This is a bittersweet moment

At this moment, I feel like an old person that I love, who had a great, long life, is about to pass on. I feel happy and sad at the same time. Yes, I am about to press play on the final installment of the Harry Potter series. I have been putting off seeing it because I don't want it to be over. Now, the time has come. Deep breath. Here goes.

Pictures, if you are interested

I have finally posted the pictures my daughter drew to go with my assignment #3. If you are interested, scroll down and take a look. You won't be disappointed (but remember, I am partial).

Just having a pity party. You don't have to come if you don't want to

Okay, so I don’t handle stress well at the best of times. But this semester is particularly bad. (Chelsea, Kelly, and Aislinn, please feel free to skip this post as you have already heard all of this three – or maybe four – times a week for the past few weeks). Lately, I feel like I’m having a constant out of body experience and looking down on myself in wonder and horrified awe as I struggle through assignments. My brain feels like a brewing storm on open water, a turbulent, rolling, heavy sloshing of incoherent thoughts.

My portfolio assignment is like a stubborn, disobedient toddler that refuses to give in and be written. No amount of threats or pleading is working. I have been struggling with it for four weeks and still have nothing. I can only hope that the pressure of being down to seven days sparks something, even something insipid, but at least something. Also, it appears that some modernist literature, to me, is like a car motor, or plumbing, or most of our current technology: sure, I could learn how it works if I wanted to, if I were willing to put in the effort it would take to figure it out, but I’m just not interested enough to expend that kind of energy. This is not true of all modernist literature; some of it I find very interesting – mostly the stuff that critics denounce as not being entirely modernist.

I told my husband yesterday that something amazing has happened, something I never thought would happen to me: I am finally sick of reading. He told me that’s not good, because one of us has to be able to do it. What a guy, he knows just the right thing to say!

My response to my own most recent post

I am still thinking about my last post. I heard/read a few days ago that “parenthood is a continual process of letting go.” That’s what I think writing is, too. The things we write are our progeny, of a sort. We create them from nothing, grow them, birth them, nurture them, then give them to the world where they take on a life of their own. I think it’s easy to want to be prescriptive with our creations, to determine what they are and how they should be perceived. With my daughters, I want to believe I can choose who they are. I say “Avary is this” and “Olivia is that,” but as soon as I say they are one thing, they change and become something else. And when I am away, they will often behave in ways (and give people opinions of them) that are incompatible with my perceptions of them. I can only believe that this is going to continue to happen to a distressing degree (for me, at least) potentially for the rest of their lives (or at least mine). I think the same thing goes for texts. Writers are their biological parents, but they will be influenced by their environment, by time, by social attitudes, by individual readers’ backgrounds, etc.

A professor once wrote on one of my papers that I seemed to imply that the writer was trying to put a message into their fictional text, and he said that writers do not put messages into their texts and that if they wanted to do that they would write an essay instead. I’m not sure I entirely agree. I know, as a writer, that I do usually try to have a general idea of what I’m trying to get across in a story. But sometimes in a workshop I realize that I have not succeeded or that it is being read in a different way than I intended. Sometimes this makes me alter my story, but sometimes I find the other readings interesting and leave it as it is. Recently, I have been doing genre research and came across this quote by John Frow: “Complex aesthetic texts...are rarely contained by the limits of a single genre.” This suggests that a multiplicity of readings is a good thing, that it speaks to the complexity of the text. I agree. I tend to think that if something can be read in many ways, it is more interesting than if it can only be read one way.

Next Up: Author Intent vs. Reader Response

Recently, I was talking to a classmate who said that, regardless of the many different readings and analyses of stories that are made, the ultimate and definitive meaning of a story should be the one the writer intended it to be. I jokingly said that my classmate obviously was not a New Critic, because in my understanding they completely ignore author intent and focus only on the text as an end in itself (unless I understood Garry Sherbert incorrectly, which is entirely possible).

On this topic, I am working on an unrelated essay right now and came across an interesting quote by William Faulkner, about his novel ‘Sanctuary,’ that reads “Faulkner suggests that Popeye, the shining voyeur, is very real, that we can perhaps recognize his presence within ourselves: he is merely “another lost human being. He became a symbol of evil in modern society only by coincidence but I was still writing about people, not about ideas, not about symbols.”” William Faulkner himself has said that he wrote the book merely as a potboiler to make some money off a popular genre and that he did not intend for his character, who is now viewed as the epitome of evil, to be a symbol of evil. And yet, people go on writing essays about how Popeye is a symbol of evil. If even he can’t dictate the direction of critique with respect to his stories, I suppose there’s no hope for the rest of us. In this book of Faulkner’s, there have been essays written that say the main female character essentially brought on her own rape, and obviously other essays that violently refute that assertion. If I, as a woman, had written that book, I would be extremely disturbed to think that anyone would read my story as suggesting that a woman asked to be raped. But what if that kind of assessment were made after I was already dead and could say nothing to deny it? Then that might become a legitimate reading of my work, as it has of his.

I think that’s a difficult thing to accept about writing, the fact that once it’s out there in the world people will read it in whatever way is relevant to them and we have to accept that. It’s kind of like giving birth to a baby and then letting everyone else in the world just name it whatever they want to name it so that it has a million different names. One day you won’t be around anymore to call it by the name you gave it, and it will go on having perpetual multiple personality disorder for all eternity. It’s kind of like the way U of R MFA grad student, Mike Binzer, recently had his final portfolio on display at the MacKenzie Art Gallery -- a series of abstract representations of the human body – and my daughter walked in and said “This one is an otter, this one is a tree trunk, this one is a submarine (or a plum), this one is a snake, this one is a manta ray, etc.” Granted, she’s only six years old so he might not take her imaginative associations as seriously as an adult’s. But my point is that I think this is the nature of art, something that we as artists have to come to terms with. People will not always see our work the way we want them to see it and we have to find some way of being able to live with that and still sleep at night.

Do you spell that with an uppercase or a lowercase ‘w’?

In art class, my professor has been asking “What is art?” His idea is that something cannot be called art, and someone cannot be called an artist, until their work has been curated for exhibition by people in the “art world” and put on display. Even someone who creates amazing things is not an artist until this happens.  A girl in our class said she had a painting on display in a cafe somewhere, so did that make her an artist? “No.” His opinion is that the closer artwork is to food, the less likely it is to be called art (which I guess is why in Chapters Margaret Atwood’s books are on the furthest possible wall from Starbucks, which is instead closest to the teenage, self-help, and children’s section).

But I kind of agree with him with respect to the art of writing. I would say that I am a person who enjoys creative writing, but no matter how great I think my own writing is (which, by the way, I don’t), and no matter how great someone else thinks my writing is (mostly my mother), I will never consider myself a writer until someone in the “literary world” publishes my work.

Now, this doesn’t mean I think that everything published by publishing companies is worth reading or that all of those authors should be considered good writers either, or that some unpublished people may not be far superior writers, but I feel like I do not personally have the right to confer that title upon myself. I just think of myself as a person who participates in the act of writing. At what point can a person feel justified in calling themselves “a writer” as opposed to just “a person who writes?” Is there a difference between being a writer and being a Writer?

Insight from a student colleague

Thank you to Kelli for offering to give me "music to write by," which I thought was the name of a band. Apparently, the CDs in my vehicle (Kesha, Jennifer Lopez, Hannah Montana, Demi Lovato, Pink's Greatest Hits, and the soundtrack to that excellent animated Brazilian bird movie, Rio), which my children so enjoy, are not what one would normally call "inspirational." Who knew? Thanks, Kel. I will come armed with my flash drive asap.