What to Wear

Hello dears. Here's a short essay I wrote for the UK's terrific Litro Magazine, I hope you enjoy it!

You attended a thousand parties in New York, at art museums and armouries, at a very good funeral home and a world famous theatre. There were pale men in fine suits and duskier-skinned cater-waiters in tuxes. Preserved old ladies wore invasive French scents that reminded you of your grandmother’s Seattle clubs, the Sunset Club and the Rainier Club, the Ladies’ Auxiliary this or the Women’s University that. If you exchanged pleasantries with such ladies your dress would carry some of that fussy old glamour with you when you said goodbye. The girls your age who weren’t there, like you, on the arm of a corporate foundation’s temp, wore lighter scents, all fruit and white flowers. When you told yourself the young girls’ perfumes were just the old lady perfumes of the future, you coveted them less.

Fiction School

I had a lot of fun doing this interview with Fiction School's Baker Lawley, Jody Gehrman, and (in spirit) Tommy Zurhellen. If you've ever wondered how memoirists and fiction writers make (or try to make) art out of life, then this is the podcast for you!

Summer Reading

Here's a fun sampler of summer reads, including Yoga Bitch!

   Summer Reads Sampler by Crown Publishing Group

Small Change in the Chicago Tribune

Very excited to see my short story Small Change in Printers Row at the Chicago Tribune. I wrote an essay about the somewhat terrifying process of writing this story, here. Printers Row is an awesome literary supplement/journal, and you can subscribe here if you're interested!

Hilary Mantel

This interview with Hilary Mantel is terrific, especially this bit:

Memoir’s not an easy form. It’s not for beginners, which is unfortunate, as it is where many people do begin. It’s hard for beginners to accept that unmediated truth often sounds unlikely and unconvincing. If other people are to care about your life, art must intervene. The writer has to negotiate with her memories, and with her reader, and find a way, without interrupting the flow, to caution that this cannot be a true record: this is a version, seen from a single viewpoint. But she has to make it as true as she can. Writing a memoir is a process of facing yourself, so you must do it when you are ready. 

Salt Hill 30, Macedonia, Deutschland and More

So, I've got a short story in the latest issue of Salt Hill, Syracuse University's gorgeous literary journal. I'm really quite thrilled about it; this story is an old one that I started sending out this summer in earnest. I wrote it-- or rather, its first lines-- over ten years ago, late at night when I lived in New York. I had probably just watched either Cabaret or an Almodóvar film, because I was obsessed with both at the time. It's called Proper Food for Children.

In other news, Yoga Bitch will be translated into Macedonian, which is thrilling-- please do tell all your Macedonian friends to keep an eye out for it.

And the German edition of Yoga Bitch is in bookstores right now! It's got a new title, Bin Ich Schon Erlaüchtet? Which means, Am I Enlightened Yet? Pretty neat, if you ask me. (And the answer is nein.)

Other than that, I'm about to disappear for a while to get the new book into second draft. Exciting, scary, etc. I am drowning in notes, outlines, half-written scenes. Time to get this thing together.

AND! I know you're all dying to know how Spartacus turned out. Oh, Spartacus. Spartacus is a bad drug. I know it's terrible, but I can't stop watching it. So, consider yourselves warned, and stick to Game of Thrones.

Till next time,
S   

I Am Spartacus

So far, 2013 has been full of tiny horrors, some of which I'd love to share with you.

1. Spartacus, the television series: Have you seen this godawful thing? Honestly, it's some of the worst television I've encountered, and I have a high tolerance for bad TV. My brothers swear up and down that if we can just make it through the first five episodes, we will fall in love with it. So we watch it with our hands over our eyes, the husband and I. I keep imagining how the writers brainstormed this show: I picture two unshowered brothers, stoned on weed and beer and porn and video games, essentially having the same conversation over and over again. I imagine it goes something like this:

Bro #1: In this scene, Spartacus should totally have sex with his wife while CGI flowers fall around them and we see her tits a lot.

Bro #2: That's exactly what I was thinking. And we should see her tits.

Bro #1: I love that idea. Definitely tits. And then . . . the Romans come!

Bro #2: Yeah, tits, Romans. Then there should be like a big scene of punches and blood, and the wife's tunic gets ripped so we see her tits. There should be yelling, and someone says something about honor.

Bro #1: Great idea. I think we should have some blood in this scene, like, big splashes of CGI blood and punches that are done in slow motion and also swords. Then, let's get some sex in there, but dirty this time.

Bro #2: Yeah, okay, so we need slaves to have sex then. Slow motion sex. Then they're interrupted by punches and there should be, like, blood splatters that like, hit the television screen. I think the punches should be in slow motion.

Bro #1: Can we get some tits in that scene?

Bro #2: We can do that. (Reaches for bong.)

**

The husband and I have taken to calling it Shitticus. But we are people of faith. We will suffer through to the fifth episode.
 
2. While watching the first episode of Downton Abbey Season 3, I kept imagining what it would be like if the writers of Spartacus got their hands on the darling of Masterpiece Theatre Anglophilia. Tidal waves of blood and boobs . . . and Maggie Smith.

3. I am back to work on the new memoir and it is kicking my ass. It's taken me over a year to be ready even to consider returning to memoir after promoting Yoga Bitch, which involved talking about myself endlessly for many months. But now I'm back to cringing and sighing and wishing I could hide under my desk most days, writing about some of the absurd things I've done, said, thought . . . Oh, memoir. That said: I kind of like the pain, because it gives me so much to complain about! And you know how I do love to complain.

4. We're doing one of those wretched little cleanses again. This time I'm allowing myself to have butter. I'm a grown-up, a decider, and I decide that on this cleanse, I can't have booze or sugar or whatever the hell, but I can have butter. This makes all the difference.

5. I had a tiny epiphany that freaked me out, and that's that this work is never going to get any easier. Memoir is hard, always, because I am dealing with the messy, complicated material of my own life. But fiction's no easier. When I'm working on shorter pieces (2012 was the year of the short story) I often feel like I've got a wicked case of ADD and mania and dilettantism. But the older I get the more aware I am that while my work habits are deeply, deeply fucked up, they are my fucked-up work habits, and somehow, they work. But they look nothing like an orderly person's.

6. I also (re)discovered that discipline isn't everything. I mean, discipline is important in this business. In the beginning, discipline meant getting my ass in the chair and slogging through my requisite three hours, or 1000 words, or two pages, whatever the goal was at the time. That discipline has become almost --almost-- second nature. Now I have to remind myself to relax. To space out. To be a conduit.

In November, I started a writing retreat to draft the remaining third of the new book. For four weeks I worked every day, grateful for the rain and the cold to keep me focused. By mid December I found myself with nearly all of the chapters drafted but a growing despair that the structure was somehow all wrong. I could either keep going in this potentially-wrong direction or I could surrender to the holidays and the not-knowing and give myself a few days off.

So I sat by the tree and read Maria Semple's delightful Where'd You Go Bernadette in two days. Ate my body weight in truffles. Moved on to Ellen Forney's marvelous Marbles. Ate bowl after bowl of buttery popcorn. And then I went to bed one night around two in the morning, and the moment I closed my eyes, the book's structure-- the flaw in the structure, rather-- revealed itself. I mean, it was like a quill writing a new outline in the air above my head. Like a revelation.

7. Surrender and revelation are often linked, and I seriously hate it. I wish I could just decide to have a revelation and then have one. Well, I surrendered to the mess, and lookie here: this gift of revelation. I'm not in control of this work, not really. I'm not in control of Spartacus's blood and boobs, either. Ah, and here we've arrived at the Meaning of the Blog Post, the Lesson: With both my work and my relationship with Spartacus, I must be patient. Sometimes things suck. But sometimes you must surrender to five episodes or more of suckiness before you get to the good stuff. Or to reach that moment when you decide that ridiculously staged sex scenes and even more absurdly choreographed acts of violence are the good stuff.

Heading into winter, into this new year, that's what I will try to remember. Happy New Year, y'all!

I hate summer (with expletives)

Fuck your slushies. Please come to my house.

There. I said it. I've written about Seattle's intolerably gorgeous summer before, right here, but I think I was being too positive. Really, summer is just wrong. It's cruel, especially when the writing isn't going well, and really the being-alive thing isn't going well-- because the writing isn't going well, so nothing can-- and I look out at the bright blue sun and the expanse of yellow sky and I think: I have no life. And it's all my fault, because I'm always stuck in this room here, trying to write.

Really, why would anybody choose to write? It's absolutely impossible, a dreadful profession. I should be one of those people who reviews books for a living. God, how fun, to just judge books, instead of writing them! To compose sentences like, Really, this is a middling effort from Philip Roth. Or, It's not Toni Morrison's best work, but it has glimmers of her earlier greatness. Oh, to sit up high, looking down, instead of squatting here, in the muck, wondering if any of this will ever be worth a good goddamn.

If I were reviewing books, I would be out right now with fashionable friends, holding forth on the great and the unworthy, making snide comments about Salman Rushdie's lesser novels and pithy asides about the weaknesses in Mark Twain's prose, waving my glass about confidently, always confidently, so confident.

(If you've enjoyed this foray into fantasyland, I also have magical theories about how good I would feel about myself if I were directing plays; an academic; a priest; one of those people who live in shacks in the mountains, watching out for forest fires . . . I will cycle through those fantasies in the future, when the writing sucks again. Probably tomorrow, if I'm still working on this motherfucker of a short story.)

So, yeah. Instead of being out in the gorgeous green day, I'm alone in my hot room wrestling a couple of strangers to the ground, strangers I created in my own head, neither of which will go have a drink with me or go for a walk with me or listen to me kvetch about my writing because they ARE my writing. They are ASSHOLES who don't want to get WRITTEN. These half-written characters of mine, they're just running the fuck away on their half-written legs, sticking their invisible tongues out at me from behind surprisingly well-drawn trees, and meanwhile the rest of the real world is out, surely enjoying a margarita somewhere. A real margarita, with, like, real alcoholic molecules.

Meanwhile I've skipped yoga and resented myself for it, I've thought about how I'm supposed to get a standing desk and learn how to write while standing. I've thought about how every moment I sit here, thinking about writing and not writing, wondering how soon I can get back on the internet and check the latest inanity on Facebook or Twitter, every moment is one moment closer to death, because sitting kills. That's what they say. Did you know this about sitting? It kills. I am killing myself right now.

So instead of thinking: what would this character do in response to xyz? instead I'm thinking about dying-from-sitting and how that's not what I'm supposed to be thinking about and besides, besides: what the fuck am I doing writing fiction anyway? I read somewhere recently that novels are the new short stories and that short stories are the new poems, and everybody knows that nobody reads poems, which means that nobody reads short stories. And I made the mistake of telling somebody (who doesn't read) what my new memoir is about, and they said, Seriously? Who would want to read that? And now I look at the 200+ pages of that first draft and think, seriously, indeed, who would? I don't even want to read it! I want to be drinking margaritas! On the street! With ALL OF HUMANITY. If we're all going to die in some La-Z-boy seated apocalypse, we might as well have a margarita in our hands, AMIRITE?

Oh, I promise to write again soon with a happier dispatch, one in which I argue that actually, there is no greater life than the writing life, that it's all orgasms and jellybeans, that all this intellectual clenching is making my ass round and succulent. But for now, let it be known that I am giving myself deep vein thrombosis in honor of a short story that might, by tomorrow, look like a big steaming pile of elephant dung.

Neil Gaiman

His commencement speech at University of the Arts is pretty great:

The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you're walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That's the moment you may be starting to get it right.

The things I've done that worked the best were the things I was the least certain about, the stories where I was sure they would either work, or more likely be the kinds of embarrassing failures people would gather together and talk about  until the end of time. They always had that in common: looking back at them, people explain why they were inevitable successes. While I was doing them, I had no idea.

Fear, Failure, and Fear of Failure

Here's a piece I wrote for Crosscut about the lead-up to the Hugo House Literary Series last month.

It's been a really interesting few months, writing-wise, mostly because of the Literary Series. I've been writing short fiction. What a wonderful thing, after publishing my first memoir, to write about people who are not me! People who don't actually exist in the real world!

From the essay:

It’s not my job to imagine how readers will respond to my work. My job is to write as well as I can. But I am profoundly unenlightened, see, and so the thought of failing in public — at my favorite event in town, the Literary Series, no less — is not something I’m quite so sanguine about. I know I shouldn’t care. I know this. But every day when I sit down to write, I struggle to ignore the sadistic online commenter who lives in my head, the one who sneers at my subject matter, who verbally moons my devotion to narrative, who snickers and whispers that no one in the world wants to hear my story, no matter how entertaining I try to make it.

On not eating delicious things

Here's a bit of feel-good fluff I wrote for Books for Better Living, in which I describe how the husband and I attempted a three-week detox cleanse. The horror! Next time, we're doing a red wine and chocolate cleanse, which is quite simple: you can eat anything you like, so long as it's paired with red wine and chocolate.

John Steinbeck

"A book is like a man-- clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers too near the sun."

Yoga Bitch in Los Angeles

If any of you are in LA this weekend, I'm thrilled to say that I'll be reading at Yogala in Echo Park this Saturday, February 11th at 6pm. Some of the nicest and smartest yogis I've met teach or attend classes at Yogala, including the marvelous Lia Aprile of Shantitown, who will be introducing me. Come on out!

I'll be staying with my dear friend Jessica and her many men (well, her husband and two baby boys) and hopefully not thinking about writing, which has been tough lately. Feels like I start bleeding every time I sit down at my desk. I want to bleach out in the sun and meet a bunch of yogis and enjoy some mommy-margarita time with Jess. And, and! I'm very excited to meet Claire Bidwell Smith while I'm in LA. Claire is the author of the just-released memoir, The Rules of Inheritance, her story of coming of age after losing both her parents by her mid-twenties. I am so excited to read Claire's book-- hers is one of the few blogs I read religiously. Check it out.

Hope to see you there, Angelinos!

Saul Bellow on Symbolism

In today's internet travels I came across this essay by Saul Bellow, circa 1959. (I have lost the trail of breadcrumbs and can't say where I found it, sorry. It's been a big day for me and the internet.) Having thoroughly steeped in the very "deep reading" Bellow denounces, I find it marvelously refreshing.

Perhaps the deepest readers are those who are least sure of themselves. An even more disturbing suspicion is that they prefer meaning to feeling. What again about the feelings? Yes, it’s too bad. I’m sorry to have to ring in this tiresome subject, but there’s no help for it. The reason why the schoolboy takes refuge in circles is that the wrath of Achilles and the death of Hector are too much for him. He is doing no more than most civilized people do when confronted with passion and death. They contrive somehow to avoid them.

Yoga Bitch Named a Best Northwest Book of 2011

The holidays have effectively drawn and quartered me, and I'm still recuperating, but today I remembered that I never blogged about Crosscut's Best Northwest Books of 2011, which included my little Yoga Bitch! As Robert McCrum notes over at the Guardian in his Fifty Things I've Learned About the Literary Life, "Lists are the curse of the age." And indeed, he is right. But goodness me, if it isn't nice to be listed anyhow.

YB also just went into its third printing, which is thrilling, to say the least. To celebrate, I've been having a non-stop panic attack about getting started on the new book again. Just kidding. Well-- kind of.

Here's the Crosscut list.

In other news, I've been reading an overwhelming amount of D.H. Lawrence lately and am actively suppressing the urge to describe the glorious sunset out my window in three pages of Lawrentian prose. As I am not D.H. Lawrence, we should all be relieved at my powers of restraint.

Happy New Year!

The tour in review

This is all I did for two months.

Greetings, netlings! Hope you're enjoying the war on Christmas!

(This morning I told the cranky, list-boggled husband he was a General fighting the War on Christmas. His response: If I was General, this war would've been won by now.)

Anyhoo, long time no blog. I've been in hiding. Nothing like several months of non-stop self-promotion to make a girl crawl back into her cave for awhile. Honestly? It's been wonderful. I'm back at work on the new book, I've written a bunch of ghost stories. Even my writerly meltdowns have had a pleasant sort of self-locating quality to them, like, Ah, yes, this is who I am. (I am a person who will cry to the tune of four thousand It Gets Better videos just to avoid writing.)

This is me talking.

Promoting a book is  . . . well, good holy hell, it's just insane. It's so much fun, and it makes you completely mentally ill. Try talking about yourself non-stop for two months, taking breaks only to switch time zones by plane, train, or automobile, and you've got the idea. It's more overwhelming than I ever would have imagined. After nearly a month on the road, I flew home with about 16 hours to kill before I was scheduled to read at Elliott Bay Book Company. During my time away, I had been on two continents, oscillating between anxiety and exhilaration, enjoying too little sleep and too much of the kind of diet I consume while traveling (whatever protein I can find to avoid passing out; red wine & coffee) and now I arrived at Elliott Bay hoping I would at least remember the name of my own book and my own self, should anyone ask me.

Yellow beverages figured prominently on this book tour.

It's funny; my exhaustion was so complete I actually almost miss it. That floaty, out-of-body feeling, the utter inability to try too hard. Or maybe I just miss the way I slept that night after my reading, grateful, relishing my own sheets and the fact that all future events would be close to Seattle. I spent the next day in my pajamas, reading. Never have I  craved my bed and the absorbing world of books more profoundly.

I'm talking some more!

From roughly mid-July to mid-October, I couldn't write to save my life. I don't know how writers like Joyce Carol Oates and  T.C. Boyle do it. How do they put out a book a year AND go on tour AND, um, put out a book a year?! There's something almost monstrous about that much energy coursing through one human being. My hat is off to you writers. Shoot, my whole outfit is off. I'm in awe.

October clipped along with more events, interviews, and this incessant buzzing in my ear that turned out to be the sound of my own voice. Then, emerging from months held hostage by that dominatrix Yoga Bitch, November was this great gift of time; book promotion had slowed to a nice gentle simmer, and each morning I flew to my desk, overflowing with ideas. I wrote stories, drafted chapters of the new book, cobbled together essays I'll pitch in the new year. Honestly, looking back on the last month, it's a little scary, how productive I was. (Maybe this is how JCO and TCB do it: they become manic at the thought of an empty calendar.) For months, everything I had written was yoga-related, and, now, having permission to write whatever I wanted again (permission from the horrid taskmaster that lives in my brain and keeps telling me I'm not doing enough to keep Yoga Bitch afloat) I went a little nuts.

Aunt Suzanne, still talking.

Now it's December. Never a good writing month, what with the houseguests, the parties, the bonbons and mulled wine to consume. So in lieu of writing, I've done something I've dreamt about doing for years. I've cleaned out every box, every desk drawer, every cubby and trunk in the house. In the hallway beneath the attic hatch are several stacks of files, notebooks, costumes, props, and about three Douglas Firs' worth of paper.

I am purging Yoga Bitch. The play, the memoir, the abandoned novel. The urine sample containers. I'm purging her in the most loving way possible. At first I thought I would shred all the early drafts, the novel, the outlines made in 2004 when I thought I could fit every single thought I had ever had into this one book. But my God, the process contained in those drafts! I learned how to write on the back of this story. I learned how to revise, how to structure, how to cut and cut and cut.

With my brilliant director, Jean-Michele Gregory, after Yoga Bitch opened in London

I've shredded a lot, and recycled a lot, but I'm keeping the drafts and the notebooks, at least for now. They'll move into the attic, and in the new year I'll start filling all the gaps they've left in my house with new work. It's remarkable, really, this chore; relegating to the past something that consumed me for so long has proven to be one of those rare, perfect experiences that is as good in reality as it was in my imagination. It's an unmitigated joy, uncomplicated by regret or nostalgia. The void waits patiently to be filled. It's a pretty great thing, really.

Twenty-five years old, in Bali.

Demons & the Afterlife

Hey! This glorious fall morning I walked down to KIRO radio headquarters, where I was on the Ross & Burbank show, chatting about yoga's demonic underbelly, urine therapy, sexual misconduct, the works. Here's the link. Dave Ross and Luke Burbank are so smart and so funny. And my self-interview is up over at the marvelous literary site The Nervous Breakdown. To up the meta quotient, I thought about interviewing myself about the interview. I wrote up a few questions and everything. But then I canceled on myself.

Writers are SO flaky.

But if you're just dying for more Yoga Bitch coverage, check out my website-- I've updated it with more interviews, reviews, TV spots, etc.

Happy Monday!

“I think the single most defining characteristic of a writer” – I found myself saying to a friend the other day, when she asked my thoughts on the teaching of writing – “I mean the difference between a writer and someone who ‘wants to be a writer,’ is a high tolerance for uncertainty.”
                                                                         --Sonya Chung

The Twenty-Four Hour Yoga Cure for Trolls | Books for Better Living

Here's a piece I wrote for Books for Better Living, about visiting my old yoga roommate Jessica as I prepared for the launch of Yoga Bitch.

I'll be in Olympia for an event at the Timberland Library this Wednesday night, and Jessica will be there! If you're nearby, come on out to meet her and get your book signed. It's gonna be a fun one. Details on my website.

The Twenty-Four Hour Yoga Cure for Trolls | Books for Better Living

Writing any book is an arduous task, one full of setbacks and anxiety— and those are just the mental and emotional issues! Physically, writing is brutal. It’s manual labor. Your neck juts out as you puzzle through a difficult sentence. Your shoulders fly to your ears. Your back rounds into a human comma. If someone snuck into my room and took a picture of me writing, I’m pretty sure I would look like a pale troll with a bad case of scoliosis. And being a troll is a workout! There have been days when I feel like a triathlete when I get up from my desk. (Not that I actually know what a triathlete feels like; in truth, just the thought of a triathlon makes me need six months of physical therapy and a prescription for Vicodin.)

Flannery O'Connor

Here's a recording of Flannery O'Connor reading A Good Man is Hard to Find. I love hearing this story in her voice. This story never fails to astonish me, no matter how many times I read it.