Camp NaNoWriMo word count: 18,116 as of 5:40am on Saturday, 13 April 2019

EMD word count has two more “resting” days at 74,883

I found my grandmother’s gravestone. There is, naturally, a website devoted to finding graves called, naturally, FindaGrave. My father adored his grandmother Rosetha was a markswoman, under 5 feet tall and strong-willed. She is buried at Forest Lawn in Glendale, California. (My mother never met her and seemed impatient hearing about her virtues—while I was enchanted.)  She was born Rosetha Alma Stiles, the first of at least four children both to Eliza Catherine Salsbury Stiles and Asa Butler Stiles. and her mother died in Minnesota when Rosetha was still a teenager. Her father would remarry and have three more children. One died in her third year. The other six surviving children, like my great grandmother, lived well into the 20th century. My dad liked to say she rode in covered wagons and in jet planes. But I must misremember that since commercial jet travel had not begun in her lifetime. On the other hand, my dad worked for Douglas Aircraft in Los Angeles before joining the Army during World War Two. 

Fridays I drive to Seaside to share work with another writer. Our meeting yesterday was reassuring. It was the best sort of feedback since it told me clearly what some part of me hoped and feared was true. The prose poem worked. Only the first stanza of the three-stanza poem worked. And the final paragraph on the essay was misplaced. I moved it and sent it off into the world. She also set me on the track of a novel with a situation very like the one I am struggling with in “Butterfly Fontanel” though George R. Stewart’s story is not otherwise like mine. My post-apocalyptic world resolves itself quite differently. My main character is Latina, the secondary character is lesbian and Black. A third, whom I have only told about and not brought onstage, is also Latina. I have dithered about names, but I think I will use family names. They are mine.

I hope I was as helpful in my comments to my writer-friend. 

I think my Rosa might measure the passage of seasons the way we do, by the position of the setting (or rising) sun in relation to some natural monument.

There are stories on the news about reparations for slave labor. Clearly it is not enough to send thoughts and prayers or even apologies. The racism crippling opportunities for people of color will not be resolved merely by good intentions. Still. I wonder when we will talk about reparations for repression of women? After all, women had almost no legal standing for most of our history. To a great degree, women were property as surely as slaves. If they were wealthy, they ate well, but in many places they could not be raped by their husband only because whatever a husband did to his wife was within his legal rights. For most of the history of this nation, women were denied the right to vote, to control property, sign contracts, serve on juries and participate fully in the economic, political, and social life of our nation. Our nation’s playing field is anything but level, but too many girls are still raised to smile on the sidelines rather than strive for their place at the table. We consistently and violently ignored the honorable intentions and specific directives of our own Constitution. White people placed bounties on the lives of Native peoples. U.S. policies failed utterly to respect promises in treaties. I would not presume to know what the answer is to resolve our deplorable racial, cultural, and sexual history.

And the president has promised a pardon to a man he insists should break the law. He seems to believe that he is allowed to do whatever he wants, regardless of the law, that he is immune and above the law. He advocates what members of his own party, what any law-abiding decent human being would recognize is a cruel policy regarding immigrants fleeing danger from the south, a policy which has been proven an absolute failure since historically falling levels of immigrants have now exploded in numbers. 

I hardly recognize my country these days. Though having two meticulous researchers for parents has always made me skeptical of historical accounts, I am an unlikely pragmatist and at heart an idealist. I want my country to be heroic and honorable. We are increasingly revealed as the bullies of the world.

Getting back to my great-grandmother Rosetha, the woman who does not resemble her theoretical English forebears: she was shorter than the rest of her family and slender in her bridal gown. Black hair and eyes and dark skin. I have always wondered if she were not a Native person, stolen or adopted from her people. I proposed this to my father many years ago, but he denied it vehemently. The story of six tall, red-headed coursins is not born out by the relatives listed on the FindaGrave site, but then again only my great aunt Vera is listed as her offspring. My father’s mother Elsie is not shown at all. Ancestry has not entranced me as it has others in our family. I have made no serious effort to locate relatives, constructed no family tree. I am more interested in where were are going than from whence we came, I suppose. 

Camp NaNoWriMo word count: 14,016 as of 6:30am on Wednesday, mostly journaling here and working on the essay, which I submitted yesterday (incorrectly, as it turns out).

Revised novel EMD word count holding steady: 74,883

This is my fifth National Novel Writing Month event. I have written three 76k manuscripts in November 2016, 2017, and 2018. Last April I wrote the draft of a novella or novelette, a more modest goal. Rewriting and expanding that piece was part of my project in November. This April I set a modest goal of 10k. I have exceeded the word count thanks to journaling, and I am pretty much on tract to complete four pieces for submissions. I suppose this is the result of quitting Facebook last month.

It’s a sad day when The Guardian covers a U.S. political story better than The Washington Post. I couldn’t even find the story in The New York Times this morning. Brett Kavanaugh was disinvited to teach at Harvard because students protested his impact on campus:

There, four students wrote an op-ed in the Harvard Law Record, saying that an “opportunity to learn about the supreme court might not be equally available to women because many will self-select out of a class taught by a credibly accused sexual assailant”. Harvard announced in October that Kavanaugh said he could no longer commit to teaching at the school.—The Guardian

But this year George Mason signed a multi-year contract with Brett Kavanaugh and students there are upset too.

Law school faculty approved Kavanaugh’s appointment in January, according to the university, but his hire was first reported on 22 March by the George Mason student newspaper, the Fourth Estate.

Soon after Kavanaugh’s hiring became public, Mason For Survivors, a student group of sexual assault survivors and their advocates, created a petition and began hosting protests against Kavanaugh’s hiring.

“There is a historic amount of institutional negligence on your part to support survivors of sexual assault and the student body as a whole,” reads the petition, which is addressed to the administration of the university and has received more than 3,000 signatures.

The anger over the school’s hire is a stark reminder of the controversy that enveloped Kavanaugh last fall when he was appointed to the court.—The Guardian

In a particularly painful twist, “the course is slated to be held in the bucolic setting of Runnymede, where Magna Carta was sealed in 1215, and where George Mason University has located its Antonin Scalia Law School.” Sometimes I wonder.

In the mean time, our neighbors are hustling around in an attempt to disguise that they built three structures without bothering to apply for permits and without approval or inspections. That they also allowed trash and concrete to be dumped in a wetland . . . and that’s just the easy part to clean up, though it is the most distressing to the owners of the trashed property.

And it’s Camp NaNo!

I should be working on fiction. I know I have work to do on “Butterfly Fontanel” but cannot seem to get myself going. And I only have 6 days before I need to go back to work on the novel. I think I will be glad to look at it again. If I were willing to waste paper, I would print it off and read it from the beginning, but the truth is that every time I try doing that, the paper copy languishes. And I know it benefits from a hard copy review . . . or I think it does. At the very least, I need to begin reading Part 2 and see how that section flows. Section 3 has not had any sort of overview. And again, truth is that I have pasted in thousands of words and discarded more thousands without full oversight. It is my hurryhurryhurry. 

Also, I wanted a new Louise DeFleur story. That hasn’t even begun. The day after tomorrow I am meeting with a friend and I need to have something to share. 

Yesterday, Gary finished cleaning the kitchen and the bedroom and still has the bathroom to clean. He vacuumed and washed down all the walls this week (he hopes I will not have to do mire than touch up the paint) and scrubbed the windows in the living room so it all looks a lot better. I put two coats of paint on the new front door and its frame—the outside and edges of the door, the inside of the frame. It needs a week to fully cure and then I will flip it all over and get a first coat on the inside of the door and the outside of the frame before it;’s installed. I had ripped out the baby blanket I was knitting, sent off the yarn I did not like to exchange for another color, and started over with a new plan.

We are determined to have a slower day today and to get our walk. We don’t mind a little rain (we have rain gear), but we do generally avoid a full gale.

And it’s still NaNo.

Camp NaNoWriMo word count: 10,266 as of 7am on Sunday, mostly journaling here. I wrote a brief dialogue yesterday afternoon that may have moved me along in toward figuring out a story I began last year. This morning I watched my counter hit exactly 10k and then kept typing.

Revised novel EMD word count: 74,883 This draft is still just sitting. I have not even peeked.

We went out yesterday morning and did not get home again for almost three hours. As the crow flies we probably covered three miles of ground, but since we were seriously beach combing (11 pieces of sea glass) we walked a considered distance, up and down up and down the rocky part of the shore. Everything had moved around.

Gary says we have been intensively combing the shore and gathering trash since our last dog died. We lost Yeti in June of 2017. Our last dog. Last year we picked up a thousand pounds of plastic. We go out nearly every morning with a bag to gather trash and I usually return with pockets full of agates and perhaps a few bits of glass in one hand.

Yesterday morning was the first time we met another couple gathering trash. Gary talked to them but did not ask where they were from. “They must have been local” he concluded because the woman talked about bringing her kitty litter scooper out to sift bits from the sand without bending over so far.

I had to reread the passage in Shawl/Ward that defines “the unmarked state”—the taken-for-granted aspects of a story: that it is set on Earth, here-and-now, that the characters are human and white and English-speaking, and male. “A character in the unmarked state has a certain transparency”—of “someone” rather than a particular person who brings a broad range of expectations.

This resonated.

Usually on the first day of my Junior English classes I taught either Suniti Namjoshi’s “The Blue Donkey” or Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Wife’s Story” and I always taught the latter in the first week. Always. I chose these stories not only because they are very good and also short, but because they offered a certain degree of misdirection that allowed me to teach lessons about the unmarked state, though I did not call it that at the time. The author begins with the unmarked state and certain assumptions she or he might make about the reader and the reader’s expectations. Generally, the author can be relied upon to tell a story that in setting occurs where and when the author him- or herself is writing from. Le Guin turns that on its head. She apparently told an interviewer that the story was about betrayal (and later told me she did not recall saying that, but never mind) and so, once we understood who the characters were in the story, we talked about betrayal, notably of the reader. Le Guin breaks that fundamental rule about where-and-when-and-who and she gets away with it because rule-breaking is pretty much the point in that story. The stories we read in class were all “good” stories. I assured students that authors worked and reworked a story. If they found a line of poetic rhyme in a narrative (such as in “Yellow Woman”) it did not happen by accident. What is the author asking us to pay attention to? Look again. If we hear the story as well as seeing it, what does it sound like, what do those sounds reveal? In Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Yellow Woman” the rhyme indicates the point in her story where the narrator tips into her story, accepts the reality of her participation in a myth. The goal of all of this was to make students pay closer attention, to help them gain awareness of craft, and to encourage them to value the process of writing.

Some of this I learned, or was reinforced, in a workshop with Bret Lott, who liked to stay he knew nothing about how to tell a story and then proceeded to detail what should happen in the center chapter of a novel (something critical). This I-know-nothing claim followed by something enormously helpful is not unique to Lott. At my first MFA residency, Bill Kittredge was pretty much bullied into giving a craft talk about writing nonfiction. He stood behind the podium, cross about this expectation and insisting he had no idea how to write an essay. And then proceeded to explain precisely how it might be written: set up a problem by composing an anecdote that defines it in the first paragraph; then write a paragraph with a false solution to the problem, also defined by an anecdote . . . Although I had already been teaching the “Real Life Problem” for years, that is exactly how that framed essay assignment was set up for students.

The sky is lightening and I think a short walk is in order today. We refilled the bedroom where I had painted the floor. We went over our taxes and I redid one page where I made an error, and then corrected two issues Gary found. The forms are collated, stapled, and ready to be stuffed into envelopes. Gary keeps wondering how our friend in Seattle is managing since he also does his own taxes but has no computer. It is increasingly difficult to complete taxes without using the online system or a paid preparer. I had planned to send a check, but found that would require yet another form, so I paid what I owed online.

The rain and windstorm caused some problems, but everything looks okay today. Our contractor is coming today to begin shingling the west side of the house. Wind has blown sand and that has ground the shingles on that one side of our house right down to the felt. The new door will be installed this week. I still have walls to paint, probably not today. Yesterday was supposed to be a day of rest and it was insanely busy. I can hear robins in the garden.

Camp NaNoWriMo word count: 7,532 as of 7am, mostly journaling here, but also some revision based on discussion with Ann. A thousand new words each day is, for me, a modest expectation.

Revised novel EMD word count: 74,883 This must be left alone for a few days. 

I met Ann and we shared our projects, goals, and fears. Today I need time off.

The storm this morning is impressive. Gary saw on the news that a mile of power poles came down in Seattle. This blowing rain is nothing unusual for us.