Published!

Photo: Markus Vodosek

Today is the day: I am a published author!  Objects of My Attention has been published in the 83rd issue of Quarterly West.

My essay was selected earlier this year as winner of the 2014 Writers at Work Fellowship in literary nonfiction. I'm joined on the "page" of Quarterly West by fiction winner Mil Norman-Risch and poetry winner Molly Spencer. Other contributions of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, new media/visual art, and reviews appear in Issue 83, selected by the editorial staff through their submission process.

Quarterly West (associated with the University of Utah Department of English) has gone completely online. When you visit the QW site, you will find my piece in a hip digital layout. The piece itself is conventionally formatted, but the site around it is visually complex (especially in the version that appears on mobile devices). If that's a bit too much for you, especially in contrast to my subject, you might want to print it out to read (your browser should print without the background).

I am grateful to Robin Hemley for selecting my piece as this year's fellowship winner and to Writers at Work for the time-consuming task of running a competition each year. I'm grateful to Quarterly West for publishing the winning texts. So many people engaged with me as I developed this piece. Nicole Walker, Christopher Merrill, Melanie Rae Thon, Matt Kirkpatrick offered sage teacherly guidance. Many have read and commented: Writers in Stuttgart (especially Cindy, Amy, and Jadi), workshop-mates and classmates, the Craigs (David, Julie, Ann, and Norm), Jim Martin, Anne Adams, audiences at readings in Bad Wimpfen, Oberlin, Alta, and Salt Lake City, and Markus, who lived through these times with me. Steve Woodward (Graywolf) and Emma Komlos-Hrobsky (Tin House) offered spot-on editing advice to make the piece sharper and lither. Miriam, my daughter, expects more of my writing than anyone, and she will continue to drive me until there is a book you can hold in your hands. Simon, whose beauty and struggle have given life to my writing, will always have my loving attention.

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.

Next reading & A letter to my mother

My next public reading of "Objects of My Attention" is TONIGHT in Salt Lake City, Utah. Please join me and poet Natalie Taylor, who will read from her chapbook Eden's Edge.

Literary Reading by Mary Craig and Natalie Taylor
Little Chapel (not the main sanctuary)
First Unitarian Church of Salt Lake City
569 S. 1300 East
7:30 pm

As for blogging ever forward, I've had a busy couple of weeks since the posts about Simon's birthday.  I was in my hometown of Oberlin, Ohio May 20-27. I saw friends from my growing up years and friends from my college years and enjoyed visiting with my parents in their house. It was perfect "porch weather", and I held a private reading for my mom and dad the last night I was there, out on the semi-outdoor brick porch with the tree frogs bellowing.

My ongoing project when I visit my parents' house is cleaning out the drawers, shelves and boxes of my stuff, sent there or dumped there over thirty years of excuses like being too far away to deal with it or take it with me. I blogged about the process in January in a post called "Returning to Tennis". This time I got my old desk completely cleared out. The biggest find was a "narrative paper" from 10th grade English about babysitting with a scary wind outside the house. Another piece about windows... It's called "A Dollar an Hour". I enjoy finding evidence that, although I think I'm pretty new to writing, I have been doing it for a long time.

While in Oberlin, I asked my mother for her permission to post the letter I wrote her this year on Mother's Day. I wrote the letter and sent it via email because my voice was too hoarse for a phone call. I appreciate her willingness to share. The letter prompted sewing memories of her own. For those who don't know, Julie (mentioned in the letter) is my older sister and an excellent seamstress.

A letter to my mother
May 11, 2014 

Dear Mom,

This Mother’s Day I am remembering that you taught me to sew. The age that sticks in my mind is seven—that I sewed my first garment (under your supervision) when I was seven. I don’t recall what the garment was. Since I only remember sewing in Oberlin (not in Berkeley), I wonder if my sewing life began after we returned from California when I was actually eight.

Remember the reversible wrap skirts Julie and I made in twin? Red on one side and mustard yellow on the reverse. A four-button panel across the abdomen held the skirt together. There were eight buttons in all because each side needed four. We used the flattest buttons we could find because they were doubled up. (It might very well turn out that you made that skirt for me, and I simply remember it.)

We spent hours paging through pattern books in the Towne Shoppe basement. We checked all the books: Simplicity, McCall and Butterick. Much later, I also looked at Vogue. We opened the beige-painted wide steel drawers to find the chosen pattern in the right size among all those neatly filed, tightly packed envelopes. Then we wandered the aisles of fabric bolts, fingered the materials, tugged them out and opened the cloth to see the right side of the fabric and watch it drape.

Following the tiny writing on the pattern envelope, we searched out zippers, elastic, buttons, hooks, and sometimes even decorative trim. In my general memories of these activities, I am doing these things all on my own. Sometimes I know someone is there helping me read hard words or reach things on high shelves, but I’m not being told what to do. Instead it feels like being the blindfolded person in Pin the Tail on the Donkey. Kind hands of an unseen person send me off in the right direction.

When I was nine or ten, I made a skirt and top that turned out to be more challenging than I expected. It was the age of the interlock knit—how thrilled we were at this fabric that wouldn’t fray or lose shape. I picked out a red and blue paisley print on white. The skirt: four gores, four seams, an elastic casing at the waist, and it was done. The top was a simple pullover (for s t r e t c h knits only, the pattern said). It had a topstitched scoop neck and a small gathered cap sleeve set into the top of the armhole. The double row of topstitching may have been the part that did me in. But my recollection is that I lost all hope while setting in a sleeve ruffle. (Was my stitching crooked? Did the bobbin send up a tangle of thread?) I wadded the maddening thing up and stuffed it into the trash basket by your desk. (I am sure I hoped you would see.)

What happened next? Did you pull it out of the trash and fix my problem for me? Did you convince me to pull it out myself with clever arguments about how much work I’d already done and how close I was to finishing it? I only know the result: here I am wearing the top in my fourth grade school photo.

School Picture - '73 - '74
(4th grade)

As you know, I turned out to be a pretty good sewer. It’s one of the many things you’ve taught me. And it’s the one I’m feeling satisfaction about and gratitude for on this Mother’s Day. Thanks, Mom!

Sorry not to be calling on the phone today, but I’ll see you week after next!

Love,
Mary

A great night at the Tearoom

My reading last night at the Cornwall Tearoom in Bad Wimpfen went exactly right. Peggy Fehily, the owner, and I were joined by my husband Markus and eleven other guests. As Peggy says, the place feels full with eight people. At 14 we had every seat filled around the small white tables. We all drank tea to our heart's content and most of us had a delicious mini-quiche to start the evening. Peggy's yummy cupcakes came out after the reading.

The full essay, "Objects of My Attention," takes 41 minutes to read. I am pleased to say I read the whole piece, making it through even the most emotional bits. It's not easy to do; I get better with practice. The guests came from Peggy's and my personal networks, and since they came willingly--even for the heavy topic of the death of a child--I felt I could ask for serious input. The big question I need advice on: if I have to omit parts for later readings, what parts should I definitely keep?

Literary Evening at the Cornwall Tearoom, Bad Wimpfen
Monday, May 12, 2014 

In a few weeks, I will give a reading as a fellowship winner during the Writers at Work conference (for Utah folks: Thursday, June 5, 7:30-9:30 pm at Alta Lodge--open to the public). As one of four readers that evening, I need to select a 20-minute portion of my essay to read. It's an iterative, six-part piece, and cutting it for a shorter reading is not an obvious task. I could, of course, read the first 20 minutes and stop there. But what reads best for an audience? How do I best represent the piece?

Using a response sheet for comments and ratings of "definitely read/maybe read/skip," the group engaged in lively, thoughtful discussion. Not everyone agreed, of course, on what's the most essential, but a consensus emerged. If you were there last night, this will make sense to you. With tiny cuts in the longer selected sections and skipping the first third of the final section, I can bring it down to 20 minutes: I. Tie-dye, III. Grime, and VI. (abridged) Clarity. Listeners can read the full piece to get the Rain, the Gauze, and the Glass. I anticipate the publication in Quarterly West sometime in the fall.

Thank you to everyone who came last night and listened so attentively. I'm very moved that you open yourselves to this story and to my writing.

I feel so lucky that I re-encountered Peggy Fehily about a year and a half ago. When I started teaching at the DHBW in Heilbronn (Cooperative University of Baden-Württemberg, where I teach Business English), I reconnected with Keith Hanna, whom I recognized as a teaching colleague from the late 1980s in Stuttgart. And Keith told me that Peggy, another colleague from way back then, had just opened up a tearoom not far from Heilbronn.

But that's not all. As we were closing shop yesterday evening, Peggy said she had books on her shelf by Melanie Rae Thon, the professor under whose guidance I had developed large parts of this essay. Peggy said she'd noticed the name in the interview I did for Writers at Work. I was genuinely surprised. Melanie has published for years and won numerous awards, but I don't often run into people who know the name, let alone remember reading Iona Moon in the 1990s. Looking at Peggy and absorbing this lovely information, I could hear the cosmic chimes all around us.

My only regret: when I began asking permission to take a group photo, I got involved in conversation. When I thought of it again, it was too late. Next time.

2014 Writers at Work Fellowship in Literary Nonfiction (part 1)

I attended the Writers at Work annual conference for the first time in 2005. I was a website-writer (I hadn't adopted the word "blogger" yet). Together with my husband, Markus, I had posted photos and written updates about our son's life with cancer at Simon's Place from 2001-2004. Simon died when he was seven. In the early years after his death, I wrote about grief. I posted little movies of him (pre-YouTube). I wrote up quotations of things Simon said, gathered from journals and bits of paper. I archived his life.

At the 2005 Writers at Work conference, which took place at Westminster College in my Salt Lake City neighborhood, I took Brenda Miller's workshop in nonfiction. We wrote imitations (like painters copying masterworks). We wrote from memory. I "met" Joan Didion and Bernard Cooper. A year later in 2006, I worked with Jesse Lee Kercheval in a generative workshop* in which we wrote fiction, poetry, prose poetry, and nonfiction over five intensive days.

The 2007 Writers at Work nonfiction workshop was in the hands of Chris Cokinos. Chris was a non-stop source of reading recommendations, and I chased many titles down. I was on my way from being a person who had never heard of Vivian Gornick or Mary Karr to someone who had read their work. That was the year I realized I needed more than a great conference each June, and I started taking semester-length writing and literature courses as a non-matriculated student in the University of Utah Department of English. From 2007-2010 I took one or two per semester (Timothy O'Keefe, Karen Brennan, Matt Kirkpatrick, Paisley Rekdal, Melanie Rae Thon).

I won a scholarship to the Wesleyan Writers Conference in 2008, and I traveled back to my early undergraduate haunts in Connecticut for a week. (I transferred to Oberlin, where I ultimately graduated.) Abigail Thomas's workshop at the 2008 Writers at Work conference in Salt Lake City came immediately after my Wesleyan week. There's no real comparison between the two conferences. People seem to make connections at the Wesleyan event, but if you want to work on your writing, go to Utah.

2009 took Writers at Work (and me) into a period of transition. I attended the conference that year, up at the Spiro Arts Center in Park City, with Eileen Pollack, whose write-it-real approach to a generative workshop challenged the smooth coating around my work.

I missed Writers at Work in 2010 and 2011. I believe there was a conference hiatus in 2010, which was during our move from Salt Lake City to Germany anyway. In 2011, I languished in writing isolation over here in Germany. In 2012, I put myself on a plane and went back to Utah for the conference and spent a nonfiction week with the very funny and also very serious Steve Almond. Same story in 2013, only that year I veered into a mind-opening poetry workshop with Katherine Coles (ask me sometime about the hamsters…). The current conference location at Alta Lodge in Little Cottonwood Canyon is mountain getaway.

Many of the years since 2006, I've entered my writing in the annual Writers at Work fellowship competition. Always in nonfiction, always from my work about my son. Aside from that Wesleyan scholarship, I haven't sent my work much anywhere else. Although I've received valuable encouragement from instructors, consultants, and workshop attendees over the years, I never made it into the finalist group.

Until this year. I submitted an essay in January, called "Objects of My Attention". Finally, here was an essay where the pieces seemed settled, the parts seemed authentically named, and I felt done as a writer. I'd love to see what a professional editor's eye and hand would add, but I felt content. I admit that my hopes crept very high when I learned I'd reached the finalist group. Then on March 11th, I awoke to find an astonishing email from Writers at Work: this year, I won!

Perhaps the lapse of a full month before I have written here about the competition win gives an idea of how moved and stunned I am. This year's nonfiction judge is Robin Hemley, whom I greatly look forward to meeting at the conference in June. His remarks about my essay mean a great deal to me. I have begun to study Robin Hemley's work, and I will be back with a report.

Today, I feel happy about this recognition of my writing. I am arranging some readings here in Germany, in Oberlin, and in Salt Lake City. There will also be a reading at the 2014 Writers at Work conference. The material is difficult to read for an audience, and I need as much routine as I can get. I'll post dates and times here on the blog. Perhaps you can attend! The essay will be published later in the year by Quarterly West.

Meanwhile, I can't enter the Writers at Work nonfiction competition ever again. It has provided a sturdy motor for my progress, but now it's time to strike forth in new directions!

*A "generative workshop" means you write new work together and you don't have to bring diddly with you, as far as words on the page, and some years that's a huge relief.