Jim Ruland and Pearl Jam

This:  http://www.granta.com/New-Writing/Teenage-Wastelands.  Jim Ruland's great piece in Granta about being a fan and about his wife being a fan.

And then I watched Pearl Jam's "Even Flow" video, and it gave me chills.  What it brought home was the sheer force of energy and emotion and will that erupts from the band and especially from Eddie Vedder.  As those lyrics from another great song go, "Every ounce of energy, he tries to give away." And he does.  He's a fountain raining down on the whole audience and changing them irrevocably.

That's what you're trying to do as an artist ~ every ounce of energy, you're trying to give away. You're trying to transport people.

It moved me.

Once More Unto the Breach, Dear Friends

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I've been a freelance reporter and an amateur photographer for years. I'm comfortable behind the scenes ~ doing the interview, writing the feature, holding the camera, the one in control shaping the story.  It's a nice little suit of armor. 

But today I strip the armor and do my first media interview about the short story collection How to Be a Man. It's nerve wracking, but of course I wouldn't have gotten into this biz had I not secretly craved being the center of attention as well.  Ah, that craven writer soul.

Wish me luck!  I hope I don't say something stupid!

It’s My Own Damn Fault

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You know what?  It’s largely my own damn fault it’s taken me this long to get where I am in writing and publishing. This isn’t self-pity nor a guilt thing ~ it’s a fact.

The reason I say this is because time and again the reason I haven’t moved forward on these dreams is because I wouldn’t allow myself to dream them, or I got in my own way, or I sabotaged my own success.

Sure, there are outside forces at work as well.  I could go on and on listing them.  But, really, a large part of why it took me so long was because I wouldn’t let myself, I didn’t put myself out there, I didn’t believe I had worth.

For example, this piece from Kelli Russell Agodon, editor of the Crab Creek Review, about what she learned as an editor:

Submit Like a Man (for the women)--

This has become a mantra I've shared with my women friends because here's a trend we've noticed as editors.

When we tell a writer we like their work and ask them to submit again, the male poets will submit work within a month (two at the very latest) of our asking.  The women writers?  We usually never hear from them again or until a year or more later.

This is the perfect example.  I have been asked to submit again at some pretty great places.  For the most part, I have not submitted again. Rapid resilience is a huge part of success ~ my only saving grace is my pigheadedness.  Eventually I pick myself up and have another go. 

In so many other ways, I have had a failure to dream, a failure to apply myself.  I could blame it on my upbringing or whatever ~ and certainly it’s contributed ~ but moreso it’s about me not valuing myself.

Like putting myself out there in a book of short stories.  Once again I sat back waiting for someone else to give me permission.  “Am I good enough? Someone please tell me what I have to say is worth something!”  No.  I need to tell myself what I have to say is worth something.

And now that the first book is out, I feel like I’ve taken my power back, like that power I granted the outside world (which has been very kind to me, but it has its own agenda) has shifted.  I’ve always had this power ~ I just haven’t let myself believe it.

You do too.  Take it.

 

Thank you!

Oh my gosh!  Thank you all so much!  Your response to the release of How to Be a Man has been phenomenal, and I'm so glad to have you along with me on this journey.  *hand to heart*, guys. YOU ROCK.

Blog Tour!

I’m so stoked!  I may soon be hanging out on a blog near you!

My blog tour begins February 10 (though I’ll be stopping by a few places in the meantime) and goes through March 10.

As part of getting the word out about How to Be a Man, I contacted the lovely and amazing Roxanne Rhoads at Bewitching Book Tours to help me connect with bloggers and others online. 

So I’ll be posting a schedule, if you would like to join me on my stops, and in the meantime, if you’d like to have me on your blog, don’t hesitate to contact Roxanne or myself (at tamara [at] tamaralinse.com).  I love to hang out with you!

Dani Shapiro's Courage

Reading Dani Shapiro's lovely Still Writing.  I love this bit!

Dani Shapiro (via)

Courage

John Updike once called fiction “nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that mankind has invented.” Engagement with this most subtle of instruments requires daily summoning of stamina, optimism, discipline, and hope.  We are in the ocean, yes.  We are constructing the very thing that holds us.  We have nothing to latch on to.  If beginnings and ends are shorelines, middles are where we dive deep, where we patch holes, where we risk drowning.  This is no time for half measures. We must meet the page with everything we’ve got.  We must lay every last bit of ourselves on the line, to, in the words of Annie Dillard, “spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time.”

You might think this requires fearlessness.  I used to think so, too, which was a problem because I am anything but fearless.  Shellfish, bees, thunderstorms, airplanes, snakes, bears, random allergic reactions, black ice are only a few of my phobias.  I am not a risk taker, not in the physical sense.  You won’t catch me hang gliding, or even waterskiing.  But when I’m alone in a room—say, on the chaise lounge, for which I haven’t budged since my first cup of coffee, the sky an overcast gray, the house empty—I am compelled to take risks.  Because there’s no point, really, in spending one’s life alone in a room, out of rhythm with the rest of humanity, unless the stakes are high. What will today bring? I hold my breath, dive down.  Come to the surface, gasping, empty-handed.  I catch my breath, then dive again.  Maybe this time.  I reach for treasures in this underwater landscape.  Ones that only I can see.  Ones that, should I discover them, will be mine and mine alone.  I suppose this requires a certain kind of courage.  But courage and fearlessness are not the same thing.  Courage is all about feeling the fear and doing it anyway.

A Reading by Claire Vaye Watkins

Claire Vaye Watkins

We don’t have many beaches in Wyoming, and my family didn’t take many vacations, so the concept of a beach read is a bit foreign to me.  Not to mention that fact that I read voraciously all the time and don’t reserve it for vacation.

But I totally get you now!  Every other summer, my husband’s family rents a house on a lake somewhere and we hang out for a week and it’s so great.  This past summer, we went to a lake in Minnesota, and one of the books ~ one of the many, which you understand, because you’re a bookworm too ~ that I took with me was Claire Vaye Watkins's Battleborn.  I can’t tell you how wonderful it was sitting on the beach in a beach chair or lying in bed at night with the sounds of family conversations and the kids playing on the beach next to the campfire.  Then, later, as I was still reading, the sounds of loons and lapping water.

And that’s why I was so stoked that Claire read in Laramie last night!  I love her short story collection ~ they’re the type of stories I try to write. They don’t offer easy answers, they reflect the subtleties and nuances of life, and they don’t skirt around the hard parts.  But they also don’t throw in gratuitous violence or tidy endings.  I love that.  They’re the kind of stories you can go back to again and again. 

And Claire herself is so lovely.  It was so great to meet her in person.  We talked briefly about how being a writer from Nevada or Wyoming gets you labeled as a “regionalist” but that’s a good thing too because wherever you go, you’re often the only writer from Nevada or the only writer from Wyoming. You’re an unusual commodity, and it has a bit of caché.

She read an epistolary story called “The Last Thing We Need.”  It’s so great, after hearing her voice in your head, to hear the story read.  You hear the ticks of accent and you can hear what makes her sad or what amuses her come through in her voice.  The story is about a man who finds some letters and photos and medicine bottles in the desert, and he begins writing to the person who left them there.  It begins with him conjecturing about the person he’s writing too, but then it’s more about himself, of course, and the man he’s become.  Again, a story you can read and reread. 

And above all, I love that fact that these are the kinds of stories that inspire me, that make me think, this is what I want to write.  I want to be this good.  And that’s good reading.

 

Thank you, Claire, for visiting and for writing such wonderful stories.