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“Take the 🦆ing donuts,” or the Womanly Art of Becoming a DONUT PERSON

In high school, I worked at an unimaginably greasy spoon, The Donut Kastle, with my friend Cassie, and it remains one of my favorite ever jobs. We sold donuts, talked to regulars and fielded their (regular) complaints, cleaned (inasmuch as that was possible), glazed and dipped donuts, rolled out donuts, restocked donuts, listened to Death Cab for Cutie and the Jayhawks, and once, when we ran out of glazed and told our boss, heard our boss say, “If I make more, they’ll just sell out again.” So he didn’t.

Photo by Beth Truax (Armstrong) for the Manual High School yearbook. From the story: "Senior Lindsey Alexander mixes a chocolate glaze for her donut creations. Mixing glaze was just one of her many responsibilities at the Donut Kastle. 'The most fun I have is making the weekly donut burger, even though nobody has ever bought it,' Alexander said."
Photo by Beth Truax (now Armstrong) for the Manual High School yearbook | From the accompanying story: “Senior Lindsey Alexander mixes a chocolate glaze for her donut creations. Mixing glaze was just one of her many responsibilities at the Donut Kastle. ‘The most fun I have is making the weekly donut burger, even though nobody has ever bought it,’ Alexander said.”

I ate a lot of donuts. And whatever extras were left at the end of the shift, we were welcome to—so I brought them to theater practices and my then-boyfriend and my friends who didn’t wake up early enough to visit me on my shift. (Our boss took the rest to the homeless, because he may have been a god-awful businessman, but he was an excellent baker and a good person.) The tip money was negligible, and several weekends, Cassie and I spent it buying cheesy tots and slushies at the Sonic next-door.

Before a redesign, we also received the best shirts ever. Despite the pit stains only a teenager in a hell kitchen could create, I still have mine and wear it with no small amount of pride: “I AM A DONUT PERSON” it proclaims, rightly, above a stick figure drawing of donuts wearing crowns and capes on a stick figure castle.

Even after having to give up gluten (shudder), I remain a donut person. (Finding a gluten-free blueberry donut is what led me to work at a bakery in Knoxville. I follow the donuts.)

In a discussion of judgment of how artists make their money or pay for their art in Amanda Palmer’s book The Art of Asking, Palmer brings up Henry David Thoreau. She notes that some people call Thoreau a poser—he isn’t a true man of the wild; he got land from a friend, was close to town, had regular dinners with his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, and every Sunday, had the audacity to accept baked goods from his mom and sister, including the occasional unforgivable, totally decadent donut. This seems like the kind of gossip that floats along in art school (“She’s only able to do that because her spouse supports her/Her mom has a trust fund/She knows someone/That opportunity was only open to [insert often racist comment here]” and so on), typically out of envy, to negate someone’s work by saying they didn’t do it all on her own.

But who among us has done it all on her own?

Palmer talks about DIY versus “maximal DIY,” saying true DIY is doing truly everything on your own—no help, no donations, no phone calls, please. True DIY, she says, requires ingenuity. “Maximal DIY,” however, is asking for help and accepting it. She argues this requires ingenuity (knowing how to ask and what to ask for, plus balancing confidence with gratitude) and trust. (You’re not totally in control. You’re dependent on other people.)

Maximalist DIY-ers take the donuts.

Palmer’s point? If Thoreau had been saving to buy land, hunting for food, making meals from scratch, and starving, chances are he wouldn’t have been writing Walden … or anything else for that matter. Whether Thoreau fails some sort of grit test because he ate some donuts and went into town, he still wrote one of the important pieces of American literature of the 19th century.

If someone offers you donuts, in the words of Palmer: “Take the f*cking donuts.” If you can afford to take time off to write your novel, take it. If your friend offers to give you studio space to record your album, take it. If a pal Venmos you money for gas for your tour or for refills of paints, say thank you, and take it.

For a long time, I’ve tried to be a true DIY-er, which, frankly, is a path I respect but, for me, has been a lonely road. That changed with the publication of my book, which depended on an excellent designer, a fabulous editor, and a publisher I would work with again without question. It continued to change as I asked friends if they’d help me with my book tour—and, remarkably, they did, offering spaces to read, audiences to read to, classes to teach, couches and air mattresses and once a real bed to sleep on, their company when I was passing through, meals, interviews, sharing reviews of my book—you name it.

Maximal DIY is the way to go, IMO. And I did not come by that opinion easily. (Us hard-heads never do, unless we are bullshitting in the middle of a debate over drinks.)

There’s no glory in refusing a donut. Or in refusing gifts, which I tried to do several times in the publication process for my book Rodeo in Reverse.

I’ve turned down some pretty good grub in the past because I didn’t have the humility to eat—avoided opportunities or publications for fear of nepotism, not accepting invitations because people are “just being nice” (uhhh, let people be nice to you?), been resentful of my husband because his career lets me have the (lower paying) career I want (and then not got much writing done because of handwringing over my lack of financial contribution), and I could go on.

But you know what? I love donuts. Life is hard enough without refusing its most perfect circular treats. I want a t-shirt with Thoreau’s face on it that says “Take the donuts” (because I am too afraid to wear anything with the F-word on it in public).

High-school me knew what was up: I AM A DONUT PERSON.

What donuts can you take to get some creative work done?

What’s your favorite donut shop where you live?

Let me know in the comments below, or email me at Lindsey@LDAlexander.com.

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Poems I’ve Loved: May 2019

“Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.”
—Faulkner, Light in August

Isnt there something jean valentine.PNG
“Isn’t there something” by Jean Valentine, from her collection Shirt in Heaven, published by Copper Canyon Press.

“Isn’t there something” by Jean Valentine

Jean Valentine is a poet whose work I came to (and who I had the good fortune of meeting) in grad school; but I was younger then, and silence outside my own bothered me more. As I age, I’m finding I’m more comfortable with less said, and though I sometimes lean toward (or on) her more traditional (narrative, explicable, punctuated) poems, I’ve come to love her work. It’s an earned love, entered into with mutual respect and trust over time; to leave so much to the imagination, so much possibility, for the reader, so much space for our subconsciouses to fill in and potentially drown her sharp-quiet thoughts on the page, is certainly an act of respect and trust.

But this isn’t to say these poems are without a dramatic pulse. To the contrary. In a world of jeering, a whisper can be twice as terrifying as a scream, and there is much more in less but an honest-less than in confident hyperbole.

This poem is a little bit more “accessible” than the typical Valentine, even in Shirt in Heaven, a book about memory and grief, and how we never really leave either, but maybe it’s because there’s a comfort in the company.

This elegy doesn’t reveal itself as an elegy until the last stanza. Before, it’s about mis-belonging, about trying to figure out or locate the parts of the self (the parts “like dogs,” “like trains leaving,” “like a gun”). What is a self, a person, made of? And if we’re made of all these parts that only appear at night, or that leave, or that threaten or protect (or both), all these parts that change, how do we keep a hold on ourselves? How do we keep it together?

This poem begins with questions, maybe rhetorical, maybe wanting affirmation from this person who, we later learn, has died. “Am I this? Am I that? Aren’t I like this and this and part that?” The speaker using “Isn’t” instead of “Is” makes for leading questions; a belief that there is indeed something in her like a gun. (It’s the difference between someone asking you “Do you think it’s rude to …?” and “Don’t you think it’s rude to … ?” The “not” implies that the person asking expects you to agree.)

At any rate, the speaker’s sure what kind of person she wants to be but isn’t: the loud squirrel that begs at the porch. And I wonder, what is it about that squirrel’s existence that’s desirable? That its desire is so out-in-the-open?

And here, where she might lose me (and also maybe because I tire of repeated words joined by an ampersand, which seems a little Literary for me), she does the oddest, most beautiful thing. It’s not just us creatures (the speaker, the dogs, the squirrel, bees) who want something (wanting having a double meaning of desiring and lacking); even the inanimate objects might: “wooden planks, / wanting something.” But what could wooden planks want? “To go back into / a tree?”

These two lines contain all the magical thinking of a great grief or great children’s book–a depth and humor and achy longing that have kept me renewing this book to re-read this poem. Here is where the speaker reveals herself and the poem turns: It’s about wanting to return to a place and time that are gone, about being without a path back.

Except in art, where we can hold on, keep the dead living. In this way, the poem is an ars poetica (a poem about poetry), which I usually despise, because they’re often highfalutin and either don’t make much sense to me or, conversely, they oversimplistically overstate how poetry changes the world. Yet, I like Valentine’s message here because it isn’t so hopeful as resurrection. It’s sad, like being the last customer to leave the bar is sad, like waiting for a phone call is sad; an unwillingness to say goodbye. But every miracle is part sad. And yes, this is miraculous, too, that there’s a place available to meet our dead, to grow our planks back into trees that the hungry dogs of us can look to or lie under.

“Lake Isle of Innisfree” by William Butler Yeats^

This one’s also a poem about memory saves us or about how the false stories we tell ourselves about future possibility save us from the “pavements grey.” I’ve been reading it often to my belly button/kiddo in utero, in hopes they’ll like it when they move out (of my uterus). It feels good to read out loud, especially the part about “the bee-loud glade.”

It reminds me of one of my favorite songs, “Tall Pines,” a bluegrass tune about the memory of home, leaving it, and returning to die, which also is bucolic and recalls the sound of bees, almost as though written from the perspective of Yeats’ speaker if he did return as an older man: “I’ll never forget the morning I left / The hum of the bees in the hay: / The farther I walked, the louder they talked— / How silent it seems here today.” The bee sounds aren’t there; the trees are taller; there’s a gravestone meant for the singer.

Valentine and Yeats don’t attempt what the bluegrass musicians do, or not quite as fully. They aren’t ready for death themselves, despite what they might imply; or ready or not, they go on living. They don’t return to their Lake Isles; they can’t return to their person yet except for in poetry, the writing of which is an embrace of life. (In something as musical as “Lake Isle of Innisfree,” the repetition of the poem aloud does this, underscores its vivacity.)

Yeats doesn’t attempt to force the plank into tree; rather, he remains on the pavement, the musicality what allows the memory to dwell so that he can “hear it in the deep heart’s core.” Still, the poet behind the speaker hints to us that this place isn’t real, or isn’t real in the way memory or hope presents it: at noon, the sky is purple, for instance.

Valentine is more outwardly self-aware, she knows she’s clinging, but in her acknowledgement of clinging of distance, isn’t she closer to obtaining the object of her affection, this lost person, through that person’s own words?

Yeats’ speaker embraces memory (and its sister nostalgia) without questioning its illogic; Valentine’s embraces memory despite its illogic, as a means to an end.

And what is it about loss and bees?* Isn’t there something?

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^Hear Yeats read it himself here. (And you can listen to scholars talk about the poem, and “kill it” to understand it, which, sigh, scholarship.)

*Coincidental: Plath wanted her bee poems to be the last in Ariel, though they’re realer (less bucolic) than the bees of the others here; her hives having swarms and stings, unlike Yeats’.

 

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What Oak Ridge Public Library means to me

*This is a slightly revised version of a speech I gave on April 4, 2019 as part of National Library Week celebrations at Oak Ridge Public Library.*

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This is a photo from the reading. (Here I’m reading from Rodeo in Reverse.) It felt pretty cool to read with my kid inside me and with a bouquet of the daffodils I mention in the speech. (Photo credit: Virginia Spence)

Thank you to the Oak Ridge Public Library for having me and for having been such a special place to me the past four years.

I was asked to speak about how libraries nurture creativity. I can’t speak for everyone, so I thought I’d talk about how this library, ORPL, has kept me going, what this library means to me, and a few of the lessons it’s taught me about how to be creative.

First, I must confess I’m predisposed to a love of libraries. You’ve been warned.

I first moved to Oak Ridge four years ago, and I awaited my mail eagerly. Did I have a love of junk mail from local churches and car lots? No. I needed something with my name on it with my new address that I could present to get my library card. I’ve never felt home without one. That January, I got my no-nonsense yellow library card from this branch; I’ve been around, and usually they’re covered in some sort of clip art, an outdated logo or something meant to look punchy. Those aren’t for me. I loved that this stood out in the bottom of my purse, that it had no pretense. I checked out Alice Munro and The Girls of the Atomic City, returned to the short-term lease my husband and I had at the time, and began to make my home here.

Oak Ridge is a beautiful town, but not one that’s easy to break into as a 26-year-old. That first winter I drove around to estate sales and new-to-me museums. I parked and stared at Melton Lake. I hiked and was grateful to live near mountains. After four years in northern Indiana, the winter here felt not too like winter at all, and I liked that. Yet, I did most of these things alone. As you might imagine, writing is mainly a solitary pursuit, and so there weren’t other people to meet on the job. My husband and I bought a house, our first, and I loved it, but also didn’t know where to begin. That season was beautiful and difficult and lonely. There were times I regretted our decision to move here, away from everyone we knew, times I worried I was incapable of making new friends. It took a toll on my marriage, my self-confidence, my business. But not on my writing.

Many readers will tell you you’re never alone with a good book. Maybe it’s because I’m a poet, I’m not sure I feel the same way. But I do know I’ve never felt alone at a library.

True, it’s a public space; there are always at least a few other people here. But it’s not that, is it? It’s the feeling that here, anything is accessible, there’s help available, there’s humor and sorrow, and old and new, tattered and pristine; there’s discovery—always discovery—and surprise. Libraries, maybe even more than nature because of my proclivities, remind me how much surprise is in the world. I come in to check out a gardening book and leave with a book about gardening and another about wolves and another about Van Gogh’s letters to his brother, Theo.

Or, after a volunteer shift in spring 2016 where I had been wondering what it meant to have on the returns cart Maya Angelou and Mein Kampf side by side, what kind of world I lived in, to walk outside and see the daffodils’ bright yellow against the concrete exterior of the building, a blue sky, up before any other bud or testimony to spring. Surprise.

At its best, art works this way, too. Art surprises. One of my favorite living poets, Mary Szybist, says it’s important not to be too “willful” in a poem. By this, I think she means not to know at the beginning where you’ll end up, to let the process of writing take you for a ride, rather than steering.

Similarly, this library specifically taught me an important lesson that I found on its shelves but not in a book. The year I volunteered, I came in to help tidy shelves after the presidential election, which was a travesty. I felt bereft, listless. I couldn’t unglue myself from the news but also couldn’t summon the creativity or strength to do anything about it. It’s one of the few extended periods in my life where I couldn’t sit down and concentrate well enough to read—and therefore, I wasn’t writing well either. I came here. For my shift, I took an aisle in the reference section. A typical shift involved straightening the shelves, putting away some books, making sure everything was in the order it should be in. Reference seemed like it would be easier—1) because I doubted it got as much action as the new fiction section and 2) because the books had an inherent order—by year, for instance.

As it so happens very rarely in this life, I was wrong. I reached Butler’s Lives of the Saints, a series organized by month. Me? I’m inclined to say January, February, March, and so on. But Dewey Decimal had other plans—leave it to the saints: alphabetically by title. This meant shelving the books April, August, December, February. My lesson was one I suspect I’ll be learning a long time: Things may appear out of sorts when they’re in order; they may appear in order when they’re out of sorts. It was exactly the lesson I needed from the library that day, given on the spines of books by saints, no less.

To me, the creative process is similar; good artists know this—a thing may appear not to come together at all until suddenly, after much work, an inner logic is on display, gleaming, like the innards of a clock. Sometimes what a writer may be working toward may look like a total disaster mid-way through. A painter staring at a streak on a canvas for weeks. Julia Child, in middle-age and years into a bad 800-page draft of what would become Mastering the Art of French Cooking, rejected by a publisher, feeling like a failure.

Sometimes, April first, not January.

The library is a place of such generosity. Just think: in thousands upon thousands of communities across the whole country, tax payers who can’t agree on healthcare, welfare, security, sidewalks, zoning, or stoplight placement put aside their differences to say there should be one building full of knowledge where all the knowledge is free. (If you’re me, it’s never quite free because there’s always a late fee, but that’s another story.) Everything in this building anyone who lives nearby can have. During the day, anyone can come here and find respite—from the cold or the hot, from home or from work or from the street, from parenting or parents, from noise. We can come use the computers, the public meeting space, listen to a CD, stream a movie, get a redwagonful of books. We can play chess or ask bizarre questions. We can meander. Librarians are so generous they not only have dedicated their lives to helping us answer questions—from how to check our email to where the bathrooms are to when is it exactly a new title will be on the shelves; they also do the unglamorous work of discretely cleaning up a chair after someone’s had an accident, and yes, of making small talk with lonely people like myself. It may be one of the few places we’re truly safe and truly daring at the same time. No telling where our minds will go, and, as Eudora Welty said, “All serious daring starts from within.”

The best artists are generous, too. Probably not as good as libraries, but if I could aspire to be anything, it would be to be like a library and the people who inhabit it. Artists who are great aren’t even necessarily the artists who anyone will ever know—even in ORPL, a relatively small library, we’d be hard-pressed to make it through every book on the shelves. But to me, great artists are those that give generously and humbly, like a library and its people. They keep their doors open and let information and ideas flow freely; they share seeds. At any moment, a book or fact or image could be found by just the person who needed it.

This bureaucratic-looking building, lit in fluorescents, seems an unlikely place to host such a miracle. But the library, as an experiment, must be one of our most noble human endeavors, one each one of us takes part in any time we drop by ORPL.

This leads me to my last but maybe most important way the library has been such a good place for me to think about creativity. It provides a kind of sustenance, renewal—if you’ll pardon my pun. In each of my stories here, the library has offered me a place to go to feel refreshed, revived, capable, curious. When we approach art, as creators or as audience members, we seek these same things. Or at least I do. If we keep ourselves open to its lessons, if we aren’t too willful, are willing to be surprised, and are generous, I have no doubt that art, and the libraries that hold it, will give and give. The perfect imperfect (which is to say, human) system.

Leave a comment below naming a favorite library (or memory from a library) and why its earned that position.

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Poems I’ve Loved: November 2018

A photo of a suspended wooden bridge with fall foliage and a blue sky.
This bridge at Talullah Falls during November in north Georgia is decidedly unseasonable for the two poems that kept me company this month while I was staying in this area.

The Trees
by Philip Larkin

The trees are coming into leaf,
Like something almost being said;
Their recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say.
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

What do I love about this poem?

First, its brevity. 12 concise lines that manage to speak about mortality, the speaker’s relationship to nature, and some ineffable sadness—the realization that emotions aren’t forever, but they never quite leave you either. “Their yearly trick of looking new / Is written down in rings of grain.”

Second, its musicality. I dare you to read this poem out loud. (Go on.)

Yes, there’s the rhyming, but in many ways that’s the least interesting formal constraint. (I had many people on my book tour ask me what makes something a poem if it doesn’t rhyme, and I wasn’t able to quote my friend Katie who said something like “No one knows what a poem is.”) There’s a move from a quietness, a softness that matches the slow ponderous observation of a Sad Poet, of a person in grief in springtime. That first stanza, the verbs are “to be” verbs—which just point out existence—and “relax and spread.” There’s an ease in this grief. It’s lush, it’s “greenness.”

Then the musicality kind of breaks itself with a rhetorical question, a questioning of the initial premise, the person wondering if they’re projecting, why it is this scene brings out grief rather than feelings of rebirth. The pace is off, the stresses aren’t what they once were. When you read it out loud, it doesn’t fall trippingly off the tongue, that question. It requires pause. It clunks. That’s when they return to that initial pace, almost sing-songily: “Their yearly trick of looking new / Is written down in rings of grain.” (Iambic tetrameter or something close for those of you playing at home.)

In the final stanza, the rhythm maintains itself, one can hurry through the ending except the words are a mouthful, tongue twisters, their sounds hard to put together: “unresting castles thresh,” the words brush against and lean on one another, beautiful, but almost brusque “fullgrown thickness.” The final repetition of “sh” sounds (“afresh, afresh, afresh”), a quieting, but loud, isn’t it? It’s a sound nature makes a lot, but it feels like not quite what it means. The sound itself, repeated in the first and fourth lines of that last stanza, introduces a kind of tension between what’s being said—”Begin again”—and how it’s being said—statically, overemphatically (not once but thrice!)—all that repetition; and of course, they only “seem” to say it.

Finally, I love this poem because of its adverbs. I have met so many writing teachers who tell their students in a blanket statement not to use adverbs instead of taking the time to show them how to use them well. (I suspect sometimes it is because the writing teachers don’t know.) The adverb I love here is “almost.”

How are the trees coming into leaf? Not like something someone’s said. They don’t announce themselves. It’s “like something almost being said.” A hesitancy there, an unspoken something, they’re holding back despite being on display.

This is the movement of this poem, too, isn’t it? The poem almost says what it’s about, but never quite circles it. What or who is the speaker grieving? He tells us what he isn’t grieving (that trees appear young as we grow old), but he keeps the true subject of the poem private. He writes a poem, displaying his feeling, yet still plays it close to the vest. This “greenness is a kind of grief.”

“To a Mouse” (read the full poem here)
by Robert Burns

But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
          Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
          For promis’d joy!
Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e’e,
          On prospects drear!
An’ forward tho’ I canna see,
          I guess an’ fear!

And this poem, in its Scottish dialect and ridiculous premise (having a good talk with a mouse). What is it about this poem I love?

First, it makes me laugh that Burns let us know before Oprah it’s best to stay in our lanes, even mice. But besides that. (I think this may actually be about not being alone, but let me have it my way. Please.)

Second, it is a fun poem to learn to read aloud. (If you’re Scottish, maybe you don’t have to teach yourself. Do you? It seems at least a bit performative, and of course, probably somewhat oldey-timey.) I would love to memorize this poem. Reading it out loud also helps if you’re having issues understanding the way the language is written.

What I maybe love best about this poem is that it code-switches. Burns plays dumb like a fox; this speaker is just a country bumpkin who’s accidentally torn up a mouse habitat with his plough, and is so bumpkin-like he decides he’s going to have a heart-to-heart with the mouse. Nothing to see here! No sleight of hand! No tricksy intellectual arguments! Bless his heart.

And he does. But the diction, and thus the register, shifts, in the second stanza to make a political statement. In highfalutin abstract language I might add: “I’m truly sorry man’s dominion / Has broken Nature’s social union …” Then he slips right back into his “natural” dialect (“thy wee-bit housie”!), forging ahead with the conceit and his argument. Really, this is a rhetorical poem, a political poem. While it can be read as a poem of environmentalism, man’s changing relationship to nature, it can also be (and often has been) read as a poem about eviction, what those in power do to those without. Here, Burns’ speaker shows such empathy (though the habitat is already destroyed, the mouse “turn’d out”). The mouse becomes a symbol for the farmer to think about how much he worries about his futures, that his fortune might be no better than the mouse’s. The conceit—talking to a mouse for a long time—is silly; the premise is dark. He’s able to sneak in the political, to get dark, because of the silliness, and the repetitive rhythm and rhyme of the Burns stanza. (Yup, dude has his own stanza.)

And in probably the most human move of all, after spending 7 stanzas empathizing with the mouse and worrying over it, Burns’ speaker lets the mouse know it has it better than him, though. Why? Because the mouse’s present is stressful, but it doesn’t have to, nor can it, worry about the future. Burns, a human, can and does. Despite the “best-laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men” being about worthless, he can “guess an’ fear!”

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Seeking, Stopping, Finding: How My Word for the Year Changed Me

“What you can plan is too small for you to live.”
— “What to Remember When Waking,” David Whyte

Inspired by Susannah Conway, I now choose a word for the year, or a handful of words, instead of making a list of resolutions. For 2018, I chose “Connect.” I chose it because I craved connection; I wanted connection to guide my decisions. I sought connection, searched for connection, hunted for friends, for happiness, for purpose. I picked the word connect because it was scary and because I felt disconnected.

Truth be told, 2018 kicked my hind-end into outerspace and back again a couple times. A long-term friendship ended; my grandmother died the same week; six months of freelance work evaporated unceremoniously; I had two asthma attacks a day for 20-some-odd days. I couldn’t even stick with my breath. That was the spring. As I pulled into therapy one day, The Mountain Goats’ “I Am Going to Make It Through This Year (If It Kills Me)” popped up on Spotify. Uproarious laughter. I never lost my sense of humor, and yet, for a while, I was calling this year “my unwanted lesson in impermanence.”

I went on fabulous vacations and smiled and laughed and danced and ate oysters on the half-shell and learned and promptly forgot all the facts I could learn and forget about the Colosseum and drank wine under the stars and stared into dozens of famous stony faces and had my first book come out and loved my life and grieved and got angry for reasons I couldn’t explain and woke up in the middle of a few nights wracked with panic.

But some time, somewhere, with connect, something happened. I didn’t notice when it began, but later, driving long hours through the South, listening to the radio, singing so loud in the middles of so many nowheres I thought were just beautiful. I realized—twice—that as a song came on that touched me, I was holding my hand to my heart. ((It was this song.) Which, honestly, what?!)

Rather than seeking to connect, I saw all the connections I’d been unable to see before.

People who were already my friends, the richness of those friendships, the place I could call home, the interests I’d been too shy to claim, how writing connects me to the world, how all of it both roots and frees me.

For years, I thought my writing was part of what kept me lonely or maybe that I kept myself lonely to devote myself to my writing. But through others reading my writing, my small but intelligent, generous audience, I’ve found, especially through my book tour, that writing is what connects me to others, to kindred spirits—not what separates me from them. Writing brought me to New York, where I spent a whole afternoon talking with my cousin on a patio and a whole day walking with another cousin sharing our deepest selves; it brought me to Mary Corse’s work, to Central Park, to meeting a man who has kept a picture of his wife in his wallet for 40 years—since they told each other they couldn’t remember why they’d gotten married, so now he always remembers; it brought me to nachos and sushi with an old friend; a porcelain duck named Spinoza; to a dog that could dance; to my great-aunt’s property and finally meeting her llama; to recognizing my friends in East Tennessee, some of whom even braved a torrential downpour to support me. Writing has brought me close friendship with a baker-writer and weekly walks with her. It’s brought me to the mountains in the cabin of a country civil rights activist, watching squirrels shake leaves from the trees.

Without writing, I would’ve forgotten the details; without writing, I would’ve lived different details. Writing, in connecting me more with the world, has brought me back to myself, to my senses. I’m not one to say art can save you (or me). It can’t. But art can remind us who we are, and we can save ourselves and each other. Thank you for being here with me, for connecting with me and continuing to read. Thanks for being patient with me. I see you now.

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What Success Is (and What It Isn’t)

Poet Lindsey Alexander reading from Rodeo in Reverse at Union Ave Books in Knoxville the day Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford spoke before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Me reading at Union Ave Books in Knoxville the day Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford spoke before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

I have friends who would say success is getting your first book published, preferably with a prize. Have a prize? A more prestigious prize. Have a prestigious prize? A more prestigious award. You can see how the bar moves.

To me, success is a bar that is level, clearing that bar. A bar I choose. Success to me is about setting one bar at a time, not sitting surrounded by bars.

My success is not a cage; my success is what I leap toward. The past couple weeks on my book tour, success has looked like:

  • Talking to a student about her career path after a class
  • Having someone ask to see a copy of a new poem I’d written after reading it
  • Answering some questions honestly and pithily after a reading
  • Watching Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford testify and then making it to a reading anyway
  • Having a woman at that reading tell me I’d read her favorite poem
  • Connecting with my friends
  • With my family’s help, creating a livable space in my basement (it was just junk in boxes)
  • Scheduling an oil change
  • Not picking fights with my husband
  • Making a good meal from ingredients we already had in the house
  • Making my pub day a day to bake and spend time with a friend, rather than trawl social media or plan a big party that would stress me out
  • When I completely spaced an appointment, apologizing and letting it go

My favorite quote about success is from Maya Angelou. I’ve shared it before, and I’ll share it again: “Success is liking who you are, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.”

Yes, sometimes success is champagne floats. (I do recommend raspberry sorbet for that, by the way.) It’s effervescent and bubbling to the top, it’s beautiful and too sacred for Instagram. It’s holding a book in your hands, or a manuscript, or thirty drawings when you thought you couldn’t finish anything. It’s a scale progression you’ve finally nailed or transitioning between chords with ease for the first time. It’s a promotion, it’s talking to someone you don’t know at a party, it’s seeing your person succeed, it’s having dinner with your parents and realizing just then how much you love them and how much you are loved. It’s stopping to watch the butterflies on the bush you planted for them a year ago. It’s a slow dance in your dining room on a Saturday afternoon—just you.

We tend to write off our everyday successes (or I do), which makes us ill-equipped to see our big ones when they come. I’m trying to revel more in them. Especially the successes that might not look like success at all to someone else.

Sometimes success isn’t glamorous—and I don’t quite mean the hard work behind a finished product. I mean sometimes the world is ugly and success is ugly, too. Sometimes success is sharing with someone you love that you’ve been hurt. Sometimes success is warning women colleagues about your harasser when you hear he’s in their orbit. Sometimes success is having developed the tools to not have a panic attack when you hear an abuser’s name in passing. Sometimes success is faceplanting on the couch so that you don’t go out and self-destruct or self-medicate. Sometimes success is admitting to yourself that you’ve been hurt and that you didn’t deserve to be hurt; it’s letting yourself cry after years of promising yourself you wouldn’t. Sometimes it’s recognizing hurt you’ve caused and contemplating how to pay restitution. It’s laughing after all this when you accidentally break a keepsake, sweeping it up, and hoping you’ll glue it back together somehow. Sometimes success is “jumping in front of a train that was heading to where it was heading anyway.”*

In the American literary scene, we are in a season of awards and lists that people like to argue over. I understand why: They help careers, give visibility to writers, can give assurance that’s much needed when an artist feels at a breaking point, and also, most people have very little taste if left to their own devices—if something wins an award, they can feel comfortable calling it good. I’m happy for kind artists who win awards pretty much regardless of whether I like their writing—mostly because it’s nice when nice things happen to nice people. (And the inverse of this is also true for me—not liking when mean or cruel people or known abusers win these awards pretty much regardless of whether I like their writing.) Sometimes great works are awarded, sometimes they are passed over for lesser ones. An award doesn’t change the original quality of a work. And somehow, work keeps getting done with or without this validation.

If we come up with our own terms for success, as Dr. Angelou suggests, then it is maybe less surprising when worldly success is bestowed to those who are undeserving—the sycophants, the posers, and infinitely worse, our abusers, our nightmares, our Brett Kavanaughs—and that we must argue over who “success” is bestowed upon, whether it’s an award or an inevitability—an entitlement, and what success means. Often, success is just a word for putting bars around others, passing a bar, a baton, between only a few people. (The bars others set for us—by design or by circumstance—usually aren’t level.)

It can be painful to realize people I care about don’t share my definition of success—that a violent felony is a rite of passage, for instance, and not disqualifying, the strange idea that a personal failing should not affect a professional success. (Especially as I’m of the first Facebook generation, where we were urged not to post anything—even a questionable joke or a red Solo cup—as teenagers that might haunt us throughout our careers.)

Having a definition of success for myself doesn’t make the world more just—it doesn’t lessen my tears. It doesn’t make me a good person. (Dang it!) But it does lighten my load. It makes me accountable to myself.

How?

I like who I am, I like what I do, and I like how I do it. (And when I realize I’ve fallen short, I change what I’m doing and how I’m doing it to match the person I know I am.)

I may be wrong, but I do not think the Kavanaughs like who they are, what they do, and how they do it. (If they did, would they deny who they are, what they do, and how they do it? Do they even begin to know who they are?) This belief, this self-love, may be the only justice we get.

What is your definition of success for yourself? What is one success (of any size) you’ve had in the last week?

*What Dr. Blasey-Ford said of her reluctance to come forward sooner.

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5 Links to Help You Stop Impostor Syndrome When It Creeps In

After all, chances are you’re an impostor impostor. Acting with the knowledge from these articles, stave off impostor syndrome.

Leslie Odom, Jr., of Hamilton fame on wobbly steps and quitting before you’ve tried

New mantra: “‘What did you do in the absence of the ringing phone?'”

“How to deal with impostor syndrome when you’re treated as an impostor”

Impostor syndrome has a greater toll on members of minority groups because “a lack of representation can make minorities feel like outsiders, and discrimination creates even more stress and anxiety when coupled with impostorism, according to Kevin Cokley, a professor of educational psychology and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin.” This article also shares three tips for helping quell impostorism.

The #ShareYourRejections hashtag on Twitter

Started by poet/author Saeed Jones, this hashtag has individuals tweeting rejections that are inevitable with making art or living life. Many are about manuscripts and art that has been rejected (some of which you’ve heard of, some you haven’t), but some people are sharing life stories of rejection as well. In medias res, happy ending, and bottomless, this is time on social media that may actually make you feel less alone in your pursuit. Being rejected doesn’t make you an impostor—not doing the work does. (As an aside, I fully believe in that barstool aphorism: “Life’s rejections are God’s protections.”)

How I dealt with my own bout of an impostor syndrome freakout while trying to re-title my book

What is Rodeo in Reverse was Impostor from the Future. Yes, I even wanted the word impostor on the front cover, bigger than my name. On the spine, beside my name. I wanted everyone to know Lindsey Alexander = impostor, okay?

How to build a sense of a belonging to immunize yourself against impostor syndrome

Trust, playfulness, and writing down your accomplishments seem like they vaccinate against the worst of impostor syndrome. This isn’t to say you’ll never feel like an impostor again, but that you can manage the resources to move alongside that feeling rather than buying into it. Here are several ways (especially geared toward the workplace) to shake it off in the Florence and the Machine way. (Wo-oa-oah.)

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Get New Books Free! How to Suggest a Purchase at Your Library

Tree in early spring at Oak Ridge Public Library with daffodils.
Tree in early spring at Oak Ridge Public Library.

In this installment of Learn Your Library, we’ll learn the best way to support your favorite authors for free. If you love an author, want a book you can’t afford at the moment, or want to assert your power, you can suggest a purchase at any library where you have a current membership.

Often, they’ll buy it; you can read it, return it, and save the money. Or, if it’s an author you feel evangelical about or owe a debt, you can do this so readers in your community come across their work.

How do you do this?

Google “[your library] + “suggest a purchase””. If you’re in a larger community or one that has a big library, chances are you can do this online. You’ll need the

  • title,
  • author,
  • publisher,
  • ISBN,
  • the genre of the book,
  • and your library card number.

For my book, Rodeo in Reverse, the info would be

  • Title: Rodeo in Reverse,
  • Author: Lindsey Alexander,
  • Publisher: Hub City Press,
  • ISBN: 978-1-938235-40-5,
  • Genre: Poetry,
  • and your library card number.

If you live in a smaller town or a place with a library whose website is not all that fancy, you can do the same thing by calling and asking for the reference librarian, chatting up the reference librarian in person, or yes, fellow Millennials, by emailing the library with that information.

Welcome, non-academics, to a lifetime of free access to the books you want to read.

If your library can’t afford a certain title, don’t despair. For that, there’s inter-library loan. Ask your reference librarian; bring the same info you brought to suggest a purchase.

If you enjoyed this post, sign up for my monthly newsletter, and get my thoughts on creative living and staving off impostor syndrome, plus updates on my book Rodeo in Reverse. Pre-order it here.

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Poems I’ve Loved: June 2018

Waterfall and pool, trances of the blast

I’ve read quite a few great poems in the past several months, but my favorite, the one that stuck to my ribs, is an oldie: “Frost at Midnight” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. (Read it, then come back here so we can discuss.)

I don’t think I’d ever read this poem, despite taking several classes that assigned Coleridge’s poetry in undergrad. To be honest, most of what I remember about Coleridge is that he took drugs (true?) and wrote Kubla Khan but came out of his stupor before he was able to see it through, he was William Wordsworth’s cool friend, an aphorism about words in their best order, and “the star-dogged Moon” and symbolism from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

“Frost at Midnight,” less fantastical, more domestic, is much more interesting to me now, as someone steeped much more in homelife than fantasy. This is a parenting poem, a poem that does that thing parents want and progeny dread: hoping children will live the life they were unable to. It’s a poem written from inside, by a fire, with a baby sleeping. If autobiographical, then, a stolen poem: up with the baby, Coleridge writes. It’s also a poem of the natural world, and for its time, the suburban world. The speaker laments growing up in the city and insists his child “shalt wander like a breeze / By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags / Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds … .” This is a 19th-century version a new or non-parent’s “My child won’t sit in front of a screen all day.”

Enter anxiety. The only thing stirring is a flame: “‘Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs / And vexes meditation with its strange / And extreme silentness.”

My reading is colored by how the poem came to me—through Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work, a memoir about the first year or so of motherhood. In it, she admits to having always loved the poem but never having noticed the baby in it. (This is a testament to the ways musical language, rhythm and rhyme, can hide meaning without a closer look. See: every pop song you sing along to until one day you realize the lyrics are awful.) After becoming a parent, she did see it. Here is some of what she has to say:

It is a poem about sitting still, about the way children act as anchors on the body and eventually the mind. … These memories arouse in [the speaker] the profoundest feelings of love for his child, as if every separation he has endured in his life can be mended by this moment of their closeness. … This love is a restitution; it is like a new place, from which the old country, the unhappy past, can safely be viewed. … Coleridge does not mention nappies, noise, bits of old food. I don’t think this is just because it’s the night shift. His poem is written in the present tense; it describes a moment, surrounded, by implication, by other moments, by noise and disarray. Perhaps moments, now, are all there is. But this is a moment to which he brings his gift, which is language, a moment in which his love finds a voice. … In this moment he experiences an elemental greatness.

As her reader, the baby is the first thing I saw, it’s where she pointed me.

Oh, but the second thing. The second thing pleases me to no end. Here it goes.

One of my favorite living poets is Mary Ruefle. A recent book of hers is Trances of the Blast. Reading the book in 2013, I kept wondering at that title.

“Trances of the blast.” Which, what does that even mean? I disliked the title but wanted not to dislike it, to know what was there.

I looked up trances, and it meant only what I thought it did: a state of being entranced, sleep-like, hypnotized. “Sleep-like states of the blast.” I know being literal doesn’t always help, but sometimes it does.

Could it mean what resounds?

Then here, 5 years after reading the Ruefle book, I came across this poem somewhere else, totally by accident, and for hours one afternoon I remained in a pleasant trance of the blast. There was the phrase in its original context, and I’m not quite sure I understand the image fully, but it was literal.

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the night-thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

Whether those eave-drops that have collected fall and last as long as the trances of the blast—perhaps the ripples in a puddle, perhaps the silence after the blast of a drop hitting the ground and splitting or whether they coalesce with coldness by the hand of that “secret ministry of frost” who could “… hang them up in silent icicles, / Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.”

(“Quietly shining to the quiet Moon” may be one of my favorite lines in the English language. To me, Coleridge is a poet of great moons.)

The blast is maybe what happens if the eave-drops (here, actual droplets from the eave of a building) hit the puddle or the ground below. To call a single drop hitting the ground a “blast” must speak to how quiet the night must feel to this speaker, or how sensitive the speaker is, how attuned. The trance though—is it the aftermath?  The quiet after the boom? That “reflection in tranquility” business his friend Wordsworth prattled on about? In that case, this drop is a literal “spontaneous overflow.” Each poem a trance in the after-blast of a reading life or some other event? Or is it the trancelike state the speaker would be in, staring at it, all night up with the baby, unless of course, that “secret ministry of frost” uses its coldness to freeze it.

And it’s fun to think of added modern meanings: blast in all its strength, sure, but also as in an email blast. (Actually, the trancelike state after receiving email blasts makes a lot of sense.) Or better yet, having a blast, the trance we’re drawn into having fun. To blast to destroy, as with dynamite and the catatonic state that might surround it. But I’m most drawn to the sonic meaning, most likely because of a talk Ruefle gave on tone earlier this year. She talked mostly about bells, yes, bells (hell’s bells, to get specific). She quoted Basho: “Coolness / the sound of a bell / leaving the bell.” Trances of the blast.

And of course, the blast of Coleridge’s work, of the Romantics, and the trances we’ve found ourselves in since, especially as poets. Maybe it is that Ruefle’s trance is one of awe and absorption. Maybe that word, part of trance’s definition, a state of absorption is it—having fallen from the roof, a drop blasts on the ground and is ultimately absorbed.

Then the third thing, much less domestic, back to that wild world Coleridge so often seemed more entranced and absorbed by: the sublime, the otherworldly, grandiose nature. (Okay, I do remember some stuff about Coleridge.)

In Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind*, Suzuki Roshi offered the metaphor of a waterfall—much more dramatic than a drop or two from an eave, but, I think, related. He said that visiting Yosemite he saw a massive waterfall, and it caused him to think about how as the river the water is one whole. As it falls, it separates into groups, drops, and spray—when it is separate, set apart, we notice it, it causes feelings and appears (and even feels) different. The waterfall, he argues, is akin to individual lives. “It takes time, you know, a long time for the water finally to reach the bottom of the waterfall. And it seems to me that our human life may be like this. … Only when it is separated does it have some difficulty in falling. … Whether it is separated into drops or not, water is water. Our life and death are the same thing.” Eventually, the waterfall joins the river below, no longer separate entities, in many ways the same as it just was but now indistinguishable, less intense, less alone, a trance of a blast.

In Ruefle’s book, from the poem “Saga”:

Everything that ever happened to me
is just hanging—crushed
and sparkling—in the air,
waiting to happen to you.
Everything that ever happened to me
happened to somebody else first.
I would give you an example
but they are all invisible.
Or off gallivanting around the globe.
Not here when I need them
now that I need them
if I ever did which I doubt.
Being particular has its problems.

My final thought for now: Such joy in not understanding a thing then receiving a little understanding sideways, years later, even if incomplete (especially, maybe, then).  The initial impact, the release, the return: to more trances of the blast. (You know I couldn’t resist.)

What is a thing you read and didn’t understand, then came to understand newly a lot later? Let me know in the comments below.

If you enjoyed this post, sign up for my monthly newsletter, and get my thoughts on creative living and staving off impostor syndrome, plus updates on my book Rodeo in Reverse. Pre-order it here.

*Which I just recently learned about and have yet to read. I heard this waterfall anecdote on a podcast, driving, at a time when it was helpful to me.

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Ancestors and Self-Acceptance, Honor and Joy

Forested mountains

Then in my heart I wanted to embrace
the spirit of my mother. She was dead,
and I did not know how. Three times I tried,
longing to touch her. But three times her ghost
flew from my arms, like shadows or like dreams.

—Odysseus, The Odyssey trans. Emily Wilson, Book 11, lines 204-8

I come as one, but I stand as 10,000.

—Oprah paraphasing Dr. Maya Angelou

Joy is the happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens. And, usually, we have the idea, well, when something nice happens, then I’m happy, and when something bad happens, of course I’m unhappy. Well, you can be unhappy, and yet joyful. We don’t think of that. But there is a deep inner peace and joy in the midst of sadness. If we feel our way into it, we know that.

—Brother David Steindl-Rast (in this excellent episode of On Being)

Forested mountains

The other day, driving home from work, I was listening to our local public radio’s classical hour and thinking of my grandmother. It was a beautiful blue-sky day, and on my route, when the sky is clear, you can see the mountains both ways. Around the bend and the view revealed them, in their purple-blue relief, the road peeling behind me. My grandmother loved a view. Then, on the radio, something odd happened. Listening to this show on the way home was part of an old-pat routine: instrumental music, no lyrics (except occasionally opera, in languages I do not understand) to wind down, an occasional misplaced CD and the commentator trying to think fast in that way that makes local public radio even more enjoyable.

But as I moved in my hunk of metal toward the mountains, a chorus began singing “Morning Has Broken,” a song played at my grandmother’s funeral. (She wasn’t religious, but she did like Cat Stevens.) For almost a whole minute, I could swear to you she was there. We were there together. In that moment, I felt all-the-way-full—not overwhelmed but totally at peace and totally realizing joy.

Since my grandmother passed in April, something that has dawned on me is all the amazing places I’ve been able to take her. I don’t mean physically. I never took my grandmother on a vacation; I never even took her to dinner—when we ate together, she always made the food or footed the bill. Instead, I mean that once she passed, I realized that thing people say about someone living on in the hearts and memories of those they love isn’t just a saying. It’s a truth. She died practically a shut-in, but someone who loved views. Whenever I see a beautiful view, I think of her. I’ve felt so connected to her since she’s been gone—I’ve shown her rolling vineyards, embankments, and cliffs in a country she’d never been to, hills unfurling terra cottas against greens; to a fog-dense mountaintop where the deciduous trees stand, branchless, upright; to who knows where next. I truly believe she’s seeing it too. (Every person I’ve confided this to has said they also experience some version of this, and I don’t think they’re saying it just out of niceness.)

You see, in the words of Dr. Maya Angelou, “I come as one, but I stand as 10,000.”

The more time I spend with that sentence, the more I realize it is not a sentence but a blessing.

A gift of my grandmother’s passing has been a form of self-acceptance, acknowledgment of all the places I’ve taken and am taking her, and all the places I’ve taken and am taking my younger self—not to mention the women my grandmother loved and missed. It’s easy to dismiss accomplishments, shrug them off, belittle them or one’s self for not being enough. For years, I wished I were in a different profession, something that people got more excited about when I mentioned it at parties or that proved I was a hard worker or smart or caring, or a different kind of artist—a musician, or a different type of writer—a bestseller, or even a different sort of poet—Twitter famous yet award-winning, a professor or New Yorker, a homesteader or L.A. muse, the best homemaker or a single devil-may-care gal (which, just by writing that phrase, probably means I’m not built to suit).

But someone’s got hip New Yorker covered. And someone else has got single Nashville singer-songwriter covered. And yet another person has West Coast Instagram personality covered. Idol is covered (largely by pop icons and serial killers). “Famous poets” is covered: mostly by dead people. I’ve got to cover Whatever This Is, and, like an actor worthy of her salt, discover something new in the role every day that I can.

In accepting myself and my lot, I honor my grandmother and the places I take her. I would never demean her intentionally, or my younger self, and so I should not diminish myself because I carry them.

They see what I see. And art is an attention to, a way of seeing, and so they help me make my art.

I used to think honoring someone meant writing a poem about them, making something for them, dedicating something to them, or doing what they’d have me do. I’m beginning to realize (my grandmother is teaching me and I’m teaching myself) that honoring myself is honoring everyone I carry with me, everyone who carried me until I got here, where I could walk so far, so high, I could sit inside a cloud and remember.

Who do you choose to honor and how will you honor them today? Leave a comment below and let me know.

If you enjoyed this post, sign up for my monthly newsletter, and get my thoughts on creative living and staving off impostor syndrome, plus updates on my book Rodeo in Reverse. Pre-order it here.