Tie the Knot and Cut the Thread

Last night, on a whim, I re-read dozens of the blog entries I have posted here over the past two years. Some were funny and made me laugh---re-living, for example, my deep self-consciousness over being perpetually mistaken for someone six years my junior. Others were obscure and heavy, written, it seemed, from the inside of a fog. At times, I felt as though I were reading the blog of another person. Who is this girl, I wondered, writing about her anxiety-ridden days in a FedEx truck? Her loneliness and pessimism? She couldn’t possibly be me.

It appears I have already forgotten the turmoil of that first year after my college graduation. It faded so gradually that I never paused to notice how much happier I was. I suppose this is good news. I can now say with confidence to those college seniors days away from graduation: it does get better. At least in my experience. Although I pray you have a more successful launch than I did.

Ironically, I find myself now in much the same position I was in two year ago: facing a long list of unknowns. This time around, however, I’m not nearly as worried about it. I have accepted admission at Seattle Pacific’s MFA program for creative writing which begins the end of July, but beyond that, my future is open. My lease ends in June, as does my guarantee of a job, and I don’t know where I’m going to live yet. Because the MFA program is low-residency, I can stay in Grand Rapids---or not. I got a scholarship, but I’ll still need to fork over money for tuition. It is also likely my boyfriend will move across the country in the next few months. Will I go too?

I probably have a few less questions than I did two years ago, but not many. What makes the difference is having a direction, goals. I don’t feel like I’m aimlessly wandering anymore. In 2012, I had too little idea of what I wanted. That much is abundantly clear from some of my posts that fall.

That too, is probably why I wrote so frequently on this blog back then. I had so much more to process. Mostly, I feel over this theme now. It’s no longer the dominant question of my life.

The Tale of the Young Farmer

Once upon a time, in a land of oak trees and gurgling brooks, there lived a young farmer. The land was a happy place in which everyone had enough to eat—although maybe more potatoes and less pie than they might hope for—and no one complained for lack of a bed—although some thought the mattresses too thin. The young farmer, following the general trend of the people, was happy too.

There was just one problem. He was a farmer, but he had no farm.

This did not bother the young farmer at first. He lived with his new wife in a little cabin near the brook, and because the two had few wants, they did not need much money. The farmer worked odd jobs for people, hiring himself out to neighbors during the harvest, chopping wood for the widow next door, carving toys for children. His wife made wicker baskets and soap. It was enough.

Still, the young farmer always felt he was missing something. After all, he was a farmer. He wanted to dig his hands into earth that he could call his own. He wanted to pull up barrels of sweet potatoes and onions and carry them to the market to sell at a stand marked with his name. To make himself feel better and keep his skills sharp, the young farmer planted vegetables in his wife’s wicker baskets.

One day the ruler of the land called a census. “Farmer,” the young farmer wrote after his name in the blank marked Occupation.

But the people in the village laughed at him. “You are not a farmer,” they said. “You have no fields or pastures. You have only a little cabin by the brook.”

“Yes, but look here,” he showed them. “I have a tomato plant.”

“That is not a farm,” the people scoffed. “That is a basket.”

The young farmer hung his head. That night, over a dinner of potatoes and cucumbers, he said to his wife, “I think we should move.”

“But why?” his wife asked. “We are so happy here. Every night we fall asleep listening to the laughter of the brook. We never want for anything.”

“I know,” said the young farmer. “But I am a farmer. I am supposed to live on a farm. I can’t stay here under the oak trees listening to the brook for the rest of my life. I need fields and pastures and oxen.”

The farmer’s wife looked at him for a long time. Then she said, “Let’s look for a farm.”

This turned out to be more difficult than the young farmer expected. The next day he went out into the country and walked north for many miles. As he walked, he looked for empty land, and he asked people, “Is there a place nearby where I might grow crops? Are there any farms for sale?” But the answer was always the same. “No, not here. This land is all full. Try further up the road.” When he had gone as far as he could, and the shadows began to lengthen, the young farmer turned around and walked back to his cabin by the brook. It was very dark by the time he returned, but his wife had left him a dinner of strawberries and squash.

“Any luck?” she asked.

The young farmer shook his head. “But I will try again tomorrow.”

The next day, carrying a basket of food from his wife, the farmer traveled west. He passed many pastures and fields as he walked, but none were available. “No land here,” the shepherds and the hired hands told him. “The Earl of Lancaster owns it all.” Mile after mile, he got the same answer. It appeared that all the western land belonged to the Earl. As his shadows lengthened behind him, the young farmer threw up his hands. “How can one man own so much?” A woman herding geese overheard him. “The Earl is a very rich man,” she said. “And he is always looking for fruit pickers. If you worked for him, you would earn a good wage.” But the farmer shook his head. He did not want to work for another man. He wanted to dirty his hands in his own soil.

When the farmer returned to his cabin that night, his wife kissed his cheek and asked, “Well?”

“West is not the best direction,” the young farmer said. “We would not be happy there.” Then he sat down to his bell peppers and rhubarb. His wife watched him silently as he ate.

The next day the farmer went out as soon as it was light. This time, he walked south. “Surely there will be open land to the south,” the farmer said to himself. “Nobody that I know travels this way.” And the farmer was right. Before the sun had reached its zenith, the farmer found open land in spades, but it was full of boulders and cliffs. The only plants that grew from the rocks were twisted juniper bushes and gnarled pines. “I can’t raise vegetables here,” the young farmer said. He walked a little further just to be sure, but then the shadows of the pines began to lengthen, and he turned around and went home.

“What did you find today?” his wife asked him, setting a plate of blackberries and eggplant on the table.

The young farmer put his head in hands. “Nothing,” he said. “Only rocks and stones.”

On the fourth day, the farmer started walking before dawn. As he traveled east, he watched the sun rise on the road in front of him. “East is a good direction,” he thought. “It is where the sun lives. Surely I will find something today.” But as he walked under the oak branches and leapt over the gurgling brooks, he realized that the trees were not getting any thinner. In fact, the longer he walked, the thicker the forest seemed to become. “Just a little further,” the young farmer said to himself. “Just a little further and I’m sure the woods will end. There will be great clearings, and I will plant fields of corn and barley and watermelon.” But it was not so. The young farmer walked under oak trees all day. Even as the shadows lengthened and the woods grew dark, he continued on, unwilling to turn back empty-handed for the fourth day in a row. “This is my last chance,” he thought. “There are no other roads to take.”

Finally, when the stars twinkled overhead and he could no longer see his feet, the young farmer turned around. He walked all night, and returned to his wife and his little cabin just as the sun was rising in the east.

“You are safe,” his wife said, running to his arms.

“I found no land,” the young farmer replied.

“I love you,” she said.

The farmer and his wife slept all day. In the evening, they made a meal of sweet potatoes and sweet peas and goat cheese. The young farmer was silent. Then he said, “I am not a farmer.”

“Why not?” said his wife.

“I have no farm.”

His wife pointed to the wicker baskets all around the cabin and outside the door, filled with soil and vegetables. “Yes, you do,” she said.

The young farmer shook his head. “That is not a farm. Those are baskets.”

“It looks like a farm to me,” she said. Then she leaned forward on her elbows. “You know what this means.”

“It means I am not meant to be a farmer.”

“No, it means you haven’t walked far enough.”

“But I have walked so far. And I don’t like leaving you.”

“You really want to be a farmer?”

“Yes.”

“Then we will pack up a cart with your baskets of plants, we will pick a direction, and we will walk. We will leave behind this cabin and this brook. We will eat the food that you have grown—the blackberries and the cherry tomatoes and the summer squash—just as we have always done. At night we will sleep under the stars. We will walk until we have found the perfect piece of land.”

“I don’t think it exists,” said the young farmer.

“You’re right,” said his wife. “It doesn’t.”

“Then why bother?”

“Because you are a farmer.”

“What does that mean?” he said, but he knew. The young farmer paused. “It would be easier just to stay. Like you said before, we are happy here in this cabin by the brook.”

“Pack up the carrots,” she said. “Pack the cucumber plant and the raspberry bush. I’ll gather the onions and the potatoes, the jalapenos and the sweet corn. We will bring everything we can carry.”

The young farmer watched as his wife cleared the table and put a kettle on the fire. “But which way will we walk?”

“Which way do you want?” she asked.

The farmer looked out the window. He thought about the land in every direction: the crowded pastures in the north, the Earl’s estates to the west. He remembered the southern boulders and cliffs. Then he thought about the oak trees, the wilderness, and the lonely road he had traveled under the stars the previous night. He wondered how long one would have to walk before the woods finally ended. He wondered if they ever did, or if they simply stretched on forever, growing right up to the end of the world and tipping off the edge.

“Well?” said his wife.

“East,” he said.

Wandering through the Words

Why do I write? This is a question I have asked myself with varying degrees of urgency over the past few years. Now is one of those heightened moments. I suppose when I spend the majority of my day writing at work and a good chunk of my free time writing stories on my own, I want to think that there is some value in the exercise. Some greater purpose that will justify the hours.

The value of creative writing is not as immediately discernible as other forms of writing that function primary to convey information. In my case, the ulitity is less clear, and, I think, less important. In any case, it's not ulitity as we typically think of it.

I’ve noticed that Jesus did not speak very often in didactic statements or theologizing or the mere recitation of facts. I’m sure he did on occasion—such words are a necessity at times—but these are not then the words that his followers remembered, that they found imperative to record. What they wrote down were stories. Stories and metaphors. This is how Jesus communicated with the crowds, and this is how the crowds learned.

“There once was a landowner who planted a vineyard,” Jesus said. Here we see a picture in our mind’s eye—a man and his vineyard and the hot sun beating down on the grapes—and this is an image that has shape, that we can metaphorically touch and participate in. And then Jesus goes on with the story, and even if the people on those dry mountain slopes did not understand the meaning of it, as it is clear they often did not, they could still remember it, and they could repeat it to their friends back home, and they could puzzle over it together. And later, perhaps years later, an incident would happen in their life that would bring to mind this story which they did not realize they still remembered and suddenly something would fall into place and their eyes would be opened and it would all finally make sense.

Jesus was a smart man. Stories stick. Stories give words and ideas a handle, so that people can find a point of entry.

But parables for the purpose of teaching are one thing—novels and short stories and memoirs quite another. What’s the point of fiction? some people ask. It’s not real anyway. It never happened. It’s just an escape from the world, an excuse not to engage in what’s happening right in front of you. I admit, I ask myself this question sometimes too. It is a good question to ask, I think: What is the point of fiction? Why have I spent so many hours of my life bent over a book or dreaming up characters to set free in a world of my own creating? I like to think the answer is deeper, more involved, than “it’s fun.” Though it most assuredly is. Sometimes.

The truth is, there are some things that can only be communicated in a round-about way because they are too harsh or brilliant to face head-on. Emily Dickinson wrote a poem about this: “Tell the truth but tell it slant—/Success in circuit lies,” she writes. “Too bright for our infirm Delight/The Truth’s superb surprise.” In stories—and in some other forms of writing—truth slips in through the back door of the mind, almost unnoticed. We couldn’t handle it otherwise; we’d fight it off. But stories—you can’t argue with them. They are what they are.

C.S. Lewis once said that nearly everything of importance he ever learned was communicated through metaphor. He certainly was a master of it himself. Who can forget, having read it, that image of the “ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea”? Everyone can certainly imagine such a scene—and themselves in it. Less people will remember the words, “we are too easily pleased by the world.” Although this communicates essentially the same message, it lacks the heart, and it lacks the handle.

Good writing is like a perfect piece of glass or the stillest, clearest body of water. You look in and you see something so pure and vibrant that you wonder how you never saw it before. And yet, you also realize this is not the first time you’ve caught a glimpse. You see it is something that you’ve always known but have never brought into perfect focus. These are the treasures that metaphor and imagery and story can bring us.

I am no C.S. Lewis. I am a lowly twenty-something with no published works and no Oxford education. My words are not read by many people and may never be. But I still want to weave the web of story that may in the end be the only way to understand the world in all its shades of grey. I write to understand, to elucidate, as I am doing now writing this essay, seeking an answer to my original question. But I also write to confound, to confuse and scramble-up, so that I may know—and others may know it too—that nothing in life is straight-forward and no answers are easy.

We are called to emulate Jesus, and I guess this is the way that makes the most sense to me.

The Death of the White Stag

I realized today that I no longer feel in a stage of transition. It’s taken me a year and half, but I have finally come to define my life as it—not as where it is going or where it has come from. I not just a post-grad, looking back at and feeling nostalgic for my college experience. And I am not merely straining towards the future, single-mindedly pursuing that elusive “career” we all seem to be hunting. I’m beginning to wonder if the creature even exists in all its mythic glory.

This place—it’s a nice place to be.

Hello, Again

It's been quite some time since my last blog post, and even that one was a cop-out (merely pasting a link in a window and adding one or two sentences of explanation). I do think I have a pretty good excuse, though. My first Masters of Fine Arts application was due yesterday at midnight, and nearly all my free time in the past few months has been dedicated to working on my writing portfolio. When you spend all day writing in the office for work and all evening writing at home for school, there isn't a lot of mental energy left over to write for "fun." (Not that working on my portfolio hasn't been fun in its own way. It has been. But also stressful.)

Today is the first day in a long time I haven't felt an urgency to write and edit. My next application is due in two weeks, but most of the grunt work is done at this point and the hardest part is hopefully behind me. And yet, of course, here I am, writing. I guess I don't know what else to do with myself.

Applying for graduate schools---particularly MFA programs, where most schools boast an acceptance rate between one and ten percent---is an extremely exposing process. Rarely in my life have I felt more vulnerable than I do now. Writing is such a personal act, even when writing fiction, and to be judged solely on that standard, to be told either you are or you aren't good enough based on one collection of painfully birthed stories, feels kind of like someone is deciding whether or not to execute your kid. A slight exaggeration, maybe, but it's something close.

It's also scary for another reason. By deciding to apply to programs, I have drawn a line in the sand for myself and for all those who hear about it (aka you). "Here I have decided that writing is the passion to which I want to devote the rest of my life (or at least the next few years), and here is the way I plan to do that." Whenever you verbalize what you want and take steps to attain it, you make yourself vulnerable to disappointment. This is not a bad thing, obviously, but it does mean that the consequences of failure feel higher. The more you want something, the harder it is when you don't get it.

All of this means that I have to hold my plans and my goals loosely. I need to be ok with the idea of not getting into schools this time around and waiting another year or two if necessary. This could be, and I'm not just saying this to convince myself, a very good thing. But I also need to not let fear of failure keep me from trying my absolute best on the remaining eight applications. I need to remember, as has been my constant lesson this past year and half, that life happens and things usually work out ok in the end for those who are patient.

So I'm trying to be patient.

An Interesting Article

It speaks to themes I have addressed on and off in this blog. Potentially a little insulting for members of my generation, but, if nothing else, the graphics are highly entertaining. Recommended reading for anyone between the ages of 18 and 30.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wait-but-why/generation-y-unhappy_b_3930620.html

Patience, Portfolios, and Piles of Mush

I like quantifiable things. I like things that can be counted, recorded, and later analyzed. For example, the number of miles I have run or biked each day. My grocery reciepts. The times my athletes run in each cross country meet and their splits per mile. The balance of my bank account. My budgets on Mint. I make to-do lists for fun, even when I’m not busy---perhaps especially when I’m not busy---and checking them off brings me pleasure.

So why on earth, I’m beginning to ask myself---why did I chose to pursue writing, of all the fields available to me? Why did I pick the most unquantifiable of endeavors, the most elusive, the most resistant to to-do lists and check marks? Shouldn’t I have gone into statistics or accounting or engineering maybe, rather than this right-brain frustration?

I’m feeling this way because I’m in the process of applying to Master of Fine Arts programs, and, if you couldn’t tell, the portfolio-producing process has not been progressing as smoothly as I hoped. The plan is to produce two flawless and imaginative short stories by November. So far, after nearly three months of sincere effort, my brain has birthed only one pile of mush that may be breathing its last breath. I’m trying not to panic.

Unfortunately for me, when it comes to MFA programs in creative writing, numbers don’t matter. Most schools don’t require a GRE score. The ones that do just want to make sure you’re not stupid. Undergraduate GPAs… well, as long you passed everything, it shouldn’t be a problem. According to a book I have about the MFA application process, 90% of your application rests on the 35-40 page writing sample in your portfolio. In other words, it all comes down to whether or not some professor decides he or she likes my story. One person could dash my hopes on a whim, no matter what my GRE or GPA is.

This is not good news for a person who likes to quantify things.

There is no way to quantify a story. There is no way to know for sure how I stack up against the hundreds of other applicants, each jostling for just a few spots. No average LSAT score, no comparable GPA or recommended extracurriculars. I can’t objectively rate my writing on a scale of 1 to 10 and use that to decide which programs to apply to. I also can’t force my writing to get better, to become more creative, to shape itself into something beautiful and poignant. Time spent does not necessarily translate into quality achieved.

That’s just how writing is, and I better get used to it because I haven’t exactly left myself room for other pursuits. Writing requires a lot of patience---also not one of my natural strengths. “Have patience with the process,” I typed on a sticky note on my laptop desktop after reading it in Story, Robert McKee’s famous book on writing and plot. I have to remind myself of this frequently. Patience. Patience. Patience.

Patience with the process is not an easy thing, in writing or in any other area of life. I like quick results and check marks, and now that I’m a year out of college, I feel like the clock is ticking for me to start producing great things. After all, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote This Side of Paradise when he was only 23 and W.H. Auden had his first book of poetry published at the same age! It’s a bit ridiculous to be comparing myself to these luminaries, I know, and to be feeling the pressures of time when I’m still a baby in the eyes of a lot of people, but it’s hard not to be frustrated with the slow progression of my writing. It’s hard not to wish for an easy way to quantify my skill level and detail the exact steps I need to take in order to increase it and produce something amazing.

I guess that’s why I’m attempting to go back to school, ultimately. To get better and to find out how to do that. But first I need to get in, and that may very well be the hardest part.