Four and Counting

So here we are. Two years later. Here I am at another residency for my MFA. I still don't know what I'm doing here and I still find I don't have much to say. Maybe it's because I spent so much of my life learning other things that have nothing to do with this world at all. Maybe it's because I don't spend as much time analyzing as I do exploring and enjoying. I absorb and let it rise. I don't want to know how, why, or should. But I'm finding that some things are the same. No one really wants to take risks here. And the people that do --those who let themselves feel & explore & move beyond the conventions - they question and interrogate like the paparazzi and the media do to those with famous faces. No one wants to own up to making something their own. They say one thing and then pick apart the people who do what they say they are looking for.

I don't fit in here. I never have. The work that gets praised is the boring stuff. The stuff that colors within the lines, but has nothing to hold it up. No one wants to work. No one wants to think. No one wants to feel. They want it handed to them and they want it easy. They don't realize that no one ever handed me anything. I had to learn to find my way in the darkness, and out of the darkness, and back into it, and then out again. For me self-navigation and feeling without knowing is the only way I know. I'm not going to write according to a plan, an outline, a structure, a convention, an easy-does-it recipe. That's not my voice. And that's not who I am. As a person or as a writer.

If you want something plain and simple, go live with the Republicans you say you can't stand. You are not so different from whom you hate. You are the same.

There are two reasons why people question who you are and what you do. They don't understand because they don't want to. Or they don't understand because they think you're beyond their reach.

If they only realized it's not about tearing down what you think you can see. It's about finding and discovering all the goodness in what you can't see.