I’m done with my stint as a faculty-artist-who-teaches-high-school-students-etc at Centrum. The sun is shining and after a chilly week, it is 80 degrees.
The class was full of amazingly intelligent, sophisticated girls, already as subversive in their writing at 16 as I can ever hope to be. When they got up to read their work on the last day of the class, and the room of parents and students and little siblings applauded them, I was so so proud. You can only do so much in a classroom setting. You encourage them to read. You encourage them to write. You give them exercises that (hopefully) help them think in new ways about poetry, character sketches, mythology, comic book characters, persona. You talk about rejection, revision. You sit with their work and talk about expectation, cliche, tone, surprise. You read them poems, in class we read out loud together chapters from Kelly Link’s “Stranger Things Happen” or a chapter from “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.” You talk about your favorite writers, why you love them. You mention life as an artist isn’t as glamorous as they probably think.You talk about sitting in front of a blank screen all day.
But what they bring to class – their unique skills, humor, imagination – are the real gifts. Anyway, it was all very rewarding and fun, if exhausting. They really were little teenage comic book superheroines.
For some reason all week I kept seeing seals and otters at the Fort Warden beach. One day I got within five feet of an otter napping in the sun underneath an old log before I saw him. They swim and look at you, swim and look away, dive underwater and come back up to peek at you again. They do not seem afraid. It makes me think of the selkies. I think, if I came back as an animal, it might be as a seal.
Now I am ready to sleep and get back to my friends, my family, writing, blogs…
Back from the Skagit River Poetry Festival and soo sooo tired. We left the house 9 AM Friday morning to catch a ferry to go over to La Connor, WA (arriving just past 1 PM) and just got back now at 8 PM Saturday night. In between that time, I caught a couple of panels (Poetry and the Spirit, Women’s Voices, etc) and some great readings (Pattiann Rogers, Rachel Rose, David Wagoner among them) and saw lots of my NW friends, and other old friends who’ve moved farther afield, if only briefly.
Got to go out to dinner Friday night with Pattiann, who was my thesis semester advisor at Pacific, and talk about her new book, Wayfare, as well as my plans (who knows?) and how/when I’m going to publish my second book (who knows?) Oh, my life is up the air. Where to live? What to do? Anyway, she was very supportive and funny as always. Her accent always reminds me a lot of my multitudes of Missouri relatives. She took me out to ice cream today and I knocked Carolyn Kizer’s daughter off the sidewalk in my enthusiasm. Oh, my childish ways!
The weather went from a bleak six months of temps hovering at the top at 50 and rain to a sudden 86 degrees this weekend, and boy did that sun come back with a vengeance. Some kind of bipolar weather. I think my lips got sunburned, just walking around. Saw tons of bald eagles, heron, even some wild turkey (the bird, not the drink.) Right before we left Friday morning, we saw a mother deer and her baby on the beach, walking in the water in an attempt, I assume, to cool off.
So good times but such a flurry of poetry activities, long driving times and many restaurants/events without air conditioning that I am exhausted. Off to shower and sleep!
