When it snows it snows

I started something brand new.

And its a sad story. I'm not sure why it is that I'm best at writing sad stories, but I am.

On Friday there was a snowstorm and Queens was blizzard white.

It looked like this.



I think the graffitied streets of Rome are officially on hold.

Loss

I've been thinking a lot about loss. When we lose someone to death it is often a slow, loud, tragic wrenching loss. But one we can begin to understand.

We don't always talk about the other kinds of losses; the quiet drawn out losses that come because of geography, growing, leaving, loving... the losses that come because your lives go in different directions and the things that were important become... replaced. By other things that are important.

I'm not very good with loss. The way I pack suitcases and boxes and move from coast to continent, you'd think I'd be better at it. I never seem to get better. And the saddest losses are inexplicable. We grow up. We need different things. We move. We gain. We lose.

I'm sad. But it's in a reflective way. Loss is part of it all. Part of the lives we live and the people we become.

GRIEF by Matthew Dickman

When grief comes to you as a purple gorilla
you must count yourself lucky.
You must offer her what's left
of your dinner, the book you were trying to finish
you must put aside
and make her a place to sit at the foot of your bed,
her eyes moving from the clock
to the television and back again.
I am not afraid. She has been here before
and now I can recognize her gait
as she approaches the house.
Some nights, when I know she's coming,
I unlock the door, lie down on my back,
and count her steps
from the street to the porch.
Tonight she brings a pencil and a ream of paper,
tells me to write down
everyone I have ever known
and we separate them between the living and the dead
so she can pick each name at random.
I play her favorite Willie Nelson album
because she misses Texas
but I don't ask why.
She hums a little,
the way my brother does when he gardens.
We sit for an hour
while she tells me how unreasonable I've been,
taking down the pictures of my family,
not writing, refusing to shower,
staring too hard at girls younger than my sister.
Eventually she puts one of her heavy
purple arms around me, leans
her head against mine,
and all of a sudden things are feeling romantic.
So I tell her,
things are feeling romantic.
She pulls another name, this time
from the dead
and turns to me in that way that parents do
so you feel embarrassed or ashamed of something.
Romantic? She says,
reading the name out loud, slowly
so I am aware of each syllable,
each consonant resembling a swollen arm, the collapsed ear,
a mouth full of teeth, each vowel
wrapping around the bones like new muscle,
the sound of that person's body
and how reckless it is,
how careless that his name is in one pile and not the other.

I have to say it

There is so much that tells me I am not supposed to wear my political beliefs on my sleeve. As a teacher and as a writer I am around young people every day and all the time, around those of you who are gathering information, understanding truths, forming your opinions, and that these truths and opinions and beliefs have got to be yours. And I believe that. I know that. But I don't think it can hurt to just say a little bit of what I believe. To tell you that each night as I walk home from the subway, the long stretched out blocks from Flatbush to Franklin, and these posters



illuminated by bedroom lights and dining room lights, framed by curtains and fingerprint streaks, in barbershops and brownstones, these posters, I can't lie, make me crazy with delight and, well, hope. Every night. Without fail.

When your book hits a brick wall

So I was thinking about this project I'm working on, called There Is No Happy Ending, actually, I'm thinking about this project most of the time... and what I'm thinking is. I lost it. I was SO in it and I lost it... what does one do now? It is in the hands, just now, of a reader who might breathe some life into it. But until then. I've never been one to work well on many projects at once. I think it might be time to start another. I feel guilty. But I have this idea. It's about journals and the year Kurt Cobain died. It's about the unexpected relationships that can only happen in secret... but I feel strange abandoning Jacob... can I bring him?

All at once

I have a fever and swollen glands and that kind of aching back that says no, this will only get worse before it gets better. And I am wrapped in bblankets on one of those wintery nights before NYC landlords turn on the heat... and Im drinking tea. And it occurs to me.

I have ARCs. (translation: Advanced Reader's Copy). I have a BOOK of my book. It is this neat little size. It has a cover with my name on it. It's not copy-edited or anything. It is used for reviews (this part I have yet to process. shhhh) Its sort of mind blowing. And in the same week the UPS man delivered these books to my door, I was interviewed by the amazing ladies here... which was my first real writerly interview. And so, although I am drowning in sick now, last week was pretty real as far as this writer thing goes.

I know I should take a picture of it and post it here... me on a bench reading my own book, my own book tucked on a shelf among other *real* books. And I will, maybe, but much like the dialogue I wrote in the book that is sometimes hard to distinguish from the inner monologues of Nadio and Noelle, the reality of this whole thing is sort of hard to distinguish from imagination. So I'm going to leave the photo out of it for now...

Or maybe I'm just feverish and so. A little delirious

Gypsy holiday

We all know I have some trouble sitting still. I get restless, anxious being in one place for too long.

I stop writing well.

Now it is official.

We



are going here



for this



What I mean is, that restlessness, those jumpy feet can still some. Because after much stress, an Alitalia flight fiasco, a desperate bank account, it is now official, I am going to Spain for the winter holidays, meeting Kira in Madrid, renting a car, maybe visiting Jaime in Alicante, maybe, hopefully meeting Jocco and Migi along the coastal way, checking out the magic of Sevilla and Granada, seeing Spain, who knows...

Ok. Deep breaths. Trip planned. I'm back.

In Words

What does graffitti look like in words?

I want to write this



so you can see it on the page, without SEEING it on the page.

But I'm wondering if I don't have it all wrong.

Or maybe I've just been writing the same scene for nine hours.

First Person

I haven't written here for a long time because I am having trouble balancing my school life with my writer life. I have this pact with myself that, for the most part, I'll keep these posts from being about the school life. I'm sometimes mildly successful... but yesterday I had a long awaited talk with my agent, who is not only a constant source of support and inspiration. She is also, and this I find to be the most important part, HONEST. We talked about There Is No Happy Ending (which, by the way, is a *working* title) She told me what is working. And it is the things I love. It is this crazy cast of characters with their bangle bracelets and jagged haircuts. It is the emotion of everything new and doing things you probably shouldn't. It is the feeling guilty that you get to do things your parents couldn't.

What isn't working? Well, the pacing. Slowslowslow. This I knew was true. I can fix this. And the narrator. Every character in this project is so real. Except Rory. Somehow I neglected to fill her out. And now, she stands at a cold distance from the reader.

What if, I whispered into the phone yesterday, what if I changed the narration to first person?

I really think that could work, agent affirmed. Which I was afraid of.

The narrator seems uncertain of her, agent went on.

Yes, I said. She is. I am.

So what if Rory were the narrator?

Ok. I don't have a good reason for making this story third person. I simply wanted it to work. I wanted to do it well because it is so rare that I read a good story about seventeen that is in the third person. So does this mean I can't do it well? Or does it simply mean Rory needs to speak to the reader, because it is her story being told, because without her voice speaking up she seems cold and flat and made of paper. I'll have to see.

Speaking of first person and COMPLETELY off topic. Please check out this blog. This is a project just beginning at my old job. I used to work with some of these students and I will talk until the end of time about how amazing they are. Look for yourself.

(ps, yes, that is me not keeping school life separate again... I try.)

One million kids

I went back to school today. Not back to school like pen and notebooks and listening to lectures, but back to school like I do now, on the teacher side of things. I'm at a new school this year. A beautiful brand new building with high windows and sun soaked floors and students from every borough and dozens of countries. Today we drew maps of our past and wrote stories about our names. And we wrote poems about the subway. I love my new commute. Its this long winding elevated ride through three boroughs. And I get to see this along the way...



this amazing place called Five Points in Long Island City. And you can imagine this sends all kind of electricity through Jacob.

Then today we read this fantastic poem called 'Night Subway'.

And we did some work imitating the venerable Katha Pollit. And I admitted that I too always wanted to write about the subway. I once wrote about finishing a book by Jim Lewis on the N train over the 59th street bridge, crying my first unstoppable public New York City tears as the book came to a close with the skyline behind me.

But today. O today. I forgot that one million students went back to school today. And tens of thousands of their teachers and aides and coaches. And the subway platform looked like this.



And the air conditioner in my car was broken. And the sneakers in my bag left imprints on my hipbone everyone was pressed so tight.

But we wrote some pretty fantastic subway poems today.

Because it's too late at night and I have too many lists

I do more than a few things to make a living. Mainly, I’m a counselor. In a high school. I teach English too. Sometimes I teach creative writing in an after school program. I also wrote a book. And, well, I guess I can say I write books. In the present tense. This week all of these things I do have been crashing together as I prepare to start a new school year at a new school and try to keep to a writing schedule. I spent four days in western Massachusetts last week, studying the theories and practices of a particular very familiar institute and it made me think (intensely, like it is two a.m. and I can’t sleep kind of think) about the way we build writing into our lives. In all of the things I do for a living writing is central. I do it not only to tell the stories that come to me at two a.m. but also to re-imagine the stories I pass on the street and bump into on the subway platform. I do it as therapy. I do it as a way of understanding myself, I teach it as a way of asking questions of yourself. I teach it as a way of understanding texts and making comparisons and digging out new ideas and explaining why you love or hate something. I do it because I can’t sleep and putting together the words to understand why makes my muscles relax and my brain slow slow slow down. I do it because something I’ve learned is that the stories people tell are the way we see the world. So all of these things I do, which sometimes seem to tumble and bang into each other, are actually inherently tied together by this truly simply act.