downsizing, evaluating, other stuff

As Some of You May or May Not Know,

traci and I recently quit our jobs. We’re trying to sell our house. We’d like to, in turn, buy some chickens and plant a garden near those chickens. Preferably some place in Southeastern Ohio. We’re downsizing, and taking a step away from academia for a while. We’re going to make more time for our art and our kids and our health, and put less energy into worrying over where our students want to put semicolons or what our colleagues think of our publication records. It’s all, I know, a noble pursuit. It simply overwhelmed us a touch. We found ourselves looking forward to retirement, rather than enjoying our lives.

So I know that raises a lot of questions: what’s your house look like?, is it close to a park, how much are you asking?, chickens?, I thought you already had chickens?, and will you find true happiness once you’ve left teaching?

In response to the first three questions: check out our realtor’s website here. Or if you just want to see our crib, which has not yet been featured on any reality shows. I know. I’m constantly shocked as well. In response what appears to be the fourth question, “chickens?” Well, that’s not really even a question. Or a sentence for that matter. But I’ll do my best to respond: a chicken is a medium-sized flightless . . . you know what just click here to find out. In response to question four, which is also, I see now, not a question, I must say, you can think it all you want, that’s not going to get us farm fresh eggs. And, finally, we’re not even sure what happiness is, but one thing that I’m only now beginning to understand is that happiness, like writing, is a process, not a product, and it is in the enacting of happiness that happiness exists.

I’ve been meditating, which is like weightlifting for one’s soul. That’s how come that last line there sounds so smart. Bet your ass.

Meditating has its limits.

Meanwhile, the above is all part and/or parcel of the reason I’ve written so little lately – I’ve found it hard to celebrate a life in limbo. But I also want you all to know what we’re up to, where we are going, where we have been, what’s on the horizon, what’s off to the left there, just around the bend, up ahead, yet to be, off to the north, up, and going on.

So keep the questions coming, or else I’m gonna have to keep making them up. Until then. Y’ens take care.

Hair Cut for the 21st Century

Though my head would almost certainly not fit into a red or blue plastic cup, I found myself looking very much like a beer pong ball recently. Well, to be honest, I still call them ping pong balls, but according to most of my students and that tupperware sitting next to the cash register at the BP station, they are now beer pong balls. And, rather than being swatted back and forth across a green plywood table in the garage, apparently the object of the game these days is to cover the ball in lint and dunk it in someone else’s drink. The more drinks you dunk it in, the better your chances for “staying on” to play the next folks.

All sort of beside the point, really. Recently, you all have been asking, “What, then, is the point, Jackson?” Which I’ve taken to mean, “Why are we here?” Or “Is there a meaning to all this?” Or “Tell me about the sea, Jackson?” The last of which, I feel I should mention, is not a question, despite the question mark. Maybe you already knew that. So, what is the point?

The point is: I got a haircut. Let me rephrase: I shaved my head. Not to the scalp exactly, but pretty short. In fact, this is what I used to look like:

This is what I look like now:

Well, a little what I look like.

The boys came home from rock climbing shortly after my “haircut.” Zac said, “Whoa, when your hair’s that short, your beard looks enormous.” Sam said, “You have a beard?”

I bumped into Naomi a short time later, and she asked, “Did you lose a bet or something?”

I asked Blaisey for her honest opinion (an honest question posed in the form of a statement (an honest question with a certain indication that a juice box might accompany the correct answer)): “My haircut looks good, right?”

Blaisey said, “Yes. Good. A little weird . . . but you look really cute in that shirt.”

She got the juice box. But, let’s face it, who wouldn’t look cute in this shirt! The one on the left.

Anyway, I've been busy for a spell, you know, whether other things, but I'm back now, or at least that's what I'd have you believe.

Also, in the off chance that it's not obvious, Desi says hi.

More Recent Evidence Reinforces My Belief That I Married up

Unfortunately, as you all know, I’ve slipped just a touch this past week in my standing as Most Successful Member of the Family. To wit: after many months of super-duper readings at great venues to vicious applause and unyielding lauding, traci’s book Recipes for Endangered Species has been panned. She was thrilled. “Look at this,” she said, “it says here, ‘I felt as if I had left a loving homestead filled with ancestral love and spiritual light to go get a job as a stripper in the city, had sold my child for drugs, and dumped my beloved cat in the trash, and walked away as it mewed. I wanted to go to sleep, but was afraid of my dreams.’”

Absolutely thrilled. She said, “This reviewer hated my book, but this review won’t make people not want to read it.”

I on the other hand felt my married-up status slipping along with traci’s grammar: “ . . . won’t make people not . . .” – so you wonder: what kind of rhetorical Wal-Marts does traci construct while you’re all away? – “won’t make people not”: that kind.

(Should that be while “y’all’re away?”)

With my PhD. a mere language requirement away, and people talking smack about traci’s writing, I thought for sure I would have to start picking my nose while teaching or throwing snowballs at Pat and Olga’s kids and blaming it on the sky. And, hell, it’s not even likely to snow here again until we leave for Utah in December. I was at an impass.

Suddenly, on Tuesday Nickole Brown from White Pine Press called traci. Turns out traci’s manuscript of prose poems Shell-Shaped Pieces of Bone was a finalist for the Marie Alexander Poetry Series. A really awesome series from a really awesome press.

While we found out this past weekend that she did not win, I was consoled by the fact that I’m back, baby. There’s no way I’m going to accomplish as much as traci any time soon, so who is the most excited in the world that I married traci? Clearly, it's this guy:

But, in all fairness, Blaisey's a close second.

Post Script: National Novel Writing Month – good attempts all around at our house. The Epic Asskicking Adventures of Princess Badass topped 8,000 words during the first week, then quickly fell from favor. Instead, I started working on my Western (The Wickedest City) again, and that went well. traci clacked steadily away at her novel – she got closer to maybe 10-12,000 words. While still shy of the 50,000 words the National Novel Writing Month experts look for, she has laid some ground work for a novel that I’m sure you all will be interested in. I’m burying Princess Badass for the time being, but traci’s going to stick with hers. I hear December is National Plutonium Enrichment Month – which means the ancient Connor family mantra (Hold My Beer I Wanna Try Something) has never been more fitting.

summer writing

You’ll all recall it’s been a few years since Ange noticed the new external lock on the outhouse door down to the camp. When he asked what was the deal with that, Pappap told him we can’t have an outhouse within X feet of our brand new septic tank. We can, however, put a lock on just about anything and call it a tool shed, and, well, you can put a tool shed just about anywhere. Angelo said, “Oh, I thought you was just worried about someone stealing your shit.”

Long story short, I recently published a series of four short pieces in which Ange figures prominently. Him and Dan, you know, some pieces that are part of my new manuscript of very short writings that I call Man Made Man. Here’s a line from the third piece: “One more thing shoved deep in their guts that makes them, every once in a while, pound their fists on the steel and stone of their respective lives for, what you might say in looking at them, is no apparent reason.”

I only mention this so as to mention the pieces are in Portland Review issue 56 volume 3, which marks the first time traci and I have writing in the same journal at the same time. (We’d both been in Fourteen Hills but not the same issue.) Her short story “Goat” is also in her collection Recipes for Endangered Species (Tarpaulin Sky Press), and here’s a couple lines: “Some of Phil’s friends touch the dog, but only on the nose, far away from the knuckled damage. They are curious and ashamed in the same way they are secretly afraid of black people.” Zing! More proof that I married up.

The above, by the way, is all prefatory to this: traci gave two readings in NYC towards (I’ve been back in PA long enough that “towards” is now pronounced “t’oards” again) the end of July. The first of which was a release party for the new edition of LIT Magazine hosted by powerHouse Books. Here’s a short paragraph from her story “Zombie” which was included in the journal: “I imagine Moab as the earth turned inside out. Sage burgning. Red rocks whimpering in the god-awful heat. A wolf worn-out with howling. Selenographers on bikes, on trails, with packs that fail to open. The sky a tumor and the rare thrust from the earth. Think of the final scene of Carrie, for example.” Hazah! Such range, such beauty – a rare and beautiful talent.

traci read alongside three other amazing writers: Mike Young, Nate Pritts, and Eduardo Jiménez Mayo (who read his own translation of Rafael Pérez Gay). But don’t just take my word for it, watch the video recap by DJ Dolack here: http://coldfrontmag.com/news/launch-parties-in-nyc -- totally worth eight minutes: a great reading.

Meanwhile, after several weeks and a couple thousand miles of travel, we’re back baby in NC where the crepe myrtles are always in bloom and the heat makes you wish you’d stayed home today.

Early July

I have to give credit to a neighbor who said that today feels like a scrotum -- as if the Earth were sticking to the sun's leg. Roger that, Pat. Still we finally got the hot tub off the porch and the dry wall up the stairs. We started a diet, we ended a binge, we found great comfort in the way sparkling water makes the strawberries bubbly.

There's not much news from N.C. except that it's hot in the day and humid in the night and vice versa. We've been remodelling since I "finished" my Ph.D. and landscaping and gardening and plumbing and you get the picture. For the most part, I've had two hours a day to write, and I'm working on The Wickedest City, which is becoming more of a historical novel than a Western. Even when it was like a Western, it was more like the movie Wallstreet, except without Charlie or Martin Sheen. It does have John Wilkes Booth in it, but I don't feel qualified to compare the actors.

traci's teaching students how to dream on the page, how to turn off their conscious mind and find out things through their writing that they don't know that they know. One thing we love about Guilford is that most of the students trust her to teach a course this way. Others reject the notion that they can't think their way into a story. Jerks. "Let them sit there in their heads writing diary entries," I tell her, "see if I care." But she pushes them and even more of them get it. I don't know, maybe I'd still rather teach middle-school math (my last major before English).

The kids are great. At least that's what I hear. Zac's been at the beach and in Athens and back to the beach -- I've only seen him a couple times. Naomi, Leah, and Sam are in PA with my folks for three weeks, catching and releasing racoons in wooden cages and swimming in one spot against the Allegheny's current.

I turned 33 the other day, so I set a new writing goal: I want to be the oldest "great American writer under 30" ever -- it will be tough, what with time and space going on and on like that forever. On the phone, Naomi asked me how old I turned. I said, "33." She said, "Neat. That's two of the same number." Later traci asked me, and I told her, and she said, "Neat. That's the same number twice." Genetics is a funny funny thing.

Two more years! I know I dwell on it every year, but I haven't had a birthday to look forward to since I was twenty. Two more years! The day I've been waiting for since I first learned about the judicial, legislative, and executive branches. That's right. Two more years and I'll be old enough to run for president. My elementary teachers all told me that "anybody can be president." So I figure I'll do it at least for a few years.

Maybe you all recall when I woke Naomi up for another day of fourth grade on 05 November 2008, and before she opened her eyes, she said, "Who won?" And I said, "Barack Obama. Are you excited?" And she said, "No. Not really. It's not like he's gonna come to our house or something." And that was the moment I decided my platform for 2012: If you elect me president of the United States of America, I will come to your house. I will sleep on your couch. I will leave the toilet seat up.

Anyway, Pappap and Aunt Jan drive the kids home Sunday, and Zac got home this evening. As for remodeling at this point, the good news is: traci and I are the only family members with a bedroom these days. The bad news is: the only bathroom in the house is in our bedroom. Oh, life, you thoroughly fickle thing.

Also, Desi says hello: