"Playing in the Shadows" (Essay published in Mabel Magazine)

"Roller derby has taught me to be in my body without shame and to use it as a powerful force. I've learned that "athlete" and "artist" are not antithetical terms. I’ve learned to be brave and to take pride in bruises. I've learned how to fall down and how to get back up (every damn time). I've learned to recognize my limitations, and to push against them with determination instead of desperation.

"But mostly, I've learned the power of practice and play—on the track as a skater, on the page as a writer, and in my everyday life."

(excerpt from my essay "Playing in the Shadows," Mabel Magazine No. 2 "Own It")

I'm so pleased to have an essay in the latest issue of Mabel Magazine, a lovely print publication that is all about "making a living and creating a life." The theme for the second issue is "Owning It." My essay "Playing in the Shadows" explores how learning to own my identity as a roller derby player has helped me to stay committed to my work as a writer and creative entrepreneur.

Thank you to Stefanie Renée and Liz Kalloch, the co-founders and co-creators of Mabel, for including me in this issue. And a special thank you to Tabitha Bowman for the great photos she took for the article.

This issue features work by musician Jonatha Brooke, writer and teacher Laurie Wagner, artist Jennette Nielsen, and many more colorful, creative, and courageous women. You can order a copy of Mabel Magazine here.

(If you're interested in reading my other roller derby essays, check out my ongoing series, Roller Derby Makes Me Brave.) 

"True Names" Essay Named Finalist for Prime Number Magazine Contest

I am thrilled to have been a finalist for Prime Number Magazine's Creative Nonfiction contest for my essay "True Names." Eight finalists were chosen from 56 entries, with the three winners being chosen by author Ned Stuckey-French. (I'm happy to say that my friend and grad school colleague Laurie Easter won third prize.)

I'm still looking for a home (read: publication) for my essay, so I can't share the whole thing here, but I thought I'd give you glimpse of it. (Such a tease, I know.)

This essay is part of my manuscript-in-progress, a collection of linked essays called For All We Learned, The Sea, which explores landscape, belief, and the longing for home and belonging in all its many forms.

Here's the beginning of "True Names":

Etch-a-Sketch, Baja, Echo. The tour guide on the whale watching boat knows these humpbacks by name. She recognizes them by their tail markings, the designs they were born with and the wounds they've sustained since then. She announces each whale as it levers its broad tail out of the water like the dark wings of an enormous seagull. To my eyes, this display is an anonymous flash of rubbery black and white on the sun-dazzled water, but our guide assures us that unique patterns decorate each one, the whale tail equivalent of human fingerprints.

** ** **

I hope you'll be able read the whole essay somewhere in the near future!

Water-Sky

winter water-sky, good harbor beach, gloucester, mass.

The sky played tricks on me over the weekend. Maybe it was something to do with the long summer light on the days around the Solstice. Or something with the moisture content in the air. I don't know. Whatever it was, I could have sworn that the wild blue sea was just over that ridge of trees. Here in landlocked southwestern Pennsylvania, I spied water-sky.

It reminded me of this passage, from one of my essays in For All We Learned, The Sea (my manuscript in progress):

Stone, water, light. These are the sum parts of a seashore.

Certain curves of land and sky are known (to those who know such things) for their light. I’ve spent hours thinking about how to describe this light with words. It’s like describing true love. What creates this love, this love that infuses everything? Is it the sky? The sky covers everything. At the sea, the love flows down to your toes in the sand.

Light washes air. The air itself is a sheer, rarified color, the palest yellow and the most translucent blue. The air is transparent with light. So much here depends on this light that glazes everything. Every object stands in stark relief to everything else, painting a harmonious whole. Cerulean blue is the sea. Even the greys shine from within. Every scene is scrubbed clean and smoothed, then steeped in patina like an old Polaroid, faded or with sun-flare.

People come to such places to paint, but the very idea makes me despair. Painting this light is as impossible as spelling it out in words. No medium is transparent and shining enough to recreate this air. Light everywhere is peculiar, wave and particle both. Seaside light in particular defies logic; it is both saturated and clear. Light is the invisible conundrum by which we see everything.

I used to think that God is light. Now I think that light is a god.

The sky is a holy spirit. She cannot keep a secret. She always gives away the presence of water. Even in the distance, even when I cannot see what lurks beneath, I can tell if water lies below. Look out into the distance, through a stand of trees or across a stretch of road. When you find an openness in the sky, a light that glows from below, you have found it. I call this water-sky.

I invented this phrase in Massachusetts before reading that the term already exists in Arctic climatology to describe a phenomenon that is the polar opposite of my definition. If you climb north, all the way to the imaginary circle at the top of the world, the underside of a cloud will look darker over open water than it does over land. This makes sense in the Arctic, where the black water absorbs more light than the bright white land. Being able to discern the appearance of Arctic water sky is helpful for navigation, say those who know such things, and I believe them. But I'm sticking with the latitudes I know and the water-sky I love.

More Pages, Fewer Screens

I want to start and end my day with pages, not screens.

One of the best things about being away at a month-long writing residency was having my studio (and by extension, my laptop) in a separate building from my living quarters, which had no WiFi connection. Here at home, I live, work, and write in the same space. I spend a lot of time on my laptop while sitting on my couch or at the dining room table. I use a spare bedroom as a studio, but it's mere steps away from my own bedroom. And even if I put the laptop away, there's still my phone, with it's oh-so-easy access to email and all manner of social media.

Like so many others, I get sucked into the whirl of the online world and lose minutes and hours. Don't get me wrong: I love the Internet, including email and social media. These things connect me to people all over the world, inspire me, and enable me to run my business. There's also loads of wonderful reading to be done online. For all of this, I am grateful and delighted. (I even keep a few Pinterest boards with links to books I want to read, great writing I find online, and all sorts of resources for writing and living the writing life.)

But when I spend 40 minutes on Facebook reading dozens of comments from people I don't know about an acquaintance's personal drama-trauma, what the hell am I doing? Or when I click over to watch one of those viral videos and end up clicking through to watch five more of them. Really? Is this how I want to spend my time? I'm not so Puritanical as to eschew all pleasure and mindless activity, but when it starts to suck the life out of me instead of making me feel rested or energized, it's time to stage a personal intervention.

So I'm trying to stick my face in a book more often than I get stuck on Facebook.

I want to start and end my day with reading, which, as a writer, is more of a wonderful necessity than a luxury. I must remind myself of this all the time. Apparently I'm just Puritanical enough to think that something that gives me pleasure must be bad for me. But reading is essential to my work as a writer.

So I'm practicing opening a book before I open my laptop in the morning. At night, I hope to get to the point where I close my laptop at least two hours before I go to bed. And then I want to step away from the TV, turn the lights down lower, and read. I need to give my mind time to calm down. I'm tired of spending my days feeling overstimulated and underachieving.

I'm doing this not just for my mental health, but for my own writing practice, as well. As I've written about before, my creative work requires time and quiet. My month at Vermont Studio Center has helped me to tap back into my desire to live a life of letters and to make writing a priority. One of the best parts of my month there was sitting in a cozy armchair, reading a book with no where to be, looking up every so often to watch the trees sway in the wind above a half-frozen river.

So really, this whole "more pages, fewer screens" campaign is about several things. For one, it's about being mindful of how I spend my time. For another, it's about stepping away from the glowing light box and letting my body and mind rest from the constant onslaught of electronic information. (Plus, research indicates that the kind of light emitted by laptops and televisions screw with humans' circadian rhythms.) And yes, it's about reading more and writing more (even if I choose to write on the computer a lot!).

From time to time I hope to share with you what I'm reading, both in print and online, because it's not that pages are inherently any better than screens when it comes to quality content. There's a wealth of wonderful work online, and if I can just learn to stop frittering away my "screen time," I'll be reading more of it.

In my next post, I'll share some of the pages I've enjoyed reading lately.