I’m talking about baseball, crying, and my project defense over on the PEN Mark blog.
Okay, mostly crying. Y’know, kinda like life.
You can read it here: http://penusa.org/blogs/mark-program/theres-no-crying-baseball or it’s posted below, if that extra click is just too much during this holiday season. (But you’ll miss out on the experiences of the other Mark participants, and then you’ll be sorry.)
With all due respect to the Mark program, the word defense made me feel a little, um, defensive. I know it comes from a lauded academic tradition–I mean, I think it does, right? A thesis defense? Now I’m not sure and I need to compulsively Google. Hold please. Yes, a lauded academic tradition. So if, like me, you never made it to the thesis defense phase of your formal education, I’m here to tell you that it’s everything you’d think it would be from the movies. And, to that end, I walked into mine feeling a little defensive.
So, picture me at one end of a big, square table in a roomful of writers, all of whom I wildly respect, and all of whom are peering at me earnestly while asking me to explain the choices I made in my work, which is sitting before them in a big, green notebook.
Oh, Jesus, let’s just get this out of the way right up front: I cried.
I’m a crier. I cry at weddings, sappy movies, once while watching the Blue Angels aerial show in San Francisco. (Also fireworks and boisterous gospel choirs. It’s a majesty thing.) I cry when the underdog triumphs and when justice prevails and do not get me started on those fucking ASPCA commercials with Sarah McLachlan.
I cried in my Emerging Voices finalist interview, and I cried in my final Mark interview, before they even chose me, so—to be fair–no one can really say that it was a giant shock when I welled up as Alan Watt started directing me toward some pretty profound realizations about where my rewrite needs to go. It was amazing. It didn’t feel like a defense, it felt like an exploration, like an archeologist’s pick cracking into some long-buried treasure. Wow, that’s so dramatic. But, indulge me, will you? I’ve been working on this book for a really long time. And, to be honest, I’ve been not working on this book for a really long time, too. That’s the more painful truth. I’d sort of ground to the end of my insight with the thing. And distance wasn’t helping.
I needed the hard questions, the relentless—but kind—prodding that Alan does incredibly well. Seriously, he’s the Writer Whisperer. He and Sam Dunn are like fairy dust for writers—their insight and encouragement is like being sprinkled with possibilities. There’s more, but I think I just made the diabetics in the room go into sugar shock.
I left my defense meeting clutching a handful of sodden Kleenex and the possibility of everything. Now comes the hard part. Now I actually have to do the work. Lucky me. To paraphrase Lou Gehrig, I feel like the luckiest girl on the face of the Earth.
Thank God I didn’t want to play baseball.
