Personal Stories, Writing

Heading out to San Francisco Tomorrow

So tomorrow, I’m taking to the road with nothing but my backpack and a prayer.  No, just kidding.  I’ll be driving up to San Francisco to meet with a fellow FIU alumni, Joe Clifford, and participate in the Lip Service West reading.  I hope to also meet with another writing buddy I know from a long time ago.  I can’t stress how important it is to know people in life who are successful at what you’re trying to do.  Mentors, people who have been through the shit.  Because honestly, writing is a tough journey; it’s filled with more ups and downs than motor cross races, and everyone’s path seems to be different, but it’s just amazing to hear the stories, to be encouraged to continue.

Well, it’s been a long time since I have had an adventure.  I used to think that everything had to been adventure or it wasn’t worth doing.  So, here I go, trying to rediscover that sense of wonder.  I’ll be giving updates throughout the weekend when I can.

Here’s a list of what I’m bringing:

  • Presents
  • Two pairs of boxers and some shirts.
  • A coat for the cold weather
  • A guitar?
  • A book on tape
  • My journal.
  • My laptop with the story I’ll be reading
  • A sense of adventure

Well, thanks to everyone for reading, and I hope you’ll check in on the story as it develops.  Oh yeah, exciting news coming out tomorrow in the literary world.

Personal Stories, Travel

San Francisco or Bust — Reading at Lip Service West

Huntington Beach

This weekend, I’m leaving Long Beach and driving out of Southern California for the first time in months.  Honestly, the farthest I’ve been north of Los Angeles County was Woodland Hills.  Oh yeah, I went to Ventura once to visit a buddy.  So on Friday, I’m excited about driving north through California to San Francisco to read at Lip Service West.  Joe Clifford hosts the reading series, and he said there was a slot.  It’s a great event, and if you’re in San Francisco, then you should find out if it’s going on. So I jumped at the opportunity.  I read once at Lip Service in Miami, and I showed up as Sex Moses — a character I invented that was based on some of the guys I came to know in South Beach.

This won’t be my first time in San Francisco, however.  In November of 2008, Heron and I flew to San Francisco for Thanksgiving.  When I look back on that experience, I’m not sure why the hell we even did it — because I know our graduate school incomes couldn’t afford it — but I’m glad we did it anyway. Since I can remember, San Francisco has existed in my imagination as a place where the Renaissance is always happening; art is always being made; and Jack Kerouac’s ghost still wanders the streets.

I remember stopping at City Lights bookstores for the first time that trip.  I remember seeing the Golden Gate Bridge.  I remember getting lost in the woods with Heron on our bikes.

Then I remember something strange, and I’m not sure why it’s coming back to me now.  I was wandering around Nob Hill by myself.  It was cold, and it was raining.  I was staring at some of the Chagall prints in the windows of closed art galleries.  They were so beautiful — memories of a Russian small town.   And I was lost in the surrealism mixed with the sounds of the street behind me — trollies grinding, buses chugging, working man shoes clopping on sidewalks.

I turned around and a woman was staring at me.  She was older, and she was holding a bag in her hand.  In the bag, I could see an outline of an ukulele.

I smiled, not sure what else to do.  She smiled back.

“It’s cold out,” she said.  The woman was older.  Maybe around 55-years old.

“Probably around 40 degrees,” I said.

I looked back at the paintings in the window display, and I could see her image still there, in the glass, staring at me.  My breath was a cloud factory.

“Can I stay with you?” she asked, looking down at her bag.  “I can keep you warm.”

“I’m sorry.”

The rain was still coming down, and I went back to staring at the paintings.  I could see her walk away in the glass and then disappear into the crowd, and I wished that people could walk in and out of paintings, out of art and water colors, the way we walk in and out of each other’s lives.

Writing

Nothing I Can Do About It — Four Months Later

The last couple days I’ve been taking stock of this freelance writing journey.  It’s been almost four months since I quit my job at the treatment center, said goodbye to the awful commute from Long Beach to Woodland Hills, and committed myself to writing.  And I think I’m coming to peace, to a sense of serenity, at this moment.  I’m not making a lot of money.  In fact, it’s still a struggle, and I just started picking up tutoring.  But so far, it’s been worth it.

When I first started trying to get bylines, I was so pumped to have calendar pitches accepted at the LA and OC Weekly — listings for events in the area.  I remember I must have spent five hours on 200 words, thinking that someone might see my work and want me to write more.  Well, that was my start, and I’m forever grateful for  those pieces (which I still write sometimes), but now I’m publishing more, and as Heron pointed out to me last night, I’ve come a long way.  I am happy with the progress of my writing.

But I miss many aspects of the full-time job.  I miss being able to go dinner.  I miss be able to pay parking tickets without it ruining my week.  I miss being able to walk down to E.J. Malloys on Broadway and buy a few beers, a cheeseburger and fries, and talk shit about a sport I didn’t care about with a stranger I would never talk to again.  I miss being able to bring home flowers to Heron whenever I felt like it.  I miss being able to take flights home to see my friends in Massachusetts.  I miss seeing my family and buying a steak every once in a while.  Though I have come to terms with all that.

I have a dream.  I have a goal.  I want to make writing my life.  And I’m not entirely sure where that’s going to take me yet.  I’m not exactly sure when I’ll go back to working full time, because if there is an opportunity out there that I can’t refuse, I’ll probably take it.  But one thing is for sure — I will find a way to write.

So this was all running through my mind tonight.  And earlier, I was talking to my Uncle in Pennsylvania.   He was always a man I admired.  Very successful.  A guy who could probably do anything in the world and be successful at it.   Then he was asking me how I was doing.  I was telling him how I was getting hitched in February and that I was a freelance writer.  I was telling him there were ups and downs.  I was telling him that I was actually being paid to write.  I was telling him about living in Long Beach, California all the way from Clinton, Mass.

He was impressed.  Then I said to him, but you know, sometimes I wish I chose another path.  Sometimes I wish I chose a job that paid better right away.  Sometimes I wish that I picked a career with a more definite career track.  Sometimes I wish I didn’t have to pay my dues without knowing what the dues were going to get me.  But then I realized, in the middle of talking to him, that I didn’t have a choice.  This way of life, well, it had chosen me.  There’s nothing I can do about it.

Creative Inspiration, Writing

What Writing Creatively Really Needs: Hope

The last week was great, because I was able to take some time away from pitching and writing and step back a bit.  I’ve been freelancing, now, for four months, and it’s time to take stock of where I am at.  It’s a difficult journey, but I have great support.  Over the last two weeks, I have had work appear at the LA Weekly, OC Weekly, and Salon.com, but when I look back on the last four months, my creative work has suffered a bit.  I’ve been so focused on trying to write for projects that will help me survive that I’ve forgotten, to some extent, about poetry, about short stories, about my memoir.

Maybe that was a part of the plan.  Maybe I needed some distance.  And when Thanksgiving “break” came, I found myself writing a new story, and it was my first true science fiction story.  It’s set in a Los Angeles in the future, and while I feel somewhat nerdy writing the story, it’s been a pleasure to allow my imagination to wander — to envision a new world.  And this has helped rev up the creative process.

This would have never happened four years ago.  I would never have even given science fiction a chance.

When I was in graduate school, I started out only interested in literary pieces.  I was (and still am) a huge fan of Tobias Wolff, Denis Johnson, Stuart Dybek, Hemingway, Raymond Carver, and Junot Diaz, and I only cared about one story — the lyrical, literary story.  I actually had a teacher in undergrad, after much pleading to tell me where I needed to grow as a writer, tell me that I only valued the realistic story.

But when I got to FIU, I met a teacher who started to introduce me to genre — especially Noir and horror.  I was resistant at first.  I thought genre was for hacks who wanted to make money.  Then I started to read Raymond Chandler, H.G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville.  One of the best anthologies this teacher suggested was the American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny From Poe to the Pulps.  I suddenly became aware of the tremendous possibilities of genre and the infinite combinations — even surrealism, abstraction, the philosophically stirring existed within the forms.  Yes, I was ignorant and stubborn, but I was learning.  So I read everything from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Island of Dr. Moreau to Borges, and I saw similarities and possibilities.

Now, this isn’t any new revelation.  Just look at Michael Chabon and many other writers experimenting with genre.  But I was suddenly freed from the reality that all writing had to be real and true.  Truth is a word, anyway, that has nothing to do with facts or even reality.

So I wrote my first horror story at FIU, and at first, it was torn apart, somewhat, in the workshops.  I had a tendency, then, and a tendency, now, to go over the top.  So I revised and worked on it.  And about two weeks ago, it was accepted into a future anthology by Sirens Call Publications.  The story is called: “The Castle on the Hill.”  The anthology is a haunted mental-ward theme.

My point is this: sometimes in order to feel free again, to be reminded of the infinite  possibilities of this world, of art, of writing, it’s important to live within a form, a genre, a guiding principle.  Sometimes it’s not.  Sometimes it’s better to be free and without direction.  Right now, I feel somewhat stuck in between both ideas.

I’ll wake up tomorrow, and I won’t truly know what the day will bring. I’ll sit down to write a pitch, and I might find a better idea.  I’ll sit down to finish a story, and I might end up writing a poem.  And maybe it’s only in this searching, in this lost wandering do we come to direction, to guidance, to form.  Well, the most important commodity, when it comes to writing, has to be hope.  Hope that you will find a thread.  Hope that your character will come alive.  Hope that you will finish.  Hope that you will be appreciated.  Hope that you will find the words to say what is pulling at your heart-strings.  Hope is what gets us through the feeling of being lost.

And so now, I must come to a stopping point.  I didn’t really know where this blog was going to take me.  I didn’t know really what was even on my mind.