Don’t ask me how I came upon her in the first place, but Chenoah over at Okey Dokey, Let’s Get Started has given me a few questions to answer here on my blog. I shall do my best, Chenoah. It was very nice of her to peruse my blog to come up with some pretty decent questions. I think I’ll offer this same thing myself. But later. After I answer these questions.
1. You mentioned your “novels” – plural. Tell us about one of them, will you?
I am in graduate school right now, earning a double master’s degree in Creative Writing and the Teaching of Writing. My creative thesis is a novel that I’ve been working on for WAY TOO LONG, and I’m not even close yet. Well, no, that’s not true. I’m much closer than I was when I started.
Anyway, to actually answer your question without pussyfooting around here, which I am known to do (which may be why I’m not done with the darn thing), this is the story of a young woman, eighteen years old, who discovers she is pregnant right before graduating high school. Instead of skipping off to college like all of her friends, she (Meg) goes to a home for unwed mothers kind of place located in the northern suburbs of Chicago. The program is affiliated with and attached to a Catholic-run hospital, and as part of the deal, Meg must work in various capacities in the hospital. One of her jobs is in the physical therapy department; she has to retrieve patients from their rooms and bring them down to the department for therapy. In this job, she meets Jim, a young man who has been burned over a majority of his body (no love interest, although some have pushed for it-I just can’t go there: pregnant girl w/burn victim-uh uh). Meg and Jim become friends, he teaches her much about life.
Meg cannot perform this job after the first few months, and is moved to a job as a secretary in the Nuclear medicine department, where she runs into some wacky characters. The baby of one of the girls who had been in the program, (who according to rumor had been raped and impregnated by her step-father) is brought in with cigarette burns over his little body, and there is a violent and sad scene with the girl/mother and her enraged step-father, who is the man with the cigarettes.
Meg forms friendships with the other girls in the program, some who keep their babies and some who do not. She is put under pressure by the counselor from Catholic Charities she is required to see once/week to give up her baby, but she insists upon keeping her, although there is a constant internal war over whether or not to do this. I’ll keep her decision a secret. I don’t want to ruin the end for you!
During Meg’s time in this program, the hospital is in the process of being sold, and the program does not admit any more young women after Meg. So by the end of her pregancy, she is the only one remaining, and for her safety is moved from the residence hall to a room in the hospital, on the nicest and most recently remodeled floor-that devoted to terminally ill patients. Some hilarity, but mostly sadness, ensues.
There’s also the “cult” of Born Again Virgins, members of which are constantly trying to recruit more members from this program by hanging out around the gas station where the girls go to buy their candy (and some, cigarettes), and by trying to sneak into the residence by various means.
I really should be able to sum this story up with one or two sentences, but I’m not quite there yet. Meg goes through some major changes, obviously, and comes to some serious realizations and conclusions about the way she had been living her life up to that point. Definitely a coming-of-age story.
2. What is your favorite Tom Robbins book, and why?
My favorite, and I know from reading Chenoah’s blog that it is hers as well, is Skinny Legs and All. My copy is basically a stack of pages held together by rubber bands. Why do I love it so much? My favorite thing about Robbins is his unique use of magical realism, present in most of his books. How can you not like a book where it is perfectly believable that a can of beans and a few utensils are characters? All of the characters are so vividly drawn and well-crafted. And somehow within all of this, he manages to make some very strong statements about the situation in the Middle East which are just as valid today as they were in 1990 when Skinny was published.
3. You plan to teach Creative Writing. Was there a creative writing teacher in your past who inspired you? If not, who did inspire you to choose teaching writing as a career?
I have always enjoyed writing-I think I’m good at it (low self-esteem day-please don’t correct me if I’m wrong). I had some good teachers in high school, but it wasn’t until college, at the University of Kansas, that I embraced the idea of being a writer. I took a 7 a.m. Fiction Writing course with a bunch of accounting majors, and I was well aware that my writing stood out in the crowd, that crowd at least. My teacher there, I believe her name was Carolyn Dowd (I’ll have to check on that, though. It might have been Dody), told me that if this was something I wanted to pursue, that I should leave Kansas and go to a school that had a Fiction or Creative Writing program. If I’d stayed at Kansas, I would have had to take that same course over and over again, and would have had to be an English major with a minor in Fiction Writing. That was right before Thanksgiving, and when I came home for the holiday, I ran into a high school friend who was in the Fiction Writing program at Columbia College Chicago, and he convinced me to make the move. My parents weren’t too happy, especially my Dad, but they were won over (kind of a “I’m doing it if I have to pay for it myself!” nineteen-year-old insistence) and I transferred to Columbia. (Maybe my parents just didn’t want me living at home, I don’t know!) At Columbia, which has the most amazing Fiction Writing department in the country (imho), I flourished, and writing became my passion. I got my BA in Fiction Writing and immediately began the MFA program. Then I got married and had two kids, and I put it all on hold, for about seven years. I started back at Columbia, adding the teaching into the mix, just last year. This is my third semester back.
4. I notice you also have a “mommy blog” and a “crafty blog,” in which you take custom orders for knitted scarves. This begs the question: How the heck do you manage to have the time to do all that?
I don’t really want to let this secret out, but the fact is that I have a time machine. I play each day over three times-first time, I play with my kids and clean my house, 2nd time, I write all day, and the 3rd time, I sit on my ass drinking vodka tonics and knitting.
Really, I have no idea how I have time to do it all. I don’t do it all every day. While I’m in the midst of a semester, I generally do not have time to knit, but I fit in a little at a time. I try to make hand-knitted scarves for friends’ birthdays, so usually I stay up all night the night before trying to get it done. I do a lot of knitting during the summer. Knitting is very relaxing for me-I don’t have to think about what my hands are doing, unless I’m doing some complicated stitch pattern (which I don’t do often! I tend to let the artistry show in the yarn rather than in the stitches, but don’t tell anyone). A lot of times, when I’m stuck on the writing, when a scene is going badly or I’m fighting it for some reason, I will turn to the knitting. Often, without realizing it, I will get unstuck, and throw the needles down and go to the page. Knitting frees up my mind in a most magical way, and it’s a way of being creative that usually gets some sense of satisfaction pretty quickly.
Also, keep in mind that I don’t work a job outside my home. I do little one-time gigs here and there, and this semester at least, I’m tutoring at school, but for the most part, I have the whole day to myself, as my kids are off at school from 8:30 until 3:30. And I’m not winning any awards for housekeeping, either. Luckily, I have a husband who is very supportive (at least until the cobwebs hang down so low that the dust-bunnies start getting caught in them) of everything I do, and my kids do their best to be.
It helps to drink a lot. Well, not really. It helps block out the stress. (I’m being facetious here, I hope that’s apparent-I don’t want to get a lot of concern about my alcoholism, which has been addressed in earlier blog posts)
5. Do you have any advice for the rest of us BlogClicking addicts? Please? Anything?
It’s awful, isn’t it? My mom and I were talking last night about getting sucked into that computer solitaire time-sucker. Did that ever happen to you? The problem with the blog-clicking addiction is that it will take a lot longer for me to get bored with it, because with every click, there is usually something interesting to read and think about, and perhaps post about myself.
Once in a while I have to remind myself that this is what I use for entertainment (I watch very little, if any TV), and that I should limit myself just as much as I limit myself where other things are concerned. And though I may be interacting with my entertainment some of the time, there are also the lost hours where I am blindly clicking, barely looking at the blogs, just waiting those twenty or thirty seconds. If I’m not interacting, what’s the point?
I try to ask myself this: at the end of my life, will I look back and say, damn, I wish I had all those hours I spent playing solitaire or clicking through blogs back right now.
Just be sure that when you are clicking, you are making it a dynamic process. And I would definitely recommend (to myself as well) limiting the sessions to a specific time frame, or rewarding myself for getting the HAVE-TOs done with a session of blog-clicking.
Now, if I would only listen to my own advice!
Thanks, Chenoah. This was really fun. But enough about me, already. Anyone who happens upon this and wishes to answer some questions, please leave me a comment with your blog address, and I’ll ask you some questions!
