The night I read at Alta Lodge (2014 Writers at Work fellowship in literary nonfiction, part 2)

Up in the Wasatch mountains, toward the top of Little Cottonwood Canyon at 8,530 feet (2,600 meters), I spent five days in a rustic lodge with a group of writers. We collect here to listen and talk, read and write, exercise our intellects and our emotions, and a walk outside if we make the time. It's the Writers at Work annual conference, this year featuring workshops with Robin Hemley in nonfiction (my group), Michael Martone in multi-genre, Ellen Bass in poetry, and Lawrence Coates in fiction. Participants share in afternoon open-mic readings (a good place to start, as I did at a 2006 W@W conference back at Westminster College in Salt Lake City). In the evenings, we hear readings from the faculty, guest writers, and the year's fellowship winners.

It's behind me now, and I still can't quite believe I was one of the readers on Thursday night, along with Mil Norman-Risch (fiction), Molly Spencer (poetry) and Rachael Weaver (guest writer). What a night. I was glad I had practiced reading for audiences. For a final dress, I hiked alone up the mountainside in the afternoon and spoke the text once to stony cliffs. All went well. In sharing this intimate, sacred text about my family's life and my son's death, I gather strength.

The next morning, I journaled. This bit of writing struck me as I reviewed my notes while flying home to Germany, yesterday to today. From the transatlantic flight, I've shared photos out my window in a new slide show: Sunset to Sunrise.

Sunset to Sunrise slide show

To move this post along, I'd like to quote my notebook from the morning after my reading at Alta.

June 6, 2014, 7:12 am, Alta Lodge

For weeks I'd steered myself toward the date of June 5th, my reading of my essay about Simon's death at the Writers at Work conference. Today is June 6th.

I'd set my alarm for 6:45, just in case, expecting I would rouse earlier, naturally with things to write on my mind (my blog, comments for workshop). But the electronic marimba twiddled its pattern of notes and tore me from far under.

No sign of my roommate. Blankness in my mind first. Then remembering to roll to one side of the bed to quiet my iPad alarm to the other side for my thyroid pill. Is the dose related to the faucet of sweat, only worse since coming to the Salt Lake Valley from Ohio, worse since coming up in the mountains? In Germany it's been only moderately bothersome (or I've stopped caring). Here I'm switching shirt, bra and underwear 2-3 times a day, grateful they dry out again so fast, doubting cotton after all--sweat soaks my cotton armpits dankly and the microfiber bra stays near-dry.

It was my neck I felt in the morning, though, mis-angled on the pillow, a ruler inserted from mid-shoulder up through the side neck toward my skull, both sides, pressing muscle, nerve. Familiar pain. I cope by expecting I can't relieve it--only by getting up, beginning things, taking my mind other places. The pain has become part of me, like my brown eyes.

Brushing teeth I closed my eyes into a weeping--into the empty-other of after-the-anticipation. I had done it, that reading. Stood in the restaurant turned event room, held a wired microphone in my right hand, steadied the shaking atop my right breast, wished for a camelback tube to suck on as my mouth dried to paste but raised the light plastic cup with a quivery left hand to sip only when I could truly break, but not during Part One when I needed it most because it was better to lose my B-sounds and R's to the stickiness of mouth flesh than to stop anywhere in that long piece of cloth.

There are many gratifying outcomes from the reading. So much support for both story and writing. The next morning, members of the poetry workshop stopped me at lunch to say they'd been discussing my work as an example of sentiment vs. sentimentality. My work was a literary reference!

People ask me how I can do it, read this difficult text out loud. The answer is this: I believe in the words, one after the next. By giving these words to an attentive, absorptive audience, I find the energy I need.

A choir friend, Renate, from Salt Lake City drove up for the reading with her sister. They are German, and we conversed a while "auf Deutsch" afterward. I walked them out to the sidewalk, where we leaned on a railing and gazed at the half moon. Renate began to sing: Der Mond ist aufgegangen. I joined her for a verse, holding the melody to her ornamentation. I turned to her and said, I just want you to know, that was Simon's favorite German lullaby. He used to ask for it: Mo' gange.

That lullaby was part of Simon's memorial service in Salt Lake City on August 28, 2004. Soprano Carol Ann Allred and pianist David Owens performed. I've linked to the full text, with English translation, at Simon's Place. It's a beautiful, thoughtful, quiet text worth reading. Don't miss the photo at the bottom of the page showing our sweet four-year-old Miriam.