Evening....

I'm working on Phantom Seed Issue #2. I have a lot of nerve, scheduling release reading events and getting the book barely done just a week in advance! I hope it all comes out okay. It looks like we're going to be close to 150 pages! I'm thrilled about our upcoming readings at the Riverside Public Library, Saturday, Oct 4th at 1:00 p.m., and at the Palm Springs Library on Monday, October 27th, 6:30 p.m. Who do I think I am, coining "desert noir?" As if teaching a full load of beginning-level English courses and plodding my scary way through student learning outcome land (didn't I do that when I taught high school back in the 90's?) and the "college that doesn't fit anymore" isn't enough.

I am leading two lives. The duality's as sharp as the appearances of wealth ( Palm Desert, designer grocery stores, golf 'fits and jaguars combing the streets and aisles) and the dry-rot soul of poverty crumbling beneath/within, as the beneath ground here undoubtedly, already, actually is caving in at various locations due to too much deep aquifer tapping....whoops! There it goes, into the bottom of the old ocean floor, caving in. Payback for filling in the slow-built, expedient "Indian Wells" used by the Cahuilla Indians - very close to my house, actually, though no one knows quite where. Hence, the name of the town next door (across the wall.)

One life is the old weird school teacher. Not old, but faded and outdated. Not weird as much as out of synch with the role, the expectations. I'm a freestyling performance professor. I have lost the ability to care beyond the moment of achieving poetic moments - in the class with my students. Great discussions and insights as we discuss Frost- Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening - one girl says, "I think the narrator is going to dump a body." Another student tells of how she narrowly averted dying in the twin towers, 9.11, before she impulsively jumped on a Greyhound for California, days later. We're getting good original poems out of these frank thoughts and ideas. Students are volunteering each class session to get up in front of others, in the chemistry lecture hall, under the chart of elements and isotopes, the crazy cacophony and crystallized poetic understandings - that's where I've got it going on. I'm not about meetings and committees and annoying secretaries by sending students to check my mailbox or make copies. I'm not about failing to find parking because I was assigned morning classes at prime time, not my choice. I'd rather be online and in the slow afternoon hours.

And the other life is the real me. The writer and editor and sitting at computer fantasizer. I work on the desert anthology, I aspire to the high-wiring of my new lit mag, Phantom Seed, pulling it together, working in tandem with Jeff, my editing/publishing work partner - we're putting a 150 page book together in a few scant days, digging up bios, and preparing for our release reading at Riverside Library! Talk about down to the wire - and we have a few authors reading whose biographies have me nervous - they are really accomplished and I feel like small peanuts next to them! The real me prefers the same stretchy workout tights (two favored pairs,) and to go into stream of consciousness eyeballing of words, metaphor, and language-work. The real me is a movie, is dreaming of how I'll write a narration for the Joshua Tree Park movie I've been invited to script for the UCR-California Museum of Photography! How I'll sculpt and write my Joshua Tree Park book for the affiliate writers residency I just won there. How I'll run the panel discussion on "desert noir" for the Riverside event; how I'll put together the biographies and introductions for the diverse authors of the desert anthology. Speaking and reading engagements left and right, I have a whole new writers life!

A weird time, and like many people, I try not to tumble in the stock market crash. Can I save my home? It's a national forest fire, and the flames are jumping fast without rationale. I'm locked in at a 6% fixed rate, but it's still scary. I am having a hard time enforcing having my 20 year old pay rent - ideally, I should be getting a boarder who is willing to pay $400 or $500 month. I might have to let the pool guy go. I am a single woman who owns her own house, and we're not getting our COLA adjustment at work this year. Makes it especially hard to care about all the extra gizmos they want us to do. I'm just trying to stay clear. Or else I might not see the moon. Light pollution sucks us all blind.

Claremont Library - Sunday, Sept 28th. I'm the featured poet, 2 p.m. I am looking forward to reading, stretching out into some of the newer poems I've written and have not yet read. Things like Mary Jane Cemetery and Dream of the Blue Frog.

California Indian Conference, 2008 - Friday, October 3rd, I'm part of a panel of professors and a Native elder to talk about Indian women's autobiographies. What an honor. UCR-Palm Desert campus.

Hope to see some of you there. Hold onto your houses, and let go, with your dreams. I have stories and poems flooding me, like when I'm sleeping and dreaming, oddly, it's something I can't help - neurosis or genius or both? All I can do is dream it along. It's an honor and it's ruining my professional life. I know colleagues at work look disdainfully, or at best, with a twist of invisibility or even pity - not able to see the priceless and long-coveted, finally-appearing stories I'm fomenting inside. I feel so excited and honored that this is all channeled to me, and yet I pay a price by being a marginalized outcast at the place where I work. I feel like a cripple of sorts, because I am not in the scantron game. If my psyche were limping, it would show. As it is, I'm diving inward. To where the water has seeped, far beneath the holes and inevitable cave-ins.
My characters and stories are old things, older than salt, and younger than me. I knew I'd pay a price to keep it and be real. Writers ARE weird. I'm finally accepting that, in me.

As the poet Galway Kinnell advised- a few years ago, when I met and chatted him up at the Idyllwild Writers workshop: "be slightly cracked in your vision and poetry - not all the way cracked up, but slightly cracked."

This was years after he led a group of my high school students through a "guest poet" workshop at the Scottsdale, Arizona Center of the Arts Young Writers Voice Project- circa 1992, through a poem activity called, "My Mother's Breast."

And upon that pillowed thought, good night.