including me, was blameless—and at the exact same time no one was exactly to blame. It’s so much richer when I look at it like this. I’ve been able to glean so much joy from the strange and compelling bonds of family. 

Speaking of good plays, I’m back in New York now, and last night I saw Larry Kramer’s The Normal Hearton Broadway.

Twenty years ago, when I aspired to become an actor, I used a monologue from that play as both a rehearsal and audition piece.

At the time, my friends and coworkers in the restaurant business were dropping one after another of what Kramer calls The Plague.

It seemed the only monologue that captured what it was like to be me at the time. It contributed to my becoming a writer and reader and lover of art. In the monologue there’s a long list of gay or presumed-gay artists throughout history. I looked up every one I’d never heard of and read their work.

Until last night, I’d never been to a “straight” play (meaning a non-musical) where the audience burst into applause between acts. More powerful for me today than it was then, I’m utterly encouraged by Kramer’s ability to have two matched sides in scenes where a lesser writer would’ve skewed the argument to one side.

Like with all the best work, the play seems more of an investigation—a desperate yearning to grasp the motivations of a group of people all responding in such different ways in the early years of the crisis. 

The play is autobiographical. The characters Ned and Ben Weeks are similar in every way to Larry and Arthur Kramer, brothers who had a complex relationship filled with love, occasional estrangement, disagreement, and passion.

Arthur put Larry into therapy to “cure” him of his homosexuality at a time in history when this was thought of as a kindness. Over the years, Arthur was interviewed and said he’d changed his position. That he’d become convinced that his brother’s homosexuality wasn’t an aberration, but a mere difference.

There’s a scene in the play when both brothers argue their positions, when Ned is desperate to have Ben validate him—and Ben will not. He can’t. He believes his brother’s sexuality to be an illness. The actors, Joe Mantello and Mark Harelik managed to play Kramer’s scene with so much passion and humanity—I found myself agreeing completely with each of the characters as they spoke. This while I completely disagreed with each of the characters as they spoke.

Ah! The theater! 

Because of my own complicated relationships with my brothers, I wondered what if Larry had given up on Arthur because of his struggle? What if Arthur had given up on Larry? For one, Yale University would not have had The Larry Kramer Initiative from 2001-2005. 

On the Italy trip, I noticed how expressive my Italian friends are with their love and affection. They wouldn’t stop showing me and telling me how much they cared about me. Maybe because I only had a week. Perhaps they’d always been that expressive but I didn’t register it. Or maybe because both of my friends have had kids and perhaps they’ve gotten used to saying “I love you” a lot.

Or maybe because some serious shit has gone down in all of our lives since we’ve seen each other last. Who can know? but Jesus,did we demonstrate how we feel for one another. 

This is not one of my strong points—but I think it needs to become one. What am I waiting for? I slept on the couch the three days I stayed at Daniela’s house. Every morning, her husband/father of my godson woke me up at 5:30 in the morning to tell me to go get in his bed with his wife. “It’s more comfortable and the kids won’t wake you later,” he whispered.

The first morning, I padded into the bedroom, timid because of the cultural context I come from, but because he insisted, I groggily followed instruction. Daniela, without opening her eyes, folded the comforter like giant bird opening its wing. After I was in the bed, she covered me. In minutes bother of us were asleep again.

I dreamt of my friend Richard and San Francisco in the early 90s and Daniela’s and my slumber parties. During the day I couldn’t stop telling her I loved her. 

Lore and Eddy were my hosts for another three days. Lore had her first and only daughter at around forty. When I told her that she seems to have taken well to motherhood, her eyes welled with tears and she told me she has the sensation of being in love with her own child.

We talked about the decision I made soon after I left Italy, nearly seven years ago, to try and practice abstinence from anything with a chemically depressive effect: nicotine, alcohol, even refined sugar—what led to it and the joy it brings me—and I realized right in front of her, that while both of us have our fair share of complaints—we’re happy. 

If you know me well, you know I’m incapable of syrupy happy. More like: content; invested; present. 

Lore and I didn’t romanticize our lives. I told her of my struggles as a single guy in San Francisco. My struggle to let go of what I perceive to be my autonomy and independence, and she spoke of her own trails.

All of our best conversations have taken place in the kitchen while preparing food. We put together a feast and carried dishes from the kitchen to the table on their outside garden deck—and I remembered Thanksgiving one year at my first apartment on Divisadero.

I was 19 years old and my lesbian (at the time) roommate/bosom-buddy always said we’d always be each other’s family. That one day we’d have kids together. She sent me to Safeway with a shopping list and on it she wrote, among the ingredients for stuffing and mashed potatoes, “Turkey Baster: the reusable kind.”

This before anyone I knew was dead of AIDS. Chuck was already sick but he hadn’t died. That day that year he’d starting having occasional dementia. He also liked to experiment with his own dosage plans for the pain meds, so no one really knew what was up when he showed up in Jackie-O sunglasses and a head scarf carrying a centerpiece featuring a Barbie Doll in Alice Cooper hair and make-up.

She stood in a field of Gerber daisies. I remember that we were all so alive and all so afraid and was that a wonderful Thanksgiving. 

So I’m back in New York and I haven’t even talked about the art I saw in Paris or the flight I took in a tiny plane over the lakes of Northern Italy.

I’m feeling open. Hopeful. Wanting to take a step toward that freedom to express emotion that I learn from my Italian family of friends. In fact, my cousin who hosts me in New York every summer just came in to say hi and I wanted to pick him up and spin him around and soak his cheeks with kisses for the opportunities he and his partner have given me over the years.

The support and the freedom to get out of my daily life and such a wonderful place to write. I didn’t do it, because that’s not exactly how we roll, and I trust I’ll find a way to let him know. He’s one of the angels that lets me have this amazing life.

My friend Mark who hosts The Lab on Douglass Street; the people who sign up for it; my peers at Performing Arts Workshop; my colleagues and boss at San Francisco State. If you made it this far: congratulations! Now you get some practical updates. Thanks for reading and for all of your support. 

READING: 

I’m reading Saturday in Brooklyn at Book Thug Nation with Leigh Gallagher, Evan Rehill, and Anne-E Wood. Here’s the invite on Facebook. NY homies: PLEASE COME!! 

NEWS: 

Former Labber Ethel Rohan has a new chapbook out by PANK. 

Former Labber Roseli Ilano is the editor of a new anthology. 

Former Labber Lorelei Lee is teaching: Sex, Death, Laughter, Disease: Writing and the Body at The Center for Sex and Culture. Are you a former Labber?

Do you have any writing-related announcements?

Please send them! 

Reserve a spot for The September Lab. 

Join us on Facebook. 

On Twitter. 

Greetings friends and friends of The Douglass Street Lab. I just made it safely past the fluke stage and I'm now happy to report I'm officially having a great semester. One superstition I have--in addition never touching the leaves of a plant when I'm angry lest they all fall out--is not saying anything in the first six weeks about how good of a semester I'm having. 

But now that we've passed the first trimester of the semester, I get to say all of my work--at SFSU, at Performing Arts Workshop, and at The Douglass Street Lab--has me so inspired and invigorated I've hardly noticed how much time traveling to or from one of these places on the motorcycle in the pouring down rain. 

In the lastest session of The Lab, we've found inspiration from Patti Smith, Cynthia Hopkins, Lucinda Williams, Mark Doty, Chimamanda Adichie, and Jamaica Kincaid, just to name a few. The participants in this cycle show up, open up, write, read, and respond. Then they revise and post snippets for their findings for their peers to read. It's been one of the most active cycles in a long time, and several of the participants will be reading at our open-house/reading/celebration coming up on March 19th. Here are all the details. (If you're not on Facebook and don't want to be, just email me and I'll send you an invite) If you've been thinking of doing The Lab and aren't sure if it's for you, this is a great (and free) opportunity to come check out both the space what people have written. 

Speaking of the space, I know I wrote that The Lab's host Mark and his sweetie were moving in and so The Lab would be moving out. It was a lie! Mark's sweetie is nonplussed by our Tuesday night meetings and Mark, who is a great writer and a student of The Lab, likes the commute. So while nothing is forever, we'll be staying on Douglass Street for the next cycle, Spring into Action, which starts on March 29th, and still has a few seats available. 

There are updates, too, on my own work/manuscript/process as well as some reflections on the importance of an aspiring novelist like me starting a new project while the finished one makes its way around the various channels that might some day result in publication. 

But alas, Fourteen Hills is meeting tonight for their final decisions, and I need to avail myself to them as their faculty advisor. 

So more soon. Probably after I'm done getting all the stuff ready for the tax dude. 

Wishing you all the best for a happy Spring. 

Oh! And if you're a former student and you have some news to share, please do! I'd love a chance to brag about you on The Lab's Facebook page. 

Happy New Year.   

As of the writing this update, The Douglass Street Lab starting on January 18th is sold out. Please contact me if you're interested in getting on the wait list or taking the next 8-week cycle of The Lab, which will most likely start late-March. I'm also on the lookout for new places to physically house The Lab. Mark, the current host, has been so good to me, but his sweetheart just moved in and I want to give them their space. Let me know if you have any suggestions as to a conducive, affordable place that can sit 10-15 people. 

I started this update last week from the burbs of Pittsburgh. My sister-in-law Vicki was out of town, so I went to hang out with my brother and his three daughters for a few nights. One night I went out for a drive in the rain and came home to everyone sleeping. The East Coast's winter had stripped its trees and browned its grass and covered both with glinting frost. That and the ground soak of a sunny day's thaw and Pennsylvania's windy roads reminded me of the bittersweet time I last lived with my brothers, in 1985, in Massachusetts, when I was learning to drive, soon before I made the first series of choices that would turn me into a writer.   

While in Pittsburgh, the girls wanted to read me their stories, show me their art, their photographs, their scripts. They wanted to hug me and hang on me and call me all sorts of nicknames. Jon admitted that he "totally relies" on Vicki for food so I whipped together some meals. My brother's instructions? "Do what you do to make it taste good and I'll do the dishes."   

What a great way to transition into the new year: feeling loved, wanted, and useful. 

Most people who've become writers haven't because they've spent their lives feeling the way I did at my brother's this New Year's. In fact, my senses are honed to pay attention to situations alive with mystery and contradiction, charged with static, things compelling and disturbing. When I first became serious about writing, I realized that its these situations I need to mine, as almost nothing else is worthy of fiction. Friends would occasionally comment about how detached I could seem in dramatic situations--and they had reason--because of the intensity with which I was observing and recording the nuances. I could be absolutely miserable about what was falling apart in front of me while simultaneously giddy, fascinated by what it might provide for my stories. This was true even when the thing falling apart in front of me was me. 

Even in the early days of my writing, in the face of AIDS and watching friends die young, I'd become transfixed by contradictory details in the hospital room: the smell of maple syrup from under the plastic lid covering uneaten French toast on the table next to the plant where the new bud of an orchid flower had started to push through its spike.   

This tendency, while good for my writing practice, I realize only in retrospect, kept me from fully experiencing relationships. Ignorant  (or perhaps indifferent) to what likely started as a defense mechanism, I felt lucky, even if occasionally inconvenienced. I must have believed that I did what all writers do. I wasn't betraying my friends by using their personal lives in my fiction, so there weren't consequences. Instead of sordid details, I paid attention to tendencies, moods, the specific ways people reacted in extreme situations (bad or good). I paid attention to people justifying their bad choices, saying yes when they wanted to say no. Keeping score.I filled notebooks with facial expressions, imagined dialogue that I came up with while studying their expressions. 

You may remember me writing about the first class of a former session of The Lab, one where I borrowed from a Michelle Carter exercise and asked participants to consider the thing they most fear writing. Not because it's so hardcore or punk rock or revealing or shameful (yawn)--but for fear of getting wrong. The subject or theme or experience so fraught with meaning that they avoid it for fear of failing to capture its depth and all its complicated nuance.   

In that update, I talked about my relationship with my brothers. All of my characters have been the "only child." Soon after this discovery, I started writing about a character--like me in some ways--not at all like me in others--who has a complicated relationship with his brothers, full of physical distance, age differences, lifestyle differences. Much had been lost and disfigured because of the violence and addiction in their childhood home, causing the two older brothers to flee at young ages. The imaginative world revolved around the reuniting of the main character with a second brother after the third's death.   

Soon after I started this story, I got a call from my own real-life younger brother who told me he has cancer. That was early November. Since then, I've made three trips to be with my family. Two to visit Paul as he goes through radiation and chemotherapy. He now has an excellent prognosis for a full recovery after a grim initial prognosis.  He's finished with chemotherapy and only has a few radiation sessions left. 

These past few months my real work has been staying present for my family. I never once thought of how the events might've worked in a scene. Instead I concentrated on the soup I was making my brother. Or sitting in the hospital room listening to the clicking of the keys of our laptops while he received his fluids through an IV. We all wanted to feel better, to try and have some modicum of control in the outcome, whether it was to get him to drink a Gatorade or eat some soup or take a walk. If I could be the one to convince him to do something "positive," when he felt too tired or depressed or overwhelmed, I could fool myself into believing he'd have a better chance of getting better because of me.    

Of course this caused nothing but tension. My brother is a smart man. He understood the consequences the doctors explained about not remaining fed and hydrated. If he had been able to eat or drink when he did not; he would've. When I just sat with him and talked to him about his coaching (he's a soccer coach) or his daughter or whether or not to get our mother an ipad for Christmas, he seemed comforted. Or perhaps that's when I felt comforted. 

I knew I needed to quit smoking and drinking years before I quit smoking and drinking. All of the signs were there. Yet no person telling me I needed to quit made me quit. The only advise that I ever got that helped me stop was my friend Michael's. He said, "Honey, smoke until you're done and try to enjoy it while it lasts. When you're ready, you'll quit." 

2010 was a professionally satisfying year in some quiet ways, though it may seem on the outside, disappointing. In response to a difficult literary fiction market, my agent decided to concentrate only on non-fiction. I took the news in stride and used the time that had passed since I finished the first definitive draft of a novel manuscript and reread it and rewrote it. I finished the new draft over the summer and have started the new agent search. As tough of a time as "they" say it is to sell a first novel, with so much pressure from the big commercial houses to buy potential best-sellers, and with talk of electronic publishing making the literary agent a job of the past, it's also a tough time to be an agent.    

I remember when I used to believe that the hardest part of publishing a novel was writing a good one. I've learned a lot about the business, and I'm moving forward in a multitude of directions. I also feel much more prepared than ever to continue writing in a time of transition. Why?    

There has been a resurfacing of the close examination of what tragic things happen to students and teachers within academia. Does teaching in the MFA program make the writer weak? Does it rob him of his time he could be spending pounding away at the laptop? Is he so inundated with mediocre student work that it infiltrates the creative centers of his brain and render him mediocre too? Is he sacrificing too much? Do under-published academic writers become the most bitter people at parties? (I have seriously seen all those and more mentioned recently).   

With so many great books and stories coming from those both in and out of academia, in and out of the commercial mainstream publishing world, it seems absurd to even engage in this discussion as if "it's good" or it's bad" to teach could be concluded. It's almost always someone who feels rejected by academia posing the argument as to why it's bad and someone struggling with his street-cred who valiantly defends the institution. We all make choices. I don't know a single person attempting to write--either within or from outside academia--who doesn't make a list of sacrifices and compromises to have a life including writing. And none of them are tragic.   

And moreover, Who, besides writers, care about how writers write? Sacrifices are being made by people I know who're blowing glass, painting on canvas, collecting fine wine, raising kids, and passionate about surfing. Slate and NYT aren't running articles on that (but then again articles aren't written by glass-blowers usually).    

To me it seems ungrateful, an excess of navel-gazing to even have this argument. There isn't a person teaching creative writing who couldn't apply for a different job and there isn't a person not teaching creative writing who couldn't pursue an academic life.   

There is, at very least, an opportunity from within various academic environments to learn something enduring. Not everyone takes the opportunity (though many of my own teachers have and continue to) and that is to come out of oneself. I know that there are teachers who teach writing to gain a means to an end, but they must be plain stupid because it's too little money for too much work. At least in the adjunct circuit.   

I want to read an article about those artists who see teaching as a separate and sustaining art form. One that allows the writer to listen and seek out and reflect back the kernels in early drafts that might lead an aspiring artist to risk more. Whether in or out of academia, most artists I know have a list of people in and out of the art world who they credit for helping them sharpen their senses and broaden their vision.  I've met a few who seem to think that their so-called artistry and so-called vision comes entirely from within--but I've yet to meet one with whom I'd like to have coffee. 

Which brings me to my concluding paragraph. It's a big thank you. This last year has been a tough one--I won't lie. Lots of little disappointments added up in my own creative career. I let personalities bug me. I felt as frequently wary as inspired by San Francisco's lit scene, but had to continue to be in it for work. Paul's diagnosis and the utter lack of control I had in being able to change it or do anything to take away his pain set me close to the edge. And it was teaching that saved me. Not every moment was glorious. No particular student breakthrough gave me the illusion that what I do is good. But seeing people engage, listen to one another, set out to earnestly help each other come closer to what they hope to write for fear of getting wrong. It moved me. Or rather, it kept me moving. So thanks. And Happy New Year.